A profile in defiance: being Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

• Author: Takeyh, Ray

IN JUNE the hard-line mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, walked across American and Israeli flags painted on the pavement of a mosque and voted in Iran's ninth presidential election. After all the ballots were counted, the results stunned the international community--an unreconstructed ideologue had emerged triumphant, confounding all predictions that Iran's youthful populace and sophisticated middle class would somehow press its politics in a reformist, even liberal direction. In the intervening months, Ahmadinejad has gone on to perplex and outrage the international community through his denials of the Holocaust, incendiary denunciations of America and a marked indifference to global opinion.

As Iran's nuclear program crosses successive thresholds and edges closer to a military capability, the Western capitals are struggling to understand the man at the helm of power in Tehran. Is Iran's president as irrational as his rhetoric would suggest? Is Ahmadinejad driven by a messianic religious fervor that makes him immune to practical considerations? What are the political and ideological determinants of Ahmadinejad's policies? Before contemplating measures to arrest Iran's impetuous impulses, it is important to have a better appreciation of the ideology that animates the new president and the new cohort of hardliners that are leading the Islamic Republic.

The War Generation Comes to Power

AFTER 27 years, the complexion of the Iranian regime is changing. An ascetic "war generation" is assuming power with a determination to rekindle revolutionary fires long extinguished.

For Ahmadinejad and his allies, the 1980-88 war with Iraq defined their experiences, and it conditions their political assumptions. The Iran-Iraq War was unusual in many respects, as it was not merely an interstate conflict designed to achieve specific territorial or even political objectives. This was a war waged for the triumph of ideas, with Ba'athi secular pan-Arabism contesting Iran's Islamic fundamentalism. As such, for those who went to the front, the war came to embody their revolutionary identity. Themes of solidarity, sacrifice, self-reliance and commitment not only allowed the regime to consolidate its power, they also made the defeat of Saddam the ultimate test of theocratic legitimacy. War and revolution had somehow fused in the clerical cosmology. To wage a determined war was to validate one's revolutionary ardor and spiritual fidelity--the notions of compromise and a "ceasefire" were anathema to this point of view.

Suddenly, in August 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the conflict to be over. After eight years of brutal struggle and clerical exhortations of the inevitability of the triumph of the armies of God, the war ended without achieving any of its pledged objectives. For veterans like Ahmadinejad, not unlike post-World War I German veterans, there was a ready explanation for this turn of events. It was not the inadequacy of Iran's military planning or the miscalculations of its commanders, but the West's machinations and its tolerance of Saddam's use of chemical weapons that had turned the tide of the battle.

And although many Iranians wanted to forget the war, for people like Ahmadinejad the war, its struggles and its lessons are far from being a faded memory: They are constantly invoked. In his much-discussed speech in front of the UN General Assembly in September, Iran's new president used the platform offered to him to pointedly admonish the gathered heads of state for their shortcomings:

 For eight years, Saddam's regime imposed a massive war of aggression against my people. It employed the most heinous weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons, against Iranians and Iraqis alike. Who, in fact, armed Saddam with those weapons? What was the reaction of those who claim to fight against WMDs regarding the use of chemical weapons then? 

A pronounced suspicion of the United States and the international community would come to characterize Ahmadinejad's perspective. After all, neither America's human rights commitments nor the many treaties prohibiting the use of weapons of mass destruction saved Iran's civilians and combatants from Saddam's wrath. The lesson that the veterans drew from the war was that Iran's independence...