The Islamic Republic is portraying itself as standing up firmly behind Arab protesters by repeatedly demanding this past week that the United States not carry out its plans to invade Libya and seize the oilfields there.
In the past several days, the regime has focused on Libya and tempered its previous vocal remarks supporting the anti-regime protests in Bahrain and Yemen. To some, that suggests the government is not so sure the Bahraini and Yemeni governments will fall and wants to put some distance between itself and the opposition in those two countries.
But Iran has gotten louder and more strident about the uprising in Libya. Its rhetoric, however, is not so much anti-Qadhdhfi as it is anti-American. It has been more concerned with painting the United States in a bad light than anything else.
It claims the US government says it plans to send troops into Libya, when the exact opposite is the truth. It insists the United States is scheming to take over the Libyan oilfields “just as it did in Iraq,” although the oilfields in Iraq have not been run by the United States and only one American company has gotten even one small contract to develop one small oilfield from the Iraqi government.
President Ahmadi-nejad has played to the belief common in much of the Arab world that the Americans like to the resort to the use of armed force. The White House is reportedly reluctant to go to the aid of the Libyan rebels in part because it also believes any US resort to military force would reinforce Arab stereotypes of the United States.
In a speech during a provincial tour last week, Ahmadi-nejad repeated his refrain that “all” the dictators in the Middle East are backed by Washington and that the Americans want to keep them in power—even in Libya.
“Be warned that if you intervene militarily one more time in any of the countries of North Africa or the Middle East, the regional peoples will rise up and dig graves for your soldiers,” he said.
“Today, they [the United States and its allies] claim they are confronting dictators. [But] everywhere in the world, in all of the Muslim world, in all of the Middle East, wherever there is a dictator, he is backed by them,” Ahmadi-nejad told the crowd.
“Now they come and say they want to support the people. But your plans have been derailed. Today, no one believes your claim of supporting the people.”
He repeated his claim that American weapons were being used to kill protesters in the uprisings. The only large-scale killing is in Libya where a full-fledged civil war is underway. The United States has not sold weapons to Libya since Qadhdhafi took power in 1969 and kicked the American military out.
Major General Hassan Firuzabadi, the highest-ranking military officer in the Islamic Republic, explained the American goals. “The fact is, the United States wants to intervene in order to take over Libya’s oil wells, just like what they did in Iraq with Iraqi oil,” he said.
“The Muslim people of Libya have risen and proven they can liberate their own country,” he said Saturday. “Libyans are in control of their own oil and want to use their power, goals and capability to achieve independence.”
Protests have been going on for several days in Oman. The Islamic Republic has not given a word of support to the protests there. In fact, two days after the protests erupted there, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported that Ahmadi-nejad had had a telephone conversation with Sultan Qaboos of Oman to discuss “bilateral and regional cooperation,” a backdoor way of saying Iran opposed the opposition in that monarchy.
Meanwhile, in Washington, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Iran was meddling in the disorder in Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen. “They are doing everything they can to influence the outcomes in these places,” she told the Senate Appropriations Committee last Wednesday. “They are using Hezbollah … to communicate with counterparts in Hamas, then in turn communicate with counterparts in Egypt. We know that they are reaching out to the opposition in Bahrain. We know that the Iranians are very much involved in the opposition movements in Yemen.”
She said, “They are constantly trying to influence events,” but she gave no assessment at how successful they were apart from saying that gaining influence “is a challenge for the Iranians; they don’t have a lot of friends.”
Clinton was testifying in an effort to avoid cuts in the State Department budget and argued that she needed all the personnel called for in the budget to keep the Iranians at bay. So, she might be seen as exaggerating the Iranian threat to scare the senators.
Two weeks, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in the Middle East the uprisings there were caused by “internal issues,” not by Iran, although he said the Islamic Republic loves to “foment instability” and “take advantage of every opportunity.” (See Iran Times of February 25, page ten.)