(Jerusalem Post) Oren Kessler - Harold Rhode, who served for decades as an analyst of the Islamic world's culture and politics in the office of the U.S. secretary of defense, knows all of the Middle East's four major languages: Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew. A university student in Iran in 1978 on the eve of the Islamic Revolution that ousted the Shah the following year, Rhode has obvious affection for Iran's culture and people, but pulls no punches in denouncing the tyrants who now run its government. "I believe regime change is the only answer," he said in an interview. Any successor regime would be preferable to the current theocracy. "One can't think of anything more extreme." Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, he continued, "hated the people who are now in power. He kept them away from government because he feared they would lead Iran to its destruction." He said there was no reason to publicize the West's next move by talking about it unnecessarily. "You don't want to show your cards to the Iranians; you want to use your cards to win." According to Rhode, Iran's current leaders "believe that if they provoke a conflagration, their hidden imam, the mahdi, will return to save them. So Mutually Assured Destruction - MAD - that we used effectively with the Soviets is an incentive and an inducement, not a deterrent." "There's unfortunately no such thing as a win-win situation in the Middle East. Confidence-building measures are interpreted as weakness. You talk after you've won; if you do so beforehand, it is seen as weakness." "In the languages of the Middle East, the concept for compromise doesn't exist - at least not as we understand it....Instead, one who compromises is said to have brought 'aib, or shame, on himself. That's why the Middle East is always in a state of tension," he explained. When former prime minister David Ben-Gurion dealt with the Arabs, he said, "he always started by saying the following: 'We are coming home. This is our homeland. We were thrown out of here 2,000 years ago. We're not coming here - we are returning home. We realize there are other people here, and in a modern, democratic society they're going to have equal rights. But this is ours - all of this is ours.'" Ben-Gurion was "willing to compromise on that, but he understood intuitively who and what he was, and he wasn't ashamed to say so to the Arabs," Rhode concluded.
2012-02-03 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive