The 'clash of civilizations'

According to a poll released earlier this year, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah is the most admired leader in the Arab world. The second most popular Arab leader is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the third most popular leader among Arabs is, surprisingly, no Arab - it is Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Given this line-up, one thing is obvious: an Arab leader who wants to win the hearts and minds of his (no need for /her) fellow Arabs doesn't have to govern well and doesn't have worry about the economy, jobs, health care, education, civil liberties or human rights - instead, what counts is that an Arab leader is perceived as standing up to the West, in particular the US and Israel.

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Perception and reality

A cynic might say that it was a contest we used to win hands down: most dangerous, most disliked, most dreadful - as long as it was a poll asking people who's the worst of them all, Israel was sure to score first place. One of the most widely reported of those poll results was a European survey back in fall 2003 which ranked Israel as the greatest threat to peace in the world.

Last year, a global BBC poll showed that when asked which countries "have a mainly negative influence in the world", Israel was again ranked first, but the same poll this year ranked Israel "only" second - which means we switched places with Iran: they came in second last year; this year, they snatched the "bad-guys-award" from us...

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Ahmadinejad on Purim

It was back in October 2005, during a "conference" in Teheran that was organized to propagate the Iranian regime's cherished vision of "The world without Zionism", when the keynote speaker, the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, issued a straightforward call for Israel to be "wiped off the face of the earth". The context of Ahmadinejad's speech (which can be read in full at the website of Iran Focus ) leaves no doubt whatsoever that this is exactly what he meant; yet, ever since, for more than two years, a controversy has been raging about how best to translate what Ahmadinejad said.

An illustration of the continuing controversy was provided on Saturday when The Guardian published an article in its "Face to Faith" series in which Rabbi Danny Rich interpreted Purim as "a timely reminder of past persecution of the Jews and the fragility of Israel". Referring to Ahmadinejad's "notorious speech of 2005", Rabbi Rich wrote that in this speech, Ahmadinejad "quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s statement that 'the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time'." Readers reacting to the article on the newspaper's website were quick to pick up on this formulation: one criticized that this was not really what Ahmadinejad said, while another commended Rabbi Rich for correctly quoting Ahmadinejad.

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History lessons yet to be learned

The recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities prompted many commentators to conclude that the US intelligence community was trying to learn the lessons from its failure to accurately assess Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. However, the question is of course whether the right lessons were learned - or, as the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" columnist put it bluntly: "The history of the CIA is littered with spectacular intelligence mistakes. Sometimes, the correction of one error can lead to a new error, as analysts atone for past mistakes by moving too far in the opposite direction."

This debate reminded me of the research I did for my Ph.D thesis about the work of the CIA's predecessor during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Back then, one of the issues intelligence analysts had to deal with was information about the fate of Europe's Jews. What becomes disturbingly obvious when you study how this information was evaluated and reported is that intelligence assessments are never produced in a political vacuum; instead, and perhaps inevitably, they are influenced by the political orientation of the analysts and their interpretation of the political and military context in which the intelligence would be relevant.

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