by Ali Reza Eshraghi
News media accounts of reactions from Iran to the recent talks in Geneva remind me of a joke that has gone viral there:
A salesman shows a variety of hearing aids ranging in cost from one to a thousand dollars to a customer, who then asks, “How well does [...]]]>
by Ali Reza Eshraghi
News media accounts of reactions from Iran to the recent talks in Geneva remind me of a joke that has gone viral there:
A salesman shows a variety of hearing aids ranging in cost from one to a thousand dollars to a customer, who then asks, “How well does the one dollar one work?” The salesman responds, “It doesn’t work at all! But, people speak louder when they see you wearing it.”
For the first time, different political factions within the Islamic republic of Iran are in agreement about President Hassan Rouhani’s method for resolving the nuclear issue and negotiating with the United States. But local and international media coverage has focused on Iranian radical groups who have shrunk in size and been marginalized after June’s presidential election. While this group occupies a small space in Iran’s current nuclear discourse, it has been presented as a major actor by the media.
Much of this coverage focuses on Kayhan, the Iranian daily newspaper, and its editor-in-chief, Hossein Shariatmadari, who has openly criticized the Iranian delegates for keeping the details of their negotiations with the P5+1 powers (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany) confidential. For Shariatmadari, this secrecy is an indication that the Iranian delegation is making a bad deal.
Of course, Khayan and Shariatmadari are not the only ones who have criticized Iranian diplomats for keeping things under wraps when it comes to the nuclear issue. In October 2009, when the Saeed Jalili-headed negotiation team was trying to make a deal with the P5+1 in Geneva, Iranian reformist media also complained about the lack of available details on the discussions.
At that time, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the sidelined candidate of Iran’s 2009 presidential election, accused the negotiators of trading the long-term interests of Iranians for “nothing” in a statement.
And last year — amid rumors of a meeting between Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior aide to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, with American officials — Kalameh, the flagship website of the opposition Green Movement, demanded that the negotiations be “transparent and [conducted] in front of people.”
Shrinking prominence
This time it’s the hardline Kayhan that has printed the loudest complaints against the confidential negotiations. But things are different now. Not long ago, each time Kayhan started a game of ball, it was immediately picked up and passed around in the Principlist front. Today, no one is willing to play along with the well-known daily.
Indeed, other conservative media outlets affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) apparently have no problem with the nuclear negotiations remaining confidential. Here is Sobh-e Sadeq, the official IRGC weekly, expressing satisfaction in its post-Geneva talks coverage:
“The Iranian delegation stressed the importance of respecting Iranian nation’s red lines, as well as the need of change in the position of the West from selfishness to a win-win interaction. [Our delegation] would not back down from the nation’s rights.”
Even more surprisingly, the IRGC has absorbed Rouhani’s vocabulary and is talking about a “win-win interaction with the US.” The Javan daily, another media outlet associated with the IRGC, stressed on Monday that the actions of the Rouhani administration “have the permission of the Supreme Leader.” Javan took this a step further by arguing that even if the administration was unsuccessful in the negotiations, Iran would still emerge victorious because it would be obvious that it was the Americans who, contrary to their claims, have no interest in resolving disputes and restoring relations.
Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, the head of the Majlis Principlist faction whose daughter is married to the Supreme Leader’s son, has also supported the confidentiality of the nuclear negotiations. Considered a hardliner, Haddad Adel, who used to favor Kayhan, could have remained silent in this debate. But he has criticized the newspaper for basing its suspicion of Iran’s diplomatic team on what he considers “the words of the Zionist media.”
With such remarks, Haddad Adel is — perhaps unintentionally — paving the road for reformists to launch a more powerful attack against the radicals. Mir-Mahmoud Mousavi, the former Director General of the Foreign Ministry and the brother of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has also accused Iranian hardliners of using the language of Israeli hardliners. He believes they both “are trying to weaken Iran’s position in the talks.”
The position of Haddad Adel, the IRGC or even Ahmad Khatami, the radical and sometimes callous Tehran Friday Prayers Leader who also said Rouhani’s administration should be trusted, has confused analysts who measure Iranian politics with a who-is-closer-to-the-Supreme-Leader tape. These pundits are uncomfortably surprised each time they come across such perplexing results. The last such surprise occurred during Iran’s 2013 presidential election when Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator who was touted as a favorite of the Supreme Leader, lost the vote.
After Ahmadinejad
Of course, it’s crucial to observe certain significant developments in Iran’s nuclear and foreign policy discourse that have occurred since Rouhani took office a few months ago. First, Iranian media can now write more openly and include a variety of opinions about their country’s controversial politics. This is why Mohammad Mohajeri, the editor-in-chief of the popular Khabar Online website and former member of the editorial board of Kayhan, reminded Shariatmadari that Jalili’s former negotiating team had tougher restrictions for the press. Before, “the press would get some burnt intelligence and were then told not to even discuss that useless information because of the confidential nature of the talks.” Compare that situation to the present when trying to gauge the level of change. Last week, for the first time, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took a group of Iranian reporters from various media outlets to Geneva. Each day they were briefed repeatedly by members of the Iranian team.
That the reformist media are not alone in attacking and quibbling with the hardliners is another new development. The moderate and progressive Principlists, in an unwritten division of labor with the reformists, have taken on the task of silencing the radicals themselves. Popular news websites affiliated with the Principlists like Alef, Khabar Online and Tabank have constantly — albeit with a softer tone — criticized Iran’s radicals since the talks in Geneva.
Bijan Moghaddam, the managing director of the widely circulated Jam-e Jam daily and the former political editor of the hardliner Fars News Agency, has warned the radicals that the “Iranian society has banished them” and asked hardliners to voice their criticism logically and “without creating a ruckus and swearing.”
Finally, there is now a visible rhetorical shift in the debate over Iran’s foreign policy. Critics of Rouhani’s diplomacy team do not merely rely on mnemonic tropes and the Islamic Republic’s ideological repertoire in their arguments. They are also invoking Iran’s “national interest” in criticizing the administration’s diplomatic method. Such changes are even visible in Khayan’s tone. For example, the daily recently criticized Rouhani for publically announcing ahead of the Geneva talks that the treasury is empty, saying that such statements would weaken Iran’s negotiating position.
In such an atmosphere, it’s not surprising that critics of the government’s foreign policy claim they are aiding the administration’s negotiating strategy. As a radical commentator recently said in an interview with the Javan daily, “President Rouhani can use the views of those opposing the talks with the US as powerful leverage to haggle with the US.”
Photo: Gholam Ali Haddad Adel greets Hossein Shariatmadari. Credit: Jam News
]]>by Farideh Farhi
I read with great interest the writing of Washington’s new Iran expert, Dennis Ross. With a title like “Don’t Discount the Iranian Election”, I thought, wow! Iran’s contested and improvised politics are finally being taken seriously. What else could that mean other than an acknowledgment that [...]]]>
by Farideh Farhi
I read with great interest the writing of Washington’s new Iran expert, Dennis Ross. With a title like “Don’t Discount the Iranian Election”, I thought, wow! Iran’s contested and improvised politics are finally being taken seriously. What else could that mean other than an acknowledgment that there is politics in Iran, including strategizing by the significant players and the organized and even unorganized forces within the power structures that impact policy choices?
But Ross’s piece is not about competing views of how to run the country, nor is it about Iran. It is all about us.
Iran’s June 14 presidential election has already been engineered by its master designer, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to send the message that “he has little interest in reaching an understanding with the United States on the Iranian nuclear program.” This, Ross states, “If [Saeed] Jalili does end up becoming the Iranian president.” But he fails to tell us what message Khamenei will send if someone besides Jalili is elected and doesn’t even entertain the possibility that the ballot box results may not be pre-determined — that people might, just might, have something to do with this.
After all, Iranian politics is either about big changes or no changes at all. It is also apparently shaped by one man who knows what he wants, but has to wait for an election to send his message to the US.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani failed in his attempt to challenge Khamenei’s authority and now there are no individuals or forces independent of Khamenei remaining. To boot, Khamenei is so independent that he is not moved by anything in society. Everything is generated from his head and his head alone. Like all imagined Oriental despots, Khamenei alone now holds agency in Iran.
The possibility that this election may involve a degree of competition among factions or circles of power, with a good part of the population still undecided about whether to participate or which candidate to vote for, is not even permitted. After all, the “freedom-loving people of Iran” also only have two modes. They either move in unison to protests in the streets or are cowed, again in unison, by the dictates and batons of one man and his cronies. In the first scenario we love them all and in the second we pity them; but in both cases we view them as a herd that occasionally may — at least we hope — stampede toward the goal of what we have.
You’d think that after more than a decade of disastrous policy choices based on the belief that Middle Eastern countries are run by one intractable man, Washington experts would have developed some humility in forwarding their Orientalist presumptions as analysis. But not even ten years of disastrous policies following repeated declarations of so-and-so must go — the last one uttered by President Obama against Bashar al-Assad nearly two years ago — has resulted in any qualms about reducing the complex politics of a post-revolutionary society, which from the beginning has been shaped and reshaped by factions and factional realignments, to a clash of titans invariably moving towards despotism.
What Happened Last Time
Yes, I am aware of what happened in 2009 and even before, when the creeping securitization of the Iranian political system was already well under way, based on both the exaggerated pretext and real fear of external meddling. And yes, I know there is an intense debate among the critics and opposition, be they the reformists or the Green Movement. Activism does not only take place in the streets, it also happens in conversations regarding whether to vote or not.
Given the dynamic state-society relations of the Islamic Republic and societal demands that clearly remain unfulfilled, it would be quite unnatural if at least some parts of Iran’s vibrant, highly urbanized and differentiated society did not debate the legitimacy, role and weight of the electoral system as an integral institution of the Islamic Republic’s identity after what happened in 2009.
This election is deemed important by some and meaningless by others depending on the assessment of the extent to which the masterminds of the 2009 so-called “electoral coup” have managed to consolidate power. But even on the issue of what voting means and whether it will legitimize the Islamic Republic there exists a mostly reasoned debate and conversation. It is a debate and conversation because many people are trying to convince both themselves and their interlocutors that they’re making the right choice. Whatever they decide, they want their action to have political meaning.
Why The Presidential Debates Matter
Another debate also exists within the frames of the available competition. Is there a difference among the candidates in terms of proposed policies? In this conversation, the cynics don’t think that a decision not to vote will undermine the Islamic Republic. Like their counterparts in many other countries, they believe that despite the different rhetoric and promises, the candidates will all end up the same; nothing will change.
But there are also those who are watching for a reason to vote. For some perhaps because a candidate appeals to them. For others, because a candidate scares them.
Iran’s state television recently announced that about 45 million out of a population of 75 million have been watching the presidential debates, the third of which on politics and foreign policy was just held. The interest-level was so high that state TV announced a potential fourth debate.
Perhaps the viewership number has been exaggerated to give the impression of a heated election, but given the conversation I am following on blogs and websites with different viewpoints, it is hard to dispute that many people have been watching.
I’ve always wondered why Iran’s presidential debates have attracted so many viewers. I was in Iran in 1997 when the first debates were held among only four candidates. I had been to Mohammad Khatami’s rallies and knew about his ability to woo through words. What made him difficult to resist as a candidate was precisely the different way he spoke to attract voters. In a country where — in both the monarchist and Islamist eras — what the voter must or should do has always been uttered in every other sentence, a presidential candidate with the art of conversation was something to behold for me. People told me I was crazy and Khatami had no chance. The system would not allow it. But when Khatami came on television and began to talk, things changed.
This isn’t romantic nostalgia. The fundamental changes that have occurred in the relationship between politicians and citizens in Iran can be detected in the way they talk to each other. Iranian clerics have always been good talkers; they know their flock. But finding a language to woo voters is something different.
What’s Happening Now
Just consider what happened in the first presidential debate last week. The highly stilted and child-like format — designed to ensure that the conversation did not spiral out of control — was immediately challenged by the reformist candidate, Mohammadreza Aref, and a couple of others who followed him.
Afterwards the debate was criticized by all the participants and became a subject of both scorn and delicious humor everywhere. The integrity of the institution that held the debate came under question, some said. Others declared the nation had been insulted, the office of the president as a whole denigrated. We are not in kindergarten; treat the audience like adults, the critics shouted.
Iran’s state-run TV effectively was forced to change the format by the second debate, but it was in the third debate that the dam broke and real conversation began on no less a topic than Iran’s handling of its nuclear dossier.
People were somewhat expecting this. Two secretaries of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and nuclear negotiators — one former and one current — are, after all, running.
Current negotiator Saeed Jalili has nothing in his portfolio other than his handling of Iran’s nuclear file in negotiations with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1), so the framing of his candidacy in terms of his handling of the talks could not be avoided.
But Jalili had to face someone who could not afford to accept his narrative — former negotiator Hassan Rowhani — since Rowhani’s own record is also somewhat tied to nuclear diplomacy. It was an intense conversation with little held back — not about whether Iran should enrich uranium or not, as the discussion is framed in the United States — but about which nuclear negotiating team has been more successful in its interactions with the West. Both played offense and defense.
During Friday’s debate, however, it was not the two nuclear negotiators who broke the dam. It was Ali Akbar Velayati, the former foreign minister and Khamenei’s current senior adviser on foreign affairs. Reacting to Jalili’s certitude over his conduct and disdain for the appeasement of Rowhani’s team, Velayati let loose his criticism of Jalili’s performance by saying, “reading statements does not make diplomacy.” Then Velayati explained to the audience that twice in the past 8 years, attempts to resolve the nuclear issue through negotiations were sabotaged by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the foreign ministry. Other candidates followed him, pointing to the lack of success of the current nuclear team.
This is not to say that Jalili demurred. He defended himself and also attacked, rejecting Velayati’s portrayal of his negotiating skills and telling the audience about the shabby way Rowhani’s team was treated by its Western counterparts, egged on by the United States. To prove his point, Jalili even read from Rowhani’s book, which details his negotiations with the EU, UK, France and Germany. Iran gave in and suspended, and the Westerners became louder in their demands, said Jalili. More significantly, Jalili did not talk like anyone’s man; he talked like a believer.
Rowhani did not run away from the conversation either. He’s a believer in his own approach too and disdainful of Jalili’s way — as is Velayati.
Keep in mind that the debates’ audiences don’t watch with a unified eye. Iran, like elsewhere, is not a country with only two abstract actors: “regime” and “people.” There are many people who agree with Jalili regarding the failure of Rowhani’s nuclear team and continue to rally together around this issue. There are also some who identify with his representation of himself as remaining true to being a basiji, or dedicated and lowly soldier of the system.
Then there are those who are genuinely fearful of a Jalili presidency. But even this fear is not expressed in a unified fashion.
Some are petrified by the potential for another 8 years of inept management. I make no claim in knowing who supports Jalili’s candidacy — and would be skeptical of anyone claiming to know. But I can read the websites that support his candidacy. And his potential cabinet ministers look awfully like Ahmadinejad’s ministers.
Sure, some of them were fired by the temperamental president, but their complaints were not about Ahmadinejad’s policies. They were about the bad or “deviant” person he hung around with (Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie). These ministers did get some superficial nods for being fired. But besides a few exceptions, even the bureaucracies they headed don’t consider them particularly good managers and would be worried if they came back.
Just to make a point, perhaps, on Rowhani’s flank, stands his campaign manager, Mohammadreza Nematzadeh, who is considered one of the most able state managers the Islamic Republic has produced (he was removed from his various National Iranian Oil Company posts by Ahmadinejad).
Also making a point is Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who has completely framed his campaign around his managerial and leadership abilities. Qalibaf is only 4 years older than Jalili, but was a commander during the Iran-Iraq war in his early 20s when Jalili remained a soldier. Qalibaf was in the war from the beginning to end while, according to his bio, Jalili joined sometime after 1984. Qalibaf even refuses to declare a campaign slogan. He says his past performance is his slogan.
The Fear Factor
But worrying about Jalili’s abilities is only one side of the story. After carefully listening to a man who has rarely talked inside Iran or said anything beyond the nuclear issue, some are terrified of his ideas about the cultural and social arenas. Oh no, not again. Or, oh no, he seems exactly like Ahmadinejad without his sense of humor, or, without his opportunism, like a collective reaction to at least a good part of more secular northern Tehran and surely some other cities and provinces too.
Jalili is even scarier than Ahmadinejad precisely because he’s deemed a believer and not an opportunist populist. If these secular folks vote — and so far they have been deemed least likely to vote — it will be out of a fear similar to that experienced by unhappy Obama 2012 voters who would not have voted had the alternative not been so frightening. They worry that Jalili may be Khamenei’s man; but they are even more worried about the possibility that, with him, Jalili will bring a group of righteous believers to power who even Khamenei cannot control. To them, Jalili represents the nightmare of continuity plus.
Jalili’s Strategy
Jalili understands this fear and frankly doesn’t give a hoot about it. Like his Christian conservative counterpart in the US, he has a lament. He and his support base think the previous presidents have not allowed true believers to express themselves sufficiently through their press or art. They think that capturing the executive branch will make a difference. Jalili knows that what limits the spread of his cherished ideas is not the state but a society worried that some of those ideas may take Iran to more dangerous places against a powerful enemy: the United States. I suspect he knows this because his campaign strategy suggests he is aware of the limitations faced by his co-believers.
In his campaign commercials, Jalili has explicitly tried to sell himself as Khamenei’s favorite and in doing so, adeptly used the Western press, which declared him the “frontrunner” on the same day (May 21) the Guardian Council announced the qualified candidates!
Jalili achieved this frontrunner designation through an understanding of how foreign press and Diaspora punditry works its way back into Iranian politics. After his qualification he gave his first interview to a Western reporter and later used the interview in a commercial. His strategy compelled his competitors and their supporters to publicly state that the pretention of having Khamenei’s support is just that: pretension.
What The Polls Say
Also working against Jalili are the announced polls, sometimes daily. Unlike the Western press, even hardline websites are not calling Jalili a front-runner, a situation completely different from 2009 when hardline newspapers such as Kayhan, as early as May, were announcing — without explaining the methodology, numbers polled, etc. — a 63-percent preference for Ahmadinejad, which turned out to be the eventual announced result.
Today, across the political spectrum, Qalibaf is acknowledged as the frontrunner. The most Jalili supporters are claiming is that he will be one of the two going to the second round. Whether this is a wish or a plan, no one knows. But there is little doubt that the belief in a predetermined outcome reduces one’s desire to vote.
But going back to Jalili, his problem is compounded by the fact that the polls have him way behind Qalibaf. Polls are notoriously politicized in Iran, but one of the interesting aspects of Iranian electoral politics is that despite the 2009 disaster, some rather serious pollsters are still taking fluctuations in voter thinking seriously.
One particularly interesting site with a daily tracking poll can be accessed here. Hossein Ghazian, a well known sociologist/pollster who was arrested for releasing polls that some authorities didn’t like, is one of the site’s masterminds. It specifies the number of people who are called on a 4-day rolling basis, as well as margins of error. Apparently, 35-percent of the people who were called refused to respond. Ghazian told me that he is not going to spend time defending the spread, but does think his approach can reveal quite a bit about the movement of close to 60-percent of the people who are still undecided about which candidate to vote for (as distinct from the people who have already decided not to vote). In this poll, Jalili is in third place, although his numbers are slowly improving.
I do not know what to think of these numbers, but I find the mere fact of their public emergence (since polls existed behind the closed doors of the Intelligence Ministry before) — even if they are not totally accurate — an important sign, for now, that at least a good sector of the Iranian society is interested in a more differentiated understanding of Iran; an Iran in which its citizens are not mere tools of a despot’s engineering.
Why Iran’s Election Matters
Jalili may still get elected, but so far he has been unable to sell himself as a candidate for the majority. In fact, no one has — not even Qalibaf — making a second round on June 21 a real possibility. If one has any respect for the agency of the multi-voiced citizens of Iran, observing their decisions, including whether they vote or not, is the least that can be done.
Declaring a candidate a frontrunner based on a presumption may be a cost-free exercise for Dennis Ross, but it is not one for Iran’s contentious political terrain. Jalili’s attempt to get himself anointed as the favorite was intended to make his non-election look like a challenge to Khamenei’s authority while convincing the latter to support his candidacy out of a fear of the further erosion of his authority.
His opponents’ turn of the debate away from Jalili’s relationship with Khamenei towards his conduct as the Secretary of the National Security Council — and not merely a nuclear negotiator — was a counter to this strategy.
During Friday’s debate, Jalili was called upon to talk about other issues related to national security and the way he runs the SNSC since he, as the secretary of this body, is also the director of its staff. On Thursday, Rowhani’s representative, former deputy foreign minister Mahmoud Vaezi, did something more damning. When Ali Bagheri tried to say that Jalili was really the implementer of policies decided elsewhere, Vaezi thundered back and criticized Jalili for not taking his job as the Secretary of the SNSC seriously as others have in the past.
Yes, Khamenei is being cleared here as the real initiator of the past few years’ policies, but with intent. The reformists and centrists have learned that powerful institutions and people who are threatened can react with quite a bit of violence (Syria, anyone?) if the threat is deemed existential.
They understand that pulling the country toward the center and away from the securitized environment that has been imposed in the past few years involves focusing on the criticisms and failures of the policies pursued and not core institutions. In other words, their language must also stop being the language of purge.
This is at least what Abbas Abdi, one of Iran’s well-known reformist journalists, seems to be relaying when he blogs (in a highly unusual piece since he has been a harsh critic and openly stated that the man’s recent candidacy was a mistake) praise for former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
After telling his readers about the years he was in prison and how his livelihood had been repeatedly undermined by the authorities, Abdi said he will still vote without revealing his choice (the prospect of Iran turning into Syria after domestic splits scares him). He says:
Critics should learn from Mr. Hashemi’s behavior. The critical leaders not only failed to bring about reform through their own elimination, more than ever they also reduced their own impact on society. But Hashemi, after a disqualification that no one’s mind could even conceive, did not even change his tone and even more interesting called for the creation of a political epic and last Saturday went to [a meeting of] the Expediency Council and ran the meeting next to [the Guardian Council Secretary] Mr. Jannati. And he will be one of the first people who will vote. It was from the same angle that I also participated in the last parliamentary election. From this [vantage point] my main issue under the current conditions is opening this path and returning critics to the official arena of the country and the person I vote for is of secondary importance. Of course, I have a preference between Rowhani and Aref. But because of the importance I give to reformist unity, I do not like to state my preference before this unity… I cannot say for sure but my feeling is that, despite what is imagined, the situation after the June 14 election can help improve societal trends.
Iran’s election should not be discounted, but not because of Khamenei’s message to us. It should be given attention and appreciated — no matter the result — as part and parcel of Iran’s multi-layered, vibrant politics and because some people are refusing to give up hope for gradual change, even if those changes don’t seem particularly grand at the moment.
]]>via Foreign Policy Association
With less than two months into the elections, what is your assessment of this year’s election dynamics and of the absence of key presidential contenders in the country’s faction-based political system?
In the upcoming elections, there is no sitting president running for re-election. So lack [...]]]>
via Foreign Policy Association
With less than two months into the elections, what is your assessment of this year’s election dynamics and of the absence of key presidential contenders in the country’s faction-based political system?
In the upcoming elections, there is no sitting president running for re-election. So lack of clarity regarding the leading contenders is not that unusual. In the 2005 election, the field of candidates also had not fully clarified two months before the election. Former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati was still contemplating a run while former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had not yet declared his intent to run (and once he did, everyone assumed he would win). This uncertainty is part and parcel of lack of political parties or groups with large social base and lack of established process for candidate selection within and among these organizations. In every election, new mechanisms and processes are invented or improvised as potential candidates jockey to establish their viability or ability to attract votes before the Guardian Council begins the process of vetting. The state of competition remains unclear for the upcoming election because of two unknowns: the so-called Nezam’s—which is usually another way of saying the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s—preferred candidate and the extent to which variety of views will be allowed on the presidential slate. These are unknowns not only to us but to the players themselves. The desire to hold at least a seemingly “clean” election and the hope to “erase the memory of 2009” all work to maintain the uncertainty about the extent to which the coming election will offer a choice, no matter how limited, on the country’s domestic and foreign policy direction, as it has been the case in the past few elections.
Do you believe there is a new cadre of reformists emerging in Iranian politics? If there is one, how genuinely reformist are they and do they have a reform platform?
I am not sure what you mean by genuinely reformist. But there is no doubt that there continues to be a whole array of groups in Iran that think in order for the Islamic Republic to function properly and achieve its revolutionary ideals of independence and freedom, it has to move in the direction of political and social reform. To be sure, some think these reforms have to be more structural or deeper than others. Meanwhile, the conservative establishment, by securitizing the political environment, has so far argued that these folks want to reform the Islamic Republic out of existence. In other words, by reacting as severely as it has, the Iranian deep state –-whose shape remains rather unknown for those who study Iran—has effectively rejected any type of structural reform at this time in no uncertain terms. If anything, it has become more entrenched and reactionary. What we see in the reformist circles in Iran is an adjustment to this reality. Clearly, some reformists are disheartened by this reality and are announcing the death of the possibility of reform within the existing constitutional and political framework. But I would say that the conversations surrounding the upcoming elections – both presidential and municipal – suggest a decision has been made not to abandon the electoral process as a means to both claim some political power as well as pursue gradual change. The way it looks so far, even if the reformists are not able to put forth –or are prevented from putting forth –a strong presidential candidate, they will be actively present in the municipal elections particularly in large cities such as Tehran. They will also be engaged in serious conversation regarding whether to support a centrist candidate in case of the absence of a popular reformist candidate.
With the current dynamics of the post-Arab Spring—the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, the crumbling of the Syrian state, the Turkish-Israeli rapprochement with possible cooperation between the two states on Syria, and the Saudi-Qatari efforts to undermine Iranian interests—do you think Iran is gradually facing a strategic crisis?
The strategic jockeying that is occurring in the region is not a static or linear dynamic with one side losing and the other side winning, particularly since the side that is presumably working to engineer Iran’s strategic decline consists of many actors with different types of relationship with Iran as well as with each other. Egyptian internal dynamics remain highly volatile and as evidenced in the Syria tragedy, the outcome is no longer in anyone’s control. The dystopia created so far is as much a headache – if not more – for Israel and Turkey as for Iran. The disintegration of Syria and reinvigoration of Jihadist forces may count as a “loss” for Iran but raises real and unpredictable security concerns for the neighboring countries of Israel, Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon with no guarantees that even the Persian Gulf countries feeding the insurgency – i.e. Saudi Arabia and Qatar – will not be bitten back. Furthermore, let us not forget that the strategic relationship between Iran and Syria was solidified in opposition to a very different Iraq and may not be as important for Iran given the drastic changes in Iraq. Iran’s strength in the region, although no doubt impacted by its alliances, is better defined by its geography as a crossroad and its resources, both material and human. No other country in the region matches it. In the next decade, Iran’s strategic vulnerability remains its domestic politics. The key question remains whether the country’s contending leadership can develop rules of the game that underwrites relatively peaceful transition of power and allows for forces excluded from the political process, which have nevertheless amassed quite a bit of social power, to have a say in the direction of the country.
Nearly thirty five years since the revolution, the Iranian women remain barred from running for president. Is this a reflection of the state’s ideological conflict with the presence of Iranian women in key decision-making posts?
The silver lining in the refusal of the Guardian Council to explain the reason for the disqualification of candidates is that it has never come out and said that the women who have been disqualified for all the past elections were so because they were women. So while I do not see a viable female candidacy at this point, it is significant that the guardians of Islamism in Iran have not chosen to set up an ideological barrier on this issue; at least not yet.
If sanctions against Iran were further tightened without resulting in achieving any concrete policy objectives for Washington, how, in your view, Washington and Tehran would respond to such measures respectively?
Tehran’s approach to the escalating sanctions regime has followed a pattern. It becomes most active in trying to prevent the impending sanctions. But, once they are imposed, its efforts shift to adapting to and undercutting the sanctions as well as pushing its nuclear program a bit forward in order to remind everyone that the sanctions regime is not changing Iran’s calculations. Under these circumstances, after the imposition of every set of sanctions, the initiative is moved back to Washington. So far Washington has been very successful in instituting an escalating sanctions regime and making sure that Tehran does not rest easy and remains in a constant state of adjustment to new sanctions. But it is not clear how long this dynamic can continue without risking war. Volatility and potential risks are very much hidden in the current dynamics in which containment is declared not an option despite the repeated “all options are on the table” mantra while military attack remains on the menu. Under these circumstances, sanctions are not an alternative but a path to war no matter how uneasy and displeased the American society and military establishment remains about the prospect.
]]>The answer to this question is simple: there is no such thing as one Tehran. Opinions vary and arguments to back up the case for either Barak Obama or Mitt Romney are sometimes unexpected. The way it looks now, the hardliners prefer Romney. Just listen to the argument made by [...]]]>
The answer to this question is simple: there is no such thing as one Tehran. Opinions vary and arguments to back up the case for either Barak Obama or Mitt Romney are sometimes unexpected. The way it looks now, the hardliners prefer Romney. Just listen to the argument made by the former MP and deputy secretary of the hard-line Society for the Followers of the Path of the Islamic Revolution, Parviz Sarvari:
Some people who are influential in the country have reached the conclusion that Obama must win in this election and this view unfortunately exists that we have to do something for Obama to win the election…Under current conditions even Mitt Romney is to our interest and it has always been shown that when Republicans have come to power, they have had war-mongering behavior and have diverged from Europe, China, and Russia and in these conditions the Islamic Republic has always been able to have more interactions with Europe, china, Russia, and other countries. Republicans have shown that they are paper tigers and make more noise but do not act. Effectively their threats have never been a threat to us. As it happens, the most attacks and pressures against Iran have been during Democratic periods.
On the other side of the spectrum stands former vice president and reformist, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who writes:
In the current American election, given the painful unilateral sanction policies that have been pursued against the nation of Iran by the administration of Mr. Obama and the harsher and more violent policies of Mr. Romney, which is closer to the military option, there are two views. The American hardliners who follow Israel welcome Mr. Romney’s election more and I think there are hardliners in Iran who also welcome this choice so that conflict and confrontation with the main enemy become more evident. In the same way part of the [Iranian] opposition which [is after] overthrow is also of the belief that Romney can better and faster bring the Islamic Republic to its knee. But in the midst of this commotion, my thinking is that Mr Obama will be elected with quite a bit of distance from Mr. Romney and all in all this is better for the world and our country.
Considering that Abatahi was imprisoned after the 2009 election and has essentially become a persona non grata within the power circles of current Iran, his opinions probably do not carry much weight. However, his view that President Obama will be re-elected is also shared by foreign policy heavy weights such as Ali Akbar Velayati, the former foreign minister and current senior advisor to Leader Ali Khamenei. Categorically denying recent reports of his meetings with US officials, Velayati relies on US polling data and suggests that Obama will probably be the victor.
Will it make a difference who wins for Iran? “America is America,” Velayati shrugs. In the past 34 years since the revolution, the Islamic Republic has “tested a variety of US presidents, Democrats and Republicans” and “we do not need of their kindness.” The bottom line for Velayati is that no matter who gets elected, Iran will not give in to the US demand to suspend “peaceful nuclear work” because “even if we waive our right temporarily, they will bring forth another excuse.”
Velayati does not reject negotiations but admits that as far as he knows, no decision has been made to talk to the US directly. But, the whole tenor of the interview suggests that Tehran is getting ready for another round of negotiations with the US within the frame of P5+1 at the end of November with the assumption that Obama will win.
At the same time, the interview makes clear that, with or without Obama, the level of mistrust is extremely high, at least among the current decision-making circles. Those inside Iran who are calling for concessions in the nuclear talks in exchange for the end of sanctions, Velayati says, do not understand the international environment. “I do not know a country in the world that has retreated against the unjust demands of Western powers and they have [in turn] fulfilled their promised concessions.”
- Farideh Farhi is an independent researcher and an affiliate graduate faculty member in political science and international relations at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.
]]>