by Ali Reza Eshraghi
“Restrictions on social media must be lifted,” said Ali Jannati, Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance to Aljazeera this Monday, admitting that he has been using Facebook for the past three years. His words are compelling, but recent events have not been very promising.
[...]]]>by Ali Reza Eshraghi
“Restrictions on social media must be lifted,” said Ali Jannati, Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance to Aljazeera this Monday, admitting that he has been using Facebook for the past three years. His words are compelling, but recent events have not been very promising.
In the final days of 2013, Iran filtered a social media App for Smartphones, called WeChat. Even though this communication service is among the top five most popular in the world, the West did not pay enough media attention to its crackdown in Iran. Perhaps that’s because unlike Facebook, Twitter and Instagram this platform is made in China! But in Iran, which according to the estimation of the Minister of Communications and Information Technology (CIT), WeChat has almost four million users, the restriction aroused some hot debates.
Since Hassan Rouhani’s administration took power, this has been the most noticeable instance of filtering in Iran. Skeptics consider this move a clear indication that the new administration, contrary to its promises, will continue past policies in restricting cyber space. The old and frequently used, simplified narrative about Iran and its Internet made a comeback in depicting the state as the ultimate villain occupied with preventing the free flow of information and communication to its citizens.
Such a narrative overlooks a (sometimes) comical paradox: if filtering is about blocking criticism, why is openly criticizing the act of filtering allowed (many online and print media have condemned the filtering of WeChat)? People have left hundreds of comments on websites — even on the infamous Fars News Agency — lambasting the Islamic Republic regime for restricting their freedom. One person, whose comment on a progressive website affiliated to the Principlists front received over 350 likes, wrote: “[how] with such stone age measures the [regime] expect not to be condemned [at the UN] for violating human rights.” None of these comments are censored.
What really happens in Iran’s virtual sphere is more complicated than we think. When it comes to the state’s policies vis–à–vis the Internet and especially social media, there are many areas of confusion and contradiction, inconsistency and incongruity among and between various stakeholders. It is one of those muddy, murky and messy situations.
Now let us review some weird facts about this wired world.
Who lets the dogs out?
In Iran, different entities can independently implement filtering. For example, two weeks ago the Tehran Prosecutor suddenly decided to filter the website of Ali Motahari, the MP famous for criticizing the Judiciary’s oppressive policies. Also, the Ministry of CIT, which is monitored by the executive branch of government, has the power to prevent access to certain applications or content at whim (as it did during former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s term.)
The major authority responsible for filtering the news has a long and strange Orwellian name: the Committee for Identifying Instances of Criminal Content. To the Iranian public, CIICC is nicknamed “The Filtering Committee.” The committee was not initially fond of this label, but now it proudly uses it. However, the story does not end here. Some ISPs (Internet service provider) in Iran are privately owned while others are state-owned and this means each has its own policies. In order to survive as a business, some private ISPs impose even stricter policies than the government-owned ones. Therefore, the experience of Internet users depends on which service they subscribe to and varies in different parts of the country.
Looking back to the issue of WeChat, it was the Filtering Committee that decided to block the App. The committee has twelve members, half of which are appointed by six of the administration’s ministries. Naturally, the bloc affiliated to the administration was expected to oppose the decision, but as the reports indicate, only the CIT representative was against it.
So far, Rouhani’s administration has given no explanation about the performance of its representatives on this council. This is contrary to the Rouhani’s campaign promise of supporting Internet freedom. Three days ago, the Telecommunications Minister tacitly implied that the administration’s appointed members “were not on the same page” and “henceforth they would coordinate better.” Does this mean that no more such surprises should be expected from Rouhani’s administration in the future? It is too soon to tell.
iFilter, Udownload!
The official reason provided for the filtering of WeChat was users’ “violation of privacy.” This kind of reasoning in the post-June 2013 election is interesting. Even the conservatives have realized that they must use proper wording to justify their actions in public. After all, who wants their privacy to be violated? But a closer look reveals that the main reason for filtering WeChat was Islamic morals. WeChat offers users the chance to find people nearby and “hook up” with members of the opposite sex without fear of the notorious Iranian morality police.
Of course, filtering is not the solution to everything. Similar applications to WeChat are available and users can download them in just a few minutes. Ramezanali Sobhanifard, a conservative MP and member of the Filtering Committee who supported blocking WeChat personally reported that people are now using another application called Coco. He said, “I have downloaded Coco” and advised people to use that “until WeChat is unblocked.” The funny thing is that Coco offers the same options that resulted in the filtering of WeChat. Users can search and meet new people nearby, enter public chat-rooms and “wink” at others. Unlike WeChat, Coco is an American application that was designed by a group of Harvard students.
The regime has filtered itself
Believe it or not, Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam, Iran’s chief of police — an outfit at the forefront of restricting social freedom — has criticized the filtering of WeChat. He even proposed reviewing the policies of the Filtering Committee in support of Rouhani’s views on freeing up the Internet. In one of his most direct criticisms of filtering policies during his campaign Rouhani said, “I wish the supporters of filtering would explain in restricting the people’s access to which news have they been successful?” It’s notable that Rouhani has not questioned the moral ground of the supporters of filtering and instead pointed out its ineffectiveness.
In Fall 2012, a study conducted by the Dubai-based online start-up incubator, Conovi, in partnership with Pars Online, the largest private ISP in Iran, found that 58 percent of Internet users in Iran regularly use Facebook. As Hessamolddin Ashena, the presidential cultural advisor and caretaker of the Presidential Center for Strategic Research recently said, the regime’s filtering policy is actually working against itself. Facebook can monitor Iranian users and so can the US’ National Security Agency (NSA) but “the filtering system effectively prevents the Iranian government from seeing and monitoring users.”
Filtering has only benefitted the sales of black market virtual private networks (VPN) and enhanced the designs of anti-filter software abroad; it is only the Iranian government that is losing popularity due to its policies. It is therefore no surprise that a consensus is forming in the higher echelons (including the police chief) to change Internet policies.
The Iranian regime has so far used traditional methods of policing the internet: territorializing cyber space, setting disciplines, and enforcing punishments. But now it is thinking about applying modern methods that echo the Foucauldian concept of governmentality: couching, supervising and managing the netizens of the virtual sphere. That’s why a high-ranking CIT official revealed efforts to negotiate with Internet giants like Google to allow their presence in Iran if they accept the regime’s policies.
Until now, there had only been talk of which sites to block, censoring, and filtering in the official discourse about the Internet — anything beyond that was forbidden. But these days there is talk of “modifying” and “optimizing” — in other words, removing the bad parts and using the rest instead of throwing the whole away.
Rouhani supports national Internet and…
Iran’s policy about launching a national Internet has not drastically changed with its new presidential administration. On Monday, Rouhani, in the first session of the Supreme Council of Cyberspace — the highest internet policymaking organization in Iran — stressed that national Internet must be launched by the end of 2015. The only difference in his remarks was that this national network “will not restrict access to international internet.”
Iranian opposition and the Western media have generally framed the regime’s intent in launching a national Internet as another attempt to restrict access to information and repress freedom of speech. But the truth is that the national Internet program was proposed and kick-started during the presidency of the reformist Mohammad Khatami. Since then different Iranian officials have stated that online communications within foreign platforms (such as Google) are a threat to the country’s security.
A year ago only Iran and China wanted to have their own national Internet and domesticated websites. But now, in the aftermath of revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, countries such as Brazil and India have considered launching internal networks of communication that will particularly avoid clutches with the NSA.
Consequently, Iran will continue cloning and domesticating virtual platforms. Already available domestic platforms have been relatively successful in attracting users despite having weaker platforms and designs compared to their international counterparts. For example, about 2.5 million Iranians use Cloob, the Iranian version of Facebook. There is even a newer version called Facenama, which currently ranks seventh among the most popular non-filtered Iranian websites according to Alexa web traffic data. Aparat, the Iranian YouTube, ranks fifteenth. Left with no other options, these cloned websites could potentially become more popular among Iranians than WeChat did among the Chinese.
]]>by Ali Reza Eshraghi
In the current debate over the November 24 interim deal with Iran on its nuclear program, an important lesson from Politics 101 is neglected: state and regime are two conceptually different terms. But when it comes to Iran, US foreign policy has systematically been incompetent in grasping this [...]]]>
by Ali Reza Eshraghi
In the current debate over the November 24 interim deal with Iran on its nuclear program, an important lesson from Politics 101 is neglected: state and regime are two conceptually different terms. But when it comes to Iran, US foreign policy has systematically been incompetent in grasping this distinction.
State refers to a sovereign political entity, which (at least in theory) is supposed to pursue the common good of its population. Regime, on the other hand, signifies an authoritarian form of governance and its ruling elites.
However, the rhetorical use of this word can be biased and highly politically motivated. In Western media one recurrently hears phrases such as “Iranian regime” and “Islamic regime” and not so much “Saudi regime,” despite Iran having significantly greater democratic features than the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Louis XIV of France once said: “L’Etat c’est moi,” I am the state. In the discourse over Iran’s nuclear program, it is often mistakenly assumed that the regime (along with the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) is the state. Subsequently, the nuclear conundrum is framed as only the problem of a regime that is greedily obsessed with its own survival, and not that of a state bound to consider long-term national interests.
If one sees a problem as a nail, the solution would be to look for a hammer. In this regard, it is not surprising that many members of the U.S. congress, assuming that more pressure will ultimately force capitulation by the regime, are pushing (though apparently defeated for the time being) for evermore sanctions against Iran.
And when it comes to negotiating with Iran, we see that the old Kremlinology of the Soviet era is ludicrously imitated, with moderate President Hassan Rouhani being compared to Mikhail Gorbachev. All the speculations are focused on how far the Iranian President could go in selling an accord to other players in the regime, and ultimately how much the whole regime, including Rouhani, can be trusted.
But what about the Iranian People? Some argue they would be happy for any deal as long as it alleviates the suffering caused by economic sanctions. It is even claimed that the democratic Iranian opposition is worried a nuclear agreement would empower the regime.
These assertions are inaccurate.
Two days after the historic phone conversation between Presidents Barack Hussein Obama and Hassan Rouhani, a rap song titled “Hassan & Hussein” went viral. The lyrics encouraged Iran-US reconciliation, but cautioned Rouhani: “Just remember when you are dancing [with Obama] / Not to give away the country two-handedly to [him] the foreigner.”
A recent poll by the Zogby Research Service shows 96% of Iranians (also the majority of Rouhani supporters) believe “maintaining the right to advance a nuclear program is worth the price being paid in economic sanctions and international isolation.”
Some Iranian opposition groups — though hateful of the regime — also believe that the nuclear dispute with the West should not be resolved at the price of damaging the pride and interests of the country.
For example Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah’s last Ambassador to the US, in an interview with BBC Persian in July 2012 defended the nuclear program of a regime that has forced him into exile: “Iranians must maintain their patriotism. No matter who is in power, Iran is our country.”
Akbar Etemad, the founder of the Atomic Energy Organization during the Shah’s regime, even recommends that Iran withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in order to keep its uranium enrichment program. This is the same position that some of the regime’s hardliners have insisted on.
Moreover, the Green Movement leaders (the largest democratic movement in Iran since the 1979 revolution, which the U.S. was sympathetic toward) are also against the Iranian regime signing a nuclear deal at the cost of disregarding national interests.
In October 2009, Iran’s top negotiator Saeed Jalili welcomed a deal in which Iran would send enriched uranium abroad. But Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the Green Movement leader who has been under house arrest for more than a thousand days, accused the regime of “making a deal over the Iranian nation’s long-term interests.” The Supreme Leader later rejected the deal.
Another severe comment was made in May 2010 when Iran signed a nuclear deal with the mediation of Brazil and Turkey (initially encouraged by President Obama but later rejected). This time Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi’s wife who has also been under house arrest, admonished the agreement as “worse than the disgraceful” Gulistan Treaty.
Coincidentally, this October the Iranian media commemorated the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Gulistan between the Iranian and Russian empires following the peace negotiations that were mediated by Great Britain.
Gulistan (1813) and its following Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828) in which Iran had to give up a great deal of territories and rights have deeply haunted the Iranian psyche.
In the Persian vocabulary “Turkmenchay” has become a metaphor for any humiliating compromise that jeopardizes national interests. In fact, after the recent Geneva agreement Iranians active on social media were wondering if it is another Turkmenchay or not. Luckily, the majority of Iranians don’t believe so although Abolhassan Banisadr, a prominent opposition figure who served as the first President of post-revolutionary Iran, has called the interim deal “worst than the Turkmenchay Treaty.”
To further understand the situation, let’s compare this metaphor to another one, which is often used in explaining the behavior of the regime:
In July 1988 after the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the Supreme Leader of the time Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini reluctantly accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598 and the immediate ceasefire. He equated his decision (like Socrates) to drinking the poisonous chalice. Since then, pundits have participated in an incongruous scholastic dispute over what conditions would lead the current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to drink the proverbial poison and accept a nuclear deal like his predecessor.
Khomeini has been lambasted by many Iranians for prolonging the war with Iraq but no one has condemned his decision to accept the UN Security Council resolution as an act of giving away a piece of land or undermining national interests and rights.
The real problem for the current Iranian regime headed by Ayatollah Khamenei is not about drinking the poisonous chalice. It has to do with the signing of a nuclear Turkmenchay. Realpolitik suggests that the regime should not be trapped between the Scylla of ever-growing sanctions and the Charybdis of a humiliating unilateral concession.
The US President has apparently grasped this notion. Speaking at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum last Saturday, Obama rejected that Iran would surrender under more sanctions and military threats: “I think [this notion] does not reflect an honest understanding of the Iranian people or the Iranian regime.”
When debating the recent Geneva deal and the prospect of a comprehensive agreement, US foreign policy makers, especially Congress, need to distinguish between Iran as a regime and Iran as a state. “What’s the difference?” they might ask.
Yet, as the literary critic Paul De Man once brilliantly explained, “What’s the difference” in some situations could be an answer rather than a question that indicates the responder does not “give a damn what the difference is.” This would be an imprudent answer from the US Congress.
Photo Credit: ISNA/Mehdi Ghasemi
]]>by Ali Reza Eshraghi
Negotiation, as the French writer Marquis de Sade once said, “like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.” In the most recent session with Iran in Geneva, the lubricant was strikingly effective. The jovialness and the diplomatic experience of Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad [...]]]>
by Ali Reza Eshraghi
Negotiation, as the French writer Marquis de Sade once said, “like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.” In the most recent session with Iran in Geneva, the lubricant was strikingly effective. The jovialness and the diplomatic experience of Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry showed the extent it could help pave the road to agreement. But it seems that de Sade’s home country, France, preferred a tough negotiation with no lubricant.
According to initial media reports, the tougher stance of French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius impeded an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program on Nov 10. Kerry later tried to shift the blame to Iran, but Zarif indirectly implied in a tweet that it was France that “gutted over half of US draft” and “publicly commented against it.” Ultimately it appears that a deal was reached before France’s arrival and then scuppered due to French objections, which Iran could not accept at that point.
In Iran, this recent experience in Geneva should leave President Hassan Rouhani and his administration with two important realizations:
First, for more than a decade, Rouhani and his diplomatic team have been arguing that without the US presence, negotiations won’t be successful. For example, Iran believes that the 2003 agreement with France, Britain and Germany was spoiled because the former administration of President George W. Bush did not attend the talk. The Geneva talks last week showed that the presence of the US in negotiations is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient for making a deal.
Second, it is argued that Iran should implement a Plan B to take advantage of the gap between two sides of the Atlantic Ocean and get closer to the Europeans (just as it did during the nuclear negotiations of the 2000s) in case America continues to keep an inflexible stance against a win-win agreement with Iran. However, now that France, as a member of the European troika, has become an obstacle to a potential agreement between Iran and the US, this plan would be more difficult to execute.
Iranian elites want to use the threat of economic retaliation in response to the French stonewalling. Two days ago, the renowned Iranian economist Mousa Ghaninejad said, “France will not benefit from the obstacles it created [at Geneva talks] after [economic] relations between Iran and the West become normalized.” This soft tone sounded very much like the argument that Ahmadinejad’s government used; in 2010, Mohammad Reza Rahimi, the former First Vice President said that if only Iran “frowns” at France once, the French economy will suffer a meltdown.
Such remarks are based on a presupposition that economic ties can lead to lasting political alliances. Coincidentally, France has proved this is not the case. Nine years ago French Foreign Trade Minister Francois Loos, speaking at a seminar on “Foreign Investment Prospect in Iran,” proudly declared that Iran ranks first among France’s trade partners in the Middle East. Based on that economic alliance reasoning, we should not have seen France abandon Iran in the nuclear dispute in the first place — but it did. (This could also raise a red flag for the Arab states in the Persian Gulf, which have — since the presidency of the former president Nicolas Sarkozy — established warm economic relations with the French.)
At the same time, it is not surprising that some Iranian and foreign analysts are inclined towards conspiracy theories in assuming that France is taking the position of bad cop that the United States once held. Others reduce France’s intentions in the talks to a personal level. Sadegh Kharazi, Iran’s former ambassador to France, said that Fabius is not the representative of all of France but is “speaking on behalf of a French radical minority.” Such analysis might be plausible in a way, but neglects the big picture.
A look back at France’s history vis-à-vis the nuclear issue reminds us of its Prometheus-like role in the region. In the late 1950s, it was France that helped Israel go nuclear. Two decades later, the French sold nuclear reactors to Iraq. During the term of the former French President, France signed a deal to build a nuclear reactor for the UAE, and the French have also offered Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco civil nuclear cooperation agreements. And this October, while referring to the “huge program the Saudi government wants to implement in the nuclear field”, the French ambassador to Saudi Arabia said, “France has a lot to bring.”
In 2009, France insisted on being part of the “Fuel Swap” agreement that Saeed Jalili, the top Iranian negotiator at the time, was about to close. But Iran did not want France to be the provider of fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor. Iran’s excuse was that France cannot be trusted since it has refused to grant Iran rights to the Eurodif enrichment facility in which Iran is a shareholder.
These historical examples show a certain continuity in French policy. France has been playing the Joker card — sometimes helpful and sometimes hostile — in Iran’s nuclear deck. But the present tells us even more.
Iran’s nuclear conundrum is only part of a more complicated and bigger puzzle that goes back to defining Iran’s role and influence in the Middle East. Yet, the assumption is that by putting the nuclear issue in brackets, one can postpone negotiating over other Middle East issues. But these issues cast a shadow over the nuclear negotiations more than any other time and haunt the prospect of a nuclear deal.
The current state of the Middle East, in the words of Hamlet, is “out of joint.” The power balance in the region has been upset after the US attack on Iraq and the subsequent Arab Spring. The Middle East has become embroiled in an unknown process of reconfiguring alliances. This condition is also strangely reminiscent of a post-modern situation: alliances have become unstable and floating. Turkey, for example, informs Iran about an Israeli spying ring while competing alongside Israel with Iran over Syria as well as its fighting against Saudi Arabia over influence in Egypt.
That is not all. The pseudo-hegemony that the US had in the Persian Gulf throughout the 1990s and early 2000s has faded. Take the Saudis for example, who sent troops to help with a crackdown in Bahrain without US permission. Put simply, these countries may still cooperate with one another but with fewer strings attached.
Saudi Arabia and Israel are also concerned that the Obama administration won’t take their interests completely into consideration and recognize that a nuclear deal with Iran will have a strong impact on the new hegemonic formation of the region. A few months ago, there was chatter from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf littoral states about wanting to participate in the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the big world powers. However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reportedly rejected this request. It is only natural for players like France — which have lost its traditional influence in The Levant — to use the existing vacuum to take on bigger roles.
Rephrasing the words of the American author Bo Bennett, “more than saying or doing the right things at the right time,” under the current circumstances, the art of diplomacy over the Iranian nuclear issue must be “to avoid saying or doing the wrong thing at any time.”
]]>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
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