Sadeq Zibakalam, University of Tehran professor and the closest the Islamic Republic has to an intra-systemic gadfly, has written an interesting commentary in the new daily Arman regarding the current state of Iranian politics. The article’s title, “End of the Deviation current,” refers to the excuse hardline conservatives in Iran have [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Sadeq Zibakalam, University of Tehran professor and the closest the Islamic Republic has to an intra-systemic gadfly, has written an interesting commentary in the new daily Arman regarding the current state of Iranian politics. The article’s title, “End of the Deviation current,” refers to the excuse hardline conservatives in Iran have relied upon to maintain their support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The “deviation current” was imaginatively concocted to blame a small clique of presidential appointees for leading Ahmadinejad astray.

Last week, Zibakalam states, proved that such a posture was no longer possible. The public interchange of letters between Ahmadinejad and the head of the Judiciary, Sadeq Amoli Larijani, ended the pretense that Ahmadinejad and his views are not the problem.

What happened last week was essentially this: Ahmadinejad’s sudden transformation into the defender of the “people’s rights”, through his public letter to the Judiciary head that in his capacity as the “implementer of the Constitution” he has the right and responsibility to visit Iranian prisons, was met with Amoli Larijani’s rather humiliating public lashing that a president’s visit is allowed only after the head of the judiciary’s permission. And, Amoli Larijani went on to say, the Judiciary does not think that it is in the “interest of the system” (maslehat) for the permission to be granted. End of conversation.

Zibakalam notes that after this exchange, even hardliners are no longer talking about the deviation current. In effect, Ahmadinejad has managed to lose every single constituency that coalesced to bring him to power in 2005 against the centrist former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The hardliners, who continue to call the 2005 election epic for heralding a discourse (goftoman-e sevom-e khordad) — at the heart and soul of which was Ahmadinejad who embodied simple living, justice-oriented policies, service to the poor, a challenge to the “aristocratic way of life,” a revolutionary stance against the West in the global arena, and the export of revolutionary values — can no longer avoid the reality that their hero is no longer one of them (or at least is acting as though he is no longer one of them).

The hardliners’ separation from Ahmadinejad does not merely lie in Ahmadinejad’s betrayal of their values and his new liberal fondness for “universal human values” and accommodation-oriented foreign policy. They are aghast at Ahmadinejad’s blatant effort to enhance his standing among the urban middle classes. To them, there is nothing wrong with Ahmadinejad trying to maintain popularity so that he can continue to play a role in Iranian politics after his term ends by August 2013. Conceivably, Ahmadinejad’s popularity can be a boon for the hardliners next presidential candidate. But Ahmadinejad’s assessment that it is the urban middle classes which need to be wooed through a liberal posture is hard to swallow. This is a problem for hardliners because it is a public abandonment of their cherished discourse, as well as a clear statement that the country’s mood is not hardline.

Ahmadinejad’s new posture is observed with quite a bit of amusement and ridicule by many who in 2009 voted for his reformist opponents, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, despite Ahmadinejad’s claim that he has been calling for their release from house arrest a couple of times. But this adds to the hardliners’ uncertainty in finding another carrier for their “discourse”, one who is both trustworthy and electable.

To be sure, so far the Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stepped in to make sure that the “justice-centered and resistance” discourse does not vanish with Ahmadinjad’s troubles. The question of whether the Leader’s abode will try to manipulate the 2013 election in order to maintain his position as an effective executive officer (along with being the Leader) is also a real one (even if this is not as easy as many imagine it to be given the fact that the body in charge of elections is the Interior Ministry, which is still run by Ahmadinejad’s appointees, and that Iranian presidents have shown a tendency to eventually object to the office of the Leader’s interference regardless of their political orientation).

At this point, the hardliners in Iran are left with no other choice but to elevate the Leader into a God-like figure who knows everything about what is best for the country with the hope that by doing so, he may be even more likely to remain on their side. Just this week Khamenei’s chief of staff, Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani said, “if one day it becomes necessary and the commander in chief [khamenei] wills it, sacred defense will again be repeated.”

However, the fear that Khamenei will eventually be forced (or connived by centrist forces) to acknowledge the same societal forces that have pushed Ahmadinejad to feign liberalism, is also there. Whether he will do so is the million dollar question in Iran, and the answer remains to be seen. (In North Khorasan a couple of weeks ago, Khamenei gave a tiny nod to the popular mood by calling for a more flexible approach to the appearance of women who don’t wear their veil properly but “are still believers.”)

But showing flexibility towards certain social conducts along with continued political repression has been an old trick in the Islamic Republic and does not represent a turn. Unless something drastic happens — such as Ahmadinejad resignation or removal — we will have to wait for the June 2013 presidential election to see whether there is a move away from the hardline discourse and which part of the electorate will be given a better chance to have its say.

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad himself is turning into an interesting figure to watch in terms of the fate that awaits him.

The Islamic Republic has treated its past three presidents differently. One past president is the current Leader  due to behind-the-scene machinations that have now turned sour for its prime architect, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Former president Khamenei continues to have a constituency, particularly in the provinces and among the lower ranks of the state and multiplicity of popular or militia-based welfare organizations and networks.

Former president Hashemi Rafsanjani has lost power but still holds a position as the chair of the Expediency Council and maintains quite a bit of clout, particularly in the business community and state-run technocracy through his advocacy of anti-hardline domestic and foreign policies.

Finally, former president Mohammad Khatami has been completely cut off from access to power, but despite all the complaints about his indecisiveness, he remains a popular man in Iran at least within a certain constituency. I have no way of knowing for sure, but there are people in Iran who insist that a real poll would show that he is still the most popular politician in the country.

In other words, Iran’s past three presidents, for all their faults, each have their own constituency. Ahmadinejad will be the first past president who will leave office with hardly any significant constituency and few political instruments to rely upon. His sudden shift toward some of the concerns of the urban middle classes suggests even he knows that once his access to state coffers is cut off, verbal populism will be of no use in maintaining a constituency that relies on state largesse.

Since the flight of Iran’s first president, Abolhassan Bani Sadr, from the country in the 1980s, all of Iran’s significant leaders have chosen to stay in Iran and precisely because of this continue to represent a voice even after they leave office because they have remained influential, each in their own way, even if purged from power and under house arrest.

Ahmadinejad stands alone, at least for now, because his confrontation with Khamenei has robbed him of support from the right of the political spectrum without any accrued benefits from the other side. In the next few months he will continue to try, as he has done in the past couple of years, to distribute as many resources among his friends as he can — even placing them in secure tenured university positions — in order to maintain some sort of political relevance after the election. But his options are limited.

Even if nuclear talks go somewhere after the US election, Ahmadinejad will not be the beneficiary of his pivot towards being a promoter of talks with the United States. He will continue to be framed as someone who, through mismanagement and bluster, brought about the enhanced sanctions regime, with Khamenei eventually taking charge and fixing the mess. He will have a hard time swallowing this reality and few believe that he will accept his checkmated predicament quietly.

But whatever Ahmadinejad does pales in comparison to what he has already done, which is to make clear, publicly, that even he is aware that public sentiments have drastically moved away from what they were in 2005 when his populist, justice-oriented platform won the day.

Ironically, this awareness was also the motivation behind the Mousavi and Karroubi campaigns in the 2009 election, and it must be quite disconcerting for those who put their reputation on the line to support Ahmadinejad’s reelection to watch him place value in public sectors that are disenchanted with his management of the economy and want a less confrontationist foreign policy.

The escalating sanctions regime that has been imposed on Iran by the United States and European Union has placed all parties involved in a rather strange position. On the US side, the palpable glee over the dropping value of the Iranian currency and the success sanctions have had in causing misery [...]]]> via Lobe Log

The escalating sanctions regime that has been imposed on Iran by the United States and European Union has placed all parties involved in a rather strange position. On the US side, the palpable glee over the dropping value of the Iranian currency and the success sanctions have had in causing misery has been hard to hide. It is also politically astute for domestic electoral purposes to take credit for the success of sanctions. That is why State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland simply couldn’t resist giving quite a bit of credit to the sanctions regime in the immediate aftermath of the currency devaluation in Iran:

Our understanding is that the Iranian currency has dropped to a historic low today against the dollar in informal currency trading, this despite some frantic efforts by the Iranian government last week to try to prop it up, rearrange the way it dealt with these issues…..From our perspective, this speaks to the unrelenting and increasingly successful international pressure that we are all bringing to bear on the Iranian economy. It is under incredible strain. Iran is increasingly cut off from the global financial system.

Yet it is not particularly seemly or civilized to take too much credit for causing misery in front of a global audience. That’s why Obama Administration officials twist and turn to explain that while sanctions are the mark of the administration’s great success, it is the Iranian government that is responsible for the deteriorating state of Iran’s economy. In the words of White House spokesman Jay Carney:

Iran’s leaders have made conscious choices about how they manage their economy, how they prioritize their budget and how they respond to the concerns of their people.  The regime has chosen to spend money to pursue nuclear activities in violation of its international obligations, to support Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime, to enable terrorist acts around the world, and to undertake destabilizing activities around the region.

The chosen examples of mismanagement is telling. Somehow we are expected to believe that the Iranian economy is in significantly worse shape than it was, let’s say, two years ago because of military and nuclear-related spending which I doubt constitutes even 1 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. (The latest figure that the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research has for Iran’s total military spending as a percentage of Gross National Product is 2 percent for 2008 while the CIA fact book puts the 2006 percentage at 2.5 percent. That’s a significantly lower percentage than neighboring countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and of course the United States, which, given its vast military presence in the region, is effectively Iran’s neighbor).

But US government officials are not the only ones caught in a delicate situation regarding the impact of sanctions, trying as they are to balance their jovial sense of success for the imposed policy of collective punishment and their avowed care for the “freedom loving people” of Iran. The EU foreign ministers’ statement on the latest sanctions slaps more broad punishment against the whole country while attempting to protect its writers from a guilty conscious. They want the world to remember that the innocuously worded “restrictive measures” are not aimed at the Iranian people but only “at affecting Iran’s nuclear program and revenues of the Iranian regime used to fund the program.”

The conversation regarding the impact of sanctions is as surreal and even more politicized inside Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after years of describing sanctions as worthless pieces of torn paper but also a source of native talents’ great advancement, has suddenly found vested interest in identifying sanctions as the source of all the country’s economic woes.

It is not his fault and if you don’t believe him he is now more than willing to hand in his resignation letter, he tells a somewhat stunned audience of Iranian politicos, in a press conference last week. Just like that, with a shrug and annoying smirk, presumably assured that none of his political opponents has the energy to get too riled up about the wreckage he has made of the Iranian political and economic landscape.

Still, his conservative opponents do try to score a point by arguing otherwise. Iran’s presidential election is coming up in June 2013 and no one can afford to be associated with the policies of the past few years. These conservative opponents do not deny the impact of sanctions but see the source of the problem in Ahmadinejad’s populist and expansionary economic policies in the face of a tightening sanctions regime that he refused to take seriously and is now unable to address adequately because of the incompetence of his economic team. Their own complicity in the creation of this wreckage is of course a topic to be ignored.

Standing on top of this cantankerous conversation is Leader Ali Khamenei whose attempt to walk a tightrope in a series of speeches to various audiences in the North Khorasan Province last week was truly a spectacle. On one hand, he has been careful not to blame the sanctions too much. He is, after all, Iran’s “decider” and the person in charge of the “general direction of the country.” All along his talking point has been that Iran’s defying stance against external bullying is actually good for the country’s blossoming talent. Iran’s “resistant economy” is his brainchild.

In North Khorasan, Khamenei again reiterated his view that the sanctions regime is not about Iran’s nuclear program and is about Iran giving in to the dictates of US hegemony. The US “does not want Iran to come back to the negotiating table; it wants Iran to surrender to Western bullying during negotiation,” he said. Rightly or wrongly, it is this rather dark view of US intentions that prevents Khamenei from blaming sanctions. Iran’s defiant posture relies on the denial of the severe impact of the sanctions regime.

But Khamenei cannot go too far in blaming government policies and general incompetence for Iran’s current economic woes either. His continued support for the Ahmadinejad government is the only thing left between the latter and a testy and worried conservative political class ready to impeach the president for incompetence along with, as I mentioned above, the hope of ridding itself of the charge of complicity in bringing about Iran’s current economic problems.

In the mind of the influential conservative MP, Ahmad Tavakoli, “Ahamdinejad’s period is over and the continuation of his presidency is not positive” but a “consensus” regarding this issue has not yet developed. When asked whether this is due to the fact that some people — read Khamenei –  would like to keep the country calm in the 9 months that are left in Ahmadinejad’s presidency, Tavakoli answers in the affirmative and emphatically rejects rumors that Khamenei’s circumspection is because “Ahmadinejad and his team has threatened the Leadership.” He says that it can be accepted that at this time “tranquility is a value and losing it is considered a loss of value but the conclusion will not always be this.” In fact, Tavakoli goes on to make clear that he disagrees with Khamenei’s decision to tolerate Ahmadinejad until the end of his term for the sake of political tranquility.

There are others who seem to agree. Last week, over 100 MPs once again signed on to a question from the president regarding the currency situation. If Khamenei doesn’t put a stop to this process – and he probably will – Ahmadinejad will be hauled to the Parliament for a second time this year. Given the rule changes put in place after his last showing, if the Parliament is not satisfied with his answer, a vote will have to be taken regarding whether to lodge a complaint against him in the Judiciary.

The likelihood of this happening is low but I guess it is important to note that even if the Iranian economy is imploding and on the verge of collapse as some western officials claim, the politics of bickering continues to rule supreme even in Iran and is bound to get worse with the nearing of the election season despite Khamanei’s repeated calls for calm and not treating competitors as enemies.