The Islamic Republic of Iran elected a new president in a democratic election that would’ve made even George Washington, the father of American democracy, proud. But this did not please one of his presidential heirs and namesake, George W. Bush, in the least. After all, this curious George only likes democratic elections when the rulers elected share his political views and religious values. And, Iran’s president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, clearly does not fit the bill.
(“New Iranian President: We Shall Have Nukes…,” The iPINIONS Journal, July 14, 2005)
Even though vexing, paradoxical, and inscrutable, Iranian politics is, above all else, doctrinaire. It has been thus ever since its Islamic Revolution in 1979.
For example, Iranians voted in a presidential election over the weekend and replaced a putatively secular reformer, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – who acted more like a religious cleric, with a putatively religious cleric, Hasan Rowhani – who acts more like a secular reformer. Yet nobody doubts that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will be the guiding force behind all of Rowhani’s policies (especially in foreign affairs) just as he was behind all of Ahmadinejad’s.
I don’t mind admitting that Ahmadinejad filled me with as much hope for positive change in Iran, when he was first elected in 2005, as Barack Obama did, with respect to the United States, when he was first elected in 2008. My hope was based on Ahmadinejad’s notoriously modest lifestyle and commensurate rhetoric about afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.
Never mind that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had already dashed similar hopes by focusing far more on afflicting U.S. presidents with asinine, bellicose rhetoric than on comforting poor Venezuelans with sustainable, poverty-alleviation programs after he was first elected in 1999.
Indeed, it speaks volumes that Ahmadinejad spent most of his two terms as president emulating Chávez – most notably topping the Venezuelan’s trite rhetoric about Yankee imperialism with far more menacing rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map.
Therefore, having been so profoundly disappointed by Ahmadinejad, I trust I’ll be forgiven for having no hope that Rowhani’s election augurs well for positive change – with respect to political reforms and social justice in Iran or its diplomatic relationships with Western countries. This, notwithstanding campaign rhetoric about the importance of political moderation and economic growth that made him seem, well, like a Western politician.
Indeed, apropos of the vexing, paradoxical and inscrutable nature of Iranian politics, Rowhani was the only cleric among the six candidates the Guardian Council, consisting of six judges and six clerics (all serving at Ayatollah Khamenei’s behest), approved to run in this presidential election. Yet, despite his pedigree and professional bona fides as a regime loyalist, he was the only one who could be considered a moderate; the other five all being unquestioning and unabashed adherents of Iran’s doctrinaire politics.
Interestingly enough, Ayatollah Khamenei displayed dubious, if not troubling, religious and political temperament when he responded to plainly hypocritical, premature, and wholly unwarranted U.S. criticisms of this election as follows:
Recently I have heard that a U.S. security official has said they do not accept this election. OK, the hell with you.
(Associated Press, June 14, 2013)
Granted, perhaps nobody is more qualified to damn people to Hell than a supreme religious leader. But this petulant response coming from a political provocateur (like Ahmadinejad) is to be expected; coming from a religious leader is, well, discouraging to say the least. Let’s hope the official White House statement congratulating the Iranian people on an exemplary presidential election will have a calming effect on Ayatollah Khamenei’s wrath.
For the record, Rowhani won 50.7 percent of the vote; the best of his five conservative-hardline opponents won only 16.5 percent.
It is particularly noteworthy that surviving reformers from the opposition Green Movement and perennially disaffected young people are celebrating as if Rowhani’s victory is the triumph that should have been theirs after the last presidential election four years ago. They are clearly vesting a great deal of hope in his ability to implement democratic freedoms and social-justice reforms.
For now though their rapture is such that you’d think Rowhani were the second coming of … the Prophet Muhammad. Whereas, in fact, he’s just the third coming of a reform-minded cleric, following – as he is – two others who preceded Ahmadinejad as president, namely Rowhani’s own political mentor Akbar Heshmi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. More to the point, I doubt any of the people hailing Rowhani today could explain why they believe he will succeed where these other reform-minded clerics failed.
That said, their hope would be somewhat vindicated if Rowhani could begin his presidency by prevailing upon Ayatollah Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards to:
- release political prisoners like Mir Hossein Mousave, leader of the Green Movement; and
- prosecute political assassins like those who killed Neda, the young woman who came to symbolize their Chinese-style squashing of Iran’s Persian Spring in 2009….
But here’s the real challenge Rowhani faces, which crystallizes why he too is fated to fail:
Iran’s economy has been withering under increasingly onerous sanctions ever since the United States imposed them to protest the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Far more problematic though has been Iran’s nuclear program.
Iran insists that it’s only for economic and other peaceful purposes. But the United States and Israel have convinced virtually every G20 country (with the world’s 20 biggest economies) that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, which of course would pose an untenable existential threat to Israel. No doubt Iran’s steadfast refusal to allow international inspectors to verify the nature of its program has only fueled suspicions in this respect.
Ironically, but for Ahmadinejad’s Hitlerian rhetoric about exterminating the Jews, most Western countries would probably have bought Iran’s claims about the economic and peaceful nature of its nuclear program….
This is why the United States has been able to amass a coalition of the willing, which includes the EU and even the UN, to impose sanctions that have had a crippling effect on its economy. And, far from easing them, the United States and its coalition partners are threatening to expand their sanctions regime to affect every facet of life in Iran. This would make the unbearable life most Iranians have been living in recent years even more so.
Therefore, despite his hopeful and encouraging rhetoric, there’s simply nothing Rowhani can do to improve the lives of his people, unless he can get the United States and other Western countries to lift those sanctions. And the only way he can get them to lift those sanctions is to prevail upon Ayatollah Khamenei to reverse course and open Iran’s nuclear program for international inspections. Alas, this seems highly unlikely; not least because Rowhani distinguished himself as a proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing as the Ayatollah Khamenei’s first nuclear envoy in negotiations with the West.
So even if Rowhani opens one hand to Western countries – by promising to meet conditions to have sanctions lifted, the suspicion will be that he’s hiding the other one behind his back with fingers crossed. And that suspicion would be well-founded because Ayatollah Khamenei has made it patently clear that Iran’s nuclear program is non-negotiable. And this includes the nuclear enrichment that belies long-standing Iranian claims that its nuclear program is strictly for economic and other peaceful purposes.
Mind you, I suspect Ayatollah Khamenei believes, quite reasonably, that possessing nuclear weapons will inoculate Iran against military attack from Israel or the United Stats, or both. Of course, transparent and verifiable proof that Iran has no interest in developing nuclear weapons would provide even greater inoculation. Except that I suspect he also believes, rather messianically, that possessing nuclear weapons will imbue him with the power to create a “Shi’ite Belt” – comprised of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon – that would exert more doctrinal influence throughout the Muslim world than the Prophet or the Quran. (Saudi Arabia … on guard!)
And, unlike North Korea’s absolute leader, Iran’s supreme leader is clearly too proud and self-righteous to even countenance bartering his nuclear prerogatives for economic concessions … even to feed starving Iranian children. Hell, he’s now inviting even more onerous sanctions by actively supporting Syrian President Bashir al-Assad in defiance of Western calls for him to go or be ousted. This, after all, is the same Assad who the U.S. charged just days ago of using chemical weapons on his own people to hold onto power, crossing Obama’s declared “red line.”
Which means that, just as Assad is daring Obama to take more aggressive steps to stop his Syrian government from using chemical weapons, Ayatollah Khamenei is daring him to take military action to stop his Iranian government from acquiring nuclear weapons…
It is also instructive to know that Ahmadinejad has been so politically neutered for merely acting as if his presidential powers were not subordinate to Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority that the candidate he publicly endorsed for this election was not even allowed to run. So the last thing we should expect Rowhani to do is anything that even smacks of insubordination in this respect.
Nonetheless, here’s to an Iranian presidential election – complete with a turnout of 72.7 percent – that put to shame any that has ever been held in the history of the United States. Except that any Iranian who voted for Rowhani, hoping he would bring an end to economic sanctions, was sold an even bigger bill of goods than any American who voted for Obama, hoping he would end Bush’s Big Brother war-on-terror policies.
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