Iran's Jun. 14 elections garnered voter participation rates close to 73 percent. Credit: Mohammad Ali Shabani

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

Iran’s Jun. 14 presidential election results, announced the day after voting was held, were nothing less than a political earthquake.

The Centrist Hassan Rowhani’s win was ruled out when Iran’s vetting body, the Guardian Council, qualified him as one of the eight candidates on May 21.

Furthermore, a first-round win by anyone in a crowded competition was not foreseen by any pre-election polling.

Up to a couple of weeks ago, conventional wisdom held that only a conservative candidate anointed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could win. Few expected the election of a self-identified independent and moderate who was not well-known outside of Tehran, and few expected participation rates of close to 73 percent.

The expected range was around 60 to 65 percent, in favour of conservative candidates, who benefit from a stable base that always votes.

But the move a few days before the election by reformists and centrists – guided by two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – to join forces and align behind the centrist Rowhani proved successful. It promises significant changes in the management and top layers of Iran’s various ministries and provincial offices.

Rowhani has also promised a shift towards a more conciliatory foreign policy and less securitised domestic political environment.

The centrist-reformist alliance formed when, in a calculated action earlier this week, the reformist candidate Mohammadreza Aref withdrew his candidacy in favour of Rowhani. But the strong support for Rowhani underwriting his first-round win came from an unexpected surge in voter turnout.

Much of the electorate, disappointed by Iran’s contested 2009 election and the crackdown that followed, was skeptical of the electoral process and whether their votes would really be counted, and they also questioned whether any elected official could change the country’s direction.

Although low voter turnout was the expectation, with the centrist-reformist alliance, the mood of the country changed, with serious debate beginning about whether or not to vote. As more people became convinced, Rowhani’s chances increased. Hope overcame skepticism and cynicism.

The case for voting centred on the argument that the most important democratic institution of the Islamic Republic – the electoral process – should not be abandoned out of fear that it would be manipulated by non-elective institutions and that abandoning the field was tantamount to premature surrender.

Reformist newspaper editorials also articulated the fear that a continuation of Iran’s current policies may lead the country into war and instability.

Syria, in particular, played an important role as the Iranian public watched peaceful protests for change there turn into a violent civil war.

The hope that the Iranian electoral system could still be used to register a desire for change was a significant motivation for voters.

Beyond the choice of Iran’s president, the conduct of this election should be considered an affirmation of a key institution of the Islamic Republic that was tainted when the 2009 results were questioned by a large part of the voting public.

The election was conducted peacefully and without any serious complaints regarding its process.

Unlike the previous election, when results were announced hurriedly on the night of the election, the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of conducting the election, with over 60,000 voting stations throughout the country, chose to take its time to reveal the complete results.

Other key individual winners of this election, beyond Rowhani, are undoubtedly former presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Khatami who proved they can lead and convince their supporters to vote for their preferred candidate.

Khatami in particular had to rally reformers behind a centrist candidate who, until this election, had said little about many reformist concerns, including the incarceration of their key leaders, Mir Hossein Mussavi, his spouse Zahra Rahnavard and Mehdi Karrubi.

Khatami’s task was made easier when Rowhani also began criticising the securitised environment of the past few years and the arrests of journalists, civil society activists and even former government officials.

Meanwhile, Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose own candidacy was rejected by the Guardian Council, saw his call for moderation and political reconciliation confirmed by Rowhani’s win.

He rightly sensed that despite the country’s huge economic problems, caused by bad management and the ferocious U.S.-led sanctions regime imposed on Iran, voters understood the importance of political change in bringing about economic recovery.

Conservatives, on the other hand, proved rather inept at understanding the mood of the country, failing in their attempt to unify behind one candidate and stealing votes from each other instead.

The biggest losers were the hardline conservatives, whose candidate Saeed Jalili ran on a platform that mostly emphasised resistance against Western powers and a reinvigoration of conservative Islamic values.

Although he was initially believed to be favoured, due to the presumed support he had from Khamenei, he ended up placing third, with only 11.4 percent of the vote, behind the more moderate conservative mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.

The hardliners loss did not, however, result from a purge. Other candidates besides Rowhani received approximately 49 percent of the vote overall, and so while this election did not signal the hardliners’ disappearance, it did showcase the diversity and differentiation of the Iranian public.

Rowhani, as a centrist candidate in alliance with the reformists, will still be a president who will need to negotiate with the conservative-controlled parliament, Guardian Council and other key institutions such as the Judiciary, various security organisations and the office of Ali Khamenei, which also continues to be controlled by conservatives.

Rowhani’s mandate gives him a strong position but not one that is outside the political frames of the Islamic Republic. He will have to negotiate between the demands of many of his supporters who will be pushing for faster change and those who want to maintain the status quo.

For a country wracked by eight years of polarised and erratic politics, Rowhani’s slogan of moderation and prudence sets the right tone, even as his promises constitute a tall order.

Whether he will be able to decrease political tensions, help release political prisoners, reverse the economic downturn and ease the sanctions regime through negotiations with the United States remains to be seen.

But Iran’s voters just showed they still believe the presidential office matters and they expect the president to play a vital role in guiding the country in a different direction.

The decision by the reformist candidate Mohammadreza Aref to withdraw his candidacy – and in effect open the path for the centrist Hassan Rowhani to become the unified candidate of both the centrists and reformists – is an important development in Iranian politics.

Its impact will reach beyond this election.

This isn’t only because the centrist and reformist forces, currently led by former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, respectively, have done what the conservative forces failed to do.

After all, the conservatives – or the array of forces known as the “Principlists” in Iran, also began with the idea of coalition-building in mind.

The trio – former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, Tehran mayor Mohmmad Baqer Qalibaf, and former Parliament Speaker Gholamreza Haddad Adel – had agreed that only one of them would stand on Election Day.

Today, however, only Haddad Adel has dropped out without specifying his preferred candidate.

Beyond Velayati and Qalibaf, other principlist candidates, including nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and former IRGC commander Mohsen Rezaie, remain in the race.

So now a splintered principlist field faces a candidate that has the backing of significant political and social forces; a candidate who may, just may, become president if the Iranian electorate decides to vote in larger than expected numbers and, of course, there is no ballot box-tampering.

Just this thought, for me, represents an amazing turn of events in Iran’s ongoing election saga.

But even if this form of strategising does not yield success for whatever reason, the process that led to this alliance is an important one, one that may have a lasting impact on Iranian politics.

Why? Well, first and foremost, it was a process that was initially pushed by the rank-and-file and then deliberated upon by a committee of Khatami advisors at the top.

In an interview with Mehr News, Ahmad Masjed Jamei, Khatami’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance, explained that after Hashemi Rafsanjani’s disqualification most committee members were thinking they would not participate in the election in an organised fashion.

Their views, however, changed because “news from the provinces” suggested that people “expected” the reformists to participate and choose one candidate to support in order to increase his chance of winning.

So by creating subcommittees, with identified membership, they began working on different tasks.

One subcommittee began talking to candidates as well as well prominent centrists such Hashemi Rafsanjani and former presidential candidate Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri.

Another developed an independent mechanism for polling to see which candidate is doing better as he presents himself to the public through state-controlled media as well as campaign rallies.

This resulted in the reformist decision to support a candidate who is not explicitly running as a reformist because of his better chances.

It took a day or so to convince Aref but once Khatami publicly stepped in and asked him to step aside, Aref did as he had said he would if the reformist leader made the request. Aref is now being declared a man of honor and his word.

And yesterday, both Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani came out in strong support of Rowhani.

Khatami released a video in which he asked people to vote, to create a wave.

He said not voting is of no use, even in a very flawed electoral system.

He shunned idealism and explained why the choice was “rationally” made in the face of the Guardian Council’s disqualification of Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Khatami is usually framed as a timid leader who has a hard time leading.

This time around, though, the reluctant leader was moved to action with pressure from below and coordination and advice by a group of aides, all in a rather public and transparent way.

There was no guarantee that it would work. In fact, many assumed that it would not. But it was tried and led to results.

The message is clear: there is a good sector of the Iranian society that wants the reformists to stay in politics, not by only lamenting what is being done to them, but by actively strategising to counter the array of tactics and maneuvers that are marshaled to prevent their rightful claim to political power.

This alliance – win or lose – is a declaration that the centrists and reformists are here to stay and cannot be purged.

The traditional approach to rejection – which essentially involved going to one’s corner and merely lamenting the unfairness of the electoral process – was not practised this time, in Masjed Jamei’s words, because of pressure from below, which demanded participation in the competition for power.

In both Aref and Rowhani’s rallies, the call for unity was loudly demanded, as was the call for Khatami to lead and help bring about the alliance.

Well, Khatami did it, using a rather deliberate and transparent process that took time and made many rank-and-file reformists nervous.

But he, and the process he relied upon, came through with a big bang, allowing him to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Hashemi Rafsanjani who also said yesterday that even Nateq Nouri, who was the so-called system’s candidate in 1997 and lost to Khatami, will support Rowhani.

Meanwhile, the Guardian Council’s spokesperson, Abbasali Kadkhodai, had a meeting with representatives of the 6 remaining candidates, assuring them that “every vote will be read”.

We will have to wait and see.

But even if every vote is read, Rowhani’s success is not guaranteed if reformist and centrist voters – the most disaffected voters after what happened in the 2009 election – do not come out and vote.

In any case, an example of what successful politics on the part of those seeking change in Iran can look like was just put on display for future reference.

With the disqualification of former president and current chair of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani by a vetting body, the Guardian Council, Iran’s presidential campaign is opening with many in the country in a state of shock.

Although the eight qualified candidates offer somewhat of a choice given their different approaches to the economy and foreign policy, the disqualification of Rafsanjani has once again raised the spectre that the conservative establishment intends to manipulate the electoral process in such a way that only a conservative candidate will win when voters cast their ballots Jun. 14.

Rafsanjan’s candidacy, which received solid support from former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, had created hope among a section of the Iranian population — unhappy with the policies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — that a real contest over the direction of the country was possible.

In his first statement after declaring his candidacy, Rafsanjani had made clear that returning the country towards “moderation” and away from the “extremism” that had taken hold in both domestic and foreign policy was his objective.

His stature and name recognition had immediately catapulted him as the most formidable candidate against the conservative establishment.

The possibility that the Guardian Council would disqualify a man who is the appointed chair of the Expediency Council and an elected member of the Clerical Council of Experts was deemed unfathomable to many.

In the words of conservative MP Ali Mottahari, who had pleaded with Rafsanjani to register as a candidate, “if Hashemi is disqualified, the foundations of the revolution and the whole system of the Islamic Republic will be questioned.”

Rafsanjani’s unexpected disqualification poses a challenge for his supporters, who include centrists, reformists and even some middle-of-the-road conservatives such as Mottahari: who, if anyone, will they now support in the election?

The slate of approved candidates includes two individuals — former nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani and former first vice president Mohammadreza Aref — who hold mostly similar views to Rafsanjani.

In fact, both had said that they would withdraw if Rafsanjani’s candidacy was approved. But neither is as well known as the former president and they will now have to compete against each other in attracting likeminded voters.

Rowhani has chosen to run as an independent, while Aref is running as a reformist. While Rafsanjani’s candidacy had energised and unified the reformists and centrists, the campaign of these two lesser known candidates may be cause for disunity and/or voter apathy.

A third candidate, Mohammad Gharazi — who may also have centrist tendencies — is even less known throughout the country.

He served first as the minister of petroleum and then post, telegraph, and telephone in the cabinet of then-prime minister Mir Hossein Mussavi — now under house arrest after his 2009 presidential bid — and then in Rafsanjani’s cabinet when he served as president.

But since 1997, Ghazari has not held public office. Furthermore, no one really knows his views or why he was qualified when several other ministers with more recent experience were not.

Reformist supporters, already distraught over the previous contested election and continued incarceration of candidates they voted for in 2009, may see Rafsanjani’s disqualification as yet another sign that their vote will not count.

Apathy or abstention in protest among supporters is now a real issue for the centrists and reformists. This challenge may — and only may — be overcome if one of the candidates agrees to withdraw in favour of the other and the popular former reformist president Khatami throws his support behind the unified candidate in the same way he did with the candidacy of Rafsanjani.

But even this may not be enough. The reality is that the low name recognition of both candidates limits the impact of such political manoeuvring and coalition-building by the reformists, especially if the conservative-controlled security establishment makes campaigning and the spread of information difficult. Already Aftab News, a website affiliated with Rowhani, has been blocked.

This leaves the competition among the other five candidates who come from the conservative bloc. One, former presidential candidate, Mohsen Rezaee, is also running as an independent and is both the most likely to last until Election Day and the least likely to garner many votes.

It is the competition among the other four conservative candidates — Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, former Parliamentary Speaker Gholamali Haddad Adel, and current nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili — that will in all likelihood determine the fate of the election.

If Rafsanjani had been qualified, there would have been an urge for unity among these candidates since, without such unity, the former president could have received the 50 percent plus one necessary to win in the first round.

Now, however, the same forces that had prevented the conservative candidates from rallying behind one candidate remain in play.

Polls published by various Iranian news agencies, although not very reliable, uniformly suggest that Qalibaf is the most popular conservative candidate because of his management of the Tehran megapolis and the vast improvement in the delivery of services he has overseen there.

But Qalibaf’s relative popularity has not yet been sufficient to convince other candidates to unite behind him. This may eventually happen after televised presidential debates if he does well in them and if Velayati and Haddad Adel drop out in his favour since, from the beginning, the three of them had agreed that eventually the most popular should stand on Election Day.

But there is no guarantee that this will happen. Velayati in particular has ambitions of his own and has implied that Leader Ali Khameni’s preference should be given at least as much weight as polls, giving rise to speculation that he is the Leader’s preferred candidate despite clear signs that he has not been able to create much excitement even among conservative voters.

Convincing the hard-line candidate Jalili to drop out in favour of Qalibaf will be even harder.

In fact, from now until Election Day there will probably be as much pressure on Qalibaf to drop out in favour of Jalili as the other way around in the hope that a unified conservative candidate can win in the first round, avoiding the risk of either Rowhani or Aref making it to the second round where the top two candidates will have to compete on Jun. 21.

Jalili is the least experienced — and well known — of all the conservative candidates and, in a campaign in which economy is the number one issue by far, there are real concerns regarding whether he is experienced enough to manage Iran’s deep economic problems.

But his late entry in the presidential race, minutes after Rafsanjani entered it, has also given rise to speculation that he, instead of Velayati, may be the Leader’s preferred choice.

What is not a subject of speculation is the fact that Jalili takes the hardest line of all the candidates.

His campaign slogan of “hope, justice, and resistance” suggests that he is the most likely to continue current policies, although perhaps with less bombast and populist flair than the current president.

As such, Jalili stands apart from the other seven candidates who will campaign on the need for both change and competent leadership.

Jalili jumped into the race at the last minute as a hard-line counter to Rafsanjani’s call for moderation. Ironically, with the latter’s disqualification, he now stands alone as the candidate whom others will try to mobilise voters against.

Since Barack Obama became president of the United States, messages marking the Iranian New Year – Norouz – celebrated at the onset of spring have become yearly affairs. So have responses given by Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from the city of Mashhad where he makes a yearly pilgrimage to visit the shrine of Shi’i Islam’s eighth imam, Imam Reza.

This year, like the first year of Obama’s presidency, the two leaders’ public messages had added significance because of the positive signals broadcast by both sides after Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany met in Almaty, Kazakhstan in March. The second meeting is slotted to occur Apr. 6.

Considering that the exchanged messages came in the midst of ongoing talks, a degree of softened language and the abandonment of threats was expected. In his first Norouz speech in 2009, when both sides were getting ready to embark on serious talks, Obama had said that his administration was committed to diplomacy and a process that “will not be advanced by threats” and is “honest and grounded in mutual respect”.

This time, however, his message was laced with threats and promises of rewards if Iranian leaders behaved well, eliciting Khamenei’s disdainful response, and revealing yet again how intractable – and dangerous – the conflict between Iran and the United States has become.

The dueling exchanges also revealed the rhetorical game both sides are playing for the hearts and minds of the Iranian people, who are caught in the crossfire of policies in which they have very little input despite the very serious impact these policies have had on their economic well-being.

Reciting Persian poetry and touting the greatness of Iran’s civilisation and culture, President Obama once again suggested that the United States is ready to reach a solution that gives “Iran access to peaceful nuclear energy while resolving once and for all the serious questions that the world has about the true nature of the Iranian nuclear programme.”

But this general offer – which remained unclear on the key question of whether the United States is willing to formally recognise Iran’s right to enrich uranium on its soil – was also framed within an explicit threat that if the “Iranian government continues down its current path, it will further isolate Iran.”

In other words, the Iranian leaders can choose “a better path” which Obama insisted was for the sake of the Iranian people for whom there is no good reason “to be denied the opportunities enjoyed by people in other countries, just as Iranians deserve the same freedoms and rights as people everywhere.”

Although Iran’s isolation was acknowledged, President Obama’s words were carefully chosen not to mention the fact that it is the United States that has endeavored to impose a ferocious sanctions regime on Iran which, in his words, “deny opportunity enjoyed by people of other countries.”

In the Norouz greeting that came after a tough year of hardship, highlighted by a 40-percent drop in Iran’s oil exports, Obama’s implicit message was that the Iranian people should not blame the United States as the source of their economic difficulties but rather their own government’s choice in refusing the demands of the “international community”.

Viewed through the eyes of the Iranian leadership, the aggressiveness of such a posture was obvious, particularly since two days later, standing next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the U.S. president set aside his soft language and once again reiterated that as far as Iran is concerned “all options are on the table.”

In other words, if the Iranian leaders do not abandon their current path, the people of Iran will not only continue to be collectively punished through broad-based sanctions and denial of opportunities, they may also be subject to military attacks.

Not surprisingly, the response from Ayatollah Khamenei was calibrated to counter President Obama’s threats hidden in the language of respect for Iranian culture and people. Khamenei also showed his conciliatory side by stating that he does not oppose even bilateral talks with the United States, but added the caveat that he is not optimistic about their results. Why?

“Because our past experiences show that in the logic of the American gentlemen, negotiation does not mean sitting down together to try to reach a rational solution,” Khamenei said. “This is not what they mean by negotiation. What they mean is that we should sit down together and talk so that Iran accepts their views. The goal has been announced in advance: Iran must accept their view.”

Highlighting a clear disconnect between what Obama says to different audiences, Ayatollah Khamenei went to the heart of the problem President Obama has in convincing the Iranian people that he has their interest in mind when talking to them. Khamenei reminded his Iranian audience that “in his official addresses, the American president speaks about Iran’s economic problems as if he is speaking about his victories.”

He pointed to the announced intent of sanctions to “cripple” Iran by “the incompetent lady who was responsible for America’s foreign policy”, an apparent reference to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Khamenei’s response also singled out the United States as Iran’s number one enemy and “main centre of conspiracies against the Iranian nation”. He did acknowledge the help the U.S. gets from other Western countries and Israel but dismissed the latter as “too small to be considered among the frontline enemies of the Iranian nation”.

Along the same lines, Khamenei was also dismissive of Obama’s claim to speak for the international community. “The international community is no way interested in enmity with Iranian or Islamic Iran,” Khamenei said.

Despite differences, however, Khamenei speech had one key point in common with Obama’s message. Both leaders were ready to heap praise on the Iranian people; one did so for their “great and celebrated culture” and the other for their resistance and “high capacity and power to turn threats into opportunities”.

Heaping praise, however, cannot hide the fact that the most likely victims of the conflict between the governments of the two countries are the ones that have no input in the decisions made in either country. Both speeches made clear that, caught in the rhetorical crossfire, the people of Iran are subjects to be wooed and courted but whose economic welfare is not of much concern.

The Tehran Research Reactor where uranium enriched to 20 percent is used to produce medical isotopes. Credit: Jim Lobe/IPS

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, Mar 10 2013 (IPS)

The meeting between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) that took place in late February in Almaty, Kazakhstan was described as positive and even a “turning point” by Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili.

This positive reception has set the stage for the meeting of lower-level representatives from the two sides in Istanbul this coming week to iron out technical details for a second high-level meeting Apr. 5 and 6 back in Almaty.

Irrespective of what the results of the next meetings will turn out to be, two aspects of the February Almaty agreements are worth noting.

First was the decision by Iran to agree to quick follow-up meetings, a development that appears to have genuinely surprised Iran’s great-power interlocutors. Having been led to believe that the upcoming June presidential elections will lead to particularly contentious times in Tehran, the common wisdom had it that Iran would shy away from direct and substantive negotiations until after the vote.

The decision in favour of quick meetings constituted a clear signal that the nuclear talks are considered a vital interest of the state and are thus not to be affected by Iran’s intense intra-elite political competition.

A second related message has been conveyed by the complete lack of commentary on the part of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regarding what happened in Almaty. If anyone had any doubts that the office of the current president no longer has any input into the discussion of how Tehran will handle its side of the nuclear negotiations, Almaty should have put them to rest.

Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did mention in his Thursday speech to the Assembly of Experts that he had given his assent to Ahmadinejad’s effort to pursue an agreement with the United States through the mediation of Turkey and Brazil in 2010, but also insisted that he told “officials that the Americans would not accept, and they didn’t.” In Khamenei’s telling, Ahmadinejad’s failure seems to have sealed his irrelevance to the nuclear talks.

Still, the clarity regarding the systemic nature of decision-making on the nuclear file does not diminish the difficult and complex challenges facing Tehran as its negotiators prepare for the technical talks in Istanbul and the subsequent Almaty II meeting in early April.

The acknowledged slight shift on the part of the U.S. has given the Iranian negotiators the opening they need to make the case for their domestic audience that the talks with the P5+1 have finally changed from a forum for issuing demands to Iran into a process of give and take.

But the question of how to respond to the shift that has taken place has also clearly placed the onus on Tehran.

The P5+1’s decision to drop its demand that Iran immediately shut down its underground enrichment plant at Fordow and allow Tehran to keep some of its 20-percent enriched uranium for use in the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) for the production of medical isotopes can be seen as a de facto recognition of Iran’s basic enrichment rights.

Although effective – as opposed to official – recognition is still far from satisfying Iranian demands, it offers an opening for a process of give and take that at least strongly suggests that official recognition will be part of the end game.

Furthermore, although the offered suspension of certain sanctions, such as the recently imposed ban on gold trade does not go far enough for Tehran, the poential for putting in place a reliable step-by-step process of exchanging layers of sanctions for increased limitations on Iran’s nuclear programme and enhanced verification of its peaceful nature is something that Tehran finds acceptable, with the understanding that there will be some sort of equivalency between the steps taken by both sides.

At the same time, the challenge of devising a sustained step-by-step process based on equivalency remains. For Tehran, the challenge is underlined by its ambivalence regarding Washington’s actual aims in the negotiations. It is sceptical that the Barack Obama administration is willing or able to put a stop to the dual-track process of simultaneously talking and pressuring Iran, even if Tehran takes the step of, for example, suspending operations at Fordow.

This ambivalence was openly expressed by Ayatollah Khamenei who, in a meeting with the members of the Assembly of Experts Thursday, said that the Westerners in the Almaty meeting “did not do anything important that can be construed as a concession; rather they only made a minor acknowledgement of just a fraction of Iran’s rights.” He went on to say, “in order to assess Western sincerity in the recent meeting, we should wait for the next meeting.”

The statement implies the belief that the U.S. has finally come to accept the reality that no matter how much economic and political pressure is exerted on Iran, Tehran will not waver on its right to pursue a nuclear energy programme.

In the words of one Iranian political analyst, Mehdi Mohammadi, “The United States believed that all-out pressures will change Iran’s strategic calculations and will force Tehran to make a concession….They expected Iran to change (its strategic calculations), but in practice, it was the United States which changed.”

The U.S. may have changed its calculations, but Khamenei’s focus on “American sincerity” still reflects his persistent scepticism about U.S. intensions. By his own admission, as well as reporting of various Iranian diplomats who have been involved in nuclear talks over the past decade, Ayatollah Khamenei has at various times supported negotiations.

But his support has also been accompanied by scepticism regarding Washington’s desire or ability to address some of Iran’s bottom lines regarding its pursuit of what it insists is a peaceful programme. The “go-ahead”, in other words, as it was with Ahmadinejad’s gambit with the Turkish and Brazilian intervention, has always been accompanied by the “it-will-not-work” caveat.

As the person now identified both domestically and internationally as being fully in charge of the nuclear file, the Leader has only himself on whom to use the “it-will-not-work” refrain and pay the domestic political costs if the negotiations fail as they have in the past.

As this new round of negotiations begins, he has to decide whether he is once again willing to accept, as he did between 2003 and 2005, the suspension of at least part of Iran’s enrichment programme in exchange for suspension of some sanctions on the part of the U.S. and Europe.

As a first step, the acceptance that neither of these suspensions needs to be considerable or major in terms of broader demands that both sides have on each other is a necessity. But the acceptance of a mini-step as a first move is by itself a sign that a process based on a more realistic understanding and expectation of what can be given and taken on the part of both sides has begun.

As the Iranian leadership prepares to engage in negotiations with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) over the fate of its nuclear programme, the conversation inside Iran has moved beyond the nuclear issue, and now includes a debate about the utility of engaging in direct talks – even relations – with the United States.

Public discussions of relations with the United States have historically been a taboo in Iran. To be sure, there have always been individuals who have brought up the idea, but they have either been severely chastised publicly and quickly silenced, or ignored. The current conversation is distinguished by its breadth as well the clear positioning of the two sides on the issue.

On one side stand hardliners who continue to tout the value of a “resistance economy” – a term coined by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – in the face of U.S.-led sanctions. On the other side is a growing number of people from across the political spectrum, including some conservatives, who are calling for bilateral talks.

The idea of direct talks with the United States was openly put forth last spring by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president and current chair of the Expediency Council, in a couple of interviews.

He insisted that Iran “can now fully negotiate with the United States based on equal conditions and mutual respect.” To be sure, Rafsanjani conceded that the current obsession with Iran’s nuclear programme is not the U.S.’s main problem, arguing against those who “think that Iran’s problems (with the West) will be solved through backing down on the nuclear issue”.

He also argued that the current situation of “not talking and not having relations with America is not sustainable…The meaning of talks is not that we capitulate to them. If they accept our position or we accept their positions, it’s done.”

Rafsanjani is no longer the lone public voice in favour of direct talks. In fact, as the conversation over talks with the U.S. has picked up, he has remained relatively quiet.

Others have stepped in. Last week, for instance, hundreds of people filled an overcrowded university auditorium in the small provincial capital of Yasuj to listen to a public debate between two former members of the Parliament over whether direct talks with the U.S. offer an opportunity or threat.

On the one side stood Mostafa Kavakabian, an academic and reformist politician, who said “whatever Islamic Iran is wrestling with in (terms of) sanctions, the nuclear energy issue, multiple resolutions (against Iran) in (international) organisations, human rights violations from the point of view of the West, the issue of Israel and international terrorism is the result of lack of logical relationship…with America.”

Majlis MP Sattar Hedayatkhah, on the other hand, argued that “relations with America under the current conditions means backtracking from 34 years of resistance against the demands and sanctions of the global arrogance.”

In recent weeks the hardline position has been articulated by individuals such as the head of the Basij militia forces, Mohammadreza Naqdi, who called the sanctions a means for unlocking Iran’s “latent potential”, and the leader’s representative in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, cleric Ali Saeedi, who said that Washington’s proposals for direct talks were a ploy to trick Tehran into “capitulating over its nuclear programme”.

Standing in the midst of this contentious conversation is the Leader Ali Khamenei who, as everyone acknowledges, is the ultimate decision-maker on the issue of talks with the United States.

In the past couple of years, he has articulated his mistrust of the Barack Obama administration’s intentions in no uncertain terms, and since the bungled October 2009 negotiations over the transfer of enriched uranium out of Iran – when Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili met with U.S. undersecretary of State William Burns on the sidelines of the P5+1 meeting – has not allowed bilateral contact at the level of principals between Iran and the U.S.

Yet the concern regarding a potentially changed position on his part has been sufficient enough for the publication of an op-ed in the hard-line Kayhan Daily warning against the “conspiracy” of “worn-out revolutionaries” to force the Leader “to drink from the poison chalice of backing down, abandoning his revolutionary positions, and talking to the U.S.”

The piece goes on to say, “by offering wrong analyses and relating all of the country’s problems to external sanctions, (worn-out revolutionaries) want to make the social atmosphere inflamed and insecure and agitate public sentiments so that the exalted Leader is forced to give in to their demands in order to protect the country’s interests and revolution’s gains.”

The idea of drinking poison is an allusion to the founder of the revolution Ruhollah Khomeini’s famous speech in which he grudgingly accepted the ceasefire with Iraq in 1988 and referred to it as a poison chalice from which he had to drink.

Hardliners in Iran continue to believe that it was the moderate leaders of the time such as Rafsanjani who convinced Khomeini to take the bitter poison, while conveniently omitting the fact that the current Leader Khamenei was at the time very much on the Rafsanjani side. This time around the suspects are “worn-out revolutionaries” who are still operating within the system.

The hardliners face a predicament. Having elevated Khamenei’s role to the level of an all-knowing imam-like leader, they have few options but to remain quiet and submit to his leadership if he makes a decision in favour of direct talks. Hence their prior attempt to portray any attempt at talks as capitulation at worst or an unnecessary bitter pill at best.

In this highly contentious context, Khamenei’s decision in favour of direct talks can only be considered a big “if”. Whether he will agree to them eventually is not at all clear and in fact is probably quite unlikely, unless the U.S. position on Iran’s nuclear programme is publicly clarified to eventually allow for an acceptable negotiated settlement.

In other words, while Khamenei may eventually assent to direct talks, the path to that position is some sort of agreement on the nuclear standoff – even if a limited one – within the P5+1 framework and not the other way around.

The reality is that U.S. pressures on Iran have helped create an environment in which many are calling for a strategic, even if incrementally implemented, shift of direction in Iran’s foreign policy regarding the so-called “America question”.

But this call for a shift can only become dominant if there are some assurances that corresponding, again even if incrementally implemented, shifts are also in the works in the U.S. regarding its “Iran question”.

*Farideh Farhi blogs at www.lobelog.com.

It must be considered pure fortuity for the Islamic Republic of Iran that the decision to hold the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran was made three years ago in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

Although the previous NAM summit took place shortly after Iran’s contested 2009 presidential election, it’s unlikely that anyone could have predicted the significance that the next summit would have for Iran in light of the Obama administration’s systematic effort to tighten the sanctions regime and the changes in the region.

The extraordinary effort put into the summit – it will include five days of holiday for government workers in Tehran along with 30 extra litres of rationed gasoline, perhaps as an encouragement for people to take a vacation away from the capital city – is intended to showcase Iran’s global role and offer concrete evidence that the United States-led initiative to isolate Iran has failed.

This is not my interpretation. It is a point loudly made by various officials in Iran. For instance, Ezatollah Zarghami, the head of Iran’s radio and television, called the summit “a maneuver against arrogance…giving the message that the nation of Iran can play a role in global equations irrespective of the power of global arrogance”.

The summit is being used to make a visually forceful case that it is not the “global community” that has problems with the Islamic Republic, as repeatedly asserted by U.S. officials, but only a U.S.-led and pressured coalition of countries. And, ironically, the Obama administration is conceding that point by identifying Tehran as a “strange and inappropriate choice” for the summit while trying to dissuade various leaders from attending the meeting.

According to Ali Saeedlou, Iran’s vice president and chair of the secretariat for the summit, 150 delegations, including from 20 international organizations, will participate. Saeedlou said Tehran is prepared to host 7,000 delegates with plans for them to visit “industrial plans, and cultural and historical venues”. India’s delegation alone will include 250 people and will be led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

To be sure, whether this showcasing of Iran’s non-isolation will strengthen Iran’s hand and actually have an impact in denting the escalating U.S.-imposed sanctions regime is an entirely different matter. NAM has already issued several statements in support of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program and there is not much else that it can or will do in Tehran beyond confirming its past positions.

There is potential for a degree of unpleasantness regarding Syria, which will have representation in the summit. According to IRNA, a news agency close to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there is even debate in Iran about whether President Bashar al-Assad should attend.

But Assad’s attendance is highly unlikely and chances are that a rather bland statement calling for regional cooperation on resolving the Syrian imbroglio will satisfy the attendees. IRNA has already conceded that inclusion of support for Syria’s sovereignty as a member of NAM in the Summit’s final statement is unlikely.

Probably the most important aspect of the summit is Egyptian president Mohammad Morsi’s decision to attend. But this decision is more about Egypt’s new foreign policy direction than Iran’s non-isolation. The Egyptian president is the current secretary-general of the Nonaligned Movement and had he not gone to Iran to hand over NAM’s rotating leadership, his move would have been seen as an insult to NAM as well as a continuation of Egypt’s U.S.-dependent foreign policy under the ousted Hosni Mubarak.

And, if Egypt and Iran do eventually decide to re-establish full diplomatic relations, that decision will not be based on what happens at the summit; it will result after the time and desire for resuming diplomatic ties has finally come in both countries.

In Iran, the desire and concerted effort to elevate relations with Egypt has existed since Mohammad Khatami’s presidency and the last vestiges of opposition have vanished with the political change in Egypt. Meanwhile, the exchange of ambassadors between the two countries is effectively the least expensive way for Egypt to announce its new independent foreign policy. Not having ambassadorial relations with Iran when every other Arab country including Saudi Arabia does simply doesn’t make sense anymore and even the U.S. must understand this.

Ambassadorial-level relations do not necessarily mean friendly relations – as the current state of Iran-Saudi relations show. And the extent to which Cairo will be willing to deepen relations with Tehran will depend on, and in all likelihood be limited by, the balance of power in Egypt’s domestic politics as well as the country’s relations with the U.S. and other regional powers.

Still, depending on how well organised the summit turns out to be, Tehran will try to garner as much publicity as possible for a show staged essentially for an audience that resides outside of Iran.

As to the audience inside Iran, once the summit is over, it will continue to be divided and weighed down with the reality of severe economic challenges and a broken and paranoid political system that still does not know what to do with a large number of disaffected citizens and cannot offer an explanation for why a former prime minister (and his spouse) and a former speaker of the Parliament continue to be incarcerated without charge.

The good news for this audience though is the persistence of its wry sense of humor. Making fun of the five-day holiday that the government is giving Tehranis, a joke is going around that during the past weekend 30 people have drowned in the Caspian Sea and 90 people died in car crashes. The punch line? “If Israel waits, a whole bunch of us will just pass away during the summit holidays.”

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate Graduate Faculty at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She has taught comparative politics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, University of Hawai’i, University of Tehran, and Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran.

Turkish-Iranian relations have been rocky since the deepening of the Syrian imbroglio, but the latest row suggests a new low.

In no uncertain terms, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu expressed displeasure with recent harsh statements coming out of Tehran regarding Turkish culpability in the quagmire Syria has become.

The Turkish leadership was particularly upset with the recent remark by Iran’s chief of general staff who has said that “it will be its turn” if Turkey continues to “help advance the warmongering policies of the United States in Syria”.

Seeking Turkey’s help for the release of some 48 Iranians kidnapped by the insurgents in Syria, Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi tried hard to soften the angry language that is coming out of Iran’s hawkish foreign policy wing. Davutoglu nevertheless warned him “in a frank and friendly manner” against blaming Ankara for violence in Syria.

On the ground, the reality in Syria is taking its toll on the relationship. Along with the exchange of unprecedented accusations, Iran has reportedly decided to suspend a visa-free travel arrangement with Turkey.

This arrangement, in force since 1964, was suspended last week under the pretext of concerns for the run-up to the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which will commence at the end of August in Tehran. It will be reinstated after the NAM meeting in September, but the reasoning has been treated with suspicion by the Turkish press.

Meanwhile, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç slammed Iran, implying that the recent surge of terror attacks in Turkey’s Southeast has Tehran’s backing.

“We have received information that Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists infiltrated from the Iranian side of the border and that they were stationed in the Şehidan camp (in Iran) and crossed into Turkey from the region of Harkuk in northern Iraq,” he said.

What explains Iran’s most recent vocal offensive against Turkey and the Erdogan government’s testy response?

Tehran has been unhappy with Ankara’s role in supporting the insurgency in Syria. But assessing that Erdogan’s Syria policy is not that popular at home, Iran seems to have made the decision to highlight the dangers of what it considers to be a Turkish policy of reckless involvement in the Syrian crisis for Turkey itself and eventually for the political standing of the Justice and Development Party.

Tehran is not that off the mark regarding the unpopularity of Erdogan’s policy and as such, there is a method in the madness of offending a government that in Erdogan’s words “stood by Iran when no one was at its side”.

Tehran is banking on the fact that with the spilling of the Syrian crisis into Turkey, Erdogan’s Islamist government will be facing increasing criticism from secular forces for supporting the insurgency against the Assad regime without thinking carefully about the implications of Syria’s disintegration as a country.

Tehran is also banking on the belief that in a contested political environment like Turkey’s, public opinion matters.

Tehran’s logic in assessing Erdogan’s domestic vulnerability on his Syrian policy is simple. Bashar al-Assad’s fall may make Iran a loser in the proxy fight over Syria, but Turkey will be an even bigger loser if the motley crew of forces that have come together to dislodge Assad end up destabilising the borders that were imposed by external forces in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Turkish border with Iraq was negotiated with the British government in 1926 and was established with Syria in 1938 when, after the expiration of the French mandate, the people of the border province of Hatay voted to be a part of Turkey rather than Syria.

While Iran may eventually lose a key ally in Assad and find its position weakened in the region, it is Turkey that has to deal with its own angry Arab Alevis residing near the Syrian border (and potentially the much larger Turkish and Kurdish Alevi population frightened by aggressive Sunni acts), opportunistic Kurdish nationalism, and the mayhem that refugees invariably bring into border areas.

Erdogan’s fierce response can also be understood with this domestic dynamic in mind. In fact, Erdogan has already issued other angry responses against the domestic critics of his Syrian policy, at times even calling them traitors for questioning his efforts.

He took a dig at the Iranian leadership’s own domestic problems when he said last week that “250,000 Syrians have left the country (Syria). Is this not the responsibility of Iran? Yet, before Iran takes responsibility for the situation in Syria, it must first hold itself accountable (for its own). We always take responsibility for our actions.”

But Iran holding itself responsible will not solve Erdogan’s Syria angst at home. Syria is a major domestic issue in Turkey with real concern regarding the potential materialization of some form of a Kurdish entity in northern Syria and the emergence of a Syria mired in an ethnic and confessional civil war with different groups controlling different regions.

Given these dynamics, Iran’s verbal and diplomatic offensive, including the national security adviser Saeed jalili’s very public meeting with Assad in Damascus, can be understood as having several objectives in mind.

First, it is intended to make a public case that Assad’s fall is not imminent as portrayed by his opponents. The intended message is that Assad may be in trouble, but pushing him out of power requires more than the current militarised approach.

Second, Iran hopes to highlight the dangers of continued support for the removal of Assad through foreign-backed armed insurgency without any political framework that takes into account the interests of Assad and his supporters. The policy has so far failed to remove the regime but even if it does succeed, it will underwrite the country’s disintegration with no one having control over the regional implications.

Third, Tehran is making the case that the resolution of the Syria problem will be not be possible without Iran’s involvement.

It is noteworthy that Tehran’s assessment of Ankara’s predicament is not that different from many assessments in the United States regarding the threat that the lengthening of the conflict poses for neighbouring countries. In the United States, however, the spectre of the conflict spinning out of control has mostly led to calls for increased support for the insurgency in order to remove Assad and end the conflict as soon as possible.

Unlike the United States, Iran does not have the resources to become directly involved in the expanding Syrian conflict. But it is trying to capitalise publicly on the costly but so far unsuccessful attempt to dislodge Assad. And for now, it is Turkish public opinion that is being conceived as a battleground.

Given the powerful allies that are prodding Turkey to remain committed to hastening the end of the Assad regime, Tehran’s play is a pretty weak one. But Erdogan’s Syria policy is also turning out to be a gamble that will only be redeemed if Syria does not disintegrate as a country.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate Graduate Faculty at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She has taught comparative politics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, University of Hawai’i, University of Tehran, and Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran.

By - - and Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, US, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Iran’s Mar. 2 parliamentary elections were touted by many Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the most “critical” event since the establishment of the Islamic Republic 33 years ago.

Speaker Ali Larijani had to contend with many unhappy deputies who say fraud and "unethical destructive conduct" were responsible for their defeats. Credit: Parmida Rahimi/CC BY 2.0

And if official figures are to be taken at face value, the Iranian electorate responded to the call, showing “insight and unity”, in the words of Gholamreaza Haddad Adel, an incumbent lawmaker who is now considered the most likely candidate to replace current speaker Ali Larijani in the next session of parliament.

Other government officials are hailing the election as a watershed in the face of military threats from Israel and “crippling” economic sanctions by the West.

According to Larijani himself, the election constituted a rebuke to Iran’s enemies who had wagered on a lacklustre turnout in order “to place even more pressure on Iran”. Instead, “the nation” stepped in to “push back against adventurist rivals and show that, in regard to national objectives, it is of one voice with the regime, and its exemplar is not political groupings, but rather the Leader of the revolution”, whose “management of the setting was praiseworthy”.

Official figures showed a seven-percent increase in voter turnout compared to the last parliamentary election in 2008 – from 57 to 64 percent. In many large cities, according to the official tally, participation increased dramatically. The number of people voting in the northern city of Rasht, for example, increased by 165 percent, while the southern city of Ahwaz witnessed a more modest, but still remarkable 50-percent increase, according to the publicly released results.

These figures are unlikely to be accepted by people who believe that the announced results of the contested 2009 presidential election, won by President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, were fraudulent. Many of them stayed home to protest political conditions in the country, including the continued detention of reformist leaders and the ban on their political parties.

Indeed, the inability to independently verify the results will add to suspicions that elections in Iran are becoming increasingly like show elections, particularly since the official in charge, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, gave out different figures regarding the number of people who participated virtually every time he spoke publicly after the polls closed Friday night.

As to the results, the much touted competition between the two lists of conservative candidates – one presumably supporting Khamenei and the other indirectly supporting Ahmadinejad – did not really materialise. Instead, among the 225 out of 290 seats that were decided in the first round of voting, the majority of winning candidates either appeared on both lists or were rookie politicians who ran as independents. About 20 people identified with the reformist movement were also elected.

Only in Tehran is there likely to be a confrontation between the two lists in the second round of voting next month, since only five out of the slotted 30 seats allotted to the capital city were decided. Fifty candidates will have to compete for the remaining 25 seats, along with candidates for another 40 seats elsewhere in the country, because none of them received the minimum 25 percent of the total vote cast that is required to win in the first round.

There was no surprise in the large number of incumbents who lost their seats, since historically only about 30 percent of sitting lawmakers have been re-elected.

Nonetheless, Speaker Larijani had to contend Monday with many unhappy deputies who claimed publicly that fraud and “unethical destructive conduct” were responsible for their defeats. Larijani must now figure out how to motivate the losers to do urgent work on next year’s budget whose approval has already been delayed by months due to government inaction and the election itself.

The high number of new deputies and the lack of clarity surrounding both their political views and their campaign donors make predictions regarding the political trajectory of the new parliament difficult.

But if the words of Ahmad Tavakoli, a current MP and head of the Majles Research Center, are to be accepted, “all (political) currents hold the same views in foreign policy, and their resistance against foreign pressures is good, despite the tactical differences they have in approaching the West.” It is in the domestic arena that “significant differences” are likely to emerge.

“We still do not know which currents or groups will take shape (in the parliament) and which one will dominate,” he went on to say.

The election produced one major surprise, described as “shocking” by some disappointed members of the opposition movement: the announcement that former president Mohammad Khatami, the most prominent reformist leader who is not under some form of detention, had voted in a district outside Tehran.

The reaction to that report was fast and furious on social networks and websites inside and outside of Iran. Criticism ranged from charges that he was committing treason against the people of Iran and being a coward and a dupe, to having blood on his hands for accepting the tenets of the Islamic Republic.

Earlier in the year, Khatami had laid out the release of all political prisoners and lifting of curbs on political parties and the press as conditions for the participation of reformist candidates in the election. He had not called for a voter boycott, but many assumed that he would not vote.

In his response to the harsh criticism directed against him by those Iranians who since the 2009 presidential elections have believed the system incapable of reform, Khatami wrote on his website, “My action is rooted in my political view and conduct and what I believe. I acted from a reformist position and for the sake of keeping open the path of reformism which I consider to be the only way for reaching the authentic ideals of the revolution, securing people’s rights, and the nation’s interests.”

In an election in which participation was insisted upon as an expression of needed national unity in the face of foreign threats, Khatami was faced with the choice of working within or against the system. Hedging or working against the system from within was not an option.

Reformists already have two leaders, 2009 presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mussavi and Mehdi Karrubi, who are under house arrest and have been widely accused of working against the system. Khatami made clear that in the face of few alternatives he does not see any utility in either joining them or abandoning the hope for reform or national reconciliation, even if only for doubtful tactical reasons.

Meanwhile, the dominant conservative bloc, which since 2009 has repeatedly accused those who protested that election of sedition, also faces a choice.

Now that this “critical” election has delivered a “slap to the enemy” and proved the “insight and unity of the nation”, the leadership could begin acting in a less paranoid fashion, intent on seeing enemies and fifth columns in every corner, if indeed its professed desire for national unity in the face of the enemy is sincere.

Although it may yet be too early, no hints of such a path have yet emerged, however, as the leadership has so far failed to show any interest in using the election to reach out to reformists and their supporters and reverse the political polarisation that has afflicted Iran’s highly diverse society since the 2009 election.

In that respect, this “critical” election appears designed more for external consumption than for internal reconciliation.

Excerpt:

Iran’s Mar. 2 parliamentary elections were touted by many Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the most “critical” event since the establishment of the Islamic Republic 33 years ago.

The campaign featured posters exhorting people to vote as a means to prevent military attacks, as well as emphatic declarations by Khamenei that high turnout would be a “slap” in the face of the enemy.

And if official figures are to be taken at face value, the Iranian electorate responded to the call, showing “insight and unity”, in the words of Gholamreaza Haddad Adel, an incumbent lawmaker who is now considered the most likely candidate to replace current speaker Ali Larijani in the next session of parliament.

Other government officials are hailing the election as a watershed in the face of military threats from Israel and “crippling” economic sanctions by the West.

Speaker Ali Larijani had to contend with many unhappy deputies who claimed publicly that fraud and "unethical destructive conduct" were responsible for their defeats. Credit: Parmida Rahimi/CC BY 2.0

According to Larijani himself, the election constituted a rebuke to Iran’s enemies who had wagered on a lacklustre turnout in order “to place even more pressure on Iran”. Instead, “the nation” stepped in to “push back against adventurist rivals and show that, in regard to national objectives, it is of one voice with the regime, and its exemplar is not political groupings, but rather the Leader of the revolution”, whose “management of the setting was praiseworthy”.

Official figures showed a seven-percent increase in voter turnout compared to the last parliamentary election in 2008 – from 57 to 64 percent. In many large cities, according to the official tally, participation increased dramatically. The number of people voting in the northern city of Rasht, for example, increased by 265 percent, while the southern city of Ahwaz witnessed a more modest, but still remarkable 50-percent increase, according to the publicly released results.

These figures are unlikely to be accepted by people who believe that the announced results of the contested 2009 presidential election, won by President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, were fraudulent. Many of them stayed home to protest political conditions in the country, including the continued detention of reformist leaders and the ban on their political parties.

Indeed, the inability to independently verify the results will add to suspicions that elections in Iran are becoming increasingly like show elections, particularly since the official in charge, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, gave out different figures regarding the number of people who participated virtually every time he spoke publicly after the polls closed Friday night.

As to the results, the much touted competition between the two lists of conservative candidates – one presumably supporting Khamenei and the other indirectly supporting Ahmadinejad – did not really materialise. Instead, among the 225 out of 290 seats that were decided in the first round of voting, the majority of winning candidates either appeared on both lists or were rookie politicians who ran as independents. About 20 people identified with the reformist movement were also elected.

Only in Tehran is there likely to be a confrontation between the two lists in the second round of voting next month, since only five out of the slotted 30 seats allotted to the capital city were decided. Fifty candidates will have to compete for the remaining 25 seats, along with candidates for another 30 seats elsewhere in the country, because none of them received the minimum 25 percent of the total vote cast that is required to win in the first round.

There was no surprise in the large number of incumbents who lost their seats, since historically only about 30 percent of sitting lawmakers have been re-elected.

Nonetheless, Speaker Larijani had to contend Monday with many unhappy deputies who claimed publicly that fraud and “unethical destructive conduct” were responsible for their defeats. Larijani must now figure out how to motivate the losers to do urgent work on next year’s budget whose approval has already been delayed by months due to government inaction and the election itself.

The high number of new deputies and the lack of clarity surrounding both their political views and their campaign donors make predictions regarding the political trajectory of the new parliament difficult.

But if the words of Ahmad Tavakoli, a current MP and head of the Majles Research Center, are to be accepted, “all (political) currents hold the same views in foreign policy, and their resistance against foreign pressures is good, despite the tactical differences they have in approaching the West.” It is in the domestic arena that “significant differences” are likely to emerge.

“We still do not know which currents or groups will take shape (in the parliament) and which one will dominate,” he went on to say.

The election produced one major surprise, described as “shocking” by some disappointed members of the opposition movement: the announcement that former president Mohammad Khatami, the most prominent reformist leader who is not under some form of detention, had voted in a district outside Tehran.

The reaction to that report was fast and furious on social networks and websites inside and outside of Iran. Criticism ranged from charges that he was committing treason against the people of Iran and being a coward and a dupe, to having blood on his hands for accepting the tenets of the Islamic Republic.

Earlier in the year, Khatami had laid out the release of all political prisoners and lifting of curbs on political parties and the press as conditions for the participation of reformist candidates in the election. He had not called for a voter boycott, but many assumed that he would not vote.

In his response to the harsh criticism directed against him by those Iranians who since the 2009 presidential elections have believed the system incapable of reform, Khatami wrote on his website, “My action is rooted in my political view and conduct and what I believe. I acted from a reformist position and for the sake of keeping open the path of reformism which I consider to be the only way for reaching the authentic ideals of the revolution, securing people’s rights, and the nation’s interests.”

In an election in which participation was insisted upon as an expression of needed national unity in the face of foreign threats, Khatami was faced with the choice of working within or against the system. Hedging or working against the system from within was not an option.

Reformists already have two leaders, 2009 presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mussavi and Mehdi Karrubi, who are under house arrest and have been widely accused of working against the system. Khatami made clear that in the face of few alternatives he does not see any utility in either joining them or abandoning the hope for reform or national reconciliation, even if only for doubtful tactical reasons.

Meanwhile, the dominant conservative bloc, which since 2009 has repeatedly accused those who protested that election of sedition, also faces a choice.

Now that this “critical” election has delivered a “slap to the enemy” and proved the “insight and unity of the nation”, the leadership could begin acting in a less paranoid fashion, intent on seeing enemies and fifth columns in every corner, if indeed its professed desire for national unity in the face of the enemy is sincere.

Although it may yet be too early, no hints of such a path have yet emerged, however, as the leadership has so far failed to show any interest in using the election to reach out to reformists and their supporters and reverse the political polarisation that has afflicted Iran’s highly diverse society since the 2009 election.

In that respect, this “critical” election appears designed more for external consumption than for internal reconciliation.

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, U.S., May 24 2011 (IPS)

Amid intensified factional fighting among conservatives who dominate the presidency, the parliament, and the office of the Islamic Republic’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an appeal for national reconciliation and forgiveness by a former reformist president is making a major splash in Iran’s political discourse.

The May 18 speech of Mohammad Khatami to a group of Iran-Iraq War veterans has taken friends and foes of the former president by surprise in a country where charges of electoral fraud and the regime’s brutal suppression of post-election protests have completely polarised the population.

While in Iran’s highly fluid politics, nothing can be asserted with certainty, Khatami’s appeal for the country to embark upon a middle path could transform the past year’s highly corrosive and vacuous political discourse, which has been dominated by paranoia about “seditious” or “deviant” currents intent on overthrowing the regime.

Khatami, who appears to be positioning himself as a mediator between conservatives on the one hand and reformists who supported the so- called Green Movement on the other, was quite clear and to the point.

“If there has been injustice done to the system and Leadership, forsake them for the sake of the future, and the nation will also forsake the injustice that was done to it and its children,” Khatami said.

He also called, as he has in the past, for the release of all political prisoners and the suspension of the house arrests of presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mussavi and Mehdi Karrubi.

The formulation – asking Khamenei to forgive and change course while promising forgiveness on the part of the nation – drew immediate and sharp responses, particularly from some of those who have suffered most from the regime’s repression.

Imploring Khatami not to wash clean “Khamenei’s bloodied hands,” Mehdi Saharkhiz, the son of Issa Saharkhiz, the long-detained press chief in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance under Khatami, issued a blistering response, acknowledging Khatami’s right to “show (his) allegiance to the Satan.” But he did not have the right “to give this allegiance in the name of the people,” added the younger Saharkhiz, who currently lives in exile.

Others, such as exiled journalist Massih Alinejad, have criticised Khatami’s formulation, arguing that it reveals the essential weakness of the reformists and their reliance on a failed strategy of pleading for change when the power to implement it is so clearly lacking.

Yet other commentators have found in Khatami’s appeal an opportunity for initiating a conversation about the goals and strategies of reformists and the Green Movement for change spawned by the 2009 election.

Writing in the Tehran-based ‘Rouzegar’, Alireza Alavi-tabar, a prominent sociologist, reminded the daily’s mostly reformist readers that “blood should not be washed with blood” and that long-term social harmony required forgiveness.

Another influential reformist, journalist Abbas Abdi, also endorsed the forgiveness theme despite the fact that, during Khatami’s tenure, he was one of the foremost critics of the former president’s mild- mannered and conciliatory approach.

“Political resistance is not about implementing justice as some people assume,” he said in an interview with ‘Rouzegar’. Rather, he went on, the aim is to reduce hardship and pain and increase happiness and satisfaction for the greatest number of people.

“Implementation of justice is the responsibility of the courts, but compromise and peace are antecedent to the courts, and politics is about compromise and peace,” said Abdi, who was one of the students who took over the U.S. embassy in 1979 and subsequently became among the regime’s most trenchant and effective critics.

Blasting exiles who call for a more-confrontational approach, Abdi charged that they really seek the regime’s violent overthrow. “They are not concerned about violated rights, harm inflicted, or the number of fatalities; they just want to implement the Iraq and Libya project in Iran,” he declared.

Iran should consider South Africa’s reconciliation process and the Allies’ decision to treat defeated Germany with greater leniency after World War II then they had after World War I despite the graver crimes committed during the former, he said.

The bottom line, according to Abdi, is that the more success Khatami and fellow-reformists have in persuading people that compromise and forgiveness are the key to a better future for Iran, the more power they will gain in convincing Khamenei and other conservatives to change course.

“The main issue is power,” he said. “Propagation of (Khatami’s) position and everyone recognising it (as the best course) strengthen the critics and cause fissures in the opposing group, and this is a move towards rebalancing power.”

Indeed, absent any organisational backbone to make its aim of gaining justice and a complete overhaul of the existing system a reality, the movement for change faces a serious challenge.

Further radicalisation simply makes the conservative forces more paranoid, more determined to maintain power, and less open to compromise. It also makes the few leaders who can still appeal for reconciliation without fear of serious reprisals, including imprisonment, less effective in making their case.

Whether this argument will hold sway with that sector of the citizenry that feels both abused and powerless as a result of the repression meted out over the past year and a half remains to be seen.

At this point, however, what is certain is that Khatami’s attempt to initiate a national conversation about Iran’s future, the extent to which polarisation harms the country, and the role of compromise in promoting democratic practices – perhaps at the expense of immediate justice – appears partially successful.

And this is already an important achievement in a country where the idea of compromise is generally understood and criticised as simply a form of appeasement of illegitimate power.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, U.S., May 8 2011 (IPS)

The very public disagreement between Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the sacking of the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, is turning out to be a losing game for both sides.

On the one hand, Khamenei’s decision to re-instate Moslehi threatens to make Ahmadinejad a lame duck until Iran’s next presidential election in 2013. Publicly humiliated and his allies accused of “deviating “from principles of the 1979 revolution, Ahmadeinejad’s political future seems uncertain at best. And the chances of one of his protégés succeeding him appear to have been significantly diminished.

On the other hand, Khamenei’s action has further exposed him as a meddlesome and imperious leader who is encouraging almost daily outlandish statements by a coterie of supportive officials celebrating his apparently absolute powers to do whatever he wants.

The chief of the judiciary, Sadeq Javadi Amoli, went so far as to suggest last week that “disobedience and rebellion against the Leader’s orders is against the constitution and sharia.” And Tehran’s Friday Prayer leader, Hojjatoleslam Kazem Sadighi, declared Khamenei’s role as the religious guide to be “above the constitution” in his latest homily.

The current controversy was sparked April 17 when, in response to Ahmadinejad’s sacking of Moslehi, Khamenei publicly released a letter in which he asked the just-dismissed spy chief to continue performing his duties. Thus overruled and publicly humiliated, Ahmadinejad expressed his displeasure by boycotting cabinet meetings for 11 days.

Under the Iranian Constitution, the president clearly has the right to dismiss his chosen ministers. Khamenei, however, justified his intervention by referring to the principle of maslehat, or the greater interest of the country, without bothering to explain how this interest had been violated by Moslehi’s dismissal.

A cleric has held the position of intelligence minister since the outset of the revolution and, during the presidencies of both Mohammad Khatami and Ahmadinejad, always upon Khamenei’s approval. Moslehi was the second intelligence minister to be sacked by Ahmadinejad in the last two years, and Khamenei was in all likelihood concerned about the office of the president asserting direct control over this critical ministry in the three-month period that an interim minister can serve without Parliament’s approval of a successor.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that Moslehi’s dismissal was occasioned by the discovery that the intelligence ministry was tapping the office of Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, a close ally and reputed presidential aspirant. But Ahmadinejad’s request to appear live on television and explain his reasons for dismissal and absence from work was rejected by Iranian national television, whose director is a Khamenei appointee.

In the first cabinet meeting he attended after the conflict, however, Ahmadinejad warned that the Leader will not be able to get anything done without “the capable arms of a strong and powerful president.”

Contending executives have always been a problem for the Islamic Republic. This is not the first time a chief executive has refused to show up to work in reaction to the intervention of other institutions.

In September 1988, then-Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mussavi sent a letter of resignation to then-President Khamenei over problems with his cabinet appointments. He stayed away from work, for a day, but his resignation was not only rejected, but the then-Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a public rebuke for his attitude, insisting that, “When the . . . people sacrifice their sons for the sake of Islam it is no time for bickering and resigning.”

Mussavi did indeed return to work, but, if the just-released daily recordings by the then-speaker of the Parliament (and future two-term president), Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, are to be believed, a resignation that was intended to acquire more powers “resulted in the loss of even more authority.”

A similar fate may now befall Ahmadinejad. One difference, however, is that Mussavi at the time was only a few months away from the end of his tenure, while Ahmadinejad has two more years left in his term.

Another difference is that the rebuke Mussavi received was from Khomeini, who at the time was part of a tripartite executive structure in which his institutional and political role as final arbiter between the president, a conservative, and the prime minister, a leftist, was undisputed.

Today that tripartite structure no longer exists, and Khamenei and his rather opaque office – which is estimated to have close to 4,000 people on its payroll — is one side of a dual governance structure. Any disagreement between him and the president is thus perceived as a political challenge to his authority.

This is a situation that Khomeini never faced not merely because he was the charismatic founder of the Islamic Republic whose authority was accepted by all wings of Iran’s politically fractured elite, but also because Iran’s institutional structure was different.

Khamenei is fond of reminding everyone that he is behaving very much as Khomeini did. This is partly true. Like his predecessor, he is either acting extra-constitutionally or interpreting the Iranian constitution in a way that gives him unlimited and unchecked powers.

But, to maintain the status of his office as the final arbiter in the current dual-executive structure, Khamenei, who also lacks Khomeini’s historical standing and charisma, must either constantly elicit declarations of public allegiance to his office, as he has been doing in the latest crisis, or promote conflicts between other individuals or institutions to the point that the various contenders are forced to go to him to mediate their differences.

The latter is what Khamenei has been doing in the institutional conflict between Ahmadinejad and Parliament in which, typically, Ahmadinejad has refused to implement laws passed either directly by the Parliament or via the longer process of gaining their approval through the Expediency Council.

Instead of resolving the conflict in a decisive fashion that gives the power to one or the other institution, Khamenei has intervened only on a case-by-case basis. His refusal to establish clear precedents has effectively weakened the Parliament by forcing it to make repeated appeals to the Leader’s office to intervene and rein in the presidency.

Khameini’s failure to clarify the division of powers by setting precedents has also resulted in the degradation of two other key institutions, the Guardian Council and the Expediency Council. And, while it has enhanced the power of Khameini’s office, it has also emboldened Ahmadinejad to think that he can push back against any institution that he considers an obstacle to the day-to-day running of the country.

The end result, however, has been a losing game for both executives. In this latest confrontation, it appears that Ahmadinejad has now been effectively reduced to a lame duck, as Khamenei has signaled his intentions to intervene further in what has been considered the presidency’s domain by directly asking Parliament to increase the yearly budget for the judiciary and military.

But if Ahmadinejad is to be a lame duck, he appears determined to be an unhappy and sulking one, and that pose could well further undercut Khamenei’s legitimacy and even his effectiveness, as it exposes the Leader as someone who even his handpicked president considers as exercising too many uncontrolled powers.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, U.S., Sep 14 2010 (IPS)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s confrontational approach towards the Iranian parliament could turn into a wider systemic crisis and is provoking appeals for a much more resolute intervention by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But Khamenei’s attempts to defuse the conflict by asking both sides to set aside differences and show unity in the face of external pressure and enemies have so far proven ineffective.

As a result, the conflicts between the parliament, or Majles, and Ahmadinejad’s government are much deeper than ever, challenging other major institutions of the Islamic Republic, as well as the constitutionally approved processes for resolving conflicts among them.

Ahmadinejad’s challenge to parliament has taken several forms, beginning with his refusal to implement recent legislation on the grounds that the process by which it was passed violated the constitution.

Iran’s legislative process is indeed byzantine, but Ahmadinejad’s constitutional objection appears to be unfounded. As amended in 1989, the Islamic Republic’s constitution is clear that the Majles is the source of all legislation. The Guardian Council, in turn, decides whether all elements of the legislation passed are both constitutional and Islamic.

When the Guardian Council rejects bills, parliament generally goes along. But the body can also refer the rejected legislation to the Council for the Discernment of the Interest of the Islamic Order, often referred to as the Expediency Council. As the name implies, this institution can decide in favour of parliament it if finds the legislation serves the general interest of the country.

Indeed, the Expediency Council has upheld legislation in the past regarding issues as varied as increasing the minimum age of marriage for women to creating a more favourable environment for foreign investment.

This complicated procedure emerged when the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, established the Expediency Council in 1988 in response to the political deadlock between a left-wing parliament and a conservative Guardian Council in the mid-1980s. A 1989 constitutional revision codified the change.

Ahmadinejad is now challenging this process by refusing to disburse funds appropriated by the Majles and eventually approved by the Expediency Council. His argument is that the Expediency Council exceeded its constitutional authority by approving legislation requiring the government to disburse the funds.

Political motives are also involved. Although a member of the Expediency Council, Ahmadinejad has refused to attend its meetings in the past 17 months because of his open conflict with its chairman, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The latter, in turn, has made a point of holding regular meetings and inviting photographers to take pictures of the president’s empty seat.

The centre of the controversy is a 2009 bill to appropriate two billion dollars for the metro lines throughout Iran. After the bill was rejected by the Guardian Council, the Expediency Council sided with parliament in March 2010. The issue is politically fraught because Mohsen Hashemi, Rafsanjani’s son, heads the organisation that runs the metro.

The Tehran metro, Iran’s largest urban rail system, is also operated by the city of Tehran, whose mayor is a political rival of Ahmadinejad, and who has said he believes the system should be run by the central government.

Constitutional and political motives aside, Ahmadinejad’s refusal to implement the law prompted Ali Larijani, the Majles Speaker and another Ahmadinejad foe, to officially relay the enactment of the legislation to the appropriate ministries in July.

But, despite statements by both Khamenei and the Guardian Council upholding the legislation as constitutional, Ahmadinejad has refused to disburse the funds. As for the Guardian Council, its spokesperson has stated it has no “legal instruments” for taking up the issue once the Expediency Council has ruled.

As a result, Ahmadinejad has challenged the role and effectiveness of an institution that was specifically created by Khomeini himself to overcome such deadlocks.

Ahmadinejad has also challenged parliament itself. He has, for example, defied the requirement that the executive branch notify parliament of all regulations and guidelines implemented by the various ministries to enable lawmakers to assess their compatibility with the intent of their legislation.

His refusal is based on the argument that some parliamentary requirements are too onerous and make the execution of laws difficult.

According to a recent study by the Majles Research Center of a 15-month period ending in March 2010, the government complied with reporting requirements in only 59 percent of 195 laws. Moreover, most of the reports were filed late.

To solve this problem, Khamenei created a Working Group for Resolving the Differences between Parliament and the Government whose members were drawn from the government, parliament and the Guardian Council.

Despite 14 meetings so date, however, no progress has been made, according to Farhad Tajari, a frustrated conservative member from the Majles, who blamed intransigence on both sides.

Ahmadinejad further challenged parliament by contesting the body’s prerogative to amend government proposals. Last year, after parliament spent many months working on his subsidy reform plan, Ahmadinejad threatened to withdraw the whole legislation. With Khamenei’s intervention, parliament eventually agreed to give the president substantial leeway in implementing the subsidy reform, which is scheduled to take effect at the end of this month.

Now, however, the conflict centres around the Fifth Five- Year Economic Plan whose consideration is already one year late. Again, after months of parliamentary work on the plan, Ahmadinejad suddenly asked to withdraw the legislation, a manoeuvre apparently designed to force parliament to delete changes – some of them in consultation with the Expediency Council – it has made to the original bill. Khamenei’s intervention prevented the withdrawal but there is no agreement yet.

Left to its own powers, parliament seems unable or unwilling to enforce its will on the president. In principle, the body can summon him for questioning, and, if necessary, launch impeachment proceedings against him for failing to execute duly enacted laws.

But, in practice, such a process will never begin without a green light from Khamenei.

The Leader himself, however, appears unwilling to end the impasse by intervening more forcefully.

In his meetings with various groups of officials, Khamenei has, on the one hand, called on parliament to avoid hindering the president in implementing laws, and, on the other, criticised the government’s deviations from long-term economic plans approved by both parliament and the Expediency Council.

His apparent ambivalence has resulted in growing frustration, particularly in the Majles. Given the Leader’s constitutional role as “the coordinator of relations among branches”, said Mohammad-reza Tabesh recently, the leader of the reformist caucus in parliament, “he has to intervene so that it becomes clear where the government is right and where parliament [is right].”

Khamenei’s reticence, however, may be calculated. The more people call upon him to intervene, the more elevated and essential he appears. This is probably something he cherishes in the wake of the post-2009 election challenge to the legitimacy of his office by the opposition Green Movement.

But the legislative impasse may also prove politically costly. Already charged by the opposition with being a repressive autocrat, his failure to resolve key institutional questions fundamental to the functioning of the Islamic Republic makes him appear weak and ineffective, even to a growing number of his loyalists.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, U.S., Aug 3 2010 (IPS)

Ongoing factional disputes and mounting international sanctions have ignited heated debates among Iran’s elites about another critical period in the country’s post- revolutionary history – the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.

That war, in which at least a quarter million Iranians are believed to have died, hastened the rise of institutions, such as the Basij militia and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which remain key actors in Iran today.

But the war also created a cultural ethos that emphasised the epic aspects of the conflict: sacrifice and courage, piety, the control of passions, disdain for fame and material gain, and unconditional loyalty to the leadership.

This was in some contradiction to the spirit of the 1979 Revolution when a multiplicity of voices and ideologies competed for attention and popularity.

With the new Islamic Republic under siege, however, the war offered a pretext for the emerging political order to both crush the domestic opposition and rally the population behind the “sacred defence” against international aggression.

Now that, a quarter century later, Iran faces another period of domestic repression coupled with a tangible increase in external pressures, key decisions made by the country’s leadership during the Iran-Iraq war are being rehashed by the country’s fractious elites.

The emerging debate is being fuelled in particular by the website of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who served as speaker of Iran’s parliament during the war and acted as a key adviser to Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who eventually appointed him to the post of commander-in- chief of the armed forces. The website has provided a daily recounting of key events and decisions during the war.

Three issues regarding the war have relevance to Iran’s current predicament, particularly as Tehran faces ever- escalating economic sanctions because of its rejection of international demands that it curb its nuclear programme.

First and foremost is the decision to continue the war after June 1982 when Iran had successfully pushed Iraqi forces out of most of its territory and began taking the offensive while rejecting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s offers of a ceasefire.

At that moment, the dilemma faced by the leadership in Tehran was whether to continue the war – and the sacrifices that implied – on behalf of a cause that was no longer shared with the same intensity by much of the population as it had been two years before.

The generally accepted narrative in defence of the decision to continue the war is simple: Iran could not afford a ceasefire in 1982 because it was believed that Hussein would use it to regroup and launch a new invasion at a moment when Iran’s leadership would find it more difficult to rally the post-revolutionary fervour behind the regime’s defence.

Iraq’s subsequent invasion of Kuwait in 1990 made this narrative plausible during most of the post-war period.

But, in recent years, and particularly since last year’s disputed elections, this justification has come increasingly under question.

The main point of contention has been over the apparent disconnect at the time between the regime’s declared war aims – in Khomeini’s famous slogan, “War, War, until Victory,” and Rafsanjani’s “War until a decisive victory,” and even exhortations by some military leaders to take over Baghdad – and the lack of adequate resources to achieve those aims.

Last week, for example, the former minister of the IRGC, Mohsen Rafiqdoust, effectively accused Mir Hosein Mussavi, the Green Movement’s presidential candidate who served as prime minister during the war, of withholding resources that could, if provided to the military, have brought the war to a victorious conclusion.

Mussavi, who until recently kept silent in the debate about the war, felt sufficiently provoked to respond in a statement posted on his Kaleme website in which he threatened to reveal the reasons for his attempted resignation in 1988, immediately after the war’s end.

Noting the sacrifices that a number of former officials, some of whom have been sentenced to prison after last year’s elections, have made in defence of the regime and the country, Mussavi pointed out that more than 65 percent of Iran’s then-severely limited oil revenues had been spent on a war that, at least in its initial phases, had been incompetently run.

He wrote that Rafiqdoust had been “imposed” on him against his will and compared the former minister’s military incompetence and promises of victory during the war to his subsequent leadership of the Foundation for the Oppressed and Disabled, a powerful organisation that became notorious for its corruption and mismanagement.

Of course, two other leaders most responsible for the decisions made during the war – then-President Ali Khamenei and Rafsanjani – also play critical roles today as Leader and chair of the Expediency Discernment Council, respectively.

Suggesting that they also set war aims for which they were either unwilling or unable to provide adequate resources is a serious charge. Even more serious, however, is the implication that by pursuing unrealistic war aims they imposed unnecessary sacrifice on the population when the confrontation with an external enemy could have been ended earlier.

Thus, the regime’s hardliners have mounted a predictable effort to blame Mussavi for Iran’s failure to achieve victory. One of his critics, Ahmad Panahian, has gone so far as to hold Mussavi and other Green leaders responsible for the latest round of international sanctions against Iran, insisting that, without their post-election “sedition”, these sanctions would not have gone into effect.

A second war-related issue relevant to the situation today relates to Khomeini’s decision to accept a ceasefire in the war after adamantly refusing to do so. Some hard-liners, still unable to reconcile themselves to the Leader’s abrupt reversal, now argue that he was deliberately misled by the political leaders, including Mussavi and Rafsanjani, of the time.

At the same time, others with a less ideological bent wonder whether, in the face of escalating pressure, the current regime was capable of acting as decisively as Khomeini did in taking responsibility for ending the war despite his prior insistence on “War, War, until Victory.”

What is undisputed is that once Khomeini decided that Iran’s economic and military capabilities could not overcome Iraq’s heavily buttressed military machine and devastating chemical attacks, Rafsanjani, as his appointed commander-in-chief, offered to take the blame for failing to achieve victory and retire from public life.

Khomeini refused the offer, announcing that he himself would drink from the “poisoned chalice” and promising a full explanation in the future, a promise that he failed to fulfil before his death in June 1989, 10 months after he accepted the ceasefire.

Still Khomeini’s decision to end the war assured the Islamic Republic’s survival by pre-empting a blame game among his followers and opening the way for the so-called “era of reconstruction” under Rafsanjani’s presidency.

Indeed, it is this re-direction that constitutes the third debate about the Iran-Iraq war and its aftermath. Hardliners are asking whether the same political leaders who they say convinced Khomeini to end the war also pushed the country in an un-Islamic direction, resulting in the abandonment of the culture of heroic sacrifice and resistance in favour of greater political, economic, and cultural liberalisation.

Their call is for a return to an era in which “values” are prized over “reconstruction”. They see Rafsanjani’s post-war “reconstruction” as the source of today’s political, economic, and diplomatic ills.

More pragmatic elements, on the other hand, publicly worry about, in Rafsanjani’s words, “the extremism and fanaticism of those who, with their unwise decisions and actions, place the revolution and (Islamic) system in the hard, perilous situation the enemy desires.”

As Tehran prepares for renewed negotiations over its nuclear programme, conflicting memories regarding the conduct of the war, the circumstances that led to the decision to end it, and the direction taken by the leadership after the war will have a significant impact on how various forces within Iran position themselves.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, May 11 2010 (IPS)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s return to Tehran after attending the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review meeting at U.N. headquarters has been received with the usual bombast by the conservative and hard-line media in Iran, which declared him victorious and an indispensable global leader.

In its May 6 editorial, for instance, the influential newspaper Kayhan declared that if “Iran is able to reach the end of the nuclear path, it will produce a new model of nuclearisation which would be followed by other countries”.

From this point of view, continued enrichment and re-direction of the international conversation towards the weapons programmes of other countries would boost Iran’s position as the leader of the developing world, whereas failure would undermine Iran’s international standing.

Ahmadinejad was much more personal in assessing his performance in New York. Speaking to students and faculty in Tehran May 10, he described the disposition of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who followed him at the NPT podium, as that of a “frightened person”.

Despite the posturing, the content of Ahmadeinjad’s talk in New York was focused less on religious sermonising and more on a critique of the conduct of nuclear weapons-states. This, combined with the dinner given by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki for members of the U.N. Security Council, has led to renewed speculation in Iran about the possible revival of last fall’s proposal to transfer much of Iran’s low-enriched uranium (LEU) abroad in exchange for supplies of 20-percent enriched uranium for Tehran’s Research Reactor.

After it was tabled during brief talks between Iran and the permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) last October, the proposal largely withered on the vine as a result of domestic opposition in Tehran and the refusal by Iran’s interlocutors to entertain any modifications in the structure of the proposed transfer.

The government appears focused on reviving the proposal with the help of mediation by Brazil and Turkey, whose leaders are expected in Tehran at the same time in the coming days.

“New formulas have been raised about the exchange of fuel,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters in reference to Brazil’s and Turkey’s participation. “I think we can arrive at practical agreements based on these formulas …That is why we welcomed the proposals in principle …and left the details for further examination.”

His remarks followed an announcement by Ahmadinejad’s office May 6 that his government had accepted Brazil’s “fuel swap proposal”, despite Brasilia’s denial that such a proposal had in fact been made.

All in all, the Ahmadinejad administration is portraying itself in favour of breaking the nuclear impasse.

Reports that the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, who held talks with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Brussels Monday, is pushing for direct talks with Iran has fuelled speculation that a new attempt at jumpstarting nuclear talks between Iran and P5+1 group is in the offing.

Davutoglu, who himself called for reviving the swap proposal during a visit last month to Washington, has in turn proposed to host talks between Ashton and Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili. According to Davutoglu, Iran has welcomed the idea and is awaiting Ashton’s reply.

Some see the sudden spike in Iran’s diplomacy as a last-minute effort to derail a Western-led push for new U.N. sanctions or provoke divisions among Security Council members who are currently discussing a new sanctions resolution.

In an interview with Khabar Online on May 11, Ali Khorram, Iran’s former ambassador to Vienna, while acknowledging the importance of such active diplomacy, used a soccer analogy, expressing concern that diplomacy that turns hyper-active only on “minute 90” of a match will prevent the country’s “diplomatic efforts from being taken seriously”.

Others argue that the recent flurry of activity reflects more than tactical posturing and suggests a major change in the way conservatives and even Ahmadinejad are looking at the nuclear file.

According to Sadeqh Zibakalam, a University of Tehran professor and a widely quoted political analyst in Iran, Ahmadinejad and many other conservatives are moving closer to the reformist position which favoured promoting Iran’s nuclear programme while calibrating its speed in such a way as to reduce the costs in terms of international isolation and economic sanctions.

According to Zibakalam, Ahmadinejad, who, as much as anyone, is identified with the view that the nuclear programme should be vigorously pushed forward regardless of the economic and political costs, is increasingly persuaded that incurring such high costs is “not correct”.

Such a shift can be detected in the statements of other prominent conservative politicians as well. Alaeddin Boroujerdi, chair of the Parliament’s Foreign Policy and National Security Committee, said “doors are open to every country that is ready to deliver us (nuclear) fuel. Iran has no limitations with regards to fuel-providing states. If the U.S. is serious about the fuel deal, it can contemplate the swap.”

Boroujerdi’s statement is significant insofar as he was one the more outspoken critics of the original U.N.-drafted swap proposal last fall. His current tone suggests a distinct softening.

But if indeed there is a softening, it poses challenges and dilemmas for both conservatives and reformists given a political culture that tends to view compromise with external powers as either “collusion” or “giving in”.

The conservative challenge is how to sell whatever compromise over the nuclear issue that may emerge – in all likelihood imposing a strict limit on the percentage of uranium enrichment permitted to take place in Iran combined with a tough international inspection regime – as a victory for Iran’s principled stance in standing up against an unjust, U.S.-dominated world order.

Meanwhile, the dilemma for the opposition is whether they should criticise a deal, as they did last October, that they would probably would accept if they were in power out of the fear that any accord struck by Ahmandinejad with the United States will likely lead to the long-term consolidation of the current power equation in Iran.

Choices are, of course, never simple in Iran. Ahmadinejad’s and his supporters’ insistence on taking all the credit for advances in the nuclear programme is without doubt intended to enhance his domestic popularity.

While analysts like Zibakalam caution against “political opportunism”, after five years of Iran paying the price of Ahmadinejad’s aggressive foreign policy, the reformists and even some of Ahmadinejad’s conservative opponents may be hesitant to allow him a political windfall.

And Ahmadinejad’s opponents are not the only ones worried about the domestic repercussions of a nuclear deal.

In the post-Jun. 12 election political environment, the Barack Obama administration has also been ambivalent toward its “engagement” policy with Iran. While it did pursue talks last fall, it proved all too willing to abandon them after merely one meeting between the principals, in all likelihood due to pressure inside the United States not to negotiate with a government deemed “illegitimate” and possibly even unstable.

With the government ostensibly in greater control of the domestic situation in Iran, however, talks are bound to begin soon. How the Obama administration will deal with its discomfort in giving Ahmadinejad something that he can sell as victory at home is not yet clear.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, Mar 19 2010 (IPS)

Iran’s 347-billion-dollar budget for the 2010-11 fiscal year, finally approved by the Guardian Council in Tehran Tuesday – just days before its scheduled implementation on the Iranian New Year Mar. 21 – appears likely to add to the tensions and uncertainty that have bedeviled the country since the disputed June 2009 elections.

While the budget is smaller than President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s original proposal, it marks a substantial increase from last year’s 280-billion-dollar budget.

Final approval came after much wrangling between the Parliament and Ahmadinejad’s government. But no one is happy with the final compromise, raising serious doubts about its full implementation in the coming year. Tehran will likely face growing external economic pressure to halt its nuclear programme, not to mention simmering domestic political discontent generated by the rise of the Green Movement.

Ahmadinejad is unhappy with the compromise because the Parliament, despite his unprecedented personal lobbying efforts, rejected his request to credit 40 billion dollars worth of revenues generated from increasing the prices of previously subsidised goods and services. It agreed only to half that sum.

At the same time, lawmakers are unhappy with the final deal because they felt they were not given sufficient time and information to deal adequately with the new budget. The government not only submitted 45 days late, but it also reduced the number of line items that the budget contained, leaving important details unanswered.

No less than 80 deputies out of the 290-member Parliament did not even bother to show up for the final vote, suggesting either unprecedented indifference or, more likely, lack of confidence not only in the budget itself, but also the process.

The budget process in Iran normally constitutes the most contentious interaction between the executive and legislative branches. And in discussing this year’s budget, a notable number of deputies, as members of the Combined Committee dealing with the budget, actively challenged the government’s numbers.

Two leading conservatives who also happen to be economists, Elias Naderan and Ahmad Tavakoli, actually called for the wholesale rejection of the budget because of its lack of transparency and questionable sources of revenues. They complained, for example, that the budget appeared to be based in part on increases in tax revenues and the sale of government properties for which there was no documented explanation.

They also questioned the projected income from the sale of approximately eight billion Euros worth of Eurobonds in an environment in which economic and financial sanctions against Iran are on the rise.

But the budget ultimately passed with only one major correction – the halving of projected revenues that were supposed to be generated from the cuts in price supports.

Parliament’s insistence in reducing the government’s proposed number was based partly on principle and partly on fear.

On principle, the parliament objected to the fact that the proposed budget legislation, which the government introduced only after the approval of its Targeted Subsidies Legislation in February, contradicted the latter’s mandate to limit the revenues resulting from price increases to between 10 billion dollars and 20 billion dollars in its first year of implementation.

It took a whole year for the subsidies legislation – which is intended to reform Iran’s bloated price support system that reportedly costs the government as much as 100 billion dollars a year – to become law, due to parliamentary wrangling with the executive branch. As passed, the legislation called for the prices of 16 goods and services – mainly food, utilities, and fuel – to be gradually liberalised over a five-year period.

Ahmadinejad’s desire for higher prices was not without economic logic. Shock therapy, he argued, was the only way to change consumption patterns; in particular, to reduce gasoline consumption of which Iranians are, on a per capita basis, one of the world’s biggest consumers.

The higher revenues generated by the proposed price adjustments would then permit the government to give the overwhelming majority of people who have signed up for cash subsidies sufficient support to offset the burden caused by higher prices during the period of structural adjustment, according to the government.

The Parliament, however, feared that the impact of injecting 40 billion dollars worth of cash into the economy would, as the Parliament Research Centre estimated, add another 68 percent to Iran’s already high inflation rate – estimated at 15.8 percent for 2009 – thus adding to the economic woes of working- and middle-class Iranians.

In the end, the Parliament opted for what Speaker Ali Larijani called “balance”. But that “balance” may have consequences for the implementation of the subsidies plan, as various members of the government have expressed doubt that the plan can be implemented without higher revenues.

Ahmadinejad himself on Friday went as far as to suggest that the Parliament’s plan is impossible to implement, instead calling for a referendum in which people decide.

Some government backers in the Parliament, such as the hard-line deputy, Ruhollah Hosseinian, have suggested that Ahmadinejad simply refrain from implementing the subsidies plan, a possibility that was rejected in no uncertain terms, however, by Deputy Speaker Mohammad-reza Bahanor, even though the latter admitted that there was no mechanism by which Parliament could hold the executive accountable if it followed Hosseinian’s advice.

All of this wrangling has served only to fuel rumours and speculation about the impending price increases for gasoline, diesel fuel and even electricity, creating an uncertain and testy economic environment not only for consumers, but also for the management of private and state-run enterprises that have been highly dependent on subsidies.

Adding to the uncertainty are contradictory statements about gasoline rationing. On the one hand, the government has announced that it is reducing monthly rations from 80 to 60 litres per car. But, with an additional 80-litre ration for the New Year holidays, it has placed a total 260 litres of gasoline on car owners’ ration cards – hence averaging more than 80 liters a month – for at least the next three months. That is two months later than the timetable set for the subsidies legislation to go into effect.

The government’s apparent complacency regarding the reduction of gasoline rations suggests that it is not as worried about the impact of the U.S. government’s growing pressure on Iran’s foreign suppliers of gasoline to halt exports to Tehran as many in the West believe. The U.S. Congress is currently trying to rush through legislation that would impose tough sanctions on foreign companies that export refined oil products to Iran.

In fact, trade figures just released suggest that the government has been stocking up on gasoline, with imports this year registering a nearly 150 percent increase in comparison to last year.

What is at issue at this point is not the economic squeeze that may be coming from the outside, but the extent to which disagreements on economic policy will be a new source of domestic contention, adding to the political impasse and woes that have gripped the country since the last year’s election.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, Feb 17 2010 (IPS)

After eight tumultuous months, during which attention from all sides of Iran’s political spectrum as well as anxious watchers around the world focused on a series of street clashes between protesters and the government’s security forces, an eerie calm has taken hold in Iran.

The government’s ability to control the aesthetics of street demonstrations on the occasion of the revolution’s 31st anniversary on Feb. 11 has once again confirmed the robust nature of the Iranian state, which used its long experience with government-sponsored demonstrations to stage what it now claims was a decisive “show of unity” involving “50 million” people “to bury the corpse of sedition.”

This is a significant development insofar as it disabuses policymakers outside Iran, as well as a large number of Iranian exiles, of the fantasy of the impending doom of the Islamic Republic or the belief that substantive change in Iran can or will come quickly.

Yet, despite the government’s proclaimed unity, nothing that happened on Feb. 11 suggests that the fundamental cleavages that have rocked Iran in the past few months have been overcome.

Indeed, the only message of Feb. 11 is that, by spending a tremendous amount of resources and energy on security, arrests and mobilisation, the government can control the crowds.

Reports from a variety of participants suggest that many supporters of the opposition that has come to be known as the Green Movement did come out, but simply did not know what to do or how to make their presence felt in the streets. In addition, the regime’s deployment of abundant numbers of security personnel ensured that anyone who did make his or her presence known was swiftly pulled out of the crowd, led away or arrested.

In other words, the security and intelligence organisations managed the stage so effectively that, despite the attendance of more than 400 foreign journalists and photographers, the presence of the government’s supporters dominated the coverage.

This was achieved not only by the massive security presence, but also by limiting the movement of foreign journalists; restricting – and, at times, even preventing – access to the Internet and cellular communications networks; the pre-emptive arrest of suspected protest organisers; and preventing the participation of recognised Green leaders, notably Mir Hussein Mussavi and his spouse Zahra Rahnavard, Mehdi Karrubi and former president Mohammad Khatami, through intimidation and pre-meditated mob attacks.

The fact that, unlike the protests during Ashura on Dec. 27, no one was killed last week added to the impressiveness of the government’s efficiency in controlling the streets, a striking contrast to the eight months that followed the disputed June elections.

But managing the stage and controlling the crowds on any given day are not the same as actually resolving the problems and grievances that have repeatedly brought protesters into the streets. Unless some of these are addressed, the Iranian state will remain on edge, vigilant, and engaged in a permanent crackdown that will effectively undermine the country’s economic and regional ambitions.

The fact that some Green Movement activists may now be less inclined to use official holidays to mount their protests – or even be pushed underground – will make dissent less predictable and thus significantly more difficult to control without the expenditure of even more state resources for the purposes of repression.

It is this dilemma that the Iranian leaders must address in the coming months. Even if it is accepted that the Green Movement is disheartened and the government “victorious,” the country’s multi-voiced and faction-ridden leadership cannot simply walk away from the events of the past eight months and avoid the “what now” question.

The country, after all, remains the same as before Feb. 11.

Iran’s political system, with its bickering elites, remains as dysfunctional as ever. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration is still perceived as incompetent even by many of its conservative backers at a time when the government faces the dual challenge of embarking upon what it calls the “economic surgery” of reforming the country’s unwieldy subsidy system and thwarting growing foreign pressures to curb the country’s nuclear programme.

To be sure, facing simultaneous economic and external challenges is nothing new for the Iranian leadership. During the Iran-Iraq War, the government did precisely that by relying on the post-revolutionary spirit of sacrifice and unity in the face of extreme adversity.

But, as pointed out by the conservative editor of Ayandenews, Foad Sadeghi, the still-unaddressed internal divisions have turned Iran’s dual challenge into a triple one, making overcoming the first two unlikely, if not impossible, without addressing the third.

It must be considered a sign of the raw nerve this conundrum struck that Sadeghi, whose brother was killed in the Iran-Iraq War and who was himself an active member of Basij militia while studying at the highly politicised Amir Kabir Technical University in the 1990s, was arrested on the very eve of the anniversary celebration, soon after publishing his commentary.

The Islamic Republic has always made the point that its standing in the world – its moral integrity and its ability to project power – is based on unity at home and on the way it has conducted its domestic affairs.

This was why the anniversary’s show of unity was so important to the regime and why President Ahmadinejad himself was so careful not to use polarising language, as he has done in the past, in his nationally televised address to the crowd gathered at Tehran’s Azadi Square.

But a show, as impressive as it may appear, cannot substitute for policies that effectively narrow the wide and persistent gap between government supporters and foes. Mere rhetoric in support of unity cannot overcome the divisive trail of newspaper closures, arrests, beatings, and the abuse and murder of prisoners.

Even Mohammad Khosh-chehreh, a former conservative member of parliament, bemoaned the fact that “the cultural and political persuasion that needed to take place after the election has not taken shape.”

“The attempt made to compensate for this weakness through the incurring of security and military costs,” he went on, has not led to “correct answers” that require “rational governance” as “the main condition to [achieving] balance.”

Khosh-chehreh’s point, which is increasingly voiced by other conservatives, is that “extremism” does not belong to elements within the opposition alone. It exists on both sides of the ongoing crisis and propels the drive to expunge the other side from the Iranian political system.

Within the opposition, extremism expresses itself through the calls for the regime’s downfall, in effect denying that the Islamic Republic and its current government have any popular base of support beyond those who are “bought” by the system to become its foot soldiers. At the same time, extremism on the conservative side uses violence and arrests not merely to suppress the crowds, but to purge its political foes.

Whether the Iranian leadership opts for a permanent crackdown as the way to manage Iran’s highly contentious system or instead takes a more conciliatory route by releasing prisoners and prosecuting individuals or vigilante groups who have engaged in especially egregious abuses against non-violent protesters in order to reduce some of the pent-up anger remains unknown.

Triumphalism over last week’s successful stage management may trump the need to rehabilitate the Iranian state along lines that are more consensual than polarising.

But if there is an eventual move to heal the wounds of the past eight months, it will have to be based on the premise that the permanent-crackdown mode will not be without substantial costs to the regional and domestic ambitions of the Iranian state.

And if there is going to be a change of direction, it is the calculation of these costs that will ultimately help push aside – not purge – those who believe or have a vested interest in repression.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, Jan 26 2010 (IPS)

As Iran nervously awaits the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution on Feb. 11 – the day that has traditionally drawn the largest public demonstrations – a subtle change in public discourse can be detected.

While hard-line forces in the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still resort to the narrative of “sedition” caused by the “foreign-inspired” leaders of the Green Movement, calls for calm and moderation in public pronouncements and action, as well as criticism of “extremism” on both sides of the political spectrum, are being voiced more frequently.

In the past two weeks, several live television debates were broadcast that, despite their relative lack of ideological diversity, nevertheless included conservative and reformist critics of Ahmadinejad’s policies and the harsh crackdown on the opposition since the June elections.

Iran’s judiciary has even moved against two hard-line publications which, on their covers, insisted on dividing Iran’s political elites into “Imam Khamenei’s Men” and “(former President Akbar) Hashemi Rafsanjani’s Men,” not only by ordering their closure but also by issuing warrants for the arrest of their publishers.

On Monday, moreover, the former head of the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), who currently holds a position in Ahmadinejad’s executive office, was found guilty of slander against Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani and Hashemi Rafsanjani, who currently chairs both the Council of Experts and Expediency Discernment Council and has repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with the post-election crackdown.

Whether these calls and moves are mere reflections of the calm before the storm, attempts at placating the critics before the worrisome Feb. 11 demonstrations, or harbingers of real change is yet to be seen.

Still the change is being noted inside Iran. According to at least one usually astute observer of Iranian politics, journalist Abbas Abdi, the events that surrounded Ayatollah Montazeri’s death and the bloody clashes that occurred during last month’s Ashura observance have made it increasingly clear to most parties in Iran’s political conflict that the continuation of the current situation will only deepen the crisis, and “will have no winners, and ultimately will only leave a scorched land for all.”

From the opposition’s side, the most significant move came with the written statement issued Jan. 1 by the main opposition presidential candidate, Mir Hossein Mussavi, in which the issue of Ahmadinejad’s rigged election was effectively set aside and his fortunes left to the future assessment of his competence by the Parliament and Judiciary.

His specific suggestions, such as release of political prisoners, lifting the bans on the press and redressing the grievances of those harmed by the crackdown, in order to return the country to normal conditions re-established Mussavi’s leadership of the Green Movement.

But they also opened the way for more moderate elements in the conservative camp to criticise the regime’s violent reaction to the protests, and, in the case of one prominent conservative critic, Ali Mottahari, to even go as far as to blame some hard-liners, including Ahmadinejad himself, for the continued turmoil in Iran and the leadership’s inability to oversee the development and prosperity of the country in a coherent fashion.

Monday’s statement by Mehdi Karrubi, the second and more outspoken opposition candidate, acknowledging Ahmadinejad as the “established” head of the government, can be seen in a similar light. According to Karrubi’s son, his statement should not be seen as a “retreat” but rather an attempt on the part of the opposition to move the country out of the “gridlock” that has paralysed virtually every arena of policy making, including Iran’s foreign relations.

By acknowledging Ahmadinejad as the head of the Iranian government – because Leader Ayatollah Khamenei confirmed his presidency and not because he is duly elected by the people – the opposition appears to be trying both to defuse a potentially explosive situation and to hold him responsible for some of the reckless policies he and other radicals intent on purging dissent are pursuing that are deemed as moving the Islamic Republic towards an “abyss”.

The power of this argument is expected to increase as the Parliament begins debating Ahmadinejad’s highly expansionist and yet vague budget for the country’s next fiscal year, which begins on Mar. 21.

This budget, which was introduced after a 45-day delay, is likely to be met with unease even among some of the government’s conservative backers, who have already objected to the government’s proposed Fifth Five-Year Economic Plan as more a collection of “desires and wishes” than a realistic policy document about the economic future of the country.

Mussavi and Karrubi are not appealing for an immediate deal but are opening the way for Khamenei, along with other conservatives, to reevaluate the policies pursued in the past seven months in terms of the costs they have incurred in Iran’s international standing, its economic situation and prospects, and Khamenei’s own domestic position.

In other words, they are placing the ball in Khamenei’s court, as former president Mohammad Khatami reportedly has in an unconfirmed recent private letter to Khamenei. On Sunday, Hashemi Rafsanjani insisted that only the leader can move the country beyond the present impasse so that it can tackle the ever-deepening economic and international problems with which it is confronted.

In responding to this challenge, Khamenei, along with many conservative critics of Ahmadinejad, are faced with a dilemma. To be sure, they cannot be happy with the way the turn of events – including the latest tragic loss of lives during the Ashura protests – has redirected the focus of popular criticism away from Ahmadinejad and towards Khamenei for his failure to perform his singularly most important duty as the Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” – to restore calm to the country in a way that is deemed fair by various political players.

Moreover, the fact that much of the popular anger towards Khamenei has been encouraged by his own radical supporters, as well as the more hard-line forces behind Ahmadinejad, who have insisted that the violence and crackdown were justified because the protesters’ real “project” was to depose Khamenei, has ironically served to weaken his position.

But this unhappiness with the way radical forces have colluded in undermining Khamenei’s legitimacy, as well as public confidence in his wisdom and effectiveness, is countered by the numerous cleavages that exist among conservative ranks and the lack of a coherent leadership that can step forward in a serious and determined fashion to resolve the crisis.

Hence, unlike the opposition, which has so far been led more or less effectively by Mussavi and Karrubi’s insistent demands for a change in direction within the confines of the Islamic Republic, the conservative side of the political spectrum is divided between those who see the need for compromise but are too hesitant to take concrete steps to achieve it, and the radicals who still think that the problem can be ignored and effectively controlled through force.

Given the fact that the latter group is more strident and draws energy from a tradition of paranoid post-revolutionary politics, its voice continues to be louder. Hence, the growing recent pressure on Khamenei (even from conservatives) to take charge and leash the radicals whose political fortunes depend on maintaining a high degree of social and political polarisation.

The hope is thus to convince Khamenei and his supporters that the danger they and Iran face from unresolved and ever increasing polarisation is greater than that from the reformist opposition, whose main leaders not only remain loyal to the Islamic Republic but also implicitly promise that their followers will not demand wholesale changes in the power structure so long as there is a general change of direction away from authoritarianism and force.

This is, of course, an ambitious promise for such an unsettled political environment. But the bet being made is that the majority of Iran’s political leaders, as well as the larger society, share the view that the continuing impasse is harmful to their long-term interests and to the country and that even partial or gradual addressing of grievances is sufficient to contain the growing discontent, at least for now.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLOLU, Hawaii, Dec 31 2009 (IPS)

The confrontation that took place in the streets of several large cities in Iran on the occasion of Ashura has brought the acrimonious political fight among the Islamic Republic’s elite into focus in significantly different ways than before.

Not only did many protesters demonstrate unprecedented willingness to confront the security forces, but the reaction by hard-line forces also suggests a determination to remain intransigent, fight crowds with crowds, and court the possibility of continued civil strife.

Unless Iran’s security establishment and hard-line forces are persuaded to take up a more creative strategy that includes accommodation of some of the protestors’ demands and redress for the egregious abuses that have occurred since the Jun. 12 elections, a dangerous deadlock punctuated by persistent street clashes that pits part of the population against another may be the coming year’s most likely scenario.

These dynamics highlight the dysfunction and political paralysis of the Islamic Republic even more than its repressive strength or its potential crackup.

If, in the immediate post-election period, the iconic pictures streaming out of Iran were of crowds walking silently in unison with upraised hands calling for the peaceful reversal of the official election results, they were replaced on Dec. 27 with images of confrontations between groups of demonstrators and either security forces or groups supportive of the government.

One eyewitness described part of central Tehran as looking like a “war zone” with “shattered glass everywhere, dozens of overturned and smoldering garbage cans, several burned-out cars, and the skeletons of a couple dozen police motorcycles”.

As in some previous demonstrations, the protestors showed that they are no longer fearful of the security forces or plainclothes vigilantes despite the threats of harsh treatment that were issued prior to the year’s most important day of mourning for Shi’ites. But this time at least some went one step further and showed that they are angry enough to engage in street battles.

And the security forces – commanded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) since the immediate post-election demonstrations – showed, in turn, that they are unable to control the crowds despite their use, in some cases, of lethal force that, according to the government’s own numbers, left at least eight people dead.

The coincidence of Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri’s death on the eve of Ashura, the holy period that highlights the religious commitment to fighting injustice, was simply too powerful for the government forces to manage.

And the government killings on the day of lamentation for the murder of the righteous Imam Hussein and his companions at the hands of an oppressive and illegitimate Islamic government more than 1,300 years ago are bound to fuel further protests on upcoming holidays, including the all-important founding day of the Islamic Republic Feb. 11, when the government traditionally stages large demonstrations in support of the revolution.

Still, the widespread arrests of scores of reform-oriented civil and political activists on the day after Ashura and the harsh written statements issued by hardline-controlled institutions such as the Guardian Council calling for “blinding the sedition’s eye” suggest that the government remains determined to deal with the protests only through force rather than to address at least some of demonstrators’ major grievances.

To be sure, the Ashura protests have given more moderate conservatives, such as former Parliament speaker Ali Akbar Nateq Nuri, the opportunity to press their case for distinguishing between “a minority who disrespected religion” or “rioters”, on the one hand, and “critics,” or “protestors”, on the other. The former, according to this view, should be punished harshly, while latter should be accommodated and allowed to express their views.

Another conservative Ali Mottahari, the son of one of the founding clerics of the Islamic Republic who was assassinated shortly after the revolution, has offered a seven-point plan for reconciliation that would require the presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mussavi and Mehdi Karrubi to acknowledge the legitimacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency coupled with an end to repressive measures, the release of all political prisoners, prosecution for those who engaged in abuses in Iranian prisons, and the re-opening of space for the critical exchange of ideas.

But it is not clear if the government is willing or able to pursue the path of accommodation to overcome the “corrosive disputes”, in the words of the current Parliament speaker Ali Larijani, that are wracking the country.

Two fundamental reasons explain why the government has so far been unable to pursue a more sophisticated strategy that would combine repression with accommodation with the aim of separating the more moderate critics of the regime from those who have now become convinced that the Islamic Republic cannot be reformed and must be replaced.

The first is the shadow of the events that culminated in the 1979 Revolution and the continued widespread belief among both the Shah’s supporters and detractors that it was his decision to give in to some of the protestors’ demands that emboldened the opposition and ultimately set the stage for his downfall.

By seeing the current events in Iran through the prism of 1979, the most hard-line conservatives are in effect reproducing the narrative that is also increasingly taking hold in the West – that Iran going through yet another revolutionary process that will eventually bring about the end of the Islamic regime. Standing firm, reacting harshly, and turning their own crowds out in the streets are their way of forestalling yet another revolution.

More moderate conservatives have no other choice but to stand with hardliners, it is argued, because the detractors’ objective of bringing down the Islamic Republic will endanger them, too.

The second reason for the one-dimensional and rather uncreative approach taken by the government is another narrative that has taken shape among the most hard-line elements of the conservative coalition that now runs the country regarding what happened during the Jun. 12 election.

According to this narrative, by aiming to defeat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the election, the Green Movement led by Mussavi, Karrubi, former president Mohammad Khatami, and children of current Expediency Council and Council of Experts chair, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and organised by two reformist political parties – the Islamic Iran’s Participation and Islamic Revolution’s Mojahedin – in close cooperation with foreign players, were effectively mounting a challenge against Leader Ali Khamenei, trying to take control of the “system” and re-directing it away from being an Islamic republic.

According to reported statements by the head of IRGC, Mohammad Jaafari, and other hardliners, the information regarding this “scenario” was gathered before the election and hence became the justification for the arrest of the leaders of the two parties and their subsequent mass public trials.

The widespread arrests of political and human rights leaders as well as journalists following the Ashura demonstrations suggest the intractability of such viewpoints in the minds of those who consider themselves to be first and foremost the guardians of the Islamic Republic.

Moreover, Sunday’s clashes have given the hardliners another chance to press their case that a heavy-handed and decisive approach is the only way to respond to political forces whose intentions as well as deeds appear to be consistent with – if not directed by – the wishes of the regime’s external foes.

In the weeks to come they will continue to face the argument about the ineffectiveness of this strategy. So far, however, their actions and words suggest they are more willing to court civil strife in Iran rather than probe the possibility of a reconciliation within the framework of the Islamic Republic.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, U.S., Dec 16 2009 (IPS)

Although the tumult that has gripped Iran since the contested Jun. 12 election has never abated, two recent occurrences have highlighted the further sharpening of internal conflict and the government’s inability to restore stability in the face of creative ways the opposition has learned to use the symbols of the Islamic Republic in order to sustain itself.

The uproar over former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s public insistence on the regime’s need to respect popular demands and the government-staged outrage over the burning of the picture of the Islamic Revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, during University Student Day demonstrations Dec. 7 have made clear that the political crisis at the heart of the establishment is intensifying.

The politics surrounding both of these occurrences suggest a dangerous deadlock and an urgent need for renegotiating political power among the various contenders, as the government seems unable to bring a degree of calm and political efficacy to the Iranian political system. However, this urgent need has yet to translate into a systemic will to overcome the political paralysis that has taken hold.

As such, recent events in all likelihood augur the entry into a new phase in which direct public confrontation among key players working within the system will become the norm despite the explicit, even if half-hearted, plea by Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for calm and de-escalating the cycle of recrimination.

The latest events are important because they reveal critical aspects of the continuing turmoil in Iran. The burning of Khomeini’s picture, in and of itself, would not have been of much significance as the radicalisation of some elements of any protest movement in the face of repression is not unusual.

What made the occasion significant was the decision by the government-controlled Iranian television (IRIB) to broadcast scenes of the burning as a means to create an environment in which all “true believers” of the Revolution could mobilise and express their outrage publicly.

The intent of this staged outrage is two-fold. On the one hand, by focusing on the rejection of the iconic founder of the republic, government supporters want to show that even if the protest movement started as a law-abiding movement against the conduct of the election, it has now turned into a radical movement intent on undermining the Islamic Republic.

On the other hand, by forcing opposition leaders to pledge public allegiance to Khomeini, hard-line forces hope to discredit them before an increasingly angry younger population, thus demonstrating that their ultimate loyalties to the system are no different from those engaged in the ongoing crackdown.

This strategy has backfired, as have so many others, because of the ability of the opposition movement to appropriate the symbols and icons of the Islamic Republic and turn them against the government. To be sure, all opposition leaders have denounced the insult to Khomeini but they have also questioned the intent behind the IRIB broadcasts.

More important, both opposition leaders, Mir Hossein Mussavi and Mehdi Karrubi, as well as the Association of Combatant Clerics – an organisation headed by former president Mohammad Khatami – have immediately asked for permission to stage an independent demonstration Friday in support of Khomeini’s legacy, parallel to the state-controlled demonstration called by the Coordinating Council for Islamic Propagation.

This request places the Ministry of Interior, which has so far refused to grant permits for any opposition-led demonstration, in a difficult position. After all, the opposition’s ability to protest and be present in the public sphere has been precisely what the government has been unable to control or prevent in the past six months because of the clever way protestors have participated in government-sanctioned demonstrations designed to celebrate key dates in the history of the Islamic Republic.

Ironically, by positioning themselves as the true heirs to Khomeini, the opposition leaders have received much help from hardliners who, in spite of their professed allegiance to Khomeini, have shown no love for his family.

The publication house in charge of Khomeini’s writings and edicts, whose deputy head questioned the wisdom of the burning picture broadcasts, has been vilified in hard-line newspapers and threatened by right-wing members of parliament with investigation. At the same time, Khomeini’s grandson, who runs his mausoleum, was wrongly accused of leaving the country instead of defending his grandfather.

This public contest over who is more devoted to Khomeini’s legacy has been complemented with a very sharp exchange occasioned by a frank speech delivered by Rafsanjani on Dec. 5 in Mashad in which he bemoaned the pitting of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia against “university and high school students, professors, teachers, managers, workers, shopkeepers, and men and women”.

Recalling the words of Prophet Mohammad to Imam Ali on the day the latter was chosen by the former as his successor, as narrated in the Shi’i tradition, moreover, Rafsanjani explicitly stated, “You have the right to guardianship from God, but if people accept (it), manage; and if (they do) not accept, do not impose yourself and allow them to manage their society the way they want.”

Rafsanjani’s words provoked a public rebuke by Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi, who read more into the former president’s speech, suggesting that he was effectively calling for the removal of Khamenei himself if people do not want him. Accusing Rafsanjani of abetting “fitna” – sedition or conspiracy – against the Islamic Republic, Moslehi also unwittingly acknowledged the power of the opposition by comparing the “fitna” to an iceberg, only the top of which can be seen above the water.

Others have followed suit in attacking Rafsanjani, who currently serves as chair of both the Expediency Council and the Council of Experts.

Mohammad Yazdi, former head of the Judiciary and current member of the Guardian Council, demanded that Rafsanjani “reduce his distance with the leader”, while Ruhollah Hosseinian, a hard-line MP, insisted that Rafsanjani, along with Mussavi and Karrubi, was too small to be made a martyr.

This implicitly, if unwittingly, acknowledged the fear among the government’s supporters that the arrests of the opposition leaders will only deepen Iran’s political crisis, a fear that was echoed Wednesday by the new head of Iran’s Judiciary, Sadeq Amoli Larijani, who insisted that “the Judiciary has enough files against them, and if the system deals with them with tolerance and kindness, do not interpret it as ignorance.”

Khamenei himself appears increasingly unable to control the situation. Speaking Sunday, he pleaded for calm and avoiding inflammatory language while, at the same time, he talked of “purge… of “former brothers” or “those who insist on distancing themselves from the system”.

Meanwhile the inability of the political system Khamenei heads to even announce the names of individuals who engaged in publicly acknowledged acts of torture and murder in a prison he himself ordered closed last summer has underlined the growing sense that the government has become paralysed.

Accountability for the abuses committed at Kahrizak prison has been perhaps the most easily accommodated demand of the protestors, but the government’s inability or unwillingness to respond is seen as additional evidence of its inflexibility and paranoia.

Where all this will end is difficult to predict. What is clear is that, at least at the level of public discourse, almost all the taboos of the Islamic Republic have been broken. Stellar revolutionaries like Rafsanjani, Mussavi, Karrubi and Khatami refuse to back down from their criticisms of the way post-election protests have been handled.

In turn, they and their families are accused of abetting those who are conspiring against the Islamic Republic; Khomeini’s family of tarnishing the Founder’s legacy. And there is little in sight to suggest that those who continue to accuse and dish out violence have any coherent strategy for getting out of the deepening crisis that they helped provoke six months ago by refusing to address any of the protesters’ grievances.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, Aug 10 2009 (IPS)

With the confirmation of his re-election by Ayatollah Khamenei and his oath of office taken, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will begin his second term facing much steeper challenges than any of Iran’s previous second-term presidents.

In fact, despite the proclaimed support of 24 million Iranians, his government is by far the weakest post-revolutionary government. Ironically, it is this weakened position that tempts him to be a force of constant agitation and confrontation.

Challenges facing Ahmadinejad include open hostility from a large section of the Iranian elite which Ayatollah Khamenei characterised in Ahmadinejad’s confirmation speech as “angry and wounded”; highly charged criticisms of his appointments and policies from within the conservative ranks; continued civil disobedience; a public mood that has turned from mostly inattentive and apolitical to concerned and angry; general unhappiness among the clergy about the harsh crackdown; and a much more hostile international environment.

All this is on top of serious economic woes that he was unable to address during his first term – as he had promised to do in his 2005 campaign.

Prior to the June election, Ahmadinejad had indeed attempted to implement a value-added tax on the sale of goods and introduce legislation to overhaul Iran’s over-bloated subsidy system – replacing it with more targeted cash subsidies to the poorer strata of society. These measures plus gradual price increases in utilities and fuel prices were meant to lower the government’s fiscal burden.

But, merchants resisted the implementation of the value-added-tax. His so- called Economic Transformation Plan was also roundly rejected prior to the campaign season as the conservative-controlled Majles – worried about the legislation’s inflationary impact and its unreliable or exaggerated data – chose to delay the discussion till the post-election period.

The political crisis that has ensued has effectively pushed economic concerns to the side, and brought to the forefront once again a whole set of political civil rights issues emphasised during former President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist era.

Ahmadinejad could pursue his economic agenda while at the same time attempting to reduce political tensions generated by the election and its aftermath. This would entail a coordinated effort with other centres of power – including the office of the Leader and the Judiciary – to address some of the serious breaches of citizens’ rights that have occurred, finding those responsible for them, and putting in place mechanisms that would ensure against their repetition.

But Ahmadinejad’s personality – and the paranoid outlook of the security- oriented circles that surround him – make it unlikely that he will choose that route for fear that any sign of weakness will only worsen his predicament. The decision to put on trial past officials en masse under conditions that lacked the slightest trappings of due process is already an indication against such a conciliatory approach.

In foreign policy, Ahmadinejad’s approach to Iran’s unprecedented turbulences is likely to deem the best defence a strong offense.

In reaction to his polarising approach, efforts to influence, control or dislodge him will come from all corners of Iran’s political spectrum – making his already erratic managerial style even more haphazard and shifting, adding to his difficult position.

Foremost among his woes is popular protest combined with unprecedented cracks at the top of Iran’s political apparatus that show no sign of subsiding. For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, a president is faced with a combination of popular mobilisation and a squeeze from the top.

Squeeze at the top has always been a predicament of the office of Iran’s president, caught between non-elective institutions – robustly equipped with their own independent and often shadowy security and economic appendages – and a rancorous elected Parliament, whose only assertion of power in the Iranian political system can come in the form of confronting or harassing the president on domestic issues.

But the persistent social mobilisation from below is bound to make the squeeze at the top even more difficult to manage because of the intensity of pressures coming from challengers, critics, and even avid supporters.

Ahmadinejad’s supporters are already calling for more heads to roll over election events, demanding that some of the most celebrated figures of the Islamic Republic – including Mir Hossein Mussavi, and former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – be put on trial for their collusion with external powers to stage a Velvet Revolution against the Islamic Republic.

Ahmadinejad’s challengers – riding on popular sentiments that have gone beyond indignation over election fraud and turned into an even more visceral outrage over the harsh crackdown in the streets, torture and deaths in prisons for which no one is willing to take responsibility – have already turned their movement into one pursuing an end to the arbitrary rule of Iran’s many shadowy instruments of repression.

The strategy of this Green Movement, according to Mussavi, will be inspired by a “slogan that in its expansiveness includes the largest number of Iranians both inside and outside of Iran.” There is persistent emphasis on the political and civil guarantees in the Islamic Constitution that “have remained vanquished” and the insistence that those engaged in the crackdown “are the ones that are breaking the structure” of the Islamic Republic.

This constitutionalist approach is deemed the most effective in creating further cleavages between the government and its conservative critics.

Ahmadinejad has never been very popular even among conservatives, but recent events have created further worries among them about his ability to manage the tide of protests and letting them subside.

To be sure, similar worries exist regarding Ayatollah Khamenei – whose wholehearted support of Ahmadinejad has effectively transformed him, in the public mind, as the real source of the harsh crackdown. However, as the chief executive officer of the country, Ahmadinejad is the one who ultimately has to face the brunt of criticisms regarding the way popular protests are confronted, prisoners treated, and civil rights undermined.

In any case, he is a much easier target to attack without being accused of questioning the foundation of the Islamic Republic.

In trying to find a Modus Vivendi to placate popular anger against his presidency, Ahmadinejad’s first task will have to be the selection of a team that can reach an agreement about how to deal with the situation. And this may not be an easy task, as one of his weaknesses as a leader has always been his inability to work well with people outside of a very close circle of friends.

In his first term he had to spend almost nine months trying to get approval for key ministers in his cabinet. And by the end of his first term, close to half of his cabinet had been either sacked or had chosen to resign. He also changed the heads of key institutions such as the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) several times, and at the end managed even to antagonise the most hard-line of his ministers at the Intelligence and Culture and Islamic Guidance ministries.

This is why two major conservative organisations – Followers of Imam and Leadership Line and Society of Islamic Engineers – have already issued unprecedentedly harsh letters warning Ahmadinejad against obstinacy, not listening to anyone, and having delusions about the extent and depth of the support he has been given. Instead they called upon him to avoid “confronting the clergy,” and to rely on the views of “Majles and Leadership” in choosing his cabinet.

Ahmadinejad’s options are limited. He can acknowledge his weakened presidency, over-see a cabinet whose individual members will contest his policies, and head an administration that is conflicted from within. Or he can try to try to act resolutely by picking fights with almost every political force in the country – in which case his behaviour will be the source of heartache for everyone who for ideological reasons or for fear of reformist resurgence ended up supporting him in the election.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Jul 22 2009 (IPS)

With the historical Friday Prayer sermon given by former president and current chair of the Council of Experts and Expediency Discernment Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on Jul. 17, and the riposte by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei three days later, lines have been drawn in unprecedented ways in Iran.

It is now clear that the Islamic Republic’s ever-present political frictions and cleavages can no longer be managed in ways they have been in the past, either through behind-the-scenes lobbying at the top or selective repression or some combination of the two.

Until the current crisis, politicians like Rafsanjani who have defined the political centre in Iran have always sided with the security establishment because of their preeminent concern for the survival of the Islamic republic.

But, on Jul. 17, Rafsanjani made clear that, beyond his longstanding disagreements with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the direction of Iran’s domestic and foreign policies, he now believes that the approach taken by the government and security establishment in addressing the post-election crisis threatens the very survival of the system.

Recalling the vision of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Rafsanjani insisted that “without the people, there is no Islamic rule… The title of Islamic Republic is not used as a formality. It is both Islamic and a republic. They have to be together… If it loses its republican aspect, [the Islamic Republic] will not be realised. …[W]ithout people and their vote there would be no Islamic system.”

That another former president, Mohammad Khatami, followed Rafsanjani with his own unprecedented call Saturday for a national referendum on the legitimacy of the election also signaled the crisis has moved to a new stage.

The inability of the Ahmadinejad government to put an end to or manage street demonstrations and elite dissent is matched by its intransigence in finding non-violent ways to address popular anger over the results of the election.

That intransigence was reaffirmed by Khamenei’s speech Monday.

In contrast to Rafsanjani’s call for unity, which appealed to the government to open the public space for dialogue, free prisoners, and redress the harm inflicted on the families of those whose loved ones have been killed or have disappeared, Khamenei issued threats.

His rebuke was directed not only to the protestors who have taken to the streets – “rioters”, he called them – but also to those among the elite who have remained silent in the confrontation between Ahmadinejad’s government and what has transformed itself from a reformist into an opposition movement, and which, with the entry of Rafsanjani, has now incorporated the centre of the political spectrum.

Khamenei’s warning to Iranian officials was unambiguous, demanding that they be careful about “what they say and what they do not say” and recognise that “they are facing a great test and not successfully passing the test is not only falling behind for a year; it is [their] downfall.”

Adding to the drama was the immediate appearance on Rafsanjani’s personal website of a headline in which he recalled the early years of the revolution. “The term fear has no meaning for us,” it said. “For every generation, there is a test. Issues related to society and people are the most important tests.”

Khamenei and the hardliners he supports insist on seeing the ongoing crisis as the result of foreign machinations or the latest in a series of factional fights that have plagued the Islamic Republic since the beginning.

They fail to recognise the dangerous and widening rift that has opened up between a significant segment of the Iranian population and the state, a rift that Rafsanjani said can be mended only through a serious and concerted effort to overcome the “doubt” created by the election and its aftermath.

As such, lines have been drawn with each side standing its ground and effectively moving the country toward political paralysis.

At this point, the opacity of the Iranian political system makes the assessment of the resources that each side brings into this conflict difficult.

Clearly, Khamenei and his supporters feel they have enough firepower to manage and eventually overcome the crisis, which, as Rafsanjani noted, is the most significant since the inception of the Islamic Republic.

But their calculations have been wrong before. They clearly failed to anticipate the reaction of other candidates – not to mention a significant part of the population – to the election results. They may once again be underestimating the extent and determination of the forces arrayed against them, seemingly more united in opposition to Ahmadinejad’s presidency than a month ago, precisely because of the way they handled both the election and its aftermath.

Khamenei and his supporters seem to believe that they can ride out the current challenge through intransigence and repression, as the regime has done during previous crises.

In all likelihood, he is also haunted by events that culminated in the 1979 revolution, identifying the Shah’s eventual decision to stand down in the face of massive protests – when he famously said he had heard the voice of the revolution – as the decisive variable in the monarchy’s collapse.

Yet, the hardliners are now presented with two challenges for which their understanding of the past may not provide sound guidance.

Their short-term interest is to end the protests, something they have manifestly failed so far to achieve. Escalating the repression at this point, however, may risk creating or aggravating rifts within the security establishment itself.

Moreover, increased repression is likely to make the longer-term task of governing Iran in ways that address the deep grievances generated by the mismanagement of the election and its aftermath significantly more difficult.

It may also create deeper rifts, not only between the government and an increasingly unified, if eclectic, opposition that now includes presidential contenders Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, as well as former presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani, but also between the Islamic system in its entirety and a significant sector of the population.

According to Abbas Abdi, an astute observer of Iranian politics who supported Karroubi in the election, “The rifts that in the future are difficult and even impossible to repair can today be repaired at much lower cost.”

To be sure, the opposition is not without its dilemmas, too. Clearly, the heavy hand of the state has not only deepened rifts between the state and society, it is also increasing on an almost daily basis demands by many protestors for fundamental changes in the Islamic system.

The power of the currently eclectic opposition derives from the unity generated by popular dissatisfaction with the election and its aftermath. That unity could suffer as various components become radicalised in the face of increased repression.

So far, though, it is the eclecticism and unity of the movement that has allowed it to weather the security establishment’s onslaughts far beyond anyone’s expectations.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, Jun 16 2009 (IPS)

Four days after Iran’s Jun. 12 election, the country remains in a state of shock and turmoil, attempting to come to grips with what happened.

The conviction held by a significant part of the electorate that the vote was stolen has led to protests and demonstrations in the streets, while the harsh response and clampdown by riot police and vigilante forces, particularly against university students, have created an atmosphere reminiscent of revolutionary days.

Already brewing fissures among the Iranian political elite have turned into irreconcilable differences, confronting the Islamic Republic of Iran with its most serious crisis since the early post-1979 period.

The massive demonstration – the first spontaneous and non-government-sponsored demonstration in the Islamic Republic, if the early post-revolutionary demonstrations are discounted – in support of former prime minister Mir Hossein Moussavi on Jun. 14 has assured the continuation of a fluid, improvised, and unpredictable historical moment.

It was an unambiguous show of force intended to counter the sizeable and yet smaller demonstration held in support of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s declared victory the day before.

It did not have to turn out this way. On the morning of Election Day, everything seemed calm and on the cusp of a historic poll that would have reportedly produced an unprecedented 80 to 85 percent turnout.

Voting began on the heels of almost 20 days of a carnival-like atmosphere in medium and large cities all over Iran, made possible by the mobilisation of the supporters of the two reformist candidates, Moussavi and former Parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karrubi.

Heated competition between the two reformist candidates and growing outrage over President Ahmadinejad’s misrepresentations in television debates about the state of the Iranian economy, as well as his record and previous controversial remarks, had energised the electorate in the last couple of weeks of the campaign in ways not foreseen by either the candidates or pundits.

The animus against Ahmadinejad and savvy campaigns run by the two candidates achieved the unthinkable and, if the total number of votes announced by the Interior Ministry is accepted, brought into the electoral process at least an additional 11 million voters out of the announced total eligible electorate of 46.2 million.

In retrospect, however, it was precisely this extensive mobilisation that must have frightened the hard-line sectors of the Iranian elite in general and the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in particular – enough to elicit their nod for what is now widely seen as the most blatant election fraud in the Islamic Republic’s history, leading to the hasty announcement of Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory by an unbelievable 62.6 percent of the vote in comparison to Moussavi’s 33.75 percent.

Electoral manipulation – or ‘engineering’, as it is sometimes called – is not uncommon in Iran. It is part and parcel of the political process and has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years to prevent repeats of the 1997 election when reformist Mohammad Khatami unexpectedly won in a landslide. At that time, the unprecedented number of people participating in the election (79 percent) effectively prevented large-scale fiddling with the ballots.

On the eve of that election, the two most prominent political figures in Iran – then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – having been informed of the political sentiments in the country by the security and intelligence apparatus, came out and publicly assured voters that their preference would be respected. Their shared concern about possible violence almost certainly brought the two leaders together.

Since then, stricter vetting by the Guardian Council – intended to demoralise voters about their available choices – has been utilised to keep turnout in both parliamentary and presidential elections to somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, a level that assured conservatives, given their own popular base and control over key institutions, they would prevail in future votes with only marginal manipulation.

This election proved different and hence uncontrollable. The decision to manipulate election results in a brazen fashion seems to have been taken in advance, as evidenced in the ransacking of the offices of reformist candidates even before the polls were closed and what now appears to be have been a concerted effort to interfere with the country’s communications system, in which text messaging and mobile phones play a major role.

The wholesale arrest of reformist leaders and the immediate presence of security forces and vigilantes in the streets all suggest premeditation.

They also suggest another major difference between 1997 and today: a clear split between the two major icons of the post-Khomeini Islamic Republic.

Rafsanjani, who supported Moussavi, publicly warned against the possibility of fraud and questioned Ahmadinejad’s allegations of corruption against him in an unprecedented public letter to Khamenei before the election. Still, the Supreme Leader chose to endorse the results, calling it in a written statement a “divine miracle” within 24 hours of the closing of the polls and even before the Guardian Council had the chance to certify the results.

Khamenei’s decision to ignore Rafsanjani’s warning about the possibility of events getting out of control will in coming days be assessed as a marker for his ability to use “correct political and social perspicacity, prudence, courage, management of sufficient power” to lead the country; – characteristics specified as qualifications for the Leadership by Section 3 of Article 109 of the Iran’s Constitution.

It will probably be a while before we know whose idea it was to manipulate the election results in such a brazen way.

Those who planned and implemented it probably thought the large turnout made it impossible for subtle manipulation of results and decided to go for broke. The brazenness was in all likelihood also deemed necessary as a show of force to make sure that the chunk of the electorate that is usually silent in Iran but was mobilised by this election returns to its apathy and cynicism.

Judging from the size of the demonstrations of the past two days, however, that tactic has not yet worked, presumably because of the extent of mobilisation during the election campaign, the shock many felt when the results were announced so hastily, and because significant players in Iranian politics such as Rafsanjani – who has been conspicuously absent from public view in the past few days – have effectively been forced to fight for their political lives behind the scenes by drawing from the considerable fortunes and networks of influence they built up during their years in politics.

As the head of the Assembly of Experts, Rafsanjani retains the power to call into question the supreme leader’s management of the crisis. As a leading cleric he also has close ties to Iran’s major sources of religious legitimacy – none of which have so far congratulated Ahmadinejad for his reelection.

The decision by all three of Ahmadinejad’s foes to lodge formal complaints against the results and, most importantly, Moussavi’s decision not to back down and to continue to call for people’s peaceful presence in the streets have also raised the stakes for everyone involved.

Elections have been at the core of the Islamic Republic’s claim to legitimacy as a political system, and there is no doubt that some individuals will have to pay for this systemic inability to manage a critical election.

The issue at hand is who. The answer lies in the outcome of the power conflict that is not only being played out on the streets of Tehran and several other large cities, but also at the highest levels of Iran’s political structure.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawaii, May 11 2009 (IPS)

With the official registration period for candidates over on May 9, the race for Iran’s presidency is entering its final stretch.

According to the Ministry of Interior, 475 individuals, including 42 women, have registered for the Jun. 12 election, but no more that a handful will be cleared to run by the Islamic Republic’s Guardian Council. Still, the competition will be stiff with a run-off between the top two candidates likely on Jun. 19.

The race pits Iran’s conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against the former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and current secretary of the Expediency Council Mohsen Rezaee, who is also a conservative, and two reformist candidates: former prime minister Mir Hossein Mussavi, and former parliamentary speaker – and the only cleric in the race – Mehdi Karrubi.

At this point, Mussavi is considered to be Ahmadinejad’s most serious challenger.

Initial expectations for this presidential race were different. Given the political weakness and lack of access to resources of the reformists, most observers believed that Ahmadinejad’s only real challenge would come from conservative forces, some of which have become increasingly unhappy with his expansionist economic policies and erratic management style.

Mussavi’s entry changed the dynamics of the race, finally forcing several hesitant conservative coalitions and organisations to set aside their disagreements and support Ahmadinejad as their “unity” candidate based on the perception that his chances of winning were greater compared to those of other conservatives.

To be sure, Rezaee is also a conservative running because of his stated dissatisfaction with the state of the country. But he lacks a conservative organisational base and thus is unlikely to pose a serious challenge to either Ahmadinejad or Mussavi.

The most his candidacy can do is to give cover to prominent conservatives, such as the current speaker of the parliament, Ali Larijani, and Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, allowing them to maintain their silence under the pretext of impartiality between the two conservative candidates.

Their continued silence favours Mussavi, who appears to be making a calculated effort to peel away conservative votes from Ahmadinejad by depicting himself as the true progeny of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, for whom he served as prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war. Lacking in charisma, Mussavi is running as a reformist who regularly cites the founding “principles” of the Islamic Revolution as a sop to those conservatives who call themselves “Principlists.”

He has attacked Ahmadinejad for weakening Iran’s managerial class, pursuing economic policies that have harmed the poor and middle classes, and promoting an extremist foreign policy that has inflicted serious damage on Tehran’s international image and interests.

To be sure, Mussavi has made clear that Iran’s nuclear programme is not negotiable. “No government can dare to take a step back on this issue,” he said recently. But, like Karrubi and Rezaee, he has called Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy adventurist and has explicitly used the term détente – a term used during reformist Mohammad Khatami’s presidency –with the world as a general guide for his foreign policy.

The Mussavi campaign is not without flaws or challenges. So far, his campaign organisation appears lacklustre. It remains to be seen whether help from some key Khatami lieutenants will bring discipline and vibrancy to a campaign that has so far failed to generate popular excitement.

Mussavi’s most serious challenge comes from Mehdi Karrubi, who is running on a platform of change. While Mussavi has managed to enlist strong support from Khatami and the endorsement of major reformist organisations, a number of leading reformists, human rights activists, and journalists have come out in favour of Karrubi, in part because of his past support for student and prisoner rights.

This division among reformists is likely to harm them unless, as some reformists believe, Karrubi actually draws more votes from Ahmadinejad than from Mussavi in the first round.

When Karrubi ran for the presidency in 2005, he campaigned on a populist platform that promised every Iranian citizen would receive cash payments from government oil revenue. Many observers believe that that pledge earned him many of the more than five million votes he received in the first round of the election and that Ahmadinejad, who ran as a populist, captured the bulk of those votes in the second round.

Today, those votes are up for grabs due to Ahmadinejad’s failure to deliver on his own redistributive policies. Karrubi’s presence may lead his previous supporters to move away from Ahmadinejad, particularly since Karrubi’s promised economic policies again rely on the idea of distributing the oil money, this time not in the form of direct cash payments, but rather a distribution of oil company shares.

Regional linkage is another reason why Karrubi’s presence may brighten the reformists’ prospects. Karrubi hails from an ethnic group centred in the southwestern part of Iran where he did particularly well in 2005. Mussavi, who is Azeri, is also expected to do well in the three Azeri-speaking northwestern provinces.

These regional linkages may increase the number of participants in several provinces, in the process reducing Ahmadinejad’s chance of receiving 50 percent of the total vote in the first round and setting the stage for a second round confrontation between Mussavi and Ahmadinejad.

In the second round, Mussavi is more likely to benefit from a large number of “anti-Ahmadinejad” votes, much the same way that, in the 2005 election, many votes were cast against former two-term President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Ahmadinejad is much better known and has a solid base among hard-line conservative supporters, but he also has high negatives – estimates range as high as 60 percent – which will kick in during the second round.

What is unknown is the extent to which Ahmadinejad’s populist policies have expanded, rather than contracted, his base. Money has been and continues to be handed out, food distributed, and short-term loans extended, but wealth has not been significantly redistributed, and inflation has eroded whatever gains the public has made from these kinds of government largess.

Also unknown is the systemic will to re-elect Ahmadinejad.

On the one hand, Iran’s elections are run by the Interior Ministry and supervised by the Guardian Council, institutions that are currently headed by Ahmadinejad supporters. Certainly, there will be some voter manipulation, including voiding ballots and efforts by Interior Ministry-appointed provincial governors to encourage people, financially or otherwise, to vote for Ahmadinejad. National television, where most Iranians get their information, can also be critical in favouring one candidate over others.

What is not clear is the extent to which these kinds of instruments will and can be used if all of the candidates running are more or less acceptable to key players and political groups.

So far, one key player, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, has hewed to his past practice of refraining from publicly endorsing any candidate. But this year he has taken the unusual step of publicly pointing out that his support for Ahmadinejad as president should not be confused with support for him as candidate, effectively fueling speculation about his “real” preference.

Mussavi’s attempt to represent himself as someone who has a foot in both reformist and conservative camps must hence be seen in the light of his attempt both to take votes away from Ahmadinejad and to reduce the will on the part of conservative-controlled institutions to cheat.

At the same time, Ahmadinejad’s will to win, as well as resources he controls as a sitting president, should not be underestimated.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
WASHINGTON, Apr 7 2009 (IPS)

Despite recent overtures and the establishment of areas of common interest, Iran’s nuclear programme remains central to its goals in dealing with the U.S.

President Barack Obama’s Nowruz message to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran – although not wholly free of the usual accusations regarding Tehran’s support for terrorism and pursuit of arms – reflected a dramatic shift in tone and initiated a direct conversation between two countries that have been long at odds and accustomed to interaction through intermediaries.

The immediate response by Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in turn, reflected Tehran’s openness to improved relations if Washington changes its heavy-handed approach towards Iran.

At the same time, it showed that, despite all the optimistic talk about possible cooperation between the U.S. and Iran – regarding, for instance, the fight against drug trafficking and terrorism in Afghanistan – being used as a stepping-stone for improved relations, Tehran’s main concern remains the trajectory of nuclear talks.

The question that occupies Tehran’s mind is whether Obama’s verbal overtures are preludes to a substantive change of direction in U.S. policy toward Iran’s nuclear programme or mere rhetorical cover for the initiation of a more robust effort to pressure Iran.

Tehran’s insistence on seeing changed policy on the nuclear front was confirmed when it chose to send Deputy Foreign Minister for Asia and Pacific Mohammad Mehdi Akhunzadeh to lead the Iranian delegation to the U.N.- backed conference on Afghanistan in Hague last week.

Considering the high-powered make-up of the U.S. delegation – which included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and “Af-Pak” (Afghanistan and Pakistan) Envoy Richard Holbrooke – the choice of Akhunzadeh, a career diplomat currently in charge of Iran’s Afghanistan portfolio, was clearly intended to convey the message that Iran can and will pursue its security interests in Afghanistan. These include combating drug trafficking and terrorism, as well as rebuilding Afghanistan – irrespective of cooperation with the U.S. or NATO forces.

The choice of coordination with Iran on the basis of mutual interest was hence squarely placed on the Obama Administration, and its ability not to treat Iran as a foe that needs to be either confronted or economically and politically contained.

It is significant that any direct cooperation between the U.S. and Iran or NATO forces and Iran will ultimately have to circumvent some of the financial and economic sanctions that the U.S. and its allies have placed on Iran in the past few years because of the latter’s nuclear programme.

In his response to Obama, Khamenei did not make direct reference to Iran’s nuclear programme. His focus on the economic and political pressures that have been imposed on Iran in recent years and the direct reference to what he called Washington’s policy of “threat and inducement” were meant to make clear that, unless Obama finds a way to change the general direction of past policies and settle the nuclear issue in a mutually satisfactory way, Tehran will continue to ignore demands placed on it and go about its business as it had during the presidency of George W. Bush.

Clearly, in Khamenei’s view, engagement in nuclear talks must be accompanied by concrete steps that demonstrate to Iran that Washington is interested in a process of give-and-take rather than one, in Khamenei’s words, based on “either deception or intimidation.”

By deception, he was apparently referring to the belief that, despite the softer language, Washington’s goal remains the same. By intimidation, he was referring to Washington’s intention to increase economic and other forms of pressure on Iran, even while engaging it diplomatically.

He left no doubt that further pressure on Iran leading up to and during talks will be taken as a sign that Obama’s rhetoric of change is insincere.

As such, Khamenei’s response should be counter-posed against the threat issued a few days later by the leader of Israel’s new government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that, unless the U.S. succeeds in persuading Tehran to dismantle its entire enrichment programme, the Jewish state will take matters in its own hands.

Clearly, despite the potential for cooperation between Iran and the U.S. regarding Afghanistan and elsewhere, the avoidance of the nuclear issue is neither acceptable to Iran nor to its foes.

At the centre of the controversy is the question of whether, in the upcoming nuclear talks with Iran, the U.S. and its partners – China, France, Germany, Russia, and the UK – should continue to insist on the indefinite suspension of Iran’s enrichment programme, or the so-called “zero option.”

From Tehran’s point of view, the zero option – whether demanded of Iran as a pre-condition for talks as the Bush Administration demanded, or as a goal of such talks as contemplated by Obama – is a recipe for deadlock. Khamenei’s response to Obama was intended to relay this message in no uncertain terms.

This point was reiterated in the Iranian New Year’s first Friday prayer led by former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is widely seen as an advocate of diplomatic engagement, but who noted that Obama’s call in his Nowruz message for Tehran to give up its alleged support for terrorism and nuclear-weapons ambitions showed that Washington’s attitude had not much changed.

“These issues must be discussed in talks and not judged before talks,” he declared, adding that Tehran has “no need for hostility with the government of the United States if it acts justly and on the basis of international principles.” This is a reference to Iran’s position that the demand that it suspend uranium enrichment is unjust because it goes beyond obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

But perhaps the clearest statement of Tehran’s position came this week from Iran’s former prime minister, Mir Hossein Mussavi, who in all likelihood will be incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s principal challenger in June’s presidential elections.

While criticising Ahmadinejad for politicising what is an essentially scientific and technological breakthrough, Mussavi explained why Iran cannot back down on its right to enrich uranium under the NPT.

“The progress we have regarding nuclear technology can be a prelude to our entry into a new and modern environment and our backing down will not be a temporary backing down and in relation to one instance; rather, we will be forced to back down completely in many projects,” he said.

“Having peaceful energy without threatening the global environment is among our strategic desires, and I do not think any [Iranian] administration will dare to take a step back in this regard since it will be faced with people’s questions. Attention to long-term interest makes it necessary not to back down at all on these issues and similar ones.”

As the U.S. and its allies prepare to meet in the coming week, the message coming from Tehran is clear. The nuclear issue is Iran’s focal point, and the real marker of a change of direction in U.S. foreign policy. Unless the U.S. finds a way to negotiate rather than dictate, hope for qualitative change in U.S.-Iran relations should not be pinned on cooperation elsewhere.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate, Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Excerpt:

By Farideh Farhi
HONOLULU, Hawai'i, Feb 5 2009 (IPS)

“We are not satisfied with [U.S. President Barack] Obama’s actions since they have not been in line with claims of change – although we are not without hope either.”

These words, uttered Monday in a press conference by Iran’s Speaker of the Parliament, Ali Larijani, encapsulate Tehran’s wait-and-see attitude towards the Obama administration and its reported policy review regarding the Islamic Republic. While Iranian officials are willing to entertain the possibility of significant change in U.S. foreign policy, they are increasingly preparing for it not to happen.

Larijani’s words are instructive. Calling the conflict between the United States and Iran “serious and not for fun” and not subject to resolution through mere “gestures”, he suggested that the United States should have a “precise plan to see what the demands of the Iranian people are.”

Yet, reflecting on the chance of such a thing happening, he said, “I think it is rather far-fetched to think that it would occur.”

That Tehran bases its change of policies on a fundamental change of attitude in Washington was also on display when it refused to extend visas to the U.S. women’s badminton team to participate in the Fajr Badminton Tournament in Tehran.

The team had flown to Dubai with full expectation of being extended visas. However, according to the Foreign Ministry’s Spokesman Hassan Qashqavi, the reason for denial was simple: “In the same way the Americans do it in relation to the issuance of visas to Iranians, this issue was in need of time and given the processing time needed, issuance of visas was not possible.”

It should not be a surprise that Tehran’s sudden insistence on due process came immediately after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “President Obama has signaled his intention to support tough and direct diplomacy with Iran, but if Iran does not comply with United Nations Security Council and IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] mandates, there must be consequences.”

Tehran followed the U.S. presidential campaign closely as President-Elect Obama repeatedly made clear his intention to engage in direct talks without first demanding a suspension of the Iranian uranium enrichment programme. However, lack of clarity about the purpose of talks left Iranian leaders wondering whether Obama will embark upon a robust version of the so-called carrots and sticks approach pursued by the George W. Bush administration or entertain comprehensive diplomatic engagement.

The uncertainly about Obama’s intentions made Tehran take a Janus-faced approach. It welcomed his presidency and message of change, as reflected in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s congratulatory letter sent to Obama – a first in the post-revolutionary era.

The diplomatic apparatus has also been quite explicit that it takes the new president’s commitment to change seriously and inclusive of Iran. In the words of Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki, “If Mr. Barack Obama remains committed to his motto, we will be hopeful that there is a real change in America.”

But both official and public discourse in Iran is increasingly showing weariness that Obama’s change will essentially mean more of the same. Some inside Iran, such as the editors at the hard-line Kayhan daily newspaper, have argued that Obama’s plan for Iran is already clear and includes “planned reduction of global oil prices, escalation of economic pressure on Iran, and reliance on political divisions inside to weaken Iran’s nuclear resolve.”

On the official front, a surprisingly unified and threatening public posture is emerging, suggesting the possibility that Obama’s new policy may be the old one repackaged. The unity of response is reflected in the words of three of Iran’s most important leaders: Parliament speaker Larijani, Expediency Council and Council of Experts chair Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

All three leaders have reacted harshly to Obama’s use of the carrots and sticks imagery as a way to solve Iran’s problem. Larijani and Rafsanjani have announced that Iran will not be interested in serious talks if the U.S. approach to Iran does not change, while Ayatollah Khamenei has reiterated his expectation that U.S. hostility will continue unabated.

As such, the space between a hard-line rejectionist position regarding any negotiation with the United States and the possibility of meaningful conversation if there are some basic changes in the U.S. posture towards Iran’s role in the region is where the contemporary Iranian conversation about Obama’s foreign policy rests.

On the question of what kind of conversation Iran seeks, Larijani has been the clearest – identifying Obama’s carrots and sticks language as a reflection of U.S. “savagery” and “cowboy” foreign policy in January. According to Larijani, the U.S. does not yet understand that Iran does not need U.S. acknowledgment of its nuclear energy programme.

Instead of “logical interaction based on international law, it carries a stick and wants to force Iran to do what it wants. If the Americans think they can approach Iran instrumentally through tactical change, they are wrong.” A “strategic conversation”, he pointed out, is a different matter.

Larijani’s language was harsh, particularly since it was used by an official considered to be a pragmatic conservative in the current Iranian political scene. But even harsher were the words uttered by Iran’s pre-eminent pragmatist or moderate: former president Rafsanjani.

In his sermon on Dec. 8 on the occasion of Eid al-Adha, he expressed real disappointment in Obama and went on to say that Iran “neither wants America’s incentives nor its punishment”. Reminding his audience of the Iran-Contra Affair, he asserted that the U.S. has always been the country hankering after Iran: “For 30 years you always wanted to talk and we didn’t, and now you want to place even heavier conditions for talks?!”

These words were echoed by Supreme Leader Khamenei, whose hard-line stance is not surprising. Emphasising U.S. desires to meddle in Iranian politics through “soft power”, he pointed out that the behaviours the U.S. wants to change are Iran’s rejection of imperialism, as well as its pursuit of “national and Islamic values.”

Speaking to students at the Science and Technology University on Dec. 14, Khamenei stated that if Iran changed these characteristics, without a doubt hostilities would cease – the implication being that Iran will of course not change these characteristics.

Taking into account these responses, the message coming out of Tehran is increasingly clear. Any change in Iran’s policy towards the U.S. will depend on the Obama administration’s policy of communicating a fundamental change in the decades-long attempt to minimise Iran’s role in the region, particularly in the Persian Gulf.

If this fundamental change is not forthcoming, the Iranian leadership in all its variety, at least publicly, is asserting its willingness to hunker down and risk further wrath rather than to “give in” to U.S. demands.

The political developments in post-invasion Iraq and Lebanon have clearly impacted Tehran’s understanding of its strengths in the region, allowing it to entertain the possibility that the U.S. may be in the process of redefining its strategic calculus and Iran’s role in it. Concurrently, they allow Iran to entertain the possibility of settling the challenges posed to its existence and interests by consistent U.S. policies of containing and neutralising Iran for the past two decades.

Yet, Tehran also seems aware that the envisioning of Iran’s broader regional role is precisely what is unnerving many quarters in Washington, seeing it instead as contradicting U.S. objectives, interests of Arab allies, and most importantly, security of Israel.

Understanding the new administration’s dilemma, Tehran is sending the message that it is ready to talk in the same way it has been in the past, this time with a U.S. presence. But it is also saying that talks along the old parametres will get old results.

*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

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