U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (far left) sitting next to Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 27. Credit: European External Action Service/cc by 2.0

By Jasmin Ramsey
GENEVA, Oct 13 2013 (IPS)

Almost exactly four months after the election of Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, talks over the Islamic Republic’s controversial nuclear programme will resume here on Tuesday.

Negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, and Russia plus Germany) were last held in April in Almaty, Kazakhstan, when the Iranian team was headed by former presidential candidate Saeed Jalili, a hardliner who was defeated by the moderate cleric in Iran’s June election.“No one should expect a decade-old impasse to be resolved in just two days." -- Ali Vaez of ICG

The closest Iran came to reaching a nuclear deal under Jalili’s watch was in October 2009 when his direct meeting with then under-secretary of state William Burns resulted in a tentative agreement that included transferring most of Iran’s low-enriched uranium to Russia to be processed into fuel rods for medical purposes.

But hopes were dashed when “Iran’s tumultuous post-election environment, combined with a lack of transparency regarding the agreement’s details, led to opposition across the political spectrum,” Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar at the University of Hawaii, told IPS.

“Eventually the inability of both Jalili and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to convince others in Iran that the agreement included an explicit acceptance of Iran’s enrichment programme led to Leader Ali Khamenei’s withdrawal of support for the agreement,” she said.

Iran’s new team

Rouhani, a former nuclear negotiating chief (2003-05) who has promised “moderation” and “constructive interaction with the world,” has raised hopes among Iranians that his administration will secure a deal that will include relief from the many rounds of sanctions Iran is currently enduring.

His trip with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to New York last month resulted in Iran’s highest-level formal direct meeting with a U.S. official since its 1979 revolution.

Zarif was “optimistic” after meeting with the P5+1 and a private 30-minute discussion with Secretary of State John Kerry on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 27.

“Now we have to match our words with action. And that’s, I hope, not a challenge,” the Western-educated diplomat said at the end of a talk by Rouhani.

The meeting was followed by a brief but cordial phone call between President Barack Obama and Rouhani that suggested a thaw in the icy relations of the two countries.

While Obama’s announcement that Kerry would be directly involved in negotiations with Iran was received positively by diplomacy advocates, the secretary of state is not expected to attend the Geneva talks, where the U.S. lead representative will continue to be Wendy Sherman, the under secretary for political affairs.

That the U.S. side will now include Adam Szubin, the director of the Treasury agency that administers and enforces sanctions (OFAC), also indicates the U.S. is evaluating its sanctions policy.

Zarif will only reportedly attend an introductory session of the two-day talks (Oct. 15-16) that will include EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton. The Iranian side will then be led by Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, according to Iranian press reports.

“I am reassured by the possibility that the Iranian side will be led by Minister Zarif, because he is a brilliant diplomat, and by the hints that the purpose of the meeting is for Iran to present ideas and for the others to get clarification and report back to Principals,” Peter Jenkins, who served as the UK’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (2001-06), told IPS.

“But problems could arise if either side sought to move too far too fast, meaning that they demanded commitments from the other side without volunteering commitments of their own,” he said.

Leaks and speculation

“We will present our views, as agreed, in Geneva, not before. No Rush, No Speculations Please (of course if you can help it!!!),” tweeted Zarif from his official account on Oct. 11.

Two days earlier, former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani seemed to suggest that Iran was willing to talk about its stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium.

“We have some surplus, you know, the amount that we don’t need. But over that we can have some discussions,” Larijani, currently Iran’s Parliament Speaker, told the Associated Press on the sidelines of an Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting in Geneva.

The Iranian parliament’s news website later described those comments as “contrary to reality and baseless,” according to a translation by Al-Monitor.

The Wall Street Journal meanwhile reported on Oct. 9 that Iran has been preparing a proposal that’s very similar to the P5+1’s Almaty proposal.

The P5+1’s last confidence-building offer, which Iran did not formally respond to, included demands that Iran suspend 20-percent enrichment, ship some of its existing uranium stockpiles abroad and temporarily shutter its Fordow enrichment facility in return for relief from U.S. and EU sanctions on precious metals and petrochemicals and on sanctions targeting Iran’s airline industry.

On Sunday, the Iranian Student News Agency reported that Iran would be presenting a three-phased proposal that includes enrichment inside Iran.

Later that day, negotiator Araqchi was quoted saying “Of course we will negotiate regarding the form, amount, and various levels of [uranium] enrichment, but the shipping of materials out of the country is our red line,” according to Reuters.

Experts, however, urge caution on these reports.

“Unsubstantiated leaks so far have only created inflated hopes that could be dangerous and lead to disappointment,” Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, told IPS.

“No one should expect a decade-old impasse to be resolved in just two days…At best, the two sides could narrow their differences on the broad contours of an end game and a road map for getting there,” he said.

Restricted timeframe 

Rouhani stressed in New York last month that he hopes a deal can be reached within three to six months. After that point hardliners could regain the upper hand domestically if Rouhani’s foreign policy has not resulted in any wins for Iran.

Meanwhile Congress is preparing to push forward more sanctions legislation.

The Senate Banking Committee agreed to delay the evaluation of a sanctions bill passed in July that further targets Iran’s oil exports after pressure from Kerry, but will proceed in the coming weeks, according to the New York Times.

When asked how increased sanctions would affect the diplomatic process, Farhi said “it depends on whether some sort of agreement is reached in Geneva or not.”

“With no agreement, the imposition of sanctions will be the public announcement of failure of talks. If there is an agreement and the U.S. Congress still insists on ratcheting up sanctions, then it is yet another announcement of Obama’s political weakness,” the Iran expert told IPS.

“I hope that all parties have enough foresight to know that, given the publicly expressed desire to resolve the issue, this is the time for flexibility and a step by step process of mutual trust building for the sake of avoiding a path that neither side desires,” said Farhi.

From Tehran’s perspective, the current negotiations between Iran and the United States may be best described as a wrestling match.

Before President Hassan Rouhani’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA), his boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke of “heroic leniency” toward the United States. Subsequently, Khamenei’s office issued a telling graphic that depicted a set of guidelines for negotiations. The graphic also called to mind an Iranian zoorkhaneh, or house of strength, where men perform traditional weightlifting and wrestling, one of the most popular sports in Iran.

According to Khamenei, the Islamic Republic is willing to engage its enemy, or show “flexibility,” in order to win the overall competition. However, Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards have also laid out clear red lines for Rouhani. He is to demonstrate no weakness or “humility” with the opponent, the United States. And he should not weaken Iran’s ties and alliances with Islamic and resistance groups, especially Hezbollah.

Rouhani’s recent charm offensive has greatly raised expectations amongst those wishing for U.S.-Iran reconciliation. However, this is not Rouhani’s mandate; rather, the Islamic Republic has tasked him with negotiating the nuclear crisis away and alleviating pressures faced by the regime. Although this may not seem the perfect outcome, it nevertheless presents a unique opportunity for the United States.

It is unlikely that Khamenei and his supporters will ever change their fundamental views of America. Suspicion of the United States may be motivated by religious and cultural values, but only to a limited extent. The regime’s revolutionary ideology and geopolitical interests play a bigger role.

Khamenei sees the global order as tilted in the West’s favour. The United States is the latest of a long line of imperialist powers that have attempted to dominate the Middle East. He views his regime, which replaced Iran’s last monarch, as the focal point of resistance to Western domination.

This has meant an Iranian policy of containment with limited engagement in which Iran limits and rolls back Washington’s influence while pursuing diplomacy when it suits regime “expediency.” (The United States has also pursued a similar policy of containment).

Khamenei has said that he does not oppose negotiating with the United States in principle as long as it does not violate Iran’s interests.

For a long time, his policy seemed to work. Iran carved out a sphere of influence from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, and could count on its allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond to help maintain its interests. Iran’s economy, while never great, functioned and at times prospered until the imposition of the most punishing sanctions.

Iran earned an estimated 500 billion dollars from oil and natural gas sales during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, while its nuclear programme progressed in the face of Western opposition. Khamenei was willing to engage the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to enhance Iran’s influence, and no more.

But Ahmadinejad’s monumental incompetence made Iran the loser, not the champion. Iran’s economy is in the dumps, the people are unhappy, and Tehran’s regional influence is in decline. Khamenei needed a new wrestler, and Rouhani appears more than capable. He can manage the economy, negotiate away sanctions, and give the Iranian people a bit more freedom, but not too much.

It is not too surprising that Rouhani did not shake President Obama’s hand during the United Nations General Assembly confab. He may have a mandate to negotiate, but he cannot appear to be weak in the face of the enemy. Khamenei’s “heroic leniency” means a well-defined set of red lines and parametres, rather than gestures that call into question the very purpose of the wrestling match.

However, this does not mean that Rouhani’s diplomacy is false or that Khamenei is merely buying time. In the past, U.S. engagement with Iran has produced results. Iran’s support was crucial in establishing the government of Hamid Karzai after the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Limited engagement with Iran focusing on the nuclear programme and perhaps even Syria can work.

Real U.S. wrestlers have competed with Iranians, and have always been greeted in Iran with open arms. However, no one should expect Rouhani to change the dynamics between Iran and the United States, or apparently, to even offer his hand in friendship. The wrestling match is not over, but for now some flexibility from both sides can ensure a managed rivalry, rather than a bloody mess between a beleaguered superpower and its frustrated but determined regional rival.

Alireza Nader is a senior international policy analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

Newly published recollections by the former French ambassador to Iran suggest that Iran was not running a covert nuclear weapons programme that it then decided to halt in late 2003, as concluded by U.S. intelligence in 2007.

Ambassador Francois Nicoullaud recounted conversations with high-ranking Iranian officials indicating that Tehran’s then nuclear policy chief – and now president-elect – Hassan Rouhani did not know what research projects relating to nuclear weapons had been carried out over the years.“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities." -- former French ambassador to Iran Francois Nicoullaud

The conversations described by Nicoullaud in a Jul. 26 New York Times op-ed also portray Rouhani as having difficulty getting individual researchers to comply with an order to halt all research related to nuclear weapons.

The picture of Iranian nuclear policy in 2003 drawn by Nicoullaud is different from the one in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had halted “its nuclear weapons program”. That conclusion implied that Iranian government leadership had organised a programme of research and development aimed at producing a nuclear weapon.

Nicoullaud recalled that a high-ranking Iranian official confided to him in late October 2003 that Rouhani had just “issued a general circular asking all Iranian departments and agencies, civilian and military, to report in detail about their past and ongoing nuclear activities.”

The conversation came immediately after Rouhani had concluded an agreement with the foreign ministers of the UK, France and Germany on Oct. 21, 2003, Nicoullaud recalled.

The same official explained that “the main difficulty Rouhani and his team were encountering was learning exactly what was happening in a system as secretive as Iran’s,” wrote Nicoullaud.

A few weeks after, the French ambassador learned from a second official, whom he described as “a close friend of Rouhani”, that Rouhani’s nuclear policy team had issued instructions to halt projects relating to nuclear weapons.

The Iranian official said the team was “having a hard time”, because, “[p]eople resist their instructions,” according to Nicoullaud. The official remarked that it was difficult to “convince researchers to abruptly terminate projects they had been conducting for years”.

In an e-mail to IPS, Nicoullaud said he did not believe the Iranian government had ever approved a nuclear weapons programme. “The first challenge for Rouhani when he took hold of the nuclear,” said Nicoullaud, “must have been to get a clear picture of what was going on in Iran in the nuclear field.”

Rouhani had been the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) since 1989 and would not only have known about but would have been involved in any government decision to establish a nuclear weapons programme.

“I guess that most people, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei included, were surprised by the extent of the activities,” Nicoullaud told IPS.

Nicoullaud’s recollections are consistent with published evidence that nuclear weapons-related research projects had begun without any government authorisation.

Despite an Iranian policy that ruled out nuclear weapons, many Iranian officials believed that a nuclear weapons “capability” would confer benefits on Iran without actually having nuclear weapons.

But the meaning of such a capability was the subject of ongoing debate. Nasser Hadian, a well-connected Tehran University political scientist, wrote in late 2003 about two schools of thought on the option of having a “nuclear weapons capability” but not the weapons themselves. One definition of that option was that Iran should have only the capability to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, Hadian explained, while the other called for Iran to have “all the necessary elements and capabilities for producing weapons”.

That debate had evidently not been officially resolved by a government decision before Rouhani’s appointment. And in the absence of a clear statement of policy, figures associated with research centres with military and defence ministry ties began in the latter of the 1990s to create their own nuclear weapons-related research projects without the knowledge of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC).

Such projects were apparently begun during a period when the Supreme National Security Council was not exercising tight control over the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), the Ministry of Defence or the military industrial complex controlled by Defence Industries Organisation related to nuclear weapons.

By the mid-1990s, AEOI was already taking advantage of the lax supervision of its operations to take actions that had significant policy implications without authorisation from the SNSC.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, then the spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, recalls in his memoirs that in January 2004, Rouhani revealed to him that AEOI had not informed the SNSC about a policy-relevant matter as important as the purchase of the P2 centrifuge designs from the A. Q. Khan network in 1995. AEOI officials had misled him, Rohani said, by claiming that “they had found some information about P2 centrifuges on the Internet and are studying it!”

When Rouhani was named to take over as nuclear policy coordinator in early October 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was demanding a full accounting by Iran of all of its nuclear activities. Rouhani’s circular to all civilian and military offices about nuclear work came soon after he had promised the IAEA that Iran would change its policy to one of full cooperation with the IAEA.

At the same time, Rouhani moved to tighten up the policy loophole that had allowed various entities to start weapons-related nuclear research.

Rouhani anticipated resistance from the bureaucratic entities that had nuclear weapons-related research projects from the beginning. He recalled in a later interview that he had told President Mohammad Khatami that he expected that there would be problems in carrying out the new nuclear policy, including “sabotage”.

The sequence of events surrounding Rouhani’s new nuclear policy indicates that he used Khamenei’s public posture that nuclear weapons were forbidden according to Islamic law to ensure compliance with the ban on such research projects.

Around the same time that Rouhani ordered the bureaucracy to report on its nuclear-related activities and to stop any research on military applications of nuclear power in late October, Khamenei gave a speech in which he said, “In contrast to the propaganda of our enemies, fundamentally we are against any production of weapons of mass destruction in any form.”

Three days later, Rouhani told students at Shahrud Industrial University that Khamenei considered nuclear weapons as religiously illegal.

That same week, in an interview with San Francisco Chronicle correspondent Robert Collier, Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of the conservative newspaper Kayhan and an adviser to Khamenei, alluded to tensions between the Rouhani team and those researchers who were not responding to or resisting the Rouhani circular.

Khamenei was forcing those working on such projects to “admit that it is forbidden under Islam”, Shariatmadari said. He also suggested that the researchers resisting the ban had been working “clandestinely”.

After the U.S. intelligence community concluded in November 2007 estimate that Iran had halted a “nuclear weapons program”, a U.S. intelligence official said key pieces of evidence were intercepted communications from at least one senior military officer and others expressing dismay in 2007 that nuclear weapons-related work had been shut down in 2003.

But U.S. intelligence officials said nothing about what kind of work was being shut down, and revealed no further evidence that it was a “nuclear weapons program” under the control of the government.

Nicoullaud’s recollections suggest that the 2007 estimate glossed over a crucial distinction between an Iranian “nuclear weapons program” and research projects that had not been authorised or coordinated by the Iranian regime.

Nicoullaud told IPS he believes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which controls Iran’s ballistic missile programme, was also carrying out a clandestine nuclear weapons programme. The IRGC’s own ministry had been merged, however, with the old Ministry of Defence to form a new ministry in 1989, which implies that any such clandestine programme would have necessarily involved a wider military conspiracy.

*Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

The victory of Hassan Rouhani in Iran’s Jun. 14 election marked a significant shift in Iranian politics, occasioned by the forceful return of the two most important political factions of the Islamic Republic – traditional conservatives and reformists.

Hassan Rouhani. Credit: Mojtaba Salimi/cc by 3.0

These two factions had been sidelined in the past decade. In fact, many had assumed that they had permanently lost their significance, giving way to either a more radical version of conservatism or the personal dictatorship of Leader Ali Khamenei.

But the alliance that was created in support of Rouhani’s candidacy by three key figures of the Islamic Republic – former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, as well as former speaker of the Parliament and presidential candidate Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri – set the stage for the return of both traditional conservatism and reformism to Iranian politics.

These two factions were effectively the founding pillars of the Islamic Republic. In the 1980s, they were identified as the right and left wings of the Islamic Republic because of their disagreements over the economic direction of the country.

But, by the late 1990s, they became known as the principlist and reformist wings due to their political differences over whether the republican or Islamic sides of the Islamic Republic should be given greater emphasis.

In the 1980s, prime minister Mir Hossein Mussavi, now under house arrest, was considered a leftist, focusing on economic justice and state control of the economy, while then-president Khamenei was deemed close to the Islamic Republic’s right wing which defended the importance of private property and the private sector.

Even the membership of the Guardian Council – which, along with the vetting of candidates for the executive and legislative branches, is tasked with assessing legislation for their constitutionality, as well as their Islamic content – included individuals from both factions.

Control of Iran’s Parliament shifted from one faction to another and from one election to another over the years. President Rafsanjani (1989-97), who has long tried to straddle both wings as a self-identified centrist and moderate, had to deal with both leftist- and rightist-controlled parliaments. Similarly, reformist President Khatami (1997-2005) had to negotiate with both reformist and principlist-controlled parliaments.

But this political arrangement began to fall apart with the 2004 parliamentary election and then the 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. He came to power with Principlist support and immediately began the process of purging the leftist/ reformist wing of the Islamic Republic.

Initially, the purge created a temporary alliance between Ahmadinejad and traditional conservatives who were happy to see their ideological opponents pushed out of the political process.

But positioning himself as a younger-generation populist, Ahmadinejad soon began to turn against the other political pillar of the Islamic Republic: traditional conservatism. While traditional conservatives maintained their presence in the judiciary and the parliament, Khamenei’s support permitted Ahmadinejad to effectively prevent any kind of legal challenge to his imperial governing style in the executive branch.

After the 2009 contested election in which Ahmadinejad was re-elected, it was Khamenei’s continued backing that led to parliament’s approval of his cabinet ministers, the prevention of various efforts to impeach him, and halting the many judicial cases against Ahmadinejad’s illegal conduct, including his repeated refusal to implement legislation passed by the Parliament.

It was within this context that Iran’s traditional conservatives began to realise that they could meet the same fate as the reformists if they did not step up and help revive some of the old political pillars of the Islamic Republic.

Instead of competing against their old their old nemeses, the reformists, they forged an alliance behind the candidacy of Rouhani, who, while belonging to the Islamic Republic’s right wing, successfully wooed the reformist vote through his criticism of the increasingly securitised political environment of Iran and the purge of key reformist politicians in the past decade.

To understand the extent of the change this alliance represented in Iran’s recent history, suffice to say that the two main candidates who ran against each other in 1997 – reformist Khatami and conservative Nateq Nouri – joined hands to rally their supporters behind Rouhani’s candidacy.

The intent of the alliance was to forestall the encroaching dictatorship of the office of the Leader and prevent the radicals with little respect for the electoral process from consolidating their control of that office.

In many ways, the formation of this alliance was an unprecedented act in the history of modern Iran and, according to many observers inside the country, reflective of the “maturity” of the political players.

In the words of reformist journalist Abbas Abdi, writing for Etemaad Daily, “This election was deeper than other elections in Iran in terms of its political meaning, and at this time we can be hopeful that it will be the beginning of a new trend in the Iranian society.”

A historian of contemporary Iran who did not want to be identified went further. He told IPS that in Iran’s recent history there were many moments when political players could have paved the way for further change and democratisation had they been able to co-operate with each other and form alliances. However, their inability to do so led to the eventual purge of all of them and the re-establishment of personal dictatorship.

The most noted example in recent memory was the collapse of the democratic coalition built by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq with the help of cleric Ayatollah Abolqassem Kashani in the early 1950s. Ultimately Mossadeq’s fall from power was assured through a CIA-sponsored military coup that brought the Shah back to power. But the coup was made easy because the coalition built by Mossadeq had by then fallen apart.

According to this historian, “the principlist-reformist alliance is such an important event that it can be said to have catapulted Iran into a new stage of its history.”

This historian also notes that at no time in Iran’s modern history has there been such “an urge in both society, as well as government circles for unity and cooperation, in the face of external threats,” including both the U.S.-led economic sanctions and threats of war by Israel and the United States.

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.

For Washington, obsessed with matters Iranian, it may be hard to accept a simple fact: Iran’s Jun. 14 presidential election is an Iranian event. If we attempt to make it about us, we will find ourselves on the same road that has previously led to multiple failures: Iran-contra; “goodwill begets goodwill”; and a non-existent two-track policy.  

In other words, we will continue the futility of the last three decades when we thought we could pick winners and losers in Iran’s elections or become involved in the country’s internal politics. If we do the same now, we will again get tied up in knots of our own bad assump­tions and uninformed decisions."In Washington, officials dismissed anything - reasonable or not - with Ahmadinejad’s fingerprints on it." – John Limbert

So what, if anything, should the United States do and say about Iran’s election?

First, we should shut up about everything but the basics and stick to the universal principles of good government.

We should not help the Islamic Republic make the election about us.

The ideologues in Tehran would love to paint a vote for this or that candidate as a slap in the face to “world arrogance” (the U.S.), or to portray a candidate who advocates rationality as an U.S. agent.

Second, if we must say something about the election, we should say as little as possible and choose our words cautiously.

To begin with the obvious, the election will give Washington an opportunity simply because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will no longer be in office.

As long as he was, his outrageous statements on the Holocaust, Israel and other mat­ters made him too toxic for U.S. officials to deal with on any issue and at any level. In Washington, officials dismissed anything – reasonable or not – with Ahmadinejad’s fingerprints on it.

Of course late-night comics and those who would turn the Islamic Republic into a superhuman threat to civilisation will miss him.

His love of the absurd and his divisiveness made him a liability even for his own countrymen, who criticised him for talking without thinking and for his needless provocative rhetoric that could drag Iran to destruction.

The reality is that the Iranian president has almost always been a minor figure in Iranian politics. True power lies elsewhere, and the sooner the president accepted his unimpor­tance, the smoother his tenure would be.

Even Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader, reportedly complained about his powerlessness when he was Iran’s president from 1981 to 1989.

Real change will come not when one Iranian figurehead replaces another. It will likely come with the end of Iran’s senior clerical elite and the network of financial, judicial and security institutions it controls.

It’s worth noting that the group of about 25 oligarchs who have held the key positions in the Islamic Republic since 1979 is now much smaller, and that one of its key figures – former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani – has taken the unlikely role of outsider.

But those members of the men’s club who do remain – including figures such as Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, Mohammad Yazdi, Ahmad Jannati, and Ali Khamenei himself – continue to wield consi­derable power.

Thus far they have shown little inclination to change either the foreign or domestic policies that have kept them in their palaces for the past 34 years.

The U.S. would certainly like to see free and fair elections in Iran. But until that blessed day arrives, we will have to deal with a less ideal world.

If the Jun. 14 Iranian election is ultimately “good enough” (that is, if it is better than Iran’s 2009 election and no worse than the 2000 U.S. presidential election), President Obama should send a note of congratulation to the winner.

In that note he should chose his platitudes carefully and avoid gratuitous insults like “odious regime”, “change your behaviour” or “stop support for terrorists”.

Judicious language about “mutual respect” and “mutual interest”, which the president used in the first years of his administration, puts the ideologues of the Islamic Republic in a most uncom­fortable place.

Although they know well (with more than 30 years of practice) how to respond to American insults, thoughtful U.S. language discredits their rhetoric and neutralises their anti-U.S. slogans.

After all, how can the Islamic Republic make a believable enemy of someone who seeks discussions based on “mutual respect”, something the Iranians have always said they want as a condition of engagement?

I am always optimistic that the U.S, and Iran can somehow end their unique 34-year estrange­ment – an estrangement that has done no one any good and threatens to descend into an armed conflict that neither side says it wants.

A recent “Iran Project” study, endorsed by three dozen former U.S. officials and scholars, says of the U.S.-Iran relation­ship: “The [American] goal would be to build a practical relationship that could over time help the United States achieve its principal objectives without resort to force.”

Such a relationship would be a major break with the past three decades of hostility and ex­changes of empty slogans, threats, insults and occasionally worse.

That break, however, is unlikely to happen as a result of this June’s Iranian presiden­tial election.

There was no break in the U.S.-Iran estrangement even after Mohammad Khatami’s election in 1997, although both sides lowered the volume of their rhetoric for a time and spoke about “dialogues” and “roadmaps”.

At that time the two countries began exchanging artists, scientists, and sports teams, but somehow those worthy programmes did not result in any change at the political level. Wrestlers and filmmakers came and went, but the silent treatment and hostility remained among officials.

So what should the U.S. do or say about the Iranian election?

Keep focused on our own goal, which, as the above-noted study says, is to achieve principal American objectives without resorting to the use of force.

Doing so requires saying as little as possible and ensuring that official statements emphasise the principle that Iranians, like the rest of us, deserve a govern­ment that does not steal elections and allows its citizens to express themselves without fear of the club and the goon squad. Everyone will get the point.

*John Limbert is Class of 1955 Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy. During a 34-year diplomatic career, he served in Tehran (where he was a hostage at the U.S. Embassy in 1979-81) and, in 2009-2010, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern (Iranian) Affairs.

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.

The last-minute entry of former president and current chair of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani into the presidential polls set for Jun. 14 has inspired vastly different reactions in a conflicted Iran.

Chair of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Credit: Amir Farshad Ebrahimi/cc by 2.0

Those calling for change hail his candidacy as a hopeful sign. Deeming his entry a response to serious societal demands, even many reformists think that as a centrist, Rafsanjani is the best choice for changing the direction the country has taken under the eight-year presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Prior to his decision to enter the fray, representatives of many groups, including the business community and university students and professors, had met and appealed to Rafsanjani to run. Even many reformists and supporters of former president Mohammad Khatami thought that Rafsanjani would be a better candidate to challenge the conservatives’ hold over the country.

Ali, one of the protesters who took to the streets after the 2009 disputed election, considers Rafsanjani the best choice since “he is faithful to the foundations of the Islamic Republic and [the 1979] revolution and also has sufficient personal power to create not only a balance in the relations between the president and the Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei], but also return the country to a normal situation with the collaboration of the latter.”

Likewise, many in the business community see Rafsanjani as the right person to rectify what they consider to be the “economic mess” Ahmadinejad’s administration has created.

One source, who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity, said, “Hashemi [Rafsanjani] has the experience of reconstruction after the [Iran-Iraq] War, and the current destruction is nothing less and perhaps even more than the destruction during the war, and there is a need for someone who can take charge of the situation.”

In a statement issued Wednesday, former president Khatami also described the country’s situation as critical in the face of the lack of popular trust in the government and the external threats that confront it. He called on his supporters to “understand this historical moment… and stand on Mr. Hashemi’s side.”

But this is only one face of Iran. Rafsanjani’s entry has so disrupted the calculations of his opponents in the conservative camp that they spared no time in attacking him and his record in unprecedented terms.

If, in the 2005 and 2009 elections, it was only Ahmadinejad who spoke against Rafsanjani, now many potential conservative candidates are using anything they can get their hands on to attack him, even suggesting, in some cases, that they are doing so on Khamenei’s behalf or to protect the Leader against the threat posed by Rafsanjani’s candidacy.

One of those potential candidates, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, who used to be a member of the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), went so far as characterising Rafsanjani’s return as “militarism”. He did not explain what the phrase meant precisely, but described Rafsanjani’s conduct since the end of his presidency in 1997 as wholly negative.

“In the debates, Mr. Rafsanjani has to explain his conduct to the people for the past 16 years,” he asserted, apparently referring to the alleged challenges Rafsanjani has posed to Khamenei’s authority.

Gholamali Haddad Adel, another potential candidate who is deemed close to the Leader, implied in an interview with Fars News that Rafsanjani has been engaged in “sedition” and said that his supporters are the same ones who voted for opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mussavi in 2009 and then attempted to undermine the system by protesting against the results of the disputed election.

Even Ali Akbar Velayati, who served as Rafsanjani’s loyal foreign minister during his presidency, accused his former boss of not taking “the position he should have taken” in 2009 and “in those circumstances not remaining on the side of the Leader.”

Given the support and excitement Rafsanjani’s candidacy has generated among various groups, these reactions are hardly unexpected. No one doubts that his entry will impact the race in significant ways. Although public opinion polls taken inside Iran are not considered reliable due to the lack of transparency regarding their methodology, one conducted by Iran Student News Agency (ISNA) suggested that Rafsanjani had moved past Khatami and others in terms of popularity as a candidate by receiving the support of 30.5 percent of over 10,000 respondents.

But while criticism of Rafsanjani is considered fair game, the question of whether Ayatollah Khamenei actually approves of the extent to which conservative candidates are questioning Rafsanjani’s loyalty to the Islamic Republic is a source of great speculation. After all, as the Khamenei-appointed chair of the Expediency Council, Rafsanjani remains a high-ranking official. Accusing him of sedition in such a public manner is unusual even for the raucous politics of the Islamic Republic.

This is why some close observers of Iranian politics are not convinced that Khamenei has given the green light for such destructive criticism. At the same time, his silence has opened the path for everyone to attack.

According to a Tehran University political science professor who spoke to IPS on the condition of anonymity, Khamenei’s silence has allowed “those who want to climb the ladder of power to think that the easiest way to move up is to claim absolute obedience to the Leader and then use that as a prop to attack their political opponents, many of whom are long-standing and experienced officials of the Islamic Republic.”

Rafsanjani seems aware of this phenomenon and, in his first statement after registering his candidacy, lamented tactics that have forced “experienced managers of the Islamic Republic to sit at home.” In this statement he identified his campaign slogan as e’tedal Alavi (“moderation” with Alavi being a reference to the political conduct of the first Shi’ite Imam Ali) and thus affirmed his apparent intent to bring many of those managers and officials back into the government.

This call for moderation against the “extremism” that has taken hold of the country also appeals to a number of traditional conservatives with strong ties to the business and clerical communities. Many of them have also been pushed out of power during Ahmadinejad’s tenure.

Indeed, one conservative politician who did not want to be identified questioned the charges being made by his colleagues that are amplified in the media, insisting that Rafsanjani’s return does not pose a serious threat to Iran’s Leader.

“Despite the different views that Mr. Hashemi has, he will maintain respect for the position and standing of the Leader. But temperament-wise he is the only one able to bring back equilibrium to the power system of the Islamic Republic,” the politician said.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Credit: sajed.ir/GNU

By Yasaman Baji
TEHRAN, May 7 2013 (IPS)

As the five-day registration period for presidential candidates began here Tuesday, the question of whether Iran’s upcoming election will represent the will of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or the people of Iran is uppermost on many people’s minds, including those of the potential candidates.

In the crowded field of former and current officials who have declared their intent to run, many have already made a point of declaring their total allegiance to the Leader’s dictates. For instance, the repeat presidential candidate, conservative Mohsen Rezaee, promised on Apr. 1 that his administration will be “the most coordinated administration” with the Leader ever.

Even some reformists, who are known to be critics of the Leader, have called for the candidacy of someone who will not provoke Khamenei’s opposition or sensitivities.

Abbas Abdi, a reformist journalist, goes as far as identifying the candidacy of former president Mohammad Khatami as a mistake, saying “Khatami has not had a meeting with a leader for the past four years. How could his presidency be possible?”

But this is not a position taken by many other reformist individuals or groups. Since mid-March many individuals and groups, through public letters and meetings, have called upon Khatami to become a candidate. Their call is premised on Khatami’s popularity and the belief in the continued attractiveness of his ideas and conduct as president.

Similar calls have been made for former president and current chair of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to run. Neither of the past presidents has committed himself, and both have said that they will not run unless the leader agrees to their candidacy. Their argument has been that, without such a nod, the political environment will just become too contentious and tension-ridden.

In Rafsanjani’s words, “if Ayatollah Khamenei does not agree with my candidacy, the result will be counterproductive…If there’s a situation where there is a difference between me and the leadership of the state, all of us will suffer.”

In fact, mere talk of runs by Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani has led to overwrought accusations on the part of hardliners.

Hossein Shariatmadari, the intractable editor of the hardline Kayhan Daily, called Khatami “corrupt on earth” and a “supporter of sedition,” a reference to his backing of former presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mussavi and Mehdi Karrubi who remain under house arrest due to the protests that followed the 2009 presidential election.

According to Shariatmadari, “supporters of sedition… will undoubtedly be disqualified.”

In turn, the hardline minister of intelligence, Heidar Moslehi, went after Rafsanjani, calling him “the source of sedition.” His language was so harsh that it elicited a response from several members of Parliament who scolded the minister for his overt political involvement and accusations against someone who continues to serve as the chair of the Leader’s own advisory council.

No one doubts that these attacks are intended to intimidate the two former presidents. Whether Khamenei himself is behind them is also a subject of much speculation. After all, Shariatmadari is appointed by Khamenei, while the minister of intelligence was protected from being fired by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad through Khamenei’s personal intervention.

Even more fundamental is the question of whether the upcoming election will once again turn into an arena of confrontation between the presumed desired candidate of the Leader and the one chosen by society, as many believe was the case in the 2009 election when Ahmadinejad was swiftly declared the winner.

While the protests have long since ended, many voters continue to believe that there was extensive fraud in 2009. Furthermore, given his ardent support for Ahmadinejad’s re-election, many hold Khamenei responsible for the downward economic spiral the country has faced and their own economic woes.

In the words of a 73-year-old taxi driver, “I used to believe in Khamenei, but when I saw that he wants everything for himself and is ready to take the country into ruin in order to insist that he made the right choice, I no longer support him. Every day I curse him for the sake of the youth in this country.”

Talk about potential runs by Khatami and Rafsanjani had created hope that Khamenei might have finally seen the mistake he made in 2009 and become willing to entertain honest competition among a whole slew of candidates representing the diverse sentiments of society.

But the harsh attacks by Shariatmadari and Moslehi have again created doubts about the potential for a fair election and Khamenei’s calculations.

According to a well-known novelist who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity, “Khameni wants us to back down and acknowledge his leadership as a principle of the constitution but when we back down, he wants more. When we say we accept the constitution, his supporters say it is not enough to accept his constitutional role; you have to completely give in to his leadership.

“When we say we will participate in the election, they say we must recant our actions in 2009. But he himself is not willing to take any responsibility or acknowledge mistakes for the mess Ahmadinejad has created in the country.”

Reformists are no longer the only critics. A prominent conservative who wished to remain anonymous told IPS that he considers Khamenei a failed leader who has tried to become like the founder of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

This conservative politician believes that Khamenei has never understood the two main differences he has with Khomeini. “First of all Khomeini was a charismatic leader who had an organic relationship with the society while Khamenei has an organisational relationship,” he said.

“Secondly, Khomeini was clever enough to accommodate popular sentiment even if they were against his own wishes while Khamenei obstinately and vindictively stands against them.”

Many citizens who participated in the 2009 election and continue to think that their vote was “stolen” will not vote in the Jun. 14 election. But everyone will be watching to see whether Khamenei will again insist on having his wish become the choice of the country.

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.

Iran appears to be putting its immediate economic and strategic needs ahead of religious solidarity as it seeks to promote ties with neighbouring Pakistan.

Judging from a recent visit to Iran by Pakistani President Asef Ali Zardari, the two countries are more interested in improving their bilateral ties than in engaging in accusations over recent religious atrocities in Pakistan or resurrecting their support for rival factions in Afghanistan as international forces there depart.

Considering Iran’s strong pro-Shiite stance, one would have expected that the recent killing of over 100 Pakistani Shiites by a militant Salafi Sunni extremist group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, would have been one of the main topics discussed during Zardari’s two-day visit to Iran, which ended Feb. 28.

Instead, the issue was overshadowed by the so-called “Peace Pipeline” project, which aims to send Iranian natural gas to energy-poor Pakistan.

In the meeting between Zardari and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the issue of religious unrest in Pakistan was discussed only briefly. Khamenei said he regretted the religious killings in Pakistan and called for bold actions to preserve “Pakistan’s national unity”.

The Iranian media blamed the killings on “Wahhabi terrorists, supported by the U.S. and Zionist regimes” rather than on the Pakistani government for failing to protect Shiites.

Iran’s lack of active support for Shiites in Pakistan could also be attributed to the fact that Pakistani Shiites are very diverse and some groups are not necessarily great fans of Iran’s model of theocratic rule.

The highlight of the Zardari-Khamenei meeting was a discussion of “Pakistan’s energy needs”. “In this region,” the ayatollah stated, “Only the Islamic Republic of Iran possesses safe energy resources and we are prepared to provide Pakistan with its energy needs.”

Zardari was quoted as saying that “the attempt by the international and regional players to prevent strengthening relations between Iran and Pakistan is a failed attempt as the nations have learned to act against Islam’s enemies.”

At present, Turkey is the only major importer of Iran’s large gas resources, purchasing about 30 million cubic metres per day. That is just a small fraction of the 600 million cubic metres a day that Iran, whose gas resources are second only to Russia, produces.

Most of the production is consumed domestically since the country lacks the means to export the gas as liquid or to stockpile it. Work has begun on another pipeline from Iran to Iraq and Syria that was approved by the Iraqi cabinet last month but it is questionable how quickly that project can be completed, especially given the deteriorating security conditions in Syria.

Considering the impact of sanctions on Iran, the leadership seeks stronger ties with South Asia for two reasons.

First, to demonstrate to the Iranian people that more countries are resisting U.S. pressure. Second, Iran hopes that joint projects that involve the interest of neighbouring countries, some of them U.S. allies, could deter military strikes against this infrastructure.

At the same time, Pakistan is facing a growing energy crisis which has caused severe electricity shortages in the country.

The “Peace” pipeline originates from the South Pars gas field in Iran’s southern city of Asalouyeh. It is to pass through Bandar Abbas and Iranshahr, in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, until it reaches Khuzdar, in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. From Khuzdar, the pipeline would continue through Sui to Multan with one extension going to Karachi.

The part of the project that is on the Iranian side is close to completion. Since Pakistan lacks the funds to start building the pipeline on its territory, Iran has offered to provide 500 million dollars, one third of the required amount, to start the project, beginning later this month.

The Barack Obama administration has warned Pakistan “to avoid any sanctionable activity” even while recognising Pakistan’s growing needs for more energy resources.

Pakistan’s media has supported the gas pipeline with Iran and questioned the benefit of the strategic alliance between the U.S. and Pakistan.

Other media accused the U.S. of a double standard in its foreign policy for “threatening Pakistan with sanctions for its ties with Iran, while Russia, China and India have very close economic and political ties with Iran.”

Both Pakistan and Iran face the challenge of ethnic and sectarian unrest. Unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has not played that card with Pakistan. This could relate to the fact that Pakistan could retaliate by actively supporting the Jundollah militant group in Sistan-Baluschistan province, one of Iran’s most sensitive and volatile regions.

Iran has criticised “the shortcomings” of Pakistani government forces for failing to prevent Baluch militants from attacking Iran, but the Tehran government has avoided confronting the Pakistan government over this issue.

The Iran-Pakistan relationship goes beyond the Peace Pipeline and it is more vital for Iran than for Pakistan. Pakistan has helped Iran develop its nuclear programme and Iran may be considering Pakistan a potential ally in the case of confrontation with the United States or Israel.

Iran’s policy towards Pakistan is an example of how economic priorities supersede ideology. However, it remains to be seen if projects such as the Peace Pipeline will be the start of strategic alliance between the two large Muslim countries.

Such an alliance would have major impact on the geopolitics of the region and could be critically important in the aftermath of international forces’ departure from Afghanistan.

Last week’s dramatic and very public display of deep fissures among the leading politicians of Iran has left many here wondering if the conflict will escalate into an all-out war among various political factions in the run-up to the presidential election in June.

President Ahmadinejad (left) and Ayatollah Khamenei. Credit: Mehr News Agency

While everyone considers Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to be the only official powerful enough to prevent such infighting from getting out of hand, confidence that he will indeed do so has been shaken.

Politics in the Islamic Republic has always been raucous and full of surprises, but what happened last week was in many ways unprecedented.

The spark was the parliament’s decision to impeach the minister of cooperatives, labour, and social welfare, Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, for his failure to dismiss former judge and Tehran prosecutor-general Saeed Mortazavi from his post as the director of the Social Security Organisation (SSO), an agency under the ministry’s authority.

Lawmakers were concerned that, under Mortazavi’s leadership, the SSO, Iran’s largest pension fund and one of its largest economic organisations, has been selling off major public assets to individuals and companies close to the government.

The Court of Administrative Justice had ruled previously that Mortazavi should be removed both because he lacked the necessary qualifications for his post and because of his suspension as a judge as a result of a number of pending indictments against him.

The executive branch, however, frustrated the ruling – first, by changing the name of the SSO and then by transferring the new organisation from the ministry’s authority to that of the first vice president’s office. It also removed Mortazavi as director only to re-appoint him as its caretaker pending the appointment of a new one.

The parliament was aghast at this deliberate defiance, but, constitutionally unable to impeach the first vice president, it chose instead move against Sheikholeslami.

But the impeachment process, which was broadcast live on radio, took an extraordinary turn when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, purportedly appearing in defence of his minister, instead played a secretly taped conversation between Mortazavi and a younger brother of the powerful Speaker of the Parliament, Ali Larijani and Judiciary chief Sadeq Amoli Larijani.

The tape’s content suggested that Larijani’s brother, Fazel, was trying to tout his influence with his brothers in order to receive profitable contracts from Mortazavi.

After allowing the tape to be played, Speaker Larijani denounced the president for his conduct. Among other charges, Larijani claimed that he had been told before the session that if he did not stop the impeachment proceeding, the tape would be played.

He then detailed alleged legal violations by the executive branch, and recalling the words of Ahmadinejad’s own brother, suggested that some members of the president’s close circle may be in contact with opposition groups outside of Iran.

At the session’s end, the parliament, in what was widely seen as a de facto referendum on Ahmadinejad’s performance, voted to remove Sheikholeslami by the largest margin recorded against any cabinet official.

Initial amusement at the fireworks and folly of politicians, however, has now given way to genuine bewilderment as to where this open acrimony among powerful factions is leading.

Ahmadinejad’s penchant for using the threat of revelations regarding the corrupt conduct of various past or present officials has been on display since his 2009 presidential re-election, when he accused key figures of the Islamic Republic, including former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former Parliament Speaker and presidential candidate Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri, of extensive corruption.

But his attack on the Larijani family, which includes the heads of the judicial and legislative branches of government, was unprecedented in its use of a secretly taped conversation played before an official and very public forum.

Mortazavi’s immediate arrest by the judiciary on charges of taping a conversation without legal authorisation calmed some nerves and suggested that Ahmadinejad was finally being reined in. It also pleased much of the Iranian press, for which Mortazavi’s career when he was a judge is best remembered for his imprisonment of numerous journalists and banning of many reformist newspapers.

“On top of satisfying a sense of revenge many people had towards Mortazavi,” one political analyst told IPS, “this arrest also signaled to many people that Leader Khamenei was now serious in addressing the blatant legal abuses committed by Ahmadinejad and his cronies.”

But Mortazavi’s release from prison the next day created new uncertainty, renewing concern about Khamenei’s willingness or ability to put an end to the attacks by Ahmadinejad and his loyal supporters against other officials of the Islamic Republic.

This concern was confirmed when, on the anniversary of the revolution Sunday, Speaker Larijani’s speech was disrupted when objects were hurled at him in an event in the holy city of Qom which he represents in the Parliament.

The well-known cleric Mohammad Javad Hojjati Kermani expressed this concern last Thursday in the daily Ettela’at, whose chief editor is appointed by Khamenei.

Noting his own disagreements with the Leader, Kermani wrote that he prays for Khamenei’s wellbeing every day since “in case of his death I do not know what will happen to this country and the nation… and what these abusive and slandering, fiery (men) will do to the people.”

This concern is not without foundation. The day after Mortazavi’s release, the Iran Daily, which is run by Ahmadinejad supporters, described the revelations against the Larijani brothers as a “soft document”. According to a journalist who did not want to be identified, “the term soft document suggests that more concrete and important evidence of their corruption will be revealed if necessary.”

Most observers believe that the Leader does indeed have the power to put an end to Ahmadinejad’s aggressive behaviour and are befuddled why he does not use it.

One university professor believes that the Leader, whose strategy since mid-2011 – when attacks by the president against his former conservative allies broke into the open – he describes as intended to gradually and peacefully weaken Ahmadinejad’s influence while letting him serve out his term, has been genuinely “taken aback” by Ahmadinejad’s “sudden game”.

In this view, Khamenei has been “temporarily thrown off-balance and doesn’t know what to do”.

But another close observer of Iranian politics sees the issue as more than temporary. This political science professor thinks that the Leader and people surrounding him are undecided about what to do for two reasons.

“Fears that Ahmadinejad may reveal more about the corruption of high-ranking officials, including Khamenei’s own children, or even the details of electoral manipulations that may have occurred in the contested 2009 presidential election and fear of admitting that he (Khamenei) was wrong in his full-fledged support of Ahmadinejad after the 2009 election,” the professor says.

What lies behind the Leader’s inaction and passivity has become a puzzle. Perhaps this is why in his last speech, which mostly focused on Iran’s foreign relations, he promised to speak soon on last week’s stunning turn of events.

The country awaits his words and wonders whether he can prevent the heat generated last week from turning into a firestorm.

Amid growing and increasingly harsh criticism of his handling of the economy, talk of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s removal has regained momentum in Iran in recent weeks.

President Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei. Credit: Mehr News Agency

But, according to most observers, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is unlikely to back any move to shorten Ahmadinejad’s term, which runs out in mid-2013, for fear that impeaching him will only wreak greater havoc on a political environment that is already highly polarised and contentious.

Over 100 members of the parliament, or Majlis, have signed on to a demand that the president be summoned to answer questions about the recent drastic devaluation of the currency. Runaway inflation, combined with rising unemployment, has rattled many MPs concerned with the devaluation’s impact both on the price of key imports and the cost of operating factories and agricultural enterprises.

If the president either refuses to appear or fails to explain his policies to parliament’s satisfaction, the issue may eventually be referred to the judiciary, which, would, in turn, clear the way to his removal before the presidential election scheduled to take place next June.

But even the MPs who have called for Ahmadinejad to testify are not optimistic that such a scenario is realistic. “Neither MPs have hope that such questioning will lead anywhere, nor the representatives of the government are trying to stop the process,” according to Etemaad Daily.

Calls for Ahamdinejad’s removal are not new. In mid-summer there were reports that two former members of Ahmadinejad’s cabinet – former foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki and former interior minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi – had written a letter to Khamenei calling for the president’s removal.

Khamenei, however, has proved reluctant to criticise the president or acknowledge the severe economic woes the country faces. In the two weeks of intense volatility in the currency market, he even denied during a provincial visit the existence of an economic crisis.

He acknowledged that problems such as unemployment and inflation exist “like everywhere else”, but insisted that these problems can be overcome. “Nothing exists that the nation and officials cannot solve,” he said.

Khamenei’s positive take on the state of the Iranian economy is received with quite a lot of scepticism among the population. Many people see Khamenei as oblivious to the crushing burden of economic difficulties that increasingly dominate conversations at dinner tables, in cafes, and in the street.

Khamenei’s continued support for Ahmadinejad is also much discussed. Some prominent politicians, such as Deputy Speaker Mohammadreza Bahaonar, have publicly said that the Leader wants the government to finish its legal terms. “The cost of removing the president is more than us doing nothing for another year,” he said recently.

This is not a view shared by Ahmad Tavakoli, another prominent MP from Tehran. “Ahmadinejad’s period is over, and the continuation of his presidency is not positive,” he said this week, suggesting that he disagrees with Khamenei’s decision to tolerate Ahmadinejad until the end of his term.

There are other theories why Khamenei will continue to support Ahmadinejad. According to Ali, a journalist who asked only that his first name be used, Khamenei cannot back down from the support because he is unable to explain the costs his support of Ahmadinejad in the disputed 2009 election have imposed on the people and the country. “Khamenei prefers the current situation to acknowledging that he made a mistake,” Ali insists.

Reza, a 58-year-old political activist, sees fear as the explanation for Khamenei’s support for Ahmadinejad. He believes that Ahmadineajd’s penchant for creating “corruption dossiers” on key political actors “will eventually be directed at Khamenei’s family whose financial record is not without blemish.”

According to Reza, if pushed, “Ahmadinejad will reveal the information he has and this scares the Ayatollah. Through his support Khamenei is in effect paying for Ahamdinejad’s silence.”

In reality, Khamenei faces a complex situation. On the one hand, he must deal with the more public and harsher criticism of Ahmadinejad’s economic policies, and, on the other, the potentially destabilising impact of the president’s removal.

So far, Khamenei’s approach in balancing these two concerns seeks a third path, which, according to one political commentator, is “to take effective control of executive affairs and transform Ahmadinejad into a show president whose time is spent traveling abroad.”

The result can be seen in Khamenei’s conduct in the past few years. Until recently, Khamenei was always considered to be a “sitting Leader” whose annual trips to a designated province or public appearances were mostly limited to official events, such as the anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s founder.

Since the end of the post- 2009 election protests, however, Khamenei has taken many more short trips. Earlier this year, for example, he comforted the family of an assassinated nuclear scientist at their home. He also took a quick trip to East Azerbaijan after the August earthquake while the president was in Saudi Arabia.

More significantly, he has been meeting with economic actors and their representatives in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, eliciting their views and promising redress. One recently elected MP who did not want to be identified told IPS, “I send requests regarding my district’s needs directly to the Leader and not the president.”

A University of Tehran professor says that the roots of Khamenei’s increased activism can be found in Ahmadinejad’s extensive use of executive privilege and extra-legal powers to circumvent and marginalise other branches of the government, particularly the parliament.

According to the professor, however, Khamenei may also be engaged in unconstitutional conduct by interfering in the affairs of the executive branch. “Khamenei is as blameworthy as Ahmadinejad in weakening the rule of law and preventing other institutions from performing their supervisory task in relation to the executive branch,” he says.

Khamenei rejects these criticisms and said in April 2011, after he prevented Ahmadinejad from firing the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, that “the office of the Leader has no intention of interfering in the decisions and activities of the government, unless it feels that an interest of the state has been ignored.”

These days, however, his words are received with scepticism. Maryam, a retired teacher, sees in Khamenei’s performance a desire to centralise power in his office. “He wants a weak president so that he can be in control and be in charge, and now he is in charge of everything. Why should he change the situation?”