Q. What impact will the call by the United States and major European powers for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down–followed by heightened U.S. and EU sanctions–have on Syria-Iran relations?
Cole: They will push Syria even more into the arms of Iran. Syria is being gradually cut off from Western finances and relationships. So if the regime is going to survive, it will want to look east to Iran and perhaps China. Syria seems to also be improving its relationship with Iraq.
Q. Why has Iraq opted to align with Syria and Iran in backing Assad?
Cole: It is not entirely clear. Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki does not state motivations. But it appears that two things are going on. There is a domestic reason; Maliki is worried about Bashar al Assad being overthrown. Assad belongs to the minority Shiite sect of Alawites. Many of Assad’s opponents are Sunnis- some of whom are Sunni fundamentalists. And some of those are the sort of people who were supporting the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Maliki does not want them to come to power in Damascus and become his neighbors.
Another consideration that has been suggested is that Maliki owes his position as prime minister in this round [of elections held in 2010] to the support of Iran for coalition building of the Iraq Shiites. So he may be paying back a debt.
Q. Is this a new de facto alliance?
Cole: There seems to be a growing Tehran-Baghdad-Damascus axis for certain purposes. Iraq is a very complex place and it still is, in odd ways, an American ally. Though in this particular instance, Baghdad is siding with Iran and Syria against the stated U.S. position. The alliance appears to be over sectarianism and regional politics. There is nothing that Syria can do for Iraq, economically. Syria is potentially a trading partner but there is no economic carrot that Syria can offer Iraq. It is actually the other way around. According to one report-that Maliki has denied-the Iranians had pressured the Iraqi government to donate $ 10 billion to Syria to help Damascus get through its current crisis. The alliance is very much about who you will like to have in the capital of your neighbor.
Q. What are the factors behind the support of Iran and Iraq for Syria?
Cole: Iran is isolated and has very few allies in the Middle East-Lebanon and Syria being the primary ones. So it has every reason to act as patron to Syria. Syria forms a bridge between Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. So it is a way of protecting Iranian power and influence in the Levant. Iraq is not similarly isolated but it is in some ways being pushed into a Shiite set of alliances, both by the sectarian undertones to the uprising in Syria and by events in Bahrain, where the Shiite majority demanded the Sunni monarchy become a constitutional monarchy. [But the Shiites] were crushed with the help of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who were essentially acting as Sunni powers in the Gulf. This crushing of Bahrain’s democracy movement by Sunni powers provoked large demonstrations in Iraq and angered a lot of Iraqi Shiites. Of course, Maliki is both the prime minister of Iraq and the main political leader of the Iraqi Shiites. So he is being pushed toward a kind of sectarian politics and a closer alliance with Iran and Damascus by the sectarian character of the Arab Spring in the Gulf region.
Q. How have Iran and Iraq reacted to unrest in Syria?
Cole: The Iranians have jumped up and down and been very vocal about the repression in Bahrain [and] they have [even] supported the Libyan uprising. In fact, they have supported all of the uprisings. They claimed that the uprisings are Islamic in character and inspired by Iran’s revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini. But the Iranians do not say anything about what is going on in Syria. It is just like a blank slate and a point of clear hypocrisy on their part.
Tehran does not admit that there are protestors in Syria. They do not say anything about the movement in Syria. They do not deplore the violence used against peaceful non-combatants in a way that they have in other countries. They just do not talk about it. The Persian press is silent– a big contrast to their vocal position on the other Arab Spring revolts. With regard to Iraq, Nouri al Maliki gave a speech [in late August] in which he warned that too much pressure on the Assad regime could get to a point where Israel would be able to take advantage of the situation. [link here] This is a remarkable statement on Maliki’s part. He has not typically talked much about Israel, although he did take a stand for Hezbollah in 2006 and was angry about the Gaza war in 2008-9.
The discourse Maliki used [on Israel] may have well been coming out of Tehran. And it seems to be a sign again that Maliki is being pushed [away] from the kind of American-sponsored states of the eastern Arab world and their discourse-[namely] Jordan and Egypt [which] have peace treaties with Israel. He is starting to sound much more like Iran or Lebanon, even Damascus, when it comes to Israel. It is a new and different discourse for[mainstream] Iraqi politics in the post-Saddam era.
Juan Cole is professor of history at the University of Michigan and runs the Informed Comment weblog. He has authored many books on the Middle East. His latest is “Engaging the Muslim World” (2010).
Chris Wallace of Fox News asked libertarian Rep. Ron Paul why he was soft on Iran and opposed economic sanctions on Tehran. Paul replied that Iran is small potatoes as a threat, compared to what we went through with the Soviet Union, and that anyway it would be perfectly natural for Iran to want a nuclear deterrent, given that it is surrounded by nuclear-armed powers, including Russia, Pakistan, Israel, etc.:
“Just think of what we went through in the Cold War when I was in the Air Force, after I was drafted into the Air Force, all through the Sixties. We were standing up against the Soviets. They had like 30,000 nuclear weapons with intercontinental missiles. Just think of the agitation and the worry about a country that might get a nuclear weapon some day.”
… That makes it much worse. Why would that be so strange if the Soviets and the Chinese had nuclear weapons, we tolerated the Soviets. We didn’t attack them. And they were a much greater danger. They were the greatest danger to us in our whole history. But you don’t go to war with them.”
…. Just think of how many nuclear weapons surround Iran. The Chinese are there. The Indians are there. The Pakistanis are there. The Israelis are there. The United States is there. All these countries … why wouldn’t it be natural if they might want a weapon? Internationally, they might be given more respect. Why should we write people off? In the Fifties, we at least talked to them. At least our leaders and Reagan talked to the Soviets. What’s so terribly bad about this? And countries you put sanctions on you are more likely to fight them. I say a policy of peace is free trade, stay out of their internal business, don’t get involved in these wars and just bring our troops home.”
Ron Paul was representing the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party. It is not exactly isolationist (note the desire for international trade), but opposes the military-industrial complex. As Right anarchists, they want the least government possible, and see government as a distraction for businesses, who succumb to the temptation to use the government to distort the eufunctional free market. In essence, government is a scam whereby some companies are seduced by the possibility of manacling the invisible hand that ought to be magically rewarding enterprise and innovation. A significant stream within libertarianism theorizes war as the ultimate in this racket, whereby some companies use government to throw enormous sums to themselves by waging wars abroad and invoking patriotic themes. This analysis is remarkably similar to that of Left anarchists such as Noam Chomsky.
The difference is that for anarcho-syndicalists like Chomsky, the good guys of history are the workers and ordinary folk, whereas for Libertarians, it is entrepreneurs. Both theories depend on a naive reading of social interest. Right anarchists seem not to be able to perceive that without government, corporations would reduce us all to living in company towns on bad wages and would constantly be purveying to us bad banking, tainted food, dangerous drugs, etc. I mean, they behave that way when they can get away with it even when there is supposed government oversight, usually by capturing the government oversight agency that should be regulating them and then defanging it (e.g. BP and the Minerals Management Service). On the environment, private companies would never ever curb emissions without government intervention because of the problem of the commons. (Tellingly, Ron Paul calls global climate change a “hoax.”)
And, what makes the Libertarians think that if there were no governments or only weak governments, the corporations would not just wage the wars themselves? The East India Companies of Britain and the Netherlands behaved that way. India was not conquered by the British government, but by the East India Company. Likewise what is now Indonesia was a project of the Dutch East India Company. Libertarians have difficulty imagining warmongering corporations who pursue war all on their own without any government involvement. But governments have often been more timid than corporate men on the spot. In late 18th century Britain, the civil government was very nervous about the EIC conquests in India and worried about corporate corruption, which is one reason Warren Hastings ended up being tried.
Likewise, the anarcho-syndicalist tradition makes workers unions more saintly and disinterested than they typically actually are, though since they are looking out for the interests of the majority (workers), they typically have more equitable positions than the narrower business elites idolized by Libertarians.
Paul’s Libertarian-pro-peace approach to the Middle East (he not only wants an end to the US confrontation with Iran but also a complete US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan) evoked a sharp response from Neoconservative Rick Santorum:
“Iran is not Iceland, Ron. Iran is a country that has been at war with us since 1979. Iran is a country that has killed more American men and women in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan than the Iraqis and the Afghans have. The Iranians are the existential threat to the state of Israel.”
Santorum has long had a fixation on Iran, and his statement here is typical of the lies he tells about that country. He knows very well that the United States is not at war with Iran, that the conflict between the two countries has been nothing like the Afghanistan or Iraq Wars. In the past, Santorum has said that the US is at war with a radical Islam, at the center of which Is Iran. Santorum does not know that Iran is a Shiite power, whereas most Muslim radicals like the Taliban are, let us say, committed Sunnis and have bad relations with Iran. His last statement, that Iran is an “existential threat” to Israel, telegraphs his motivation in this war propaganda, which is to attract campaign contributions from the Israel lobbies.
When Paul replied,
” The senator is wrong on his history. We’ve been at war in Iran for a lot longer than ’79. We started it in 1953 when we sent in a coup, installed the Shah, and the reaction — the blowback — came in 1979. It’s been going on and on because we just don’t mind our own business. That’s our problem.”
Santorum responded by defending the CIA coup against the elected government of Iran in 1953, and asserted that the oppressive dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was an era of liberty for the Iranian people!
Ron Paul concluded:
“You’ve heard the war propaganda that is liable to lead us into the sixth war and I worry about that position. Iran is a threat because they have some militants there, but believe me, they’re all around the world and they’re not a whole lot different than others. Iran does not have an air force that can come here. They can’t even make enough gasoline for themselves.”
Ron Paul’s “peace through trade” approach to geopolitics and skepticism of overbearing imperialism does not have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming the foreign policy of the United States. He represents small-town entrepreneurs who see the wars and their expense as a burden and a block to trade opportunities. They are a significant segment of the Republican Party, but I’d put them at 15% at most.
The Republican Party is a coalition of seven or eight distinct groups in American society. These include Evangelicals, the majority of whom are typically imperialist in their foreign policy emphases, Wall Street (which includes both hawkish concerns like Boeing and dovish groups like the bankers), Midwestern farmers, suburban and exurban professionals, and the 15% or so of Jewish Americans on the political Right (who, however, account for nearly 200 of our 400 billionaires and whose prominent position in retail business gives them both a reason to be deeply involved in politics and the wherewithal to contribute to campaigns). The preponderance of the party will be with the Santorums and the Bachmanns on a militaristic foreign policy.
Journalism often reports the views of politicians and stops there, and concentrates on personal clashes and personalities. But social historians see politicians as representatives of large social groups, and politics as the victory of some interests over others. Neither Paul nor Santorum will likely ever be president, but the groups they appeal to will have to be won over by the ultimately successful candidate. Unfortunately, the Republican Party’s various constituents add up to a party of Islamophobia and warmongering (munitions corporations, Big Oil and Gas, right wing Evangelicals, Right wing Zionists, white nationalists). The anarcho-syndicalist theory that capitalism naturally produces wars and imperialism is too broad, but certainly some groups within capitalist society will plump for those opportunities. Paul is likely right about the sixth war looming.
Far rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu of the Likud Party has attempted to sidestep making peace with the Palestinians by using the magician’s favorite tactic of misdirection– of trying to get the audience to look somewhere else while the trick is being performed. Netanyahu’s ploy is to endeavor to shift attention to Iran while his government brazenly steals ever more land from the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (theft which is illegal in international law, not to mention contrary to Commandment no. 8 in the series of Ten).
Netanyahu’s prestidigitation has not gone well. The Arab Spring has taken the world’s mind off Iran. The power struggle between Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been decisively lost by an increasingly diminished Ahmadinejad, putting paid to earlier charges that the president had made a military coup against the Leader with the help of feckless Revolutionary Guards.
But the Iran meme has crashed and burned inside Israel on two other scores, as well. First, Netanyahu appears to have forced out Meir Dagan, the head of the Israeli spying agency Mossad, whose departure coincided with that of the chief of staff, the head of domestic intelligence, and other key security officials. Dagan, having become a civilian, promptly went public, lambasting Netanyahu for refusing to make peace with the Palestinians while it was still possible.
Dagan went on to accuse Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, of grossly exaggerating the threat from Iran, calling a strike on that country “stupid idea that offers no advantage.” He warned that it would provoke another rocket attack on Israel by Lebanon’s Hizbullah, and perhaps by Syria as well– i.e. it could lead to a regional conflagration.
The back story that has emerged in the Israeli press is that Barak, who is a notorious war-monger and adventurist, had gotten Netanyahu’s ear and pressed for a military strike on Iran. Dagan and all the other major security officials stood against this foolhardy plan, and managed to derail it. But Dagan is said to be concerned that virtually all the level heads have gone out of office together, and that Netanyahu and Barak may now be in a position to revive their crazy plan of attacking Iran. Moreover, they may want to attack in September, as a way of creating a crisis that will overshadow Palestinian plans to seek membership in the United Nations.
Dagan and other high Israeli security officials appear to believe that Iran has no present nuclear weapons program. That is what Military Intelligence Director, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, has told the Israeli parliament. Kochavi thinks it unlikely that Iran would start up a military nuclear program. In other words, Israeli military intelligence holds the same position as Seymour Hersh. (Of course, one piece of hypocrisy here is that Israel has hundreds of nuclear warheads itself). In the Obama administration’s pillorying of Hersh, it never came up that Dagan and Kochavi concur with him! (Iran has a civilian nuclear enrichment program, which is being inspected by the IAEA, but a civilian program is different from a military one; there is no evidence for the latter, though sometimes Iranian officials occasionally talk big. Iran probably wants what is called ‘nuclear latency,’ the ability to build a bomb in short order, as deterrence against attack, but probably does not want an actual bomb, which it considers contrary to Islamic law).
Netanyahu’s Iran gambit has been further damaged by the revelation that the Israeli Ofer Brothers company has been sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury for trading with Iran! They seem to have sold Iran an oil tanker through the United Arab Emirates. No one has jumped up and down more loudly about the need to slap economic sanctions on Iran than the Israeli government, but now it emerges that Israeli economic concerns put profits first.
So to sum up: The former head of Mossad thinks that Netanyahu and Barak are terminally flaky; he and other high officials think Iran has no nuclear weapons program; he thinks an Israeli attack on Iran was and would be “the stupidest thing I have ever heard;” and he and other now-retired security officials think that the 2002 peace agreement offered Israel by the Arab League is the country’s last best chance for integration into the Middle East and security for Israeli citizens. The Likud Party has consistently pissed all over the 2002 Saudi-led Arab League initiative and has preferred unilaterally to annex Palestinian territory instead. (That unilateral Israeli policy is why it is so ridiculous for President Obama to condemn the Palestinians for ‘unilaterally’ seeking UN membership– that and the oddness of characterizing a UN General Assembly vote by 193 nations as ‘unilateral.’)
In other words, ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s positions on Israel and Iran and the flakiness of Netanyahu in these regards are the same as those of Juan Cole, who has been pilloried by the American Likud for taking them.
The USG Open Source Center translated the following radio reports from Hebrew on the Ofer affair:
‘ Israel: Aides Warn of Ofer Affair ‘Strategic Damage’; Dagan: Coverage ‘Exaggerated’
Israel — OSC Summary
Tuesday, May 31, 2011…
The Israeli media on 30-31 May report on the latest developments in the wake of the US State Department’s announcement that sanctions had been imposed on the Ofer Brothers Group and Tanker Pacific because of their commercial dealings with Iran…
Affair Checked With Americans; PM Aides Warn of ‘Big Strategic Damage’ to Israel
State-funded but independent Jerusalem Voice of Israel Network B in Hebrew reports at 0500 GMT on 31 May: “The Defense Ministry has in recent days checked the entire Ofer Brothers affair with the Americans. The American department dealing with the affair stated that there is no security connection to the Israeli Defense Ministry, our army affairs correspondent Karmela Menashe reports.
“Aides in the prime minister’s bureau claim that anybody insinuating that the Ofer Brothers were issued permits to operate in Iran should reveal them to the public. According to these aides, this affair might evolve into a big strategic damage to Israel. A senior diplomatic source said that Israel has no mechanism to check non-military deals and that it serious lags behind other countries in this respect, our political correspondent Shmu’el Tal reports.” Ofer Brothers: Netanyahu ‘Has Thrown Us to the Dogs’; Central Bank Checking
Tel Aviv IDF Radio in Hebrew at 0500 GMT says: “Sources in Ofer Brothers are furious with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who yesterday claimed yesterday that Israel was in no way connected to the anchoring of ships in Iran. One source said: The state used us more than once for national purposes, but now Netanyahu has thrown us to the dogs.
“Our economic affairs correspondent Yona Levzov reported this morning that in parallel with the Defense Ministry’s check, the Bank of Israel is also looking into the suspicions against the Ofer Brothers that one of their companies traded with Iran. If the check by the central bank yields suspicions of a violation of Israeli law, the Ofer Brothers may have to sell their shares in Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot.”
Farhang Jahanpour writes in a guest column for Informed Comment
The tug of war between Supreme Leader Khamene’i and President Ahmadinejad
Despite the political turmoil and subsequent crackdowns in Iran since summer, 2009, seeming unity among the hardliners who rule the country was largely preserved. Recently, however, the façade of unity between Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been totally shattered and deep hostility between them has come to the fore.
Ahmadinejad Khamenei
Following the fraudulent presidential election in June 2009 that led to unprecedented nationwide demonstrations by the Iranian people demanding that their votes be respected, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i put his full support behind Mahmud Ahmadinejad, and with incredible brutality suppressed the demonstrations. The supporters of Khamene’i and Ahmadinejad labelled the uprising as “sedition” instigated by foreigners. In the course of the demonstrations that ensued, dozens were killed and hundreds were arrested and tortured, many of whom still remain in jail.
Those events created a major rift between the extreme right-wing elements around the leader and the president on the one hand, and the reformist and even more moderate conservative figures on the other. Those events marginalized Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the two-term president and the two-term speaker of the Iranian Parliament [the Majlis], who was regarded as the second most powerful figure in Iran only after the supreme leader. A few weeks ago, he lost his post as the chairman of the Assembly of Experts, which has the task of selecting the new leader when the present leader dies or is incapacitated. After his last sermon in July 2009, describing the situation as a crisis and calling for the freeing of political prisoners and for some form of reconciliation with the reformers, he was prevented from preaching any more sermons at the televised Tehran Friday prayers, although since Ayatollah Khomeyni’s time he had been the main Friday Imam of Tehran.
Pro-Khamene’i mobs attacked the office of the late Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri, who had been Khomeyni’s designated heir before he was dropped shortly prior to Khomeyni’s death, and who had supported Musavi. Mobs attacked the house of another leading Grand Ayatollah Yusef Sane’i, and they even disrupted a speech by Ayatollah Khomeyni’s grandson at his grandfather’s shrine and prevented him from continuing his speech.
The root of the current problem between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad lies in a struggle for power between the two. The open disagreement started over Ahmadinejad’s appointment of his close friend and his son’s father-in-law Esfandiar Rahim Masha’i to the post of first vice-president shortly after the start of his second presidential term.
During his time as the head of the Tourism Organization during Ahmadinejad’s first term as president, Masha’i had become the object of a great deal of controversy. He had been present at a cultural ceremony in Turkey in December 2005 at which women had performed a traditional dance, and he was strongly criticised for that. In 2008, Masha’i hosted a ceremony in Tehran in which several women played tambourines while another carried the Koran to a podium to recite verses from the Muslim holy book. Hard-liners viewed the festive mood as disrespectful to the Koran.
Masha’i faced even harsher criticism following his remarks about the Israeli people. Speaking at a conference on tourism in Tehran, he said: “No nation in the world is our enemy. Today, Iran is friends with the people of America and Israel and this is an honour.” His remarks created an outcry among conservatives who criticised such an unprecedented stance towards Israel. Masha’i rejected all criticism and said: “I am proud of what I said and I am not going to correct myself… I would like to announce for the thousandth time, and stronger than before, that we are friends with all peoples of the world, even the people of America and Israel.” Instead of distancing himself from those remarks, Ahmadinejad defended his friend, adding: “Masha’i's words reflected the government’s stance. It is very clear. Our people do not have any problem with other nations.”
Ignoring all that criticism, Ahmadinejad appointed Masha’i as his first vice-president after the controversial presidential election. Ayatollah Khamene’i opposed that appointment and told the president to reverse the decision. Ahmadinejad ignored the Supreme Leader’s orders for many days. There was a row at the cabinet meeting on 22 July 2010 over the rejection of the supreme leader’s order to the president. In response, Ahmadinejad dismissed a number of ministers who had disagreed with him, including the then Minister of Intelligence Mohseni-Ezhe’i.
As a matter of tradition in the Islamic Republic, the appointment and dismissal of key ministers, including ministers of intelligence, foreign affairs, defense (in charge of the military) and interior (in charge of the police) are carried out in agreement with the supreme leader. However, on that occasion, Khamene’i did not openly object to the dismissal of the minister of intelligence, but insisted on his stance over Masha’i, only to be ignored by the president, until the letter by Khamene’i to Ahmadinejad calling on him directly to sack Masha’i was read out on national television, forcing the president’s hand. Now, Ahmadinejad had no option but to give in to the leader’s demand, but he immediately appointed Masha’i as the chief of staff in the president’s office, hardly a less influential position.
A few weeks ago, a series of documentary films were released called “The Reappearance is Near.” The films referred to the reappearance of the Hidden Imam who according to the Shi’is went into hiding as a child and who will return in the Last Days to crush the enemies of Islam and to establish a reign of justice and peace. A number of people will supposedly accompany the Hidden Imam on his return. The films openly stated that President Ahmadinejad is the embodiment of Shu’ayb bin Salih, one of the saintly figures who will accompany the Hidden Imam. This would give the president a special place above all the ruling clerics as a special companion of the Hidden Imam. In fact, the president frequently takes the entire cabinet to pray next to a well near Qom, from where the Hidden Imam is supposed to emerge. He also starts all his speeches, including the ones that he has delivered at the United Nations, with a prayer for the speedy return of the Hidden Imam.
Those films have understandably created a great deal of controversy among the clerics who see Ahmadinejad usurping their privileged spiritual position, as the true representatives of the Hidden Imam and the interpreters of Islamic teachings. Masha’i has been accused of having been the mastermind behind the creation of those films, a charge that he has denied. However, during the past few days, some of those who were involved in the production of the film have been arrested and accused of spreading superstition and undermining the position of the Hidden Imam.
Two other issues that have further deepened the rift between Khamene’i and Ahmadinejad have been the dismissal of Manuchehr Mottaki, the former foreign minister, due to his criticisms of Masha’i’s meddling in the affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Again, without consulting Khamene’i, Ahmadinejad appointed the former director of Iranian nuclear energy, Ali Akbar Salehi, as the new foreign minister. On that occasion too Khamene’i decided that silence was the best option.
Those moves emboldened Ahmadinejad, and so two weeks ago, he dismissed the new Minister of Intelligence, Heydar Moslehi. Various Iranian sources have reported that allegedly Moslehi was secretly recording the telephone conversations of Masha’i and other government ministers. However, the problem goes deeper than that. The next Iranian parliamentary election is due to be held in March 2012, followed by the next presidential election in June 2013. Ahmadinejad has been trying to groom Masha’i as the next president so that his legacy will continue.
Many pro-government websites in Iran have compared the relationship between Ahmadinejad and Masha’i to that between the former Russian President Vladimir Putin and his protégé President Dmitry Medvedev. If Masha’i could succeed Ahmadinejad, there is a chance that Ahmadinejad could run again after Masha’i’s term. However, the qualifications of the candidates both for Majlis and presidential elections should be approved by the Guardian Council, which acts partly on the recommendation of the minister of intelligence. Therefore, the reports prepared by the minister of intelligence are crucial for the success or failure of any presumptive candidates.
This is where the rivalry between the president and the Supreme Leader assumes very serious dimensions, because it involves the future course of the Islamic Republic.
This time, Khamene’i objected to Moslehi’s dismissal, but as usual Ahmadinejad ignored his advice. This forced the leader to go over the president’s head and in a letter to Moslehi he reinstated him to his post. This overt interference in the president’s prerogatives incensed Ahmadinejad, and in protest he refused to attend any cabinet meetings for eight days, and cancelled a pre-planned visit by the entire cabinet to Qom province. After over a week’s absence, Ahmadinejad took part in two cabinet meetings but he prevented Moslehi from taking part in them. He also did not attend an important religious ceremony convened by Khamene’i on Friday 6 May, but significantly with Moslehi in attendance. Two preachers speaking in those ceremonies in Khamene’i’s presence openly attacked the president. The main speaker, Ayatollah Kazem Sadiqi, pointedly said: “We did not expect that a person who during the [presidential] election used the religious groups and mosques as his propaganda bases and who also claimed to be the follower of Vali-ye Amr [Khamene’i] to behave like this.” He added: “I am informed that even Mr Ahmadinejad’s closest friends and colleagues are intensely upset and unhappy at his behaviour.”
Some of his former supporters, including the influential Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, have launched savage attacks on Ahmadinejad telling him that disobedience to the Supreme Leader would lead to his dismissal. Mesbah-Yazdi said: “Opposing the Vali-e Faqih [Khamene'i] is the same as opposing the Holy Imams (peace be upon them), and according to some traditions it is at the level of attributing partners to God”, which is regarded as the most grievous sin in Islam.
When some of Ahmadinejad’s friends said that the relationship between him and the Supreme Leader is like the relationship between a father and a son, Ayatollah Khamene’i’s representative at the Revolutionary Guards rejected that analogy, and said that the relationship between him and the leader should be that of a slave and a master, a pupil and a teacher, and a king and a subject. He has no right even to question the orders of the leader, let alone reject them.
Another influential clergyman Ayatollah Abolqasem Khaz’ali, a member of the Guardian Council, referring to Ahmadinejad’s boast that he was elected by the people, said: “… if someone receives not 20 million but 40 million votes, without the leader’s endorsement those votes have no value and are just a number of zeroes.” He said that only the leader’s backing would put a figure in front of those zeroes.
According to the reports of various news agencies in Tehran, a few nights ago Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the influential secretary of the Guardian Council, visited Mahmud Ahmadinejad and asked him to obey the leader. In a hostile mood, Ahmadinejad replied: “I owe nothing to the leader that I should give in!” He went on to say that first of all, he had managed to put an end to the power of the reformers. Secondly, he was the person who had persisted with the nuclear program despite universal opposition. Thirdly, he had carried out difficult economic reforms and implemented the project on targeted subsidies that nobody had been able to undertake before. He complained that the only power that he had was to appoint and dismiss ministers and Khamene’i had taken that power from him too.
On Thursday evening, 28 April 2011, again Ayatollah Jannati and Dr Ali Larijani (the Majles speaker) had decided to meet with Ahmadinejad to mediate between him and the leader, but he had refused to receive them. Most ominously for Ahmadinejad, the commander of the revolutionary guards has also come out strongly on the side of Ayatollah Khamene’i, reminding Ahmadinejad of the fate of the first Iranian President Bani-Sadr who was dismissed by Ayatollah Khomeyni shortly after the revolution.
This is certainly the biggest challenge facing Ahmadinejad and one of the most serious challenges facing Khamene’i. It was assumed that the president enjoyed the backing of the revolutionary guards, in which he had served during the Iran-Iraq war. However, it seems that the revolutionary guards are more inclined to back the supreme leader. With the support of powerful revolutionary guards and the overwhelming majority of the top clerics, Khamene’i is in a much stronger position than his appointed president. Knowing the unpopularity of the clerics among the vast majority of Iranians Ahmadinejad had calculated that they would ultimately back him against the dictatorial supreme leader, but that remains to be seen.
Ahmadinejad seems to have three options, either to resign and go quietly, or to stand up to Khamene’i and face a major and probably a bloody showdown, or finally to swallow his pride, remain in office but continue to oppose Khamene’i’s policies. In any case, the Islamic Republic of Iran is going to have an exciting time ahead of it.
—–
Dr Farhang Jahanpour is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan, Iran, and a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at Harvard. He is Associate Fellow at the Faculty of Oriental Studies and tutor in Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford
‘ Risking the radicalization of Bahrain’s Shiite community may be a very bad idea. Worries on that score are what led Vice President Joe Biden to ask again in a phone call Sunday to the king of the island nation for a negotiated settlement between the Sunni monarchy and his repressed Shiite majority. Meanwhile, as Iraqi Shiites demonstrated in favor of their coreligionists in Bahrain, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned somewhat apocalyptically this weekend that Saudi intervention against Bahrain’s Shiites could ignite a “sectarian war” in the Persian Gulf region.
Bahrain’s protest movement, inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, began Feb. 14. The Bahraini crowds demanded the resignation of the prime minister, whom they accused of ordering severe and persistent human rights abuses. Khalifa Al Khalifa, the uncle of the king, has held the post since Bahrain became independent of Britain in 1971. The largely Shiite protesters, led by the Wifaq Party, also insisted that the constitution be altered to give more power to the Shiite majority, and that the country become a constitutional monarchy. Three small parties (including al-Haq, which had split from Wifaq), began calling in early March for an outright republic, and of course they frightened the Sunni monarchy and its Saudi backers most of all. ‘
Consider also the following report translated from Persian by the USG Open Source Center, which indicates the depth of anger in Iran over the use of Saudi and other Sunni troops to repress the largely Shiite Bahran demonstrators:
“Iran: Defense Minister Denounces Saudi Arabia’s Military Interference in Bahrain
Iranian Students News Agency
Tuesday, March 29, 2011 …
According to the ISNA news desk, at the end of the government cabinet meeting and in response to a question regarding Saudi Arabia’s military interference in Bahrain’s internal affairs, the Minister of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics, Commander General Ahmad Vahidi, denounced this act and said: “Governments must protect the lives, possessions, and independence of their people and not invite other countries to hurt and kill their own people.” He reiterated: “These kinds of actions increase friction and destroy the region’s stability and security. If these uncalculated and unlawful acts become customary, the region will turn into a center of hostility, conflict, and incendiarism, and the only ones to suffer will be the region’s nations.”
(Description of Source: Tehran Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) in Persian — Conservative news agency linked to University Jihad, a state-backed student organization generally supportive of government policy and providing conservative reporting. On 19 June 2010, University Jihad Head Dr. Hamid Reza Tayyebi appointed caretaker Ali Mottaqiyan as the director-general of ISNA for three years. URL: www.isna.ir )”
Security forces, possibly including Saudi troops, moved Wednesday morning against the hundreds of protesters still camped out at the Pearl Roundabout downtown. Eyewitnesses told CNN of gunfire and plumes of smoke rising during the assault on unarmed, peaceful civilians.
On Tuesday, hundreds had been wounded as troops fired on protesters, thousands of whom marched on the Saudi embassy. The five leading Shiite clergymen warned of an impending massacre and called on the UN and other international bodies, as well as on Shiite authorities elsewhere, to forestall it.
There are roughly 560,000 citizen residents of Bahrain, about 370,000 of which are Shiite Muslims (i.e. about two-thirds of the population). The king and the court and a minority of citizens are Sunni. There are also 300,000 Indian expatriates, about a third of them Hindus, along with other guest workers who bring the total population to 1.2 million.
On Monday some 1000 Saudi fighters, along with some from the United Arab Emirates, came in to protect the Sunni King from Shiite demonstrators, some of whom had been calling for his overthrow.
Strict Wahhabi Saudi Arabia carefully regiments its own Shiite population (about 12%) in the oil-rich Eastern Province, and is thought to have been concerned that the Bahrain protests might encourage Saudi Shiites to follow suit.
Likewise, because of the popularity of the ideas of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution against the Shah, some Shiites are republicans in the sense of rejecting monarchy, and both the Saudi and Bahrain dynasties fear them as Gulf Tom Paines.
In fact, most Saudi and Bahrain Shiites have simply been calling for constitutional monarchy and parliamentary governance, a call that is controversial only because both governments are absolute monarchies. Saudi Shiite cleric Tawfiq al-Amer was briefly jailed for demanding a constitutional monarchy.
Iran angrily denounced the Saudi troop presence in Bahrain, authorized by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Ali Larijani, speaking on behalf of the Iranian parliament, said, “The Islamic Consultative Assembly (parliament) cautions the regional states that they should not imagine such a military intervention, which is happening at the US orders, would have no costs.” Iran is 90% Shiite and is ruled by a Shiite cleric.
Persian Gulf
Meanwhile, Reuters Arabic reported that the Bahrain events divided Iraqis along sectarian lines. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has long opposed US troops in Iraq, said that any intervention against the desires of a majority of Bahrainis represents tyranny. He described what was happening in Bahrain as “a popular revolution and a revolution of the truth, the quashing of which is completely forbidden.”
Khalid al-As’adi, a member of parliament from the Shiite State of Law coalition led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said that the Saudi intervention and that of other Sunni countries, at the invitation of the Bahrain government, will only exacerbate the sectarian struggle. Iraq is 60% Shiite and is ruled by a coalition of Shiite religious parties.
In contrast, Sunni attorney Ahmad Yunus alleged that only the naive could fail to see Iran’s hand in Bahrain’s protests
Aljazeera reports that by Wednesday morning pro-Qaddafi forces had retaken Gharyan and Sabratha in the northwest, and had tried and failed to take the oil town of Brega in the east. Qaddafi’s jets also bombed arms depots in rebel-held Ajdabiya.
Pro-Qaddafi forces had secured the country’s Western border with Tunisia on Tuesday and then attacked the city of Zawiya, just to the west of the capital. Zawiya’s partisans, joined by defectors from the Libyan army, successfully defended the city. There is said also to have been an attack by Qaddafi’s forces on Misurata (Misrata) to Tripoli’s east.
In other words, Qaddafi still controls only parts of Tripoli, a bit of territory to the far west, and his birthplace of Sirte, and is not proving able to retake lost territory. As it stands, I still think he has lost 90% of the country. But until the Tripoli officer corps decides they cannot win and throw in with the rebels, or until the rebels manage to mount a credible military campaign to take the rest of Libya, it appears things have settled for the moment into a stalemate– though one that overwhelmingly favors the rebels with regard to people-power, despite Qaddafi’s continued military assets (a small military force that is well-equipped and relatively well-trained can sometime trump a big civilian population).
It increasingly appears that outside intervention via the UN or NATO is off the table, and so the end game will likely play out inside Libya and based on Libyan dynamics.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s major swing producer, is afraid of unrest itself and attempting to buy off its own population, so needs the extra money for this purpose. Saudi Arabia had traditionally attempted to hold prices down, because its vast reserves meant it could always make its money in the future, and its relatively small population (22 mn. citizens) left it with limitations on its economic absorptive capacity, i.e., it couldn’t put a lot of oil profits to work in its own domestic economy.
So the Saudi government is handing out $37 billion, all of a sudden, to its people for housing and unemployment relief.
Saudi authorities on Tuesday detained a Shiite clergyman in the Eastern Province who preached a sermon calling for a constitutional monarchy. Shiites are probably about 12 percent of Saudis and are culturally and politically repressed by the Wahhabi establishment, which typically views them as idolaters. Had the call for constitutional monarchy come from other quarters, it would be more significant, since it is hard to imagine Wahhabi-Shiite political unity. Unrest among Saudi Shiites might affect the oil-rich Eastern Province where they mostly reside, but the Saudi state has significant repressive capacities in that area.
So far, Iran and Iraq are the only Middle East countries to have seen significant protests this winter that have regular parliamentary elections. Significantly, Iran’s elections are now viewed as fraudulent by a plurality of Iranians. Protesters came out into the downtown area of Tehran on Tuesday, and were repressed, while opposition leaders Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi may have been taken off to prison (they were under house arrest).
The March 9, 2010 elections in Iraq produced no change from the previous government, and power inheres more in the oil-rich central executive than in parliament. There is a big protest planned next week on the anniversary of those elections, which is pretty scary– as Libyans and Egyptians demand parliamentary elections, Iraqi’s are protesting against theirs. Many Kurds outside the Kurdistan Alliance establishment, many Sunnis, and many Sadrist and other Shiites feel as though high political deals brokered behind closed doors determine their fate more than elections. Otherwise, most of the major protest movements have been against authoritarian regimes that had ceased making sure the people shared in national resources. Ironically, Iraq is dealing with its protests with a combination of violence and hand-outs, and so is behaving more like Saudi Arabia than like Tunisia and Egypt.
The Great Middle Eastern revolt of 2011 has not written its last line yet.
Kusha Sefat writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment:
In delineating the differences and similarities between the recent Egyptian uprising and the one that resulted from the disputed presidential election in Iran, Pouya Alimagham points to an interesting and important point. The Egyptian regime, while enjoying broad international support, fell in just 18 days. This contrasts the Iranian regime’s ability to systematically squash a grassroots uprising that at one point included three million protesters. Alimagham notes that Iran’s resilience in the face of mass protest deservers some consideration.
An equally important point is Iran’s attitude (and what enables this attitude to persist) in contrast to most other states in the region engulfed in mass demonstrations. Both Mubarak and Bin Ali immediately conceded by offering “reforms.” Fearing their own uprising, states like Jordan and Saudi Arabia conceded in advance, with the latter offering its citizens $36 billion in benefits. (Ghadaffi never backed down, but he may lose his life over it). Iran, on the other hand, is taking steps that sharply contrast the conciliatory attitudes of other regional states. Domestically, and in the midst of broad international sanctions, Iran is undertaking a significant and comprehensive economic reform plan which is likely to hurt and further anger the core of the opposition (middle class urbanites). Internationally, during the last round of talks in Istanbul, Iran added two preconditions for moving forward with the P5+1: suspension of sanctions and acknowledging Iran’s right to enrichment, effectively asking the West, in the words of Reza Marashi: “Now what are you going to do?” This is more than a case of resilience and defiance toward domestic opposition and the West. Rather, it raises questions on state capabilities. That is, in contrast to Egypt and Tunisia, what capabilities does the Iranian state have to withstand grassroots uprisings, and how were these capabilities gained?
As one veteran conservative Iranian diplomat put it, “we do not bow down to any power, unless that power is really powerful.” It seems that the US, together with European allies and domestic opposition can shake Iran, but are not powerful enough to break it. Yet, only thirty years ago the Shah of Iran, who similar to Mubarak and Bin Ali enjoyed broad international support, was ousted by domestic opposition alone. This points to a qualitative shift in Iran’s capabilities over the past 30 years facilitated by one primary factor that distinguishes it from all other states’ in the region and the former Pahlavi regime: the experience of revolutionary crisis. It is, as such, worth trying to understand Iran’s capabilities in a revolutionary context and in doing so, the appropriate comparison would be to others states with successful social revolutions, namely France, Russia, and China.
There has been much debate about revolutions, particularly since the beginning of the Egyptian protest. But rarely has this debate touched on what a successful revolution really looks like, what capabilities revolutionary states gain, and how. To look at Iran through the prism of revolutionary crisis, it is worth going back to Theda Skocpol’s seminal work on social revolutions. Skocpol illustrates some of the conditions that must exist for revolution to take place. These conditions existed in Iran prior to its revolution but no longer do, yet they continue to exist today in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. Further, Skocpol illustrates the course that a revolutionary movement must take in order for that state to benefit from the fruits of revolution and gain strategic capability; otherwise what is left has more in common with coup d’état.
In comparing France, Russia, and China Skockpol identifies that both domestic and transnational conditions must exist for revolution to take place. While domestic and transnational conditions influence one another, if the particular state faced with domestic pressure is also at a disadvantage internationally (politically, militarily, and ideologically) then the conditions for revolutionary crises are in motion. Like Egypt and Tunisia today, France, Russia, China, and Iran were all at a transnational disadvantage prior to their uprisings. France’s competition with England exhausted its capacity to raise new loans and sent the economy into a severe recession and resulted in the bankruptcy of state’s financial institutions. Russia was entangled with a comparable, if not worse, vicious cycle of international competition. By 1915, the magnitude of Russian defeats in WWI had been acknowledged and the dominant strata of the Russian society lost confidence in the Tsar and his autocracy. China and Iran were both characterized by political dependency which as Skockpol points out is the most severe case of transnational disadvantage. While, through their revolutionary crisis, France, Russia, China, and Iran overcame their transnational disadvantages, Egypt and Tunisia are currently characterized by political dependency and are firmly under Washington’s strategic umbrella. This means that in addition to domestic pressure caused by the uneven spread of capital, the international conditions for revolution are also ripe in Egypt and Tunisia. The same is not true with respect to Iran.
How was Iran able to move up the transnational scale via its revolutionary crisis? Revolutions are not static, but are processes. An important factor in revolutionary crisis are external wars, which as Skocpol notes are central and constitutive. Revolutionary France ultimately lost the Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, mobilization for war and military interventions in the midst of the unstable internal realm of France created a centralized bureaucratic mechanism at the disposal of the state. The same is true with the Russian revolution and WWII, the Chinese revolution and the Sino-Japanese War, and the Iranian revolution during the Iran-Iraq war. In the case of the latter, the war was as much part of the revolutionary crises as the ousting of the Shah. In Iran, practically all internal opposition which resisted the dominant discourse of the war were wiped out, leading to a sense of stability in the face of an Iraqi incursion which confirmed the Islamic Republic as the true and undisputed legitimate authority of Iran. By the end of the war, a highly centralized, effective, and flexible government had prevailed. Internationally (militarily, politically, and ideologically) Iran started accumulating strategic capabilities, a process which excelled after the fall of Iraq and reached its apex during the Hezbollah-Israel war.
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