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The ayatollah's new
reign
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Tehran's populist mayor, Mahmud
Ahmadinejad, became Iran's new president by
upstaging his rivals through a shrewd sleeper
campaign that exploited the limelight being away
from him, yet the real winner of this tumultuous
contest was Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah
Seyed Ali Khamenei.
After eight years of a
fractious dual leadership, with outgoing President
Mohammad Khatami's two liberalist administrations
challenging the fundamentalist regime at nearly
every turn, Iran will now experience a unified
leadership with only one man at the top navigating
the ship of state, at least for the next four
years, until the next round of presidential
elections in 2009.
The new president,
49-year-old son of a blacksmith turned university
professor turned provincial governor before
becoming Tehran's mayor, is by all indications a
Khamenei loyalist who will not recycle any of the
fissures and tensions of his predecessor, who more
often than not was on the defensive for his
staunch defense of individual liberties and
liberal reforms. Instead, Ahmadinejad will
faithfully serve the commands from above dictated
by Supreme Leader Khamenei, both in the domestic -
and especially - in the foreign realms. In
defeating his competitor, former president
Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani,
Ahmadinejad has effectively forestalled the
possibility that the era of dual leadership would
continue after Khatami.
This was, of
course, not what most people expected, including
Rafsanjani and his top aids, who on the eve of the
run-off election last Friday complained bitterly
about the interference of military personnel in
the electoral process, forbidden by the Islamic
constitution. A letter sent to the Interior
Ministry by Rafsanjani's chief of campaign singled
out several top-ranking officers, including a few
who are representatives of the leader. It is
absolutely inconceivable that those officers would
intervene without a prior green light from the
Supreme Leader, and their input in favor of
Ahmadinejad was most likely a significant
contributing factor in the election's outcome.
At this point a question: what has
motivated the Iranian system to steer away from
dual leadership and toward single leadership? A
multiplicity of factors pertaining to both
internal and external conditions can be mentioned,
without necessarily putting them in a hierarchy of
importance: the systemic tightness caused by the
US military intervention in Iran's vicinity,
causing a national security panic of sorts
favoring policy centralization; the growing
ideological cleavage within the state between the
different branches controlled by different
factions; the motivation crisis of the Islamic
regime caused by the perceived excesses of
Khatami-led liberalization; and the historic
tendency of the regime's leadership toward
monopoly of power at the top.
Needless to
say, the evaporation of dual leadership is not
necessarily tantamount to the end of political
factionalism, as seen by the votes cast for
reformers in the first round of the presidential
election in which seven people participated, and
the previous pattern of rule by consensus, proven
so effective in maintaining a semblance of
political unity, will likely continue, albeit with
certain modifications.
A case in point,
the moderate faction led by Rafsanjani, present in
both the parliament and the quasi-parliamentary
Expediency Council, has tremendous influence,
particularly in the realm of foreign affairs, and
it is highly unlikely that this influence will
diminish significantly in the near future.
However, this does not imply the absence of some
important foreign policy shifts, and even
reorientations, during the tenure of Ahmadinejad,
such as with respect to the country's nuclear
program, in light of the president-elect's stiff
criticisms of Iran's nuclear negotiation team and
his adamant position that Iran is entitled to
possess nuclear fuel and must, therefore, rescind
its freeze on low-grade uranium enrichment.
Also, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly stated
his penchant to "establish an Islamic world
order", rekindling the Islamic republic's initial
sound and fury of a permanent revolution extending
well beyond the country's borders. This nostalgic,
ideological restorationist presidency can, if
unchecked, translate into a back-to-the-past
"exporting the revolution" foreign approach
abhorred and even dreaded by Iran's conservative
Muslim neighbors, particularly in the Persian
Gulf. Thus, the charted, new slogans of the
government in Tehran will possibly alienate Saudi
Arabia and their carefully cultivated
confidence-building bridge will be somewhat
broken.
In historical retrospective,
President George W Bush's wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan may be regarded as the most important
contributing factor to the demise of the reformist
movement in Iran, just as this author had
predicted months before the war began, in a letter
published in the New York Times, dated September
3, 2002, that read:
The viability of President Mohammad
Khatami's reform efforts depends on his ability
to simultaneously pursue economic liberalization
and political institutional reform. Mr Khatami's
recent attempt to weaken the clergy-dominated
Guardians Council and to strengthen the
presidency represents critical turning points in
the country's post-revolutionary political
process. Reforms of this nature contribute to
the regime's longevity by enhancing the present
system of checks and balances. Mr Khatami's
reform agenda can be set back by a United States
war on Iraq, which is likely to create a
national emergency inside Iran. A peaceful
environment is an essential condition for
deliberative democracy, especially in the
turbulent Middle East. Unfortunately,
the White House has been blind to both the
negative, long-term repercussions of the war in
Iraq and, more so, the utility of rule of
democracy for the "return to authenticity" of the
Muslim fundamentalists seeking the removal of US
power from Muslim territories. The presidency of
Ahmadinejad may then turn out to be quite
turbulent in terms of Iran-US relations, barring
unforeseen developments, given his position that
Iran is not interested in improving relations with
Washington. A case of self-fulfilling prophecy,
Washington hardliners may now point at Iran's
return to the militancy of the 1980s as a
justification to steer the second Bush
administration away from the multilateral track
noticeable in recent months and toward a more
bellicose approach vis-a-vis Tehran's ruling
fundamentalists, especially if the Iran-European
Union nuclear talks, already suffering, are either
terminated or shrunk considerably as a result of
Tehran's more rigid and less flexible new
approach.
On the other hand, on the
domestic front we can expect a significant erosion
of some of the civil society gains of the Khatami
era, coinciding with a more disciplined economic
policy and planning aimed at addressing the ills
of Iran's high-unemployment economy. Ahmadinejad
is a champion of the working classes and the
"disinherited of the earth" who have sacrificed so
much in the past, particularly in the eight-year
war against Iraq in the 1980s, but it is far from
certain that he can actually deliver on some of
his economic promises, especially if there is
capital flight due to the greater capital risks
stemming from foreign threats raised in reaction
to Iran's tough new approach. In that case, the
Iranian youth's hope and expectations for
employment opportunities may be frustrated and
contribute to further erosion of legitimacy.
For the moment, however, economic reform
tops the agenda of Ahmadinejad, who has promised
to fight corruption, install a new generation of
managers, create economic justice and redistribute
wealth, perhaps through a new tax policy, and
create jobs. For the latter, he will need business
confidence, which, in turn, cannot be forthcoming
if Ahmadinejad plays Robin Hood too much, and if
his initiatives end up expanding the scope of the
state, when in fact what is needed is a
substantive shrinking of the government, by and
through a more meaningful privatization policy.
Backed by the country's petty bourgeois
merchants centered in the bazaars, Ahmadinejad may
well succumb to his illusions and commence,
following blessing from above, a type of economic
Bonapartism we call economic populism. But the
very nature of Iranian capitalism militates
against it, which is why we should not vest too
much hope that Ahmadinejad will be any more
successful in implementing his reform agenda than
his predecessor.
On a broader level, the
resurgence of Islamic populism associated with the
meteoric success of Ahmadinejad is as much a
solution to the systemic problems of the Islamic
state as a reflection of those problems. Caught in
the horns of a dilemma are the paradoxical
movements away from and, as in a U-turn, back to
the revolution's original idealism associated with
its late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Instead of post-Khomeinism, we are now witnessing
a resurgent Khomeinism caused, ironically enough,
by the evolution of the political system toward
post-Khomeinism, this being a feature of Iran's
permanent populism, defying the usual
understanding of populism as a transitional
phenomenon.
This author once expounded on
this rather unique and complex political dialectic
in a lengthy dissertation on state and populism in
Iran and the Middle East, arguing that the
attribution of transitional to the Islamist
movement was misplaced. The 2005 presidential
election in Iran is a vivid reminder of the
lingering ethos of Islamic revolution long
considered dead by so many simplistic experts.
Revolution is dead, long live the revolution, or
so say the ayatollah's "mass of maneuver" who cast
their votes in ballots as "so many bullets" aimed
at "the enemies", to paraphrase a key ayatollah
who backed Ahmadinejad's bid for presidency,
contrary to most other high-ranking ayatollahs who
supported Rafsanjani. Clearly, the spirit of
Islamic revolution lives on.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy
Since 9/11", Brown's Journal of World Affairs,
co-authored with former deputy foreign minister
Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches political
science at Tehran University.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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