THE
ROVING EYE What's really happening in
Tehran By Pepe Escobar
"Tehran appears
hell-bent on defying the international community
and pursuing a nuclear program that is of growing
concern." - Sean
McCormack, US State Department spokesman. This
followed a rare press conference with the
international media in Tehran on Monday in which
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad suggested
that Tehran might withdraw from the United Nations
nuclear watchdog agency and the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, and also said "there is
no need" for US-Iranian talks on Iraq.
Because of the opacity of Iran's
theocratic nationalism, outsiders may be tempted
to assume that the official Iranian position is the
one
expressed last week in Baku, Azerbaijan, by
Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar: "The
United States has been threatening Iran for 27
years, and this is not new for us. Therefore, we
are never afraid of US threats."
President
George W Bush and other US administration
officials have frequently said that "all options
are on the table" with regard to Iran's nuclear
program, which the United States suspects is
designed to develop nuclear weapons.
Last
month, the United Nations Security Council passed
a statement asking Atomic Energy Agency head
Mohamed ElBaradei to report simultaneously to the
council and the IAEA board by April 28 on whether
Iran had halted enriching uranium, a process that
can produce fuel for nuclear warheads. To date,
Tehran has refused to do so.
Javad Zarif,
the Iranian ambassador to the UN, has repeatedly
relayed the official position. Iran's nuclear
program is peaceful; there is no proof of a
military development; the religious leadership
opposes atomic weapons; and Iran has not invaded
or attacked any nation for the past 250 years.
The power spheres in Iran seem to bet that
even in the event of a shock and awe of B-2s,
missiles and bunker busters, that simply is not
enough to snuff out accumulated Iranian nuclear
know-how and the quest to master the nuclear fuel
cycle. So the only real question would be for how
many years the US would be able to slow down
Iran's nuclear program.
Is that all there
is? Not really.
As some Iranian analysts
and ministry officials have told Asia Times Online
in Tehran off the record, there are reasons to
believe the leadership is misreading an avalanche
of US signs related to the military and
psychological preparation for a possible war.
For instance, fundamentalist Christians in
the US - who support Zionism for theological
reasons - unleashed a ferocious media campaign
depicting Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad as
the Antichrist who wants to destroy Jerusalem and
prevent Jesus' comeback.
There are even
indications that the Iranian leadership has not
taken the Bush administration's explicit desire
for regime change seriously. It's as if the
leadership is persuading itself Washington would
never dare to escalate the situation - especially
after such US bodies as the Union of Concerned
Scientists and the National Academy of Sciences
have stated that a tactical nuclear strike could
kill more than a million Iranians.
At
Monday's press conference, Ahmadinejad, asked
about possible military strikes, smiled broadly
and dismissed the notion. "Military attacks? On
what pretext?" he asked, adding that Iran was
strong and could defend itself.
Earlier,
Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar
said any US military attack over Iran's nuclear
program would result in a humiliating defeat for
the United States, the official Islamic Republic
News Agency (IRNA) reported.
But what if
the Bush administration and the Ahmadinejad
presidency were bluffing each other into a nuclear
war?
Pick your faction The key
question is which Iranian leadership will have the
final say. There are at least four main factions
in the complex Iranian game of power politics.
The first faction is a sort of extreme
right, closely aligned from the beginning to the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and involved with a
rapprochement with Sunni Arabs in general, while
opposing even a tactical rapprochement with the
US.
The faction includes the dreaded
hojjatieh (a semi-clandestine, radically
anti-Sunni organization) and the Iranian
Hezbollah, which supports both the Lebanese
Hezbollah and the Arab nationalism of Muqtada
al-Sadr in Iraq. Former defense minister Ali
Chamkhani - whom Asia Times Online was told in
Tehran could not talk to the foreign press - is
very close to this faction. They are very
conservative religiously and socialist
economically.
The difference between the
Iranian and the Lebanese Hezbollah is that in
Beirut Hezbollah is much more active, pushing to
be at the heart of political life and improving
people's living conditions.
The role of
Ahmadinejad - a former Revolutionary Guards
(Pasdaran) middle-rank official - in molding this
first faction has been crucial. In 2005, Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had the support of
former president and Machiavellian master of
ambiguity, Hashemi Rafsanjani, at the highest
levels of power - the Expediency Council.
But as a balancing act the supreme leader
also decided to boost the profile of Ahmadinejad,
who happened to be totally opposed to the
pragmatist Rafsanjani. To add more arabesques to
this Persian miniature, Khamenei's favorite
candidate in the 2005 presidential elections was
actually Baqer Qalibaf, a former chief of police -
basically a conservative but in favor of a
controlled opening of political life, the supreme
leader's own policy.
What this all means
is that Ahmadinejad - even winning against
Rafsanjani and Qalibaf - and as the new leader of
the extreme right is not really in charge of the
government. It's an open secret in Tehran that the
Pasdaran intervened in the elections through
massive fraud. This has led in the past few months
to the formation of an anti-Ahmadinejad coalition
that ranges from Qalibaf supporters to - believe
it or not - pro-secular intellectuals close to
former president Mohammad Khatami.
The
supreme leader knew that Ahmadinejad would revive
the regime with his populist rhetoric, very
appealing to the downtrodden masses. But the
ruling ayatollahs may have miscalculated that
since they control everything - the Supreme
National Security Council, the Guardians Council,
the foundations, the army, the media - they could
also control the "street cleaner of the people".
That was not the case, so now plan B - restraining
the president, and the powerful Pasdaran - is in
order.
The second key faction is composed
of provincial clerics, whose master is the supreme
leader himself. These are pure conservatives,
attached to the purity of the Islamic Revolution
of 1979, and more patriotic than the first
faction. They are not interested in more
integration with Sunni Arabs. Faithful to the
supreme leader, they want to keep both
progressives and extremists "in the same house"
(Ahl al Bait) , with the
velayat-e-faqih - the role of jurisprudence
- as the supreme law of the land. Ever since the
2004 parliamentary elections - largely boycotted
by the Iranian population - an association of
clerics totally dominates the majlis (parliament).
But there are huge problems behind this
appearance of unity. Iranian money from the
bonyads - foundations - badly wants a
reconciliation with the West. They know that the
relentless flight of both capital and brains -
which is being actively encouraged by the
Rafsanjani faction - is against the national
interest. But they also know this can hurt
Ahmadinejad's power. Some Western-connected
Iranians are even comparing Ahmadinejad's current
days to the Gang of Four in China a little while
before the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.
The Pasdaran for their part want to keep
their fight against Zionism and go all the way
with the nuclear program. This entails the
extraordinary possibility of a US attack against
Iranian nuclear sites counting on the complicity
of a great deal of the mullahcracy - which does
not hide its desire to get rid of Ahmadinejad and
his Pasdaran "gang".
All going the
Machiavellian's way? The third faction is
the left - initially former partisans of the son
of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ahmad Khomeini,
who died in mysterious circumstances in the 1990s.
After that they operated a spectacular mutation
from Soviet-style socialism into some sort of
religious democracy, which found its icon in
former president Khatami of "dialogue of
civilizations" fame. They became the so-called
progressives - and even if they lost the 2004 and
2005 elections, they are still a force, although
already debilitated by the slow awakening of a
younger, more secular and more radical opposition.
The fourth and most unpredictable faction
is Rafsanjani's. The consummate Machiavellian
masterfully retained his own power from the late
1990s, juggling between Khamenei and Khatami. He
may be the ultimate centrist, but Rafsanjani is
and will always remain a supporter of the supreme
leader. What he dearly wants is to restore Iran's
national might and regional power, and reconcile
the country with the West, for one essential
reason: he knows an anti-Islamic tempest is
already brewing among the youth in Iran's big
cities.
As head of the Expediency Council,
fully supported by the supreme leader, and in his
quest to "save" the Islamic Revolution, Rafsanjani
retains the best possible positioning.
Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad holds as much power
as his predecessor - the urbane, enlightened and
sartorially impeccable Khatami: that is, not much.
What Ahmadinejad's obvious excesses are doing is
to solidify the support the Rafsanjani faction is
getting from the intelligentsia as well as the
urban youth, not to mention the "enlightened
police" faction of Qalibaf. This does not mean
that another revolution is around the corner - as
the Bush administration's wishful thinking goes.
Apart from these four factions, there are
two others that are outside the ironclad circle of
supreme-leader power: the revolutionary left and
the secular right. Clerics call them
biganeh (eccentric), and the denomination
may be correct to a point, as both these groups
are mostly disconnected from the majority of the
population, although they also support the nuclear
program out of patriotism.
The extreme
left hates the mullahcracy, but has also derided
Khatami's moderately progressive agenda. As for
the Westernized liberals - which include former
supporters of deposed prime minister Mohammad
Mossadegh and members of the Freedom Movement of
Iran, an opposition party, they are becoming
increasingly popular with Tehran students, who are
more and more pro-American (if not in foreign
policy at least in behavior and cultural
preferences).
The regime may in essence be
unpopular - because of so much austerity and the
virtual absence of social mobility - but for
millions it is still bearable. No one seems to be
dreaming of revolution in Iran. What is actually
happening is the slow emergence of a common front
- bent on the restoration of the power of the
Iranian state through an alliance with Shi'ism in
Iraq, Bahrain and Lebanon.
This may be
interpreted as a Shi'ite crescent by alarmist
Sunni Arabs, but there's no military, expansionist
logic behind it. The common front is also in favor
of moving toward a more market economy and a
progressive liberalization of morals and public
opinion. This is what one hears in Tehran from
young people, women, workers in the cultural
industry, and philosophers - and it is Tehran that
always sets the agenda in Iran.
If the
regime does not open up, the Iranian economy will
never create enough jobs over the next few years
to fight unemployment among its overwhelmingly
young population. A great deal of the
non-oil-dependent private sector is controlled by
the bonyads, whose managers are usually
incompetent and corrupt clerics.
Many
Iranians know that an economic crisis - high oil
prices notwithstanding - will rip the heart out of
the lower middle class, the regime's base, and
more crucially the industrial working class, which
used to be aligned with the Tudeh, Iran's
communist party.
There is a way out
They key to solving most of Iran's
problems lies in finding a compromise with the
West - especially the Americans - regarding the
nuclear dossier. For all his vocal, popular
support in the provinces, if Ahmadinejad and his
Pasdaran hardliners go against this national
desire for stability and progress, they will be
sidelined.
Demonizing Western parallels of
Iran enriching a few grams of uranium as akin to
Adolf Hitler's march into the Rhineland is
positively silly. So far Iran has only disregarded
a non-binding request from the UN Security
Council. The uranium-enrichment program may be
under the operational control of the Pasdaran, but
Ahmadinejad does not set Iran's nuclear policy:
the supreme leader does, his guidelines followed
by the Supreme National Security Council, which is
led by the leader's protege, Ali Larijani.
Khamenei and Larijani have both substantially
toned down the rhetoric; Ahmadinejad hasn't.
The point is not that Ahmadinejad is a
suicidal nut bent on confronting the US by all
means available. The point is that the president
leads just one of four key factions in a do-or-die
power play, and he is following his own agenda,
which is not necessarily the Iranian theocratic
leadership's agenda. Washington neo-conservatives
for their part may want regime change - but that
won't happen with another shock and awe.
Ahmadinejad is playing the typical
Bonapartist - using a political deadlock to go all
the way toward dictatorship. Rafsanjani may also
be a Bonapartist, but the difference is he's not
interested in dictatorship.
The ideal
outcome of this whole "nuclear crisis" would be an
Iran moving to a moderately liberal alliance
between eternal pragmatist Rafsanjani - the only
one capable of subduing the Pasdaran - and the
semi-secular left, which still regards Khatami as
the least bad of all possible models. It may not
be paradise, but it certainly beats war.
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