THE ROVING EYE
What is Iran's Supreme
Leader's game? By Pepe Escobar
We interrupt this program to ask the
supreme war-or-peace question; what game is Iran's
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei really
playing?
A recurrent theme among the
lively Iranian global diaspora is that the Supreme
Leader is the perfect US/Israel asset - as he
incarnates Iran (although in many cases less than President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad) as "the
enemy"; in parallel, the military dictatorship of
the mullahtariat in Tehran also needs "the enemy"
- as in the Great Satan and the Zionists - to
justify its monopoly of power.
The
ultimate loser, in this case, is true Iranian
democracy - as in the foundation for the country's
ability to resist Empire. Especially now, after
the immensely dodgy 2009 presidential election and
the repression of the Green movement - when even
former supporters swear the Islamic Republic
turned into neither a "republic" and certainly not
"Islamic".
At the same time, informed
Iranian - and Western - critics of Empire swear
that the belligerent Likud-majority government of
Israel is in fact the perfect Iran asset. This is
because Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu
and former Moldova bouncer turned Foreign Minister
Avigdor Lieberman's non-stop warmongering has only
worked to rally Iranians of all persuasions -
always proudly nationalistic - behind the regime.
After all, the absolute majority of
Iranians feel they are targeted by a heavily
weaponized foreign power - US/Israel, followed in
the shade by the Sunni Persian Gulf monarchies of
the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, also known as
Gulf Cooperation Council. The regime was wily
enough to instrumentalize this foreign threat and
at the same time further smash the Green movement.
Keep your bombs away from me
Parliamentary elections in Iran are less
than a week away, on March 3. These are the first
elections after the 2009 drama. In The
Ayatollahs' Democracy: an Iranian Challenge
(Penguin Books), Hooman Majd makes a very strong
case detailing how the election was stolen. And
that's the key current problem; millions of
Iranians don't believe in their Islamic democracy
anymore.
Gholam Reza Moghaddam, a cleric
and the head of the Majlis (parliament) commission
that is conducting an extremely delicate move in
the middle of an economic crisis - to finish
government subsidies on basic food items and
energy - recently admitted that the Ahmadinejad
government was by all practical purposes bribing
the population "to encourage them to vote in the
Majlis elections".
Major General Yahya
Rahim Safavi - a senior military adviser to
Khamenei and, crucially, former chief of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) - asked
Iranians to "take the elections seriously and by
voting in maximum numbers create another epic
event". The Supreme Leader believes - or hopes -
turnout at the "epic event" will be around 60%.
They may be in for a rude shock. Word in
Iran is that the election appeal at universities
is close to zero. No wonder; Green movement leader
Mir Hossein Mousavi has been under house arrest
for a full year. According to Kaleme, a website
close to Mousavi and his wife, Dr Zahra Rahnavard,
a few days ago they were allowed to speak only
briefly, by phone, with their three daughters.
Khamenei's attention seems to be
concentrated more on the external pressure than
the internal dynamic. Once again, on Wednesday, he
went public to renew his vow that a nuclear weapon
is anti-Islamic. His words should - but they won't
- be carefully scrutinized in the West:
We believe that using nuclear
weapons is haram and prohibited, and that
it is everybody's duty to make efforts to
protect humanity against this great disaster. We
believe that besides nuclear weapons, other
types of weapons of mass destruction such as
chemical and biological weapons also pose a
serious threat to humanity. The Iranian nation
which is itself a victim of chemical weapons
feels more than any other nation the danger that
is caused by the production and stockpiling of
such weapons and is prepared to make use of all
its facilities to counter such
threats.
To see the Supreme Leader's
"nuclear" views, warmongers could do worse than
consult his website. [1] Of course, they won't.
What's certain is that the leader seems to
be ready to fight for the long haul. Major General
(retired) Mohsen Rezai, the secretary general of
the Expediency Council, said it in so many words;
Western sanctions will go on for at least another
five years, and are much tougher than those
imposed during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
Rezai also said that for 16 years, when
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and then Mohammad Khatami
were presidents, Iran tried to reach some sort of
deal with the US; but "because the gap [between
the two] was too deep, a compromise was not
possible ... We allowed them to inspect Natanz, we
reduced the number of centrifuges, we suspended
the Isfahan [uranium conversion facility], and our
president [Khatami] began the 'dialogue among
civilizations'. But [president George W] Bush
declared that Iran, Iraq and North Korea
constitute the 'axis of evil' and began a
confrontation with us." [2]
A former
spokesman for the Iranian nuclear negotiation
team, ambassador Hossein Mousavian, brought this
confrontational mood up to date - to the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team's
October 2011 visit to Iran, led by deputy director
general Herman Nackaerts - the same Nackaerts who
was back in Iran this week.
According to
Mousavian, "during the visit, Fereydoon
Abbasi-Davani, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy
Organization, offered a blank check to the IAEA,
granting full transparency, openness to
inspections, and cooperation with the IAEA. He
also informed Nackaerts of Iran's receptiveness to
putting the country's nuclear program under 'full
IAEA supervision', including implementing the
Additional Protocol [of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty] for five years, provided
that sanctions against Iran were lifted."
Guess what was Washington's reaction;
forget about dialogue, we want sanctions. That set
the scene for Washington's next steps; the
Fast-and-Furious plot trying to frame Tehran for
the assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador
to the US; the pressure to divert the IAEA's
November 2011 report on Iran by adding a spin on a
"possible" military angle to the nuclear program;
the oil embargo; the sponsoring of a United
Nations resolution against Iran on terrorism; and
the list goes on.
Show me the path of
the Imam In all matters external and
internal, in Iran the bucks stops with Khamenei -
not Ahmadinejad. If the Supreme Leader seems to
have his finger firmly on the nuclear dossier, at
homely matters he may be unraveling. He may take
comfort that outside the big cities, he remains
popular - as government loans in rural areas
remain generous, at least while the new Western
sanctions don't bite.
But high-ranking
clerics in Qom are now openly calling for legal
mechanisms to oversee - and criticize - him; his
response - hardly a secret in Tehran - was to
order all their offices and homes to be bugged.
Khamenei has vehemently rejected any sort
of oversight by the Council of Experts - the body
that appoints the Supreme Leader, monitors his
performance, and can even topple him.
According to Seyyed Abbas Nabavi, the head
of the Organization for Islamic Civilization and
Development, Khamenei told the experts, "I do not
accept the assembly can say that the Supreme
Leader is still qualified, but then question why
such and such official was directed in a certain
direction, or why I allowed a certain official [to
do certain things]." [3]
Following the
outbursts of outrage in 2009 - when for the first
time people in the streets openly called for the
downfall of the leader - revolt steadily marches
on, with highly educated Iranians deriding
Khamenei as stubborn, jealous and vindictive,
holding a monster grudge against millions who
never swallowed his endorsement of Ahmadinejad in
2009 (he always calls them "seditionists").
For instance, even the daughter of a
well-known ayatollah has gone public saying that
Khamenei "holds a grudge in his heart" against
Rafsanjani and former presidential candidates Mir
Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi "because of the
Imam's [Khomeini's] love and support for them and
also because in comparison to these three, in
particular Hashemi [Rafsanjani] and Mousavi, he is
clearly a second-rate individual." Khamenei is now
being widely blamed for anything from Iran's
falling production capacity to mounting inflation
and widespread corruption.
That raises the
question; what about the IRGC's support for the
Supreme Leader?
The Iranian diaspora
largely considers this to be pure propaganda. Yet
the fact is the IRGC is now a monster conglomerate
with myriad military-industrial, economic and
financial interests. Top managers - and the array
of enterprises they control - are bound to the
ethos of antagonizing the West, the same West from
whose sanctions they profit, handsomely. So, for
them, the status quo is nice and dandy - even with
the everyday possibility of a miscalculation, or a
false flag operation, leading to war.
At
the same time, the IRGC may count on the key
strategic/political support of BRICS members
Russia and China - and is certain that the country
will be able to dribble the embargo and keep
selling oil mostly to Asian clients.
But
what's really juicy, in terms of the internal
dynamic, is the fact that the cream of the IRGC is
now engaged in a sort of economic war against the
bazaaris - the traditionally very
conservative Persian merchants.
It's
crucial to remember that these bazaaris
financed the so-called "Path of the Imam" Islamic
revolution in 1979. They were - and remain -
radically anti-colonialism (especially as
practiced by the British and then the Americans);
but this does not mean they are anti-Western
(something that most in the West still don't
understand).
Once again, as top Iranian
analysts have been ceaselessly pointing out, one
must remember that the Islamic revolution's
original motto was "Neither East nor West"; what
mattered was a sort of curiously Buddhist "middle
of the road" - exactly that "Path of the Imam"
that would guarantee Islamic Iran as a sovereign,
non-aligned country.
And guess who was
part of this original "Path of the Imam" coalition
of the willing? Exactly; Khamenei (and
Ahmadinejad) foes Mousavi, Khatami, Karoubi and
Rafsanjani, not to mention a moderate faction of
the IRGC, graphically symbolized by former IRGC
commander and former presidential candidate Mohsen
Rezai.
So what the "Path of the Imam"
coalition is essentially saying is that Khamenei
is a traitor of the principles of the revolution;
they accuse him of trying to become a sort of
Shi'ite caliph - an absolute ruler. This message
is increasingly getting public resonance among
millions of Iranians who believe in a true
"Islamic", but most of all "republic" state.
And that leads us to the Supreme Leader's
supreme fear; that a coalition of Islamic republic
purists - including powerful Qom clerics and
powerful IRGC commanders or former commanders -
may eventually rise up, get rid of him, and
finally implement their dream of a true Islamic
republic. Only this is certain; the one thing they
won't get rid of is Iran's civilian nuclear
program.
Notes 1. See here. 2.
See the original text, in Farsi
. 3. See the original text in Farsi.
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