The results of Friday's election for
Iran's parliament, the Majlis, generate a
political climate in Tehran that augurs well for
the commencement of talks over the nuclear issue.
The US administration senses this. The big issue
is whether President Barack Obama can carry the
United States' two key allies - Saudi Arabia and
Israel - in the quest of finding a "permanent"
solution to the US-Iran standoff.
Yet this
has been a season of fables. Iranian politics
arouses great curiosity, and election time becomes
a carnival of fables. Four years ago Iran's
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was usurping
political power and the country was becoming a
military dictatorship. This year's hot pick (so
far) is that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
is dispatching President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to
political exile and the Majlis is their arena of
contestation. It's all
forgotten how Khamenei fought off single-handedly
the reformists' challenge in 2009 and preserved
Ahmedinejad's presidency.
True, Iran's
politics, like politics anywhere, is complex. The
Shi'ite religious establishment is known in
history as fractious. Party politics as is known
in Western liberal democracies does not exist in
Iran. But factions and cliques and interest groups
realign incessantly, and that gives much verve to
Iranian politics.
Friday's election has
been no exception. An added factor is how the
newly elected Majlis will affect the country's
power structure - and what impact that will have
on policies - at a juncture when Iran is at
crossroads against the backdrop of the epochal
upheaval in the region.
From the results,
the composition of the Majlis may shift in a
direction that can have positive fallout for
regional security. The factions and cliques that
can be called "conservative" - in the Iranian
context - bonded together as "Principalists" and
fought the election as an identifiable grouping,
and they have done exceedingly well.
The
Principalists comprise clerics and non-clerics who
formed a "united front". What brought them
together is their conservative political outlook
as regards the ideology of the Iranian revolution
and the absolute centrality of velayat-e
faqih - Shi'ite government.
Permanent solution The dominance
of Principalists in the Majlis will make the
overall power structure far more cohesive than at
any time in the past decade and a half. But the
paramount role of the supreme leader was never in
doubt, and that institution didn't need
strengthening by the Majlis.
What cannot
be overlooked either is that the authority of the
president and the effectiveness of his executive
power always depended on his ability to work
within the system.
The Principalists
significantly strengthen the power structure. As
far as Iran's interlocutors are concerned, they
will probably hear a more unified voice. All in
all, therefore, what matters to the international
community is that Tehran is getting its act
together as it approaches the negotiating table on
the nuclear issue.
The West almost
reflexively runs down Iran's elections. However,
Obama perceives the shift in the locus of power in
Tehran and the consolidation of authority as a
window of opportunity.
It wasn't lost on
Obama that in the run-up to the Majlis elections,
Iran's supreme leader made a hugely significant
statement with regard to the nuclear issue. While
addressing a gathering of Iranian nuclear
scientists, Khamenei said:
The purpose of the uproar they [the
West] cause is to stop us. They know that we are
not after nuclear weapons. They already know
this. I do not have any doubts that in the
countries that are opposed to us, the
organizations in charge of decision-making are
fully aware that we are not after nuclear
weapons.
Nuclear weapons are not at all
beneficial to us. Moreover, from an ideological
and [velayat-e] faqih perspective, we
consider developing nuclear weapons as unlawful.
We consider using such weapons as a big sin. We
also believe that keeping such weapons is futile
and dangerous, and we will never go after them.
They know this, but they stress the issue in
order to stop our movement.
Thus,
after mulling over Khamenei's pledge for a full
fortnight, Obama decided to acknowledge it. That
became a key salience of his interview with
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly last
week.
Obama underlined that he was looking
for a "permanent" solution to the Iran nuclear
issue, "as opposed to temporarily". He then
pointed out that a permanent solution was possible
only if Iran were "self-interested". In a
brilliant use of double negative that would be the
envy of any Persian speaker, Obama added:
They [Iranians] are sensitive to the
opinions of the people and they are troubled by
the isolation that they're experiencing ... They
are able to take decisions based on trying to
avoid bad outcomes from their perspective. So if
they're presented with options ... then there's
no guarantee that they can't make a better
decision.
Obama admitted that the US
would have to make some sort of a deal, and that's
feasible because he thinks the Iranian leaders are
at bottom rational actors. On the other hand,
Obama thought a military strike against Iran would
be a needless "distraction".
Because, as
he put it, "Iran does not yet have a nuclear
weapon and is not yet in a position to obtain a
nuclear weapon without us [Washington] having a
pretty long lead time in which we will know that
they are making that attempt."
Having
'Israel's back' So an incumbent president
in the White House is probably getting Iran right,
finally. However, the problem for Obama is going
to arise from two quarters. One is Saudi Arabia,
whose regional priority at the moment does not lie
in US-Iran engagement but is on forcing a regime
change in Damascus through a Western/US
intervention, which it hopes would drive a spear
straight into the heart of Iran's standing as a
regional power and weaken the cause of Shi'ite
empowerment (including in Saudi Arabia itself).
The dramatic "walkout" by Saudi Foreign
Minister Saud al-Faisal from the "Friends of
Syria" meeting in Tunis last week shows up the
straws in the wind. But having said that, the
Saudis also understand very well that what
Khamenei has probably achieved is that the sort of
factionalism that threw Iranian policies (and
negotiators) into disarray in the most recent
years - including on the nuclear issue - isn't
repeated.
Conceivably, a cohesive power
structure in Tehran suits the Saudis, too. The
point is, Tehran is going to have to make some
difficult decisions in the period ahead, and it
should be strong and resilient enough to show
flexibility.
Obama's main problem lies
elsewhere. He has to tackle the Israeli government
headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Obama
has a tough customer in Netanyahu, although the
media hype that "Bibi" would be the arbiter of
Obama's re-election bid is stretching the point
too far.
The "Netanyahu problem" is
compounded by the fact that 2012 is an election
year in the US and, as Obama derisively suggested,
"You have a set of political actors [in US
politics] who want to see if they can drive a
wedge not between the United States and Israel,
but between Barack Obama and a Jewish-American
vote that has historically been very supportive of
his candidacy."
But Obama's political
instinct is right. The fact is, he won 78 percent
of the Jewish vote in 2008, and they didn't vote
on his Israel policy alone. Again, in Israel
itself, the majority opinion militates against any
form of conflict with Iran.
This is where
Obama's message counts during the interview with
Goldberg - his forceful statement that the US "has
Israel's back", and his consistently pro-Israel
posture throughout the interview.
Not
surprisingly, Obama also utilized the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) forum on
Sunday to make unequivocal pledges of solidarity
with Israel. He made it "my commitment" - not US
commitment. "When the chips are down, I have
Israel's back."
But then he came back to
the point - namely, Washington's current strategy
of sanctions against Iran is working and he isn't
done with diplomacy: "I firmly believe that an
opportunity remains for diplomacy backed by
pressure to succeed."
At the end of it
all, there was no mistaking what Obama intended as
his lasting message to the AIPAC audience:
"Already there is too much loose talk of war."
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His
assignments included the Soviet Union, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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