http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF28Ak02.html
Jun 28, 2005
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. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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