Biar kata udah pemilu atawa sudah melaksanakan demokrasi juga, kalau gak sesuai "selera" barat mah, pasti hasilnya "pemilu yang cacat", sebenarnya ada gak sih demokrasi itu?
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ambon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;> Sent: Monday, June 27, 2005 2:22 PM Subject: [ppiindia] The ayatollah's new reign > 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. 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