Beyond the Wave: Why the US Still Engages with Iran

The Latest from Iran (31 July): And Now….?

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I suspect this extended article by Roger Cohen, formally published in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, will cause a few media fireworks. Cohen has been criticised for a series of recent pieces, based on a visit to Iran, which have provided complexity beyond the image of an anti-Western, anti-Israeli country. This essay combines Cohen's sympathy with the Green Movement with an incisive examination of the Obama Administration's approach to the Government that is still in power. His conclusions echo our own analysis on Enduring America: the baseline for Washington's policy is that it has to deal with an Iranian regime which may or may not be developing nuclear weapons and which is definitely a key player in regional politics, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East.

The Making of an Iran Policy

The silent protest began in Imam Khomeini Square in front of the forbidding Ministry of Telecommunications, which was busy cutting off cellphones but powerless to stop the murmured rage coursing through Tehran. Six days had passed since Iran’s disputed June 12 election, but the fury that brought three million people onto the streets the previous Monday showed no sign of abating. “Silence will win against bullets,” a woman beside me whispered. Her name was Zahra. She wore a green headband — the color adopted by the campaign of the defeated reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi — and she held a banner saying, “This land is my land.” The words captured the popular conviction that not only had President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stolen votes, but he also had made off with Iran’s dignity. Slowly the vast crowd began to move north. No chant issued from the throng, only distilled indignation. A young man asked me where I was from. When I told him New York, he shot back: “Give our regards to freedom. It’s coming right here!”

In those giddy postelectoral days, anything seemed possible, even the arrival of liberty, or at least more of it, in the 30-year-old Islamic Republic. Through the swirl of events — the huge crowds, the beatings and the sirens, the tear gas and black smoke — the core issues were simple. Iranians felt cheated. They wanted their votes to count. They knew that no genuinevictor with two-thirds of the vote need resort to brutality or fear a recount. Sometimes they asked me if the United Nations would help them; often they asked if America would. It was their way of saying, with fierce emotion, that the morality of the Iranian story, its right and wrong, was plain.

But it was precisely emotion, and notions of good and evil, that the Obama administration had spent the previous months trying to drain from the charged U.S.-Iranian relationship. Sobriety dominated the ideas of the president’s Iran team, as I’d learned before I left in conversations with senior officials at the State Department and the National Security Council. The Bush administration’s ideologically driven axis-of-evil approach to Iran had failed. Tehran had prospered by expanding its regional influence and was accelerating its nuclear program. The Obama administration believed it was time to seek normalization through a new, cooler look at a nation critical to U.S. strategic interests — from advancing Israeli-Arab peace negotiations to a successful withdrawal from Iraq.

“Who they select as leader in Iran is their prerogative, and there’s nothing we can do to control that,” Ray Takeyh, an Iranian-born adviser to Dennis Ross, the veteran Mideast negotiator who has been working on Iran for the Obama administration, told me before the election. “We’re trying to deal with Iran as an entity, a state, rather than privileging one faction or another. We want to inject a degree of rationality into this relationship, reduce it to two nations with some differences and some common interests — get beyond the incendiary rhetoric.” Takeyh’s words reminded me of Ross, who in his book “Statecraft” defined the term’s first principles as, “Have clear objectives, tailor them to fit reality.”

But now, as the crowd streaming before me demonstrated, Iran’s reality had changed. In his inaugural address, President Obama said: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Seldom had a fist been clenched more unequivocally, dissent silenced more harshly or deceit practiced with more brazenness than in Iran after June 12.

Still, Obama’s Iran team — Ross; the courtly under secretary of state William Burns; the dapper deputy national security adviser Tom Donilon; the studious senior N.S.C. official Puneet Talwar (the only one, other than Takeyh, who has been to Iran); the hard-charging organization man Denis McDonough, who controls strategic communication at the White House — faced a difficult choice between sticking with strategic outreach to the regime and questioning its legitimacy in the name of human rights. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose instincts on Iran have always been more hawkish than the president’s, “was pushing for a harder line sooner after the June 12 vote,” a Mideast expert close to her told me last month. She was supported by her friend Joe Biden, the vice president. They did not prevail. The tone was cautious; although Obama’s denunciations of the clampdown grew stronger as it worsened, the extended hand, which had proved more unsettling to Iran than all the Bush administration bluster, was not withdrawn.

When I returned from Iran, I went to see one of these senior officials to ask what it had been like making that call. Painful, was the response. Every day, in the election’s aftermath, the team met and conference-called. “It is difficult to weigh all the different considerations,” this official told me. “But given the profoundly serious consequences of an Iranian regime that acquires a nuclear-weapons capability, the judgment in the end was that it was important to follow through on the offer of direct engagement.” He noted that this offer had been “signaled clearly in the course of the campaign” by Obama, and developed since. In other words, this goes deep with the president. He’s driving Iran policy. The Iran gambit lies close to the core of his refashioned global strategy, America’s “new era of engagement.”

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Iran: Will the Supreme Leader Give Up Ahmadinejad?

The Latest from Iran (28 July): The Regime Crumbles
The Latest from Iran (28 July): The Government Crumbles

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Perhaps the most striking headline in yesterday's press was that of The New York Times, "Ahmadinejad Seen as Increasingly Vulnerable". Unfortunately for the paper, the distinction was not that this indicated information or insight, but that it showed reporters who were either naive or coming very late to the political party.

This weekend's events were not the start of the President's slide from power. That process had started as early as 15 June, when the mass demonstrations pointed to at least a significant minority in Iran who were unprepared to give Ahmadinejad any legitimacy. The significance of last week's developments --- the growing unease with detentions, the increase in clerical fatwas calling for Government reform, and then the row over the First Vice President --- was that illegitimacy was now complemented by a sense amongst "conservatives" of Ahmadinejad's negligence or ineptitude.

So the big question after the President's attempt, possibly his last, to regain authority --- the firing of four Ministers, reduced to one when Ahmadinejad realised he could no longer govern without Parliamentary consent --- is not about Mahmoud. Instead, it is about the Supreme Leader: what does Ayatollah Khamenei now do with a terminally wounded political leader?

To this point, the post-election path can be marked by the Supreme Leader's firm refusal to give up Ahmadinejad. Khamenei could have refrained from making the unprecedented move on Election Night of setting aside the official process and declaring a victor; he did not. A week after the election, speaking at Friday prayers, he could have traded some support for the President for a more conciliatory position towards the opposition; he did not. Khamenei could have stepped aside to allow a true recount by the Guardian Council of the Presidential vote; instead, he declared in advance that there would be no change in the outcome.

The symbolism of the battle over the First Vice President, Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, was that the Supreme Leader, at least in this case, said to the President, "Enough." Whether this was because of Rahim-Mashai's politically dubious views on relations with Israel, "conservative" unease with the choice, the whiff of nepotism, or the concern that Ahmadinejad was publicly being too "independent" is unclear. The extent of Khamenei's slap-down is not, however. When the President refused to budge after he received the Supreme Leader's letter, Khamenei's advisors ensured that the order to remove Rahim-Mashai became very public.

There is a difference, however, between smiting your President in one high-profile case and giving him up completely. And, beyond superficial New York Times headlines, what distinguishes these last 72 hours is that the Supreme Leader has said nothing, made no more letters public, offered no clue even during Ahmadinejad's botched attempt to remove Ministers with whom he had argued.

And that silence is understandable. Because even if Khamenei does not say it, giving up Ahmadinejad means, "I was wrong." Wrong to push so hard on the Presidential election result, wrong not to extend an hand to the Green Movement, wrong to let arrests and beatings and killings spiral.

That silence cannot be maintained, however. The President's inauguration is in eight days. And by that point, Khamenei either has to disown his boy or embrace him, albeit while reminding Ahmadinejad not to stray again.

So far, the Supreme Leader has blundered, both in perception and strategy, by being too firm in his support of the President. Does he dare risk hugging Mahmoud to the point where he goes down with him?

Iran: Rebellion of the Clerics? Not So Fast

The Latest from Iran (10 July): What Next?

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One area of the Iranian post-election crisis that we've been watching carefully is the possibility of clerical opposition to the regime. On the one hand, we're wary of stories --- such as the wayward New York Times article last Sunday --- that portray a rebellion of the clerics. On the other, we do think the opposition of some ayatollahs may have some significance, especially if that intersects with other political moves against the current leadership.

Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in contrast, dismisses the notion of a clerical challenge, at least for now:

While a handful of marginal clerics and religious groups dispute the official result of Iran’s recent presidential election, the Shiite clerical establishment as a whole currently supports Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Although this support has been demonstrated through silence, the fact that most Shiite clerics have not intervened in the public debate over the election or the government’s use of force against protesters has been particularly effective in strengthening Khamenei’s position.

The Establishment

Iran’s clerical establishment consists of about 200,000 members, and its hierarchy includes many midlevel clerics called hojjat ol-eslam (”proof of Islam”) and around a thousand ayatollahs (”sign of God”), who are leaders recognized for their scholarship. Ranking above ayatollahs are roughly fifteen grand ayatollahs, who are revered as sources of emulation, or as religious guides, for many followers.
Khamenei was a mere hojjat ol-eslam when he was elevated to the rank of ayatollah, in a controversial move aimed at making him constitutionally fit to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, as Iran’s principal leader. Khamenei’s authority stems from the principal of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist), which combines political and religious power into one supreme authority.


Dissent Only from the Margins

The ayatollahs in Qom and Isfahan who have criticized the recent presidential election are isolated, with no significant role in the clerical establishment; they lack both financial resources and religious popularity. Although these ayatollahs held key political and juridical positions during the first decades of the Islamic Republic, they were sidelined first by Khomeini and then later by Khamenei.

A small marginal group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom Seminary, is the only clerical group that has explicitly referred to the presidential election as illegitimate. The association was founded in 1998, and its central council consists of eighteen midranking clerics and one ayatollah. This group plays no role in the administration of the clerical establishment, and none of its members are considered to be sources of emulation. The association was originally created to support former president Muhammad Khatami, but its support has remained symbolic rather than practical. The group’s secretary, the controversial Seyyed Hossein Moussavi Tabrizi, was involved in the execution of many of the regime’s opponents and political prisoners while he was the general prosecutor of the Revolutionary Court during the first decade of Islamic Republic,


Coopting the Clerical Establishment

Iran’s current clerical establishment has little similarity to what it was prior to 1979 Islamic Revolution. Historically, the clerical class was a semiautonomous political institution with independent financial resources from religious taxes collected directly from followers. But after the revolution, and especially since Khamenei became leader twenty years ago, the establishment became totally dependent on the government’s financial resources, social authority, networking, organization, and political status. Iran’s leader is not only the head of the judiciary, intelligence services, and the armed forces, he is also the head of Iran’s Shiite clerics.

Clerics receive hefty regular stipends from the government, and many ayatollahs have exclusive privileges for numerous profit-making transactions. The government has modernized and bureaucratized the clerical establishment by creating the Center for Seminary Management, which is under direct supervision of Khamenei and is in full control of clerical finances, the seminary’s educational system, and the political direction of the establishment. Even Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, along with other influential Shiite leaders, allegedly runs his offices within the framework of the Center.

To control clerics politically, the government created the Special Court of Clerics — an organization that works outside the judiciary branch of government and is headed by an appointee of Khamenei — to deal with dissenting clerics. This independent court does not operate within the country’s legal system; it has own set of procedures and maintains its own prisons in most Iranian cities.

Politically defiant clerics who oppose certain government decisions work outside the clerical establishment and usually have a track record of supporting Iran’s reform movement. Although several prominent reformist figures, such as former president Muhammad Khatami and former speaker of the Iranian parliament Mehdi Karrubi, are clerics, their words and actions have little or no impact on the clerical establishment and pose no threat of causing political splits.

Conclusion

The Shiite clerical establishment, which stretches across the Middle East, is highly unlikely to initiate any sort of opposition to Khamenei’s authority. Various Shiite leaders may not be happy with the Iranian government’s policies, but publicizing their differences might jeopardize the social, political, and financial advantages they now receive from Iran. For example, during his Friday sermon immediately after the Iranian election, Seyyed Mohammad Hossein Fazlallah, a prominent Shiite ayatollah in Lebanon, stated his support for the government’s official result and voiced his admiration of the Iranian people for their participation in the election. In Iraq, al-Sistani kept silent about the election result and has not reacted to the postelection crisis. Both ayatollahs have offices in Qom and benefit from the support of the Iranian government.
Inside Iran, support for Khamenei, although mostly silent, is also evident. Morteza Moqtadai, the head of Center for Seminary Management, announced that the election result was approved by “God and the Hidden Imam,” and stated that Khamenei’s words are the “Hidden Imam’s words; when he says there was no manipulation in the election, he should be heard as the ultimate arbiter.”
Khamenei — for the moment — is in a strong position. The clerical establishment’s prevailing silence, however, could eventually work against him. If the political tide begins to turn, the establishment could be rendered powerless and its support ineffective, leaving Khamenei and his followers in a vulnerable position.

Getting Iran (Loudly) Wrong: Posturing for Mr Ahmadinejad and Mr Hitchens

The Latest from Iran (10 July): What Next?

NEW Iran: How Big Were the 18 Tir Protests?
The Latest from Iran (18 Tir/9 July): Day of Reckoning?
LATEST Video: The 18 Tir Protests (9 July)

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A couple of fine examples of how to wedge events in Iran into personal and political prejudices and agendas. In Asia Times Online, Mahan Abedin charts "The Rise and Rise of Ahmadinejad" with the claim:

[He is] the most formidable leader of a faction that has incrementally broadened and deepened the scope of its reach and influence within the regime to the point where it is now completely dominant. Factional politics in the Islamic Republic - as we know it - has collapsed....All the other factions, particularly the once-powerful Islamic left, are in complete disarray. Their leaders have been exposed as losers and their supporters have been left demoralized by the entire state machinery's acquiescence in the final victory of the Islamic right.

To call this analysis "quirky", in light of Ahmadinejad's political floundering in the last three weeks would be generous. A less charitable reading would be that Abedin wants to wipe out any alternative to the President: "The biggest loser of all is former prime minister Mousavi....Another great loser is former president and arch-oligarch Rafsanjani....Many other core establishment figures, including losing presidential contender Mehdi Karroubi and former Majlis (parliament) speaker Nategh Nouri, are expected to be edged out."

Which means that, presto magico!, Ahmadinejad stands atop "a new consensus" in Iran: "While the contours of a broader political alliance have still to be worked out, there are indications that at the grassroots level at least a substantial number of Islamic left personalities and activists are willing to fall behind Ahmadinejad and accept the public hegemony of the Islamic right."

Meanwhile, swerving violently from the other direction, Christopher Hitchens in Salon finally finds the moment to vindicate his 7-year "liberation of Iraq" shout-out by linking it to the "liberation of Iran". Unfortunately, that moment is based on the wildly inaccurate New York Times story of 5 July that "the most important clerical group" in Iran had come out against the regime:

So it is very hard to overstate the significance of the statement made last Saturday by the Association of Teachers and Researchers of Qum, a much-respected source of religious rulings, which has in effect come right out with it and said that the recent farcical and prearranged plebiscite in the country was just that: a sham event. (In this, the clerics of Qum are a lot more clear-eyed than many American "experts" on Iranian public opinion, who were busy until recently writing about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the rough-hewn man of the people.)

This shaky pretext self-justifies Hitchens in the ignorance of every internal dynamic in Iran, apart from Ayatollah Khomeini's "good" grandon Sayeed, in favour of an Iraqi platform:

Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about "the liberation of Iraq," he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran's regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a "let's pretend" election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.

The silver lining in this cloud of promoting, posturing and preening analysis is that it's much easier to expose by going to the real "experts" in this story, the folks getting information out of Iran by any means necessary. So, farewell, "Rise and Rise of Ahmadinejad". Bye bye, Christopher. Hello, new media.

Iran: How Big Were the 18 Tir Protests?

The Latest from Iran (10 July): What Next?

The Latest from Iran (18 Tir/9 July): Day of Reckoning?
LATEST Video: The 18 Tir Protests (9 July)

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We're not certain about the extent of the marches in Tehran yesterday (and, to be honest, I think the symbolic significance of the show of opposition outweighs any number), but others are trying to establish the size of the rallies.

CNN's assertion of 2,000 to 3,000 appears to be based on little more than a scattering of information and has not been updated for many hours. The New York Times, from either caution or an inability to establish what is happening, sticks with "thousands".

Far more insight, and possibly accuracy, comes from the "alternative" media on the Internet. Fintan Dunne offers a "guesstimate", based on videos, reports, and a knowledge of Tehran's geography, of 25,000. Josh Shahryar's "Green Brief", with an excellent summary of the day's events, puts out a figure of 35,000 in Tehran and, with less apparent support, "slightly more than twice as much...all over the country". (Thanks to Shahryar for the note he just sent me, clarifying that he means a total of more than 70,000 protesters across Iran, including the numbers in Tehran.)

Shahryar offers the valuable information, if true:

Large protests were fully confirmed in Ahvaz, Mashhad, Rasht, Isfahan, Tabriz, Sari, Hamadan, Babol, Kerman, Dezfol and Shiraz. Reports from Shiraz indicate that the protest there was probably the largest. Isfahan was a close second in terms of the number of people on the streets.