Tag Archives: iran

On Syria, Obama administration prepared to shoot now, ask questions later

August 27, 2013 Kevin Lees 5 Comments

Even before the United States has provided any public evidence that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is responsible for what appears to be a craven chemical warfare attack in Ghouta last Wednesday, the United States is preparing to launch missile strikes against Syria and Assad in retaliation as soon as Thursday, with the support of French president François Hollande and British prime minister David Cameron.

That marks a failure of U.S. president Barack Obama’s foreign policy in at least four senses.

The first is that we still don’t know what happened last Wednesday. We do know that a chemical attack of some variety ultimately killed many civilians, up to 1300, on the eastern outskirts of Damascus. But we don’t know which chemical agent caused it (was it sarin? was it concentrated tear gas? was it mustard or chlorine gas?) and, more importantly, we certainly don’t know who launched the attack. While the U.S., French and British governments assure us that Assad was responsible, the public evidence is far from certain. While the U.S. state department claims that a full intelligence assessment is coming later this week, it assures us for now that it’s ‘crystal clear’ that Assad is responsible. But how credible will that assessment be if it’s delivered hours or minutes before a U.S. military strike? If it’s delivered after the military strike? Will it contain forensics evidence gathered yesterday by United Nations experts? No one knows.

While Assad’s certainly a prime suspect, there’s more than enough reason to believe, in the absence of further intelligence or forensic evidence to the contrary, that anti-Assad rebels could well have perpetrated the attack to frame Assad and draw the international community (or at least the United States and Europe) into the kind of response that now seems likely to happen in the next 48 hours. At a minimum, the United States should wait for U.N. chemical weapons inspectors, who spent at least a short time on the scene of the attack yesterday, to draw what conclusions they can on the basis of hard evidence. What happens if we learn in one year or five years that radical Sunni elements within the opposition were responsible for the attack? That will only encourage false-flag attacks in the future designed to provoke the United States into inadvertently taking sides in a civil war.

The second is that it’s an uncharacteristically unilateral, hasty and severe response. Assume that we had proof that Assad is responsible for the chemical attacks. The next step would be to determine the appropriate response from the international community, and it is telling that the United States and its British and French allies believe that a military response should be the first step, not the last step. There’s a panoply of various responses that the United States is ready to bypass, all of which could bear the stamp of legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council. Those include a U.N. peacekeeping and/or further inspections forces, a NATO-led and UN-approved no-fly zone, a tighter regime of diplomatic and economic sanctions against the Assad regime, and a prosecution against Assad and his military leaders for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court. Moreover, given the current stalemate, Syria is now essentially split into three disparate parts: pro-Assad territory along the coast and the Lebanese border, anti-Assad territory in the north and Kurdish strongholds in the northeast:

With Assad regaining ground over the past months, it doesn’t look like the end of the civil war will come from a military triumph but from a political settlement. That makes an immediate military response (and not a political response) from the United States even more inappropriate. By all means, use the threat of military action as a negotiating point with Russia and Syria’s other allies on the Security Council. But by launching a hasty attack just eight days after the incident makes it seem to the rest of the world that the U.S. action is less concerned about punishment for chemical warfare, but rather salvaging the credibility of the Obama administration over an ill-advised ‘red line’ stand that Obama articulated last autumn in the heat of a presidential campaign. Continue reading On Syria, Obama administration prepared to shoot now, ask questions later →

Syria, United States

Kerry’s forceful remarks on Syria fail to explain why Assad’s to blame

August 26, 2013 Kevin Lees 3 Comments

U.S. secretary of state John Kerry this afternoon emerged with some strong remarks about the unfolding international situation with respect to Syria, where chemical weapons were unleashed last Wednesday upon civilians in Ghouta in the eastern outskirts of Damascus and that killed up to 1,300 people.

Max Fisher at The Washington Post writes that Kerry’s remarks amounted to a ‘war speech,’ that the Obama administration has all but decided to respond to the chemical attack with air strikes. I don’t disagree with that assessment, but the oddest thing about Kerry’s seven minutes on Syria was how much of it he spent arguing that the attacks were real — consider the following exchange:

Last night, after speaking with foreign ministers from around the world about the gravity of this situation, I went back and I watched the videos — the videos that anybody can watch in the social media, and I watched them one more gut-wrenching time. It is really hard to express in words the the human suffering that they lay out before us. As a father, I can’t get the image out of my head of a man who held up his dead child, wailing while chaos swirled around him, the images of entire families dead in their beds without a drop of blood or even a visible wound, bodies contorting in spasms, human suffering that we can never ignore or forget. Anyone who could claim that an attack of this staggering scale could be contrived or fabricated needs to check their conscience and their own moral compass. What is before us today is real, and it is compelling.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of John Kerry (pictured above) — he’s had a strong start at State and that follows a generally impeccable senatorial record of thoughtful engagement on foreign affairs. But with all due respect, I certainly hope the chief diplomat of the United States of America is spending more time reviewing the intelligence that the U.S., British and French governments allegedly have that implicates the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in the chemical attack than watching shock footage on YouTube.

No one is arguing that the attack was contrived or fabricated — it’s a horrific slaughter that deserves a united and firm response from the international community conveying that the use of chemical weapons to kill civilians, including women and children, is unacceptable. What remains at issue is determining who was responsible for the attack, and that’s why it was odd to watch Kerry spend more time knocking down a straw-man argument than explaining why the U.S. government is so sure that Assad was responsible for the attack. Earlier today, Saleh Muslim, head of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), who has clashed with both pro-Assad and anti-Assad forces, said that he doesn’t believe Assad is responsible for the attacks. It’s a real question, and the U.S. media and the rest of the world should demand an answer.

What’s staggering is that, with all signs pointing to U.S. and British military poised to launch some kind of strike against Assad, the Obama administration still hasn’t made the case for why it believes that Assad — and not anti-Assad extremists looking to draw the international community into Syria’s two-year civil war — is to blame. As many commentators have written, the timing of last week’s attack is incredibly suspicious, given that U.N. weapons inspectors were in Damascus during the attacks and that Assad has generally been gaining ground against the opposition, and there’s plenty of reason why the more radical elements among the anti-Assad opposition want to provoke the world’s ire against Assad.

It’s generally undisputed that Assad has stockpiled chemical weapons in the past, while we don’t know if any rebel group of the opposition now have access to them. But that’s hardly a smoking gun.

The fact that Assad denied U.N. experts to inspect the scene for five days (and then allowed only 90 minutes of access today) is highly suspicious. But in a court of law in the United States, that would amount to circumstantial evidence. Remember that Saddam Hussein hedged over whether he had weapons of mass destruction in 2002 and 2003 mostly because he wanted to deter neighboring Iran. Moreover, I can think of a half-dozen reasons why the Assad regime might hesitate to allow United Nations inspectors into the affected area. (If Assad wasn’t actually responsible for the chemical attack, do you think he has enough control to guarantee the safety of U.N. inspectors from anti-Assad rebels?)

The international community deserves more from the United States, given its track record of failed intelligence over the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (notably nuclear weapons) in Iraq in 2003. That ‘slam dunk’ intelligence justified an eight-year military effort that catalyzed massive amounts of violence in Iraq. New revelations this morning from Foreign Policy detailing the U.S. government’s complicity and acquiescence in the use of chemical weapons by then-ally Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war against Iran in the 1980s only underscore the troublesome record that the United States has accrued on this issue. Continue reading Kerry’s forceful remarks on Syria fail to explain why Assad’s to blame →

Syria, United States

U.S. says ‘very little doubt’ Assad responsible for Syrian chemical warfare, preps possible intervention

August 25, 2013 Kevin Lees 2 Comments

The international response to last Wednesday’s chemical warfare attack on the outskirts of Damascus is fast congealing, with U.S., British and French intelligence all pointing to the regime of Bashar al-Assad as the culprit.

An official in the administration of U.S. president Barack Obama said Sunday morning that there’s ‘very little doubt’ that Assad perpetrated the attack. French president François Hollande said earlier today that there was ‘a body of evidence indicating that the August 21 attack was chemical in nature, and that everything led to the belief that the Syrian regime was responsible for this unspeakable act.’

Obama and U.K. prime minister David Cameron have discussed the possibility of some form of military intervention, according to The Guardian and other news sources. Meanwhile, the Syrian regime, under pressure from its Russian and Iranian allies, has agreed to allow U.N. weapons experts to inspect the site of the attacks. In a sour irony, U.N. inspectors were already in Damascus earlier this week when the attack occurred for the purpose of determining the extent of potential chemical warfare earlier this spring.

The outset burden on Western governments is to connect the dots to make clear why they believe Assad is responsible — a decade ago, U.S. and British intelligence claimed they had a ‘slam dunk’ case that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, launching a unilateral attack on what turned out to be incorrect intelligence. If anything, there’s ample evidence in the revelations about PRISM and the Internet snooping by the U.S. National Security Agency that we shouldn’t necessarily take the governments of even liberal democracy at their word.

Remember that the timing of the chemical attacks is incredibly suspicious — Assad’s forces are generally winning via-à-vis the opposition forces in Syria, so it’s not incredibly clear why Assad would order a chemical attack now, especially under the noses of U.N. chemical weapons inspectors. But given the Obama administration’s position that use of chemical weapons is a ‘red line’ that, if crossed, will merit an international response, there’s every reason for opposition forces to use a small-scale attack to try to draw U.S. and European power against Assad, and other radical Sunni elements sympathetic to both the anti-Assad forces and terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are more than happy to bait the West into intervening in the Syrian civil war. But while it’s generally accepted that Assad has access to chemical weapons, it’s far less clear that any of the disparate rebel groups have them or have access to them.

Even if Assad is guilty of what amounts to a war crime, there’s still reason to tread lightly. If Assad is responsible, he should face a wide berth of sanction under international law — those might include further tightening economic and diplomatic sanctions against Assad, his inner circle and the Syrian military, action sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons or destroy his ability to deploy them in the future (including a no-fly zone), a fully empowered U.N. peacekeeping force, and an indictment from the International Criminal Court against Assad and the top military or other Syrian officials directly responsible for the chemical attack.

But even though U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel is preparing for ‘all contingencies,’ and U.S. warships in the eastern Mediterranean are already positioning for a potential attack, the international community can still respond in an affirmative way short of immediate U.S.-led military action. Moreover, if Assad were removed tomorrow, Syria would still face a power vacuum, the potential for even more intense fighting between Shi’a/Alawite and Sunni Muslims within Syria and jockeying among various opposition groups, which range from secular Assad opponents to very conservative Islamic fundamentalists. Those are just the known potential downsides for Syria — the unknown consequences and the potential adverse reaction in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East are more reason to tread lightly.

The next week is likely to bring even louder calls for the United States and/or the United Nations to act. To do something.

But the challenge for the Obama administration is that foreign policymaking in real time is very difficult, while political soundbytes are as easy as they are worthless. There’s obviously a role for U.S. and international leadership to register a stand for human rights and against crimes of humanity. But don’t trust anyone — in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in the Middle East — who has a ‘clear’ answer in mind for how the international community should now respond.

Don’t let hawks like U.S. senator John McCain convince you otherwise — the response to the latest turn in Syria’s conflict is more complicated than the polar choice of ‘doing nothing’ and launching a U.S.-led attack on Syria, guns-a-blazin’. Given the U.S. history of intervention in the Middle East, and the horrific sectarian violence that followed the U.S.-led removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, it would be less controversial for the United Nations — not the United States — to take the lead in the organizing the international response. Also don’t let liberal interventionists try to convince you that the United States should act immediately in order to avoid a Rwanda-style genocide in the Middle East. Though the international community largely stood aside while 800,000 Tustis were hacked to death by Hutus in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, they welcomed the belated French intervention that served to provide relief and refuge to the genocidaires themselves.

Syria, United States

Obama wisely treads softly in wake of Syrian chemical attack

August 23, 2013 Kevin Lees 1 Comment

In the aftermath of what now seems like a devastating and lethal chemical-weapons attack against thousands of civilians on the outskirts of Damascus early Wednesday, U.S. president Barack Obama is treading lightly on the evolving turn in the Syrian civil war — at least until we know more about the circumstances of the attack.

In an interview today with CNN, Obama measured his words very carefully about what action he believes the United States or the international community can or should take in the wake of what amounts to a violation of international law:

Asked about claims by anti-regime activists in Syria that Bashar al-Assad’s government used chemical weapons in an attack that was said to have killed more than 1,300 people, Obama responded that officials are “right now gathering information” and that “what we’ve seen indicates that this is clearly a big event of grave concern.”

“It is very troublesome,” the president stressed. Obama said U.S. officials are pushing “to prompt better action” from the United Nations, and are calling on the Syrian government to allow an investigation of the site of the alleged attack outside Damascus.

“We don’t expect cooperation (from the Syrian government), given their past history,” Obama conceded. He quickly followed up with a warning, however, that “core national interests” of the U.S. are now involved in Syria’s civil war, “both in terms of us making sure that weapons of mass destruction are not proliferating, as well as needing to protect our allies, our bases in the region.”

His words are certain to disappoint both neoconservatives on the U.S. right and liberal interventionists on the U.S. left (many of which populate key roles within his administration) who see the attack as a clear violation of international law and an invitation for an aggressive response from the international community. Already, U.S. senator John McCain is renewing calls for U.S. military intervention in Syria.

But there’s good reason for caution, and although it’s politically easier to make bold statements at a time of international crisis, Obama’s statement on Friday wisely reflects the ambiguity that we still know very little about the Syrian civil war, the anti-Assad opposition, the chemical attack itself and the potential unintended consequences of a more muscular U.S. or European response.

No one is comfortable to sit idly by when a thousand civilians have been gassed to death. But in a world where human rights activists and conservative hawks alike are quick to pass judgment on the Obama administration’s reaction, it’s worth taking a moment to applaud Obama’s restraint.

We still don’t yet know who is responsible for the chemical attack nor do we actually know exactly what the attack agent was (reports indicate it was perhaps sarin, mustard gas or chlorine gas, though we won’t know until soil samples and other evidence is examined). Although British foreign minister William Hague has gone further than the Obama administration in blaming Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad for the attack, the public evidence does not point to the clear conclusion that Hague has drawn. It’s widely accepted that Assad has access to chemical weapons, but after nearly two years of open civil war, it is not impossible for some of those weapons to have fallen into opposition hands — or worse.

The timing, most of all, is incredibly odd, as BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner and others have noted. If anything, Assad has been winning the civil war and reclaiming ground from the opposition. The opposition’s repeated attempts to form a unified front against Assad have been mixed at best. Meanwhile, a United Nations weapons inspection team was in Damascus this week to determine the extent of chemical warfare during the war. It seems incredibly unlikely that Assad, who’s gained the upper hand, would launch a chemical weapons attack the very week when UN inspectors are merely kilometers away. Allegations of previous chemical attacks stem from March and April — this is the first chemical attack in four months.

That opens the uncomfortable door to the notion that radical elements within the opposition, which ranges from secular Assad opponents to radical Sunni jihadists and al-Qaeda sympathizers, could have unleashed the attack. Knowing that it is losing, the chemical attack might have been a false-flag gambit designed to inflame international opinion against Assad, especially given the position that Obama has taken that chemical weapon use is a ‘red line’ that will merit international action. But it could be radical Islamic elements unassociated with the opposition, and it could be rogue elements of the Syrian army.

So far, Assad has refused to allow U.N. inspectors to examine the scene, which is an unacceptable response. Even Assad’s allies like Russia are calling on him to allow U.N. access, and the longer Assad hesitates, the guiltier his regime looks.

But even if Assad was responsible for the attack — the worst chemical warfare since Iraqi president Saddam Hussein unleashed chemical weapons in the 1980s against his own people and on the battlefield against Iran — there’s still reason to tread lightly. Continue reading Obama wisely treads softly in wake of Syrian chemical attack →

Iran

As Rowhani takes power, U.S. must now move forward to improve U.S.-Iran relations

August 6, 2013 Kevin Lees 6 Comments

In 1995, months before the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton found a peaceful solution at the Dayton peace talks to end the ethnic cleansing that had plagued Bosnia-Herzegovina for the previous four years, it found itself in the rare position of colluding with Iran to save Bosnian lives.

At the time, the United States was unable, under a United Nations arms embargo that prohibited the shipment of arms to any parties in the ongoing Bosnian civil war, to provide Bosnian Muslims with the arms necessary to protect themselves from Serbian aggression. The U.S. government suddenly found the Islamic Republic a useful ally. Iran, lacking the same qualms of violating the U.N. embargo as a permanent member of the U.S. Security Council, happily shipped clandestine weapons to Bosnian Muslims, a move that Clinton-era officials tacitly encouraged in public on the pages of The New York Times:

A senior Administration official insisted today that the White House neither approved nor endorsed the Iranians’ actions. But after months in which President Clinton and his aides have been unable to persuade American allies to allow arms to flow legally to the Bosnian Muslims, one adviser to Mr. Clinton called Teheran’s motivations in making the shipments “understandable.”

The new flow of arms and ammunition has not yet put Bosnian Muslim forces on the same plane as their better-armed Bosnian Serb rivals, Administration officials said. But with the shipments of small arms, ammunition and anti-tank weapons amounting to perhaps hundreds of tons, they said it had made the Bosnian Government a more formidable force as a four-month-old cease-fire is about to expire.

Two months after the Times reported the critical role Iran, then in the final years of the presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani, was playing to save Bosnian lives, Clinton signed an executive order banning U.S. businesses from trading with the Iranian government and implementing sanctions on oil and other trade with Iran. It was a missed opportunity to thaw the 16-year diplomatic rupture with the United States.

Fast forward six years to the presidency of liberal reformer Mohammed Khatami shortly after the horrific al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. Within weeks, the United States pushed the radical Taliban from power, and it did so on the strength of the Northern Alliance, a group that had not only received material support from Tehran in the years leading up to 2001, but had also received Tehran’s tacit encouragement to work with the United States. The Shiite government in Iran had much reason to be wary of both the radical Sunni, militant al-Qaeda, with its roots in the Arabian Peninsula to Iran’s west and the destabilizing Taliban to Iran’s east that had sent thousands of refugees into Iran by 2001. But it was also another fertile opportunity for U.S.-Iranian relations, just months after Khatami secured an easy reelection. As the Christian Science Monitor reported in October 2001:

Iran, which admitted last week that it has directed covert military and logistical support to the embattled Northern Alliance, also backs a transitional government that would give way to what one Foreign Ministry official has described as “a broad-based government set up under UN auspices.”

Iran’s reward at the time? Bush included it in his three-country ‘axis of evil’ alongside North Korea and Iraq in January 2002.

Now fast-forward to last weekend. During his inauguration on Sunday, Iran’s new president Hassan Rowhani urged a largely conciliatory and moderate course , contrasting sharply to the defiant, anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But as Rowhani (pictured above, right, with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) gets down to the business of governing Iran, U.S. officials should realize that Iranian leaders feel like they have been burned by the United States before. Continue reading As Rowhani takes power, U.S. must now move forward to improve U.S.-Iran relations →

Iran

Did Rowhani’s support in Iran outperform the potential of a Rafsanjani candidacy?

June 17, 2013 Kevin Lees 1 Comment

Hassan Rowhani’s runaway first-round victory in Iran’s June 14 presidential election was unexpected after many U.S. commentators had disregarded Rowhani’s chances when Iran’s Guardian Council refused to permit former president Hashemi Rafsanjani to run.

Before the Guardian Council’s decision, Rafsanjani was thought to have been the stronger candidate for Iran’s presidency, though by no means did anyone suggest Rafsanjani would be a shoo-in for victory.

It may well ironically turn out that Rowhani — and not Rafsanjani — proved to be the stronger candidate all along.

Rowhani, moreover, ultimately won election with the backing of the same coalition that Rafsanjani was expected to mobilize — moderates like Rowhani himself, more liberal reformists and followers of former president Mohammed Khatami, the ‘Green movement’ supporters who backed Mir-Hossein Mousavi, unsuccessfully, in the 2009 presidential race, and other who have become disenchanted with the outgoing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over Iran’s stumbling economy, stringent international sanctions over Iran’s nuclear energy program, and political freedoms.

Of course, we’ll never know whether Rafsanjani (pictured above, right, with Rowhani) would have been able to attract even more than the 18.6 million votes that Rowhani won in the election.

But it seems likely that Rowhani could have actually overperformed a hypothetical Rafsanjani candidacy (assuming that Rowhani would have dropped out of the race in deference to Rafsanjani).

In many ways, the Rowhani campaign offered all of the benefits of a Rafsanjani candidacy without any of the drawbacks.

Rowhani has been a strong Rafsanjani ally since the 1980s and the earliest days of the Islamic Republic, when Iran was locked in a fierce, decade-long border war with Iraq. When Rafsanjani became Iran’s president in 1989, he appointed Rowhani as the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, putting Rowhani at the head of Iran’s regional security as the Iraq war wound down. Khatami, upon assuming the presidency in 1997, retained Rowhani in that role, and he appointed Rowhani as the country’s first negotiator over Iran’s nuclear energy program in 2003, a position that Rowhani relinquished when the more hardline Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005.

As such, Rowhani’s victory is seen as somewhat of a victory for Rafsanjani, who is expected to return to influence as a guiding role in Rowhani’s administration:

“Rafsanjani was really the only choice to re-energize reformists,” said Rasool Nafisi, an Iranian affairs analyst at Strayer University in Virginia. “Rowhani only got their support because he is seen as Rafsanjani’s man and a vote for Rowhani was a vote for Rafsanjani.”

This deep connection between the two men could give a potential Rowhani presidency a dual nature: Rowhani as the public face and Rafsanjani behind the scenes as its powerful godfather and protector.

Although all key policies such the nuclear programme are directed by the ruling clerics, the alliance with Rafsanjani may give Rowhani more latitude to put his stamp on Iran’s negotiation tactics with world powers after four rounds of talks since last year have failed to make any significant headway.

But three weeks ago, it was not entirely clear which of Iran’s eight approved presidential candidates would emerge as the clearest voice of change — the runner-up in the presidential vote, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, came to the race as both a conservative ‘principlist,’ but also as a strident Ahmadinejad critic with a substantial base of support as Tehran’s mayor since 2005, a role in which Qalibaf has been viewed as a relatively effective executive by boosting Tehran’s green spaces, public transport and benefits for its poorest residents. Continue reading Did Rowhani’s support in Iran outperform the potential of a Rafsanjani candidacy? →

Iran

Moderate cleric Rowhani wins stunning first-round victory in Iran presidential election

June 15, 2013 Kevin Lees 33 Comments

Hassan Rowhani, the moderate cleric and former Iranian nuclear negotiator, has won a first-round victory in Iran’s presidential election, a stunning development that, despite evidence of Rowhani’s surge, no one predicted even 24 hours ago.

The victory was so stunning over a divided field of more conservative ‘principlist’ candidates that it calls into question the strategy of leading principlists to have remained in the race so long, thereby dividing conservative support and prohibiting the emergence of a single principlist standard-bearer.

With all of the votes counted, Iran’s ministry of the interior reports a turnout of just over 72% in the race, and Rowhani’s 50.71% support is sufficient to avoid a runoff with Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf on June 21:

It’s no surprise that Qalibaf finished in second place, given the fact that he has a strong base of supporters in Tehran, where he’s served as mayor since 2005 and has been twice elected by the city council, and that he’s long been a critic of the administration of outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The two candidates most associated with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — current nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and longtime former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati — did even worse, despite reports that proclaimed Jalili a ‘frontrunner’ in the campaign. Jalili, with just over 11% of the vote, only narrowly outpaced third-time candidate Mohsen Rezai, the former head of the Revolutionary Guards who’s popular with rural Iranian voters. Velayati finished far behind in fifth place with just 6.18% of the vote.

Meanwhile, Rowhani has consolidated the support of three main groups in Iran: reformists, moderate conservatives, and voters disillusioned with the outgoing Ahmadinejad’s failures on economic growth and international relations. Continue reading Moderate cleric Rowhani wins stunning first-round victory in Iran presidential election →

Iran

What U.S. commentators get wrong about Iran — and why Iran’s election matters

June 14, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes in The Atlantic this morning that Iran has a ‘presidential selection,’ not a presidential election.

That will come as some surprise to Iran’s 75 million citizens, many of whom have turned out today to participate in the first of what is likely to be two votes to determine who will succeed outgoing Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Moreover, the ultimate winner of the election will pay a vital role in shaping policy for the struggling Iranian economy over the next four years and, more crucially for the United States, help determine the tone that Iran will take with respect to ongoing P5+1 negotiations over the future of Iran’s nuclear energy program.

Iran’s democracy is, shall we say, less than perfect from any objective standards of democracy — Western, Islamic or otherwise.

But Dubowitz is essentially arguing that the election has no consequences:

But Iranian voters know better. The election may indicate changes in the interfactional balance of power within the regime, and a victory by [Hassan] Rouhani or [Mohammad Baqer] Qalibaf may temper the tone of the regime’s nuclear intransigence, but there will be no change in substance. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, election in reality means selection. [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei will remain in charge.

But that Khamenei will remain in charge is a coals-to-Newcastle argument. Today’s election is for president, not for Supreme Leader.

We may not like it, but the dual roles of the Supreme Leader and the Iranian president are part of the system of Iran’s government for over three decades. You can, perhaps, think of the Supreme Leader as a strong head of state and the president as the head of government. It’s perhaps easier to think of Iran’s president as akin to a prime minister — Iran had a prime minister in the 1980s, but the office ended in 1989, largely because of the overlap between the president and the prime minister. It’s arguable that Iran’s president has more independence from the Supreme Leader than, in effect, French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has from French president François Hollande.

Perhaps Iran’s is not the most representative system, but it’s more representative than the dictator-for-life model that Hosni Mubarak effected in Egypt for three decades with the full bipartisan support of U.S. policymakers. It’s also more representative than the current system of selecting the leadership of the People’s Republic of China as well.

Dubowitz is right that there are many reasons to cast doubt on the role of the Guardian Council, a gatekeeper body comprised of 12 members, six appointed by the Supreme Leader and six by Iran’s conservative-dominated parliament. Despite hundreds of hopeful presidential candidates, the Guardian Council approved just eight candidates to run in today’s election, though two have already dropped out. The Guardian Council has never approved a woman to run for the presidency, and its dubious refusal to approve former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate seen as the best shot in 2013 for reformist-minded voters, calls into question the even-handedness of the Guardian Council.

It also refused to allow Ahmadinejad’s chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei to run, though many believe Mashaei’s campaign was a stalking-horse candidacy designed to provide Ahmadinejad a way to continue to influence policy despite a limit of two consecutive presidential terms.

Without doubt, these disqualifications (and Guardian Council interference in other minor elections, such as for Tehran’s city council, and in Iran’s parliamentary elections last year) call into question whether Iran’s odd style of democracy is as robust as it once was. Remember that eight years ago, the relatively unknown Ahmadinejad leapt over many more experienced rivals into the presidency on a conservative and populist agenda, and 16 years ago, reformist dark-horse candidate Mohammed Khatami won the presidency in a landslide as well. Continue reading What U.S. commentators get wrong about Iran — and why Iran’s election matters →

Iran

Voting wrapping up in Iran’s presidential election

June 14, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

It’s only 10 a.m. on the U.S. east coast, but that means we’re approaching nighttime in Tehran — it’s now 6:30 p.m. and voters are finishing a day of voting to select a new president.

All of the candidates, plus Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (pictured above), have cast their ballots in what is expected to be just the first round of the election. With eight candidates originally approved to run by Iran’s Guardian Council and with six candidates remaining in the race today, it seems unlikely that any single candidate will win the 50%-plus support required to avoid a runoff of the top two vote-winners next Friday, June 21.

Polls showed that the most likely runoff would be between moderate cleric Hassan Rowhani, Iran’s former nuclear energy negotiator, and conservative ‘principlist’ Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, though I have argued that the race is so fluid that any of the top five candidates could wind up in the runoff, including current nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati and the former head of the Revolutionary Guards Mohsen Rezai.

The winner will replace outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, himself the former mayor of Tehran, whose populist focus on economic issues swept him to power in 2005 and to reelection in 2009, though his relationship with the Supreme Leader has frayed in recent years and many of the current candidates have blamed him for Iran’s economic woes and the international sanctions and diplomatic isolation that Iran suffers today.

Despite initial disappointment at the Guardian Council’s refusal to permit former president Hashemi Rafsanjani to run, the race has turned out to be incredibly competitive, and the six candidates represent a relatively wide diversity, as far as Iranian elections go. Candidates come from both the ‘founding’ generation of the 1979 revolution that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic and the younger generation that came of age during the brutal war with Iraq in the 1980s. Candidates also come from both the principlist camps and the moderate/reformist camps.

Far from boycotting the race, Rafsanjani and former president Mohammed Khatami have urged voters to back Rowhani, and Khatami’s vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, dropped out the race earlier this week in favor of Rowhani, and former supporters of the 2009 presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the ‘Green movement’ are likely to back Rowhani as well.

I’ll have additional thoughts when the winner(s) of the race become clear. In the meanwhile, you can follow all of my coverage of the Iranian election here.

Iran

Rowhani, Qalibaf appear to lead polls to top Friday’s vote, advance to June 21 runoff

June 12, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

Polling is an inexact science in Iran, so most polls should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.

But the field poll data coming from the U.S.-based Information and Public Opinion Solutions is more reliable than most, even though it’s not based in Tehran, because it conducts daily telephone interviews with a sample of over 1,000 potential voters within Iran.

The bottom line is that a runoff seems increasingly likely and, although that runoff seems likeliest to be a faceoff between conservative Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and moderate Hassan Rowhani, that’s by no means a certainty. I continue to believe that any of the five leading candidates could ultimately wind up in the runoff, especially if former longtime foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati withdraws from the race in the next 48 hours in favor of Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, which remains a possibility, given that both candidates are viewed has having the closest ties to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989. That’s especially true if you believe that the 2009 presidential vote was subject to massive electoral fraud — in such case, it seems possible that Rowhani could be excluded through chicanery. But despite the fact that he’s the most reformist of the six remaining candidate, Rowhani is the only cleric in the race, he has a solid relationship with Khamenei.

The latest results show Rowhani moving for the first time into the lead with 26.6% of the vote at the same time that former presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami have endorsed him. Rafsanjani, a political moderate, had registered to run for president in the election, but he was disqualified by the Guardian Council, a 12-member body close to the Supreme Leader that certifies candidates to run for office in Iran. The reformist Khatami, who had supported Rafsanjani’s presidential bid, indicated his support for Rowhani after his former vice president Mohammad Reza Aref dropped out of the race on Monday in favor of Rowhani. Rowhani’s support has steadily increased from a poll last week that showed him with just 8.1%. (Online polls have shown Rowhani and Aref with much wider support, but those seem skewed toward wealthier, more urban voters likelier to support more liberal candidates like Rowhani and Aref).

For the first time in an IPOS poll, the more ‘principlist’ conservative mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, has slipped into second place. Despite Qalibaf’s position as a conservative, he’s been a relatively popular mayor and is expected to do well among voters in Tehran, which is home to over 12 million of Iran’s 75 million people. Last week, however, Qalibaf held a much wider lead with 39% of the vote, though his lead seems to be shrinking as more undecided voters (57% of all voters last week) ultimately choose a candidate to support:

The third-place candidate, according to the poll, is Mohsen Rezai, whose support seems to be incredibly stable — 16.3% today and 16.6% last week. Rezai, the former head of the Revolutionary Guards, is seen as a more independent-minded conservative, and he pulls much of his strength from rural Iran and from within Iran’s military forces. Continue reading Rowhani, Qalibaf appear to lead polls to top Friday’s vote, advance to June 21 runoff →

Iran

The incredibly shrinking president: Ahmadinejad’s subdued role in Iran’s presidential race

June 12, 2013 Kevin Lees 2 Comments

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has never been one to shrink from a political battle — not during his breakthrough 2005 presidential campaign to his heated, not in his routine, over-the-top attacks against the United States and Israel, and not in his more recent fights with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei over personnel and other policy disputes.

Ahmadinejad is limited to two consecutive presidential terms and therefore is not eligible to run for reelection in this month’s presidential race, so it was always certain that he would fade somewhat to the background as the race focuses on the six candidates hoping to succeed him. But it’s staggering to note just how minor a role Ahmadinejad has played in the campaign, especially in light of the fact that he was very recently attempting to boost Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, his chief of staff, to the presidency, thereby giving Ahmadinejad a key role in Iranian affairs even after his own administration ends.

But the Guardian Council refused to permit Mashaei, to run for president earlier in May when it also disqualified former president Hashemi Rafsanjani as well. When Ahmadinejad tried to make Mashaei Iran’s first vice president in 2009, Khamenei made a rare and direct intervention into domestic politics to overrule the decision and ordered Ahmadinejad to replace Mashaei. Since his reelection four years ago, Ahmadinejad’s growing rift with principlists loyal to Khamenei have increasingly isolated him within Iran’s domestic political sphere.

One of the reasons why Mashaei is believed to be such a unique threat to the Supreme Leader is that he’s been willing to champion a form of Persian nationalism that harkens back to the time before Shi’a Islam took root in what’s now modern-day Iran. Mashaei’s ties to Ahmadinejad were forged three decades ago, when Mashaei served in the Revolutionary Guards and in Iran’s intelligence ministry during the 1980s war with Iraq. He joined Ahmadinejad’s city government when Ahmadinejad became Tehran’s mayor in 2003, and he held a key advisory role during Ahmadinejad’s first presidential term.

But there are other reasons why Khamenei and his conservative ‘principlist’ allies have been wary of Mashaei, including conciliatory comments towards Israel — he once remarked that Iranians are friends of Israelis. Furthermore, in a country where presidents are required to have religious as well as political credentials, religious conservatives have called Mashaei a ‘deviant’ due to Mashaei’s relatively relaxed views on matters such as the role of music and dancing in Iranian life to the wearing of the hijab. Ahmadinejad responded to Mashaei’s disqualification by claiming that Mashaei was ‘wronged,’ adding that he hoped Khamenei would intervene and call upon the Guardian Council to reconsider its decision, but those calls have been met with silence from both the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council.

Since then, however, Ahmadinejad has remained uncharacteristically subdued, in a way that mirrors the relatively quiet role that the unpopular former U.S. president George W. Bush — a longtime Ahmadinejad foil — played in the 2008 presidential election.

Although critics of Iran’s political system have charged that the eight candidates approved by the Guardian Council are all conservatives (the field has now whittled down to six after two hopefuls dropped out earlier this week), they nonetheless represent a fairly wide range of generational, clerical and ideological diversity. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s turbulent eight years in office have as been the target of much criticism throughout the election campaign, including as to his handling of Iran’s sputtering economy, growing inflation, widespread unemployment, and the way in which he’s isolated Iran’s position internationally, which has led to economic sanctions that have only exacerbated Iran’s economic woes.

None of the candidates in the race seem incredibly inclined to embrace Ahmadinejad.

The one potential exception is Saeed Jalili, Iran’s current negotiator with the P5+1 international powers over Iran’s nuclear energy program. Heralded as a frontrunner by the Western and Iranian media alike, Jalili is the closest thing to an incumbent in the race, and he’s absorbed criticism from both principlist candidates (such as Ali Akbar Velayati, a top international adviser to the Supreme Leader) and reformist candidates (such as Hassan Rowhani, who took a more conciliatory tone as Iran’s nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005). Continue reading The incredibly shrinking president: Ahmadinejad’s subdued role in Iran’s presidential race →

United States

Remembering Medgar Evers and the fight for civil rights

June 12, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

Exactly 50 years ago today — on June 12, 1963 — a young 37-year-old civil rights activist was brutally shot in the back in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

That young activist, Medgar Evers, had spent his tragically truncated life as the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a role in which he helped James Meredith break the segregation barrier in order to become the first black male to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Evers today has entered the pantheon of American heroes. His remains lie in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. If you fly into Jackson today, you’ll fly into Mississippi’s largest airport, which is now named in honor of Evers. But at the time, his murderer was twice freed after a jury, comprised solely of white men, refused to convict him — he was convicted only in 1994 on the basis of new evidence.

In the 50 years since Evers death, the United States has become a much more equal place — after all, it elected its first non-white president five years ago, and it’s had two black secretaries of state. The world of white privilege and segregation that Evers — and Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders of the 1960s — fought to tear down is unrecognizable today.

But that doesn’t mean the cause for civil rights is over. Within the United States alone, black Americans remain far behind, as a group, on terms of socioeconomic gains. Immigrants to the United States, many of whom came to this country as young children, remain in painful legal limbo. Gay and lesbian Americans struggle not just for the right to same-sex marriage, but the right to live, work and exist without prejudice. A U.S. prison population in excess of seven million people (though that number is starting to decline), many of who are in prison for non-violent offenses, faces innumerable challenges to even their basic safety behind bars. The revelations of the NSA and PRISM programs show that the U.S. government continues to push forward with new surveillance tools that, though they may enhance homeland security, innumerably reduce global privacy rights.

That highlights the fact that the lines between greater civil rights in the United States and greater civil rights globally has blurred. In many ways, the work of Medgar Evers is now a broader, globalized struggle. U.S. activists work alongside European, Asia, Arab and African activists to challenge inequality worldwide.

In Mauritania and elsewhere in the Sahel, the fight continues against the continued practice of human slavery.
In Turkey, the crackdown this week of protesters at Taksim Square by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have highlighted the fact that the biggest threat isn’t creeping Islamism, but the more garden-variety illiberal disregard for basic civil rights like freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and deeper abuses of power that have hollowed out Turkey’s democracy.
Even as western Europe enters a world of same-sex marriage equality, many pockets of the world feature significant hurdles for gay and lesbian individuals — sub-Saharan Africa continues to treat gay activists with brutality and just yesterday, Russia passed a troublingly broad anti-gay law.
In Iran, moderate presidential candidate Hassan Rowhani has pushed for the loosening of political and cultural censorship and greater political freedoms within the framework of Iran’s existing Islamic republic.
In the People’s Republic of China, residents of Hong Kong marched last week on the occasion of the anniversary of the government crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The Arab Spring protests of 2011 — from Bahrain to Tunisia to Egypt — have made political participation unavoidable throughout the Arab world, even if new majoritarian Islamist governments now face new civil rights challenges in finding a way to make Islamic democracy work without introducing new elements of religious, political and gender-based inequality.
A few hundred miles from the coast of Florida, Haitians continue to suffer from some of the worst poverty in the world, exacerbated by the tolls taken by the 2010 earthquake.

So as today’s more globalized fight for civil rights continues, it’s worth reflecting today to remember Evers and an entire generation of Americans who defined much of the content of what we think of as ‘civil rights’ in their fight for racial equality in the United States half a century ago.

Bottom photo credit to Kevin Lees — Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, May 2012.

Iran

And then there were six: the dwindling Iranian presidential field

June 11, 2013 Kevin Lees 2 Comments

It’s been a fast-paced 36 hours in Iran’s presidential election, with two of the eight approved candidates exiting of the race following Friday’s third and final presidential debate.

Monday brought news that Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel would drop out of the election, reducing the number of conservative ‘principlists’ competing for votes in the first round of the June 14 presidential race. Haddad-Adel, who served as the speaker of Iran’s Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majles) from 2004 to 2008, and whose daughter is married to the son of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, did not specify an endorsement for any particular candidate, though he previously belonged to the ‘2+1 Principlist’ coalition that included former longtime foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati and Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, and his exit from the race will likely mean fewer votes spread among Velayati, Qalibaf and Iran’s current top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili (pictured above preparing for a recent presidential debate).

Today brings the news that Mohammad Reza Aref will also drop out in favor of moderate candidate Hassan Rowhani, which gives moderates and reformists a chance to unite behind one candidate. Aref, who served as communications minister and vice president under former reformist president Mohammed Khatami, allegedly ended his presidential bid after Khatami asked him to step down. Khatami has now endorsed Rowhani, who is seen as more of a moderate than a reformist. Rowhani is very close to former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was controversially disqualified in May to stand as a candidate in the current election by the Guardian Council. It’s a development that wasn’t entirely unexpected, and to the extent reformists and moderates don’t boycott the election entirely, it is very good news for Rowhani, who can try to unite to reformist and moderate camps in the hours ahead of Friday’s vote.

So where does that leave the six-candidate field? Realistically, it’s a five-man race. Though he remains a candidate, it’s hard to believe that Mohammad Gharazi could win. Although he served as Iran’s oil minister from 1981 to 1985 and as communications minister from 1985 to 1997, he’s a leftist in the mould of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who served as prime minister in the 1980s before his resurrection as a reformist presidential candidate in 2009. He’s run a campaign focused largely on economic management and controlling inflation.

The remaining five — three principlists, another independent conservative and a reformist/moderate — are not so much vying to win outright on Friday so much as vying to win one of two spots in a runoff that will be held on the following Friday, June 21 in the event that no candidate wins over 50%. If that happens, as seems likely, there’s really no way to know who will emerge in the top two spots. Though polling is not incredibly reliable in Iranian elections, a recent telephone poll by the U.S.-based IPOS indicates 57% of Iranians have not yet decided but, among those who have, Qalibaf has a wide lead of around 40% against the remaining four candidate essentially tied for second between around 10% and 20%. That generally corresponds to other field polls, though Rowhani has led other similar polls. Rowhani has led the lion’s share of unscientific online polls since the campaign began in earnest, but those are even less reliable indicators of true support.

So what are the chances for each of those five candidates? Here’s a look at the pros and cons of each candidate, and how each would shape up in a potential runoff. Continue reading And then there were six: the dwindling Iranian presidential field →

Iran

How the West could learn to stop worrying and love a nuclear Iran

June 10, 2013 Kevin Lees 3 Comments

No issue looms larger in Iran’s foreign relations than its nuclear program and global fears that Iran’s nuclear energy program could quickly transform into a nuclear weapons program.

So it was with some sadness last month that one of the pioneers of international relations theory, Kenneth Waltz died just days before the Iranian election, which the entire world is watching in large part for its implications for Iran’s nuclear program.

Waltz, a founder of the realist school of international relations, may perhaps have been most well-known in recent years for his argument that we should welcome nuclear proliferation because nation-states act more responsibly with nuclear arms than without them. So even assuming the worst intentions of Iran’s nuclear program — that it’s not only pursuing nuclear energy, but it’s also clandestinely developing a breakout capability to build a nuclear weapon — the West should not be so concerned with Iran’s nuclear machinations. Moreover, it should embrace Iran’s entry into the nuclear club, as Waltz himself argued in Foreign Affairs last summer:

History shows that when countries acquire the bomb, they feel increasingly vulnerable and become acutely aware that their nuclear weapons make them a potential target in the eyes of major powers. This awareness discourages nuclear states from bold and aggressive action. Maoist China, for example, became much less bellicose after acquiring nuclear weapons in 1964, and India and Pakistan have both become more cautious since going nuclear. There is little reason to believe Iran would break this mold.

As you might realize, this is a controversial position, and others have argued that Waltz’s views are irresponsible and short-sighted, though I’ve always found that Waltz’s reasoning on nuclear weapons makes a lot of sense. For many reasons, however, no one should expect that the United States will follow Waltz’s advice anytime soon.

Moreover, it’s worth noting very clearly that Iran is not necessarily seeking to develop nuclear weapons, but rather simply an alternative energy program. That would enable the Islamic Republic to export more of its copious fossil fuels, and it’s a goal that U.S. policymakers actually nurtured in the 1950s, 1960 and 1970s during the rule of Iran’s shah, who was deposed in the 1979 revolution that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic. As Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett note in their new book on U.S.-Iranian relations, Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran (which is a very compelling read, even if Roger Cohen and much of the official Washington commentariat have written it off as apology for the Iranian regime), a nuclear weapons program is unlawful under Islamic law, a constraint that the Leveretts argue is ‘more substantial than most Western analysts appreciate’:

Ahmadinejad has described nuclear weapons as a ‘fire against humanity,’ charging that ‘to have a nuclear bomb is not only a dishonor; it’s obscene and shameful. Threatening to use it and using it is even more shameful.’… As recently as 2012, [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei reiterated his stance that, from an ideological and fiqhi [Islamic jurisprudence] perspective, we consider developing nuclear weapons as unlawful. We consider using such weapons as a big sin.’

Even if you aren’t as sanguine as the Leveretts that Iran’s leaders are not pursuing nuclear weapons, that doesn’t matter under Waltz’s analysis, because he’s argued that it’s in Iran’s national interest to pursue at least the capability of nuclear weaponry in light of Israel’s longstanding (though unofficial) nuclear capability:

Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly, which has proved remarkably durable for the past four decades, has long fueled instability in the Middle East. In no other region of the world does a lone, unchecked nuclear state exist. It is Israel’s nuclear arsenal, not Iran’s desire for one, that has contributed most to the current crisis. Power, after all, begs to be balanced. What is surprising about the Israeli case is that it has taken so long for a potential balancer to emerge.

Waltz, like the Leveretts, have argued that the West, generally, and the United States, specifically, have systemically assumed that Iran’s Islamic leadership means it will not respond to the typical deterrents that constrain nuclear-armed nation-states and that Iran will not act rationally in its national interest if it acquires a nuclear weapon. But despite Iranian support for Hezbollah and other groups that have at times wreaked major havoc throughout the Middle East, there’s really no tangible support for that view of Iran, which has conducted a foreign policy over the past 30 years that’s been more defensive than offensive. It was an U.S.-backed Iraq, after all, that launched an invasion of Iran shortly after the revolution. Even in light of often heated and inappropriate rhetoric against Israel’s right to exist, Iran has never launched a full-frontal military attack on Israel, despite some evidence that Israel has helped assassinate several of Iran’s top nuclear scientists and its demonstrated willingness in the past 30 years to launch preemptive strikes against other Middle Eastern states, including Iraq and Syria.

As Waltz wrote:

Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, Iranian policy is made not by “mad mullahs” but by perfectly sane ayatollahs who want to survive just like any other leaders. Although Iran’s leaders indulge in inflammatory and hateful rhetoric, they show no propensity for self-destruction. It would be a grave error for policymakers in the United States and Israel to assume otherwise.

Yet that is precisely what many U.S. and Israeli officials and analysts have done. Portraying Iran as irrational has allowed them to argue that the logic of nuclear deterrence does not apply to the Islamic Republic. If Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, they warn, it would not hesitate to use it in a first strike against Israel, even though doing so would invite massive retaliation and risk destroying everything the Iranian regime holds dear.

The biggest criticism against Waltz is that he too breezily dismisses otherwise valid concerns that nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of more radical terrorist groups or other non-state actors. But it seems unlikely that Iran would hand over nukes to Hezbollah or Hamas or anyone other related groups because any such nuclear attack would invariably be linked to Iran, even if Iran didn’t turn out to be the ultimate source. (Let’s keep in mind that U.S. intelligence couldn’t tell the difference in 2002 the difference between a genuine nuclear program in Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s bluffing to make Iran think he had weapons of mass destruction). Furthermore, the risk of ‘loose nukes’ seems even greater in the context of the former Soviet Union or, more forebodingly, Pakistan, whose civilian government and military do not even exert territorial dominance throughout the entire country.

No one seriously believes that U.S. negotiators are simply going to relent to Iran’s nuclear energy program so long as it could facilitate the building of an Iranian nuclear weapon, though. Talks have stalled throughout Ahmadinejad’s second term over the issue of whether Iran will allow its uranium to be enriched abroad, and while the chance of a military encounter between Iran and the United States remains relatively low, it’s not wholly out of the realm of possibility, and an Israeli strike against Iran could quickly escalate.

But Iran’s presidential election could provide a way for the United States and its allies, on the one hand, and Iran, on the other hand, to mark a pivot point from the current impasse in two regards. First, the next Iranian president could be much more open to conciliation than Ahmadinejad ever was. Second, with the election firmly in the past, the occasion of a new president could be an opportunity for renewal of negotiations, regardless of the election’s winner. Continue reading How the West could learn to stop worrying and love a nuclear Iran →

Iran

In Depth: Iran

June 1, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

<See below Suffragio’s preview of Iran’s June 2013 presidential election, followed by a real-time listing of all coverage of Iranian politics.>

Citizens in the Islamic Republic of Iran will select a new president on June 14 from among eight pre-vetted candidates.

Under Iran’s unique system, the ultimate authority is the Supreme Leader, who controls the military as well as virtually all other branches of government, including the executive. Upon the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979, grand ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Iraq and France to become its first Supreme Leader. Upon his death in 1989, ayatollah Ali Khamenei (pictured above, with Kohmeini in background) was appointed Supreme Leader and has held the office in the ensuing 24 years.

The Supreme Leader is appointed by the Assembly of Experts, an 86-member body of Islamic scholars elected to eight-year terms. The Assembly of Experts also has the power to oversee and even dismiss the Supreme Leader although, in practice, its members are essentially subservient. Its current chair, since 2011, is Mohammad Kani, a conservative loyal to Khamenei.

The Iranian president, elected directly for a four-year term, with a limit of two consecutive terms, remains subservient to the Supreme Leader. Although Iran’s president can set both foreign and domestic policy, in practice, the president can do very little without the consent of the Supreme Leader. Since 1981, Iran has had four presidents, and each of them has served two full terms:

Ali Khamenei, 1981 — 1989. Khamenei, before his elevation to Supreme Leader, served as Iran’s president in the 1980s when the country was focused on a difficult war against Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980 after the Islamic Revolution, in large part due to fears that Iran’s Shi’a majority would embolden the Shi’a minority in his own country. Although Iran regained its territory by 1982, the war lasted for another six years and featured the use of chemical weapons by Iraqi forces against Iranians, and anywhere from 300,000 to 900,000 Iranians were killed.

Hashemi Rafsanjani, 1989 — 1997. Rafsanjani’s presidency focused on rebuilding Iran after its costly war with Iran and transitioning its role in the Middle East following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the increased building of U.S. forces in the Middle East following the Cold War, notably during the 1990-91 war against Iraq to liberate Kuwait.

Mohammed Khatami, 1997 — 2005. Khatami emerged as a dark-horse candidate to win the 1997 presidential election and remains Iran’s most prominent reformist voice. Under his leadership, he achieved limited gains in relaxing freedoms within Iran, and he continued Rafsanjani’s approach toward conciliation with the United States and Europe, especially with respect to Iran’s nuclear energy program, which emerged as a hot-button issue in the early 2000s in light of U.S. and Israeli fears that a nuclear-powered Iran could easily pursue a nuclear weapons program.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 2005 — 2013. Ahmadinejad (pictured below) won the presidency in 2005 over Rafsanjani as a conservative populist who focused on Iran’s economic woes. The former mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad came to office as a voice of the poorer working class, unlike his predecessors. Unlike Khatami and Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad’s administration has taken a harder line with respect to the West, especially in defense of Iran’s sovereign right to develop nuclear energy. That’s left Iran subject to U.N. sanctions and other measures that have largely left it isolated diplomatically and struggling economically at the end of Ahmadinejad’s second term.

Iran’s unicameral legislature is called the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majles), and it’s comprised of 290 directly elected members. It’s not nearly as powerful as the Supreme Leader, the president or even the Guardian Council, but it has significant powers with respect to Iran’s public budget. In the most recent parliamentary elections, conservatives won around 180 seats, of which around 100 were ‘principlists’ loyal to Khamenei and only around 40 of which were conservative loyalists of Ahmadinejad, with around 70 seats going to reformists and moderates of various stripes and around 20 seats going to religious minorities, including Armenian Christians and Jews. Its speaker, since 2008, has been Ali Larijani.

The more powerful Guardian Council is a body of 12 members, six of which are appointed by the Majles and six of which are appointed by the Supreme Leader, which has the power to interpret laws passed by the Majles and other constitutional issues. Its chief role, however, is vetting and approving candidates who run for public office — including candidates for president.

The current presidential election takes place under the backdrop of the fraught 2009 election, in which Ahmadinejad officially defeated former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi by 66.6% to 33.9%, though Mousavi’s supporters launched the ‘Green movement’ protests in response, alleging voter fraud. Although the evidence of actual fraud was not incredibly strong, the Supreme Leader and his supporters responded with vigor to put down the protests, placing Mousavi and key reformist allies under house arrest (they remain so even today) and placing many activists in detention.

Former president Rafsanjani, who registered to run for president in 2013, and was rejected as a candidate by the Guardian Council in May 2013, had hewn a middle road between Khamenei and the protestors throughout the 2009 post-election crisis, supporting the Supreme Leader but also subtly criticizing the heavy-handed response.

The election will come down to eight candidates and, if no single candidate wins a majority of the vote, the two top contenders will face off in a June 21 runoff.

Those candidates are, as announced by the Guardian Council:

Mohammad Reza Aref, the reformist candidate, who served as Khatami’s communications minister and vice president.
Hassan Rowhani, a moderate candidate with ties to Rafsanjani, a former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and its chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005.
Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a ‘principlist’ conservative, who succeeded Ahmadinejad as Tehran’s mayor in 2005 and has been a relatively aggressive Ahmadinejad critic.
Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel, a principlist and the former speaker of the Majles in the mid-2000s, whose daughter is married to the Supreme Leader’s son.
Ali Akbar Velayati, a principlist and currently a top advisor to the Supreme Leader on international affairs and Iran’s foreign minister from 1981 to 1997.
Saeed Jalili, a principlist, and the current head of the Supreme National Security Council and Iran’s current nuclear negotiator, who has strong connections to conservatives tied to both Khamenei and to Ahmadinejad.
Mohsen Rezai, a conservative who formerly headed the Revolutionary Guards and who unsuccessfully ran in 2005 and 2009 as well.
Mohammad Gharazi, a former oil minister and communications minister in the 1980s and the 1990s.