Much like the bellicose conservatives in the United States, the hardliners of Iran are unable to accept that they are not the anointed of the masses. Rohollah Faghihi reports in AL Monitor on the objections of the hardliners to the results of the recent Presidential election won by Reformist and current President Rouhani – and, somehow, their objections sound faintly familiar:
In remarks published May 22 on the Telegram channel of the hard-line Raja News, Ebrahim Raisi, the leading conservative candidate in the election, asserted that the alleged violations were not of a limited scope and that he is pursuing the matter through the Guardian Council.
Moreover, Ali Nikzad, head of Raisi’s campaign, said that same day, “Seyyed Ebrahim is like a mother who left his baby to prevent him from being hurt, and the baby fell [into the hands] of the stepmother.” In other words, Nikzad is alleging voting fraud, but for the sake of Iran’s national security Raisi has not publicly announced anything — and that is why Rouhani is now president.
Raisi wrote a letter dated May 21 to Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the conservative chairman of the Guardian Council — the body tasked with vetting candidates and probing objections to voting results. In the letter, Raisi asked Jannati to look into violations of the law before and during the elections. He also attached 100 pages of documentation to supposedly substantiate his allegations.
On the same day, in an interview with the state-run Arabic news channel Al-Alam, Guardian Council spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaie rejected the notion that there had been major violations during the voting process, stating, “Though there were minor violations, fortunately the violations weren’t so important that they would compel us to stop the election process.” Moreover, in a short message published May 22 on his Telegram channel, Kadkhodaie advised Raisi and his supporters to accept the results of the elections.
A particularly striking echo:
… Hossein Shariatmadari — editor of the hard-line daily Kayhan — claimed May 21 that Raisi’s votes could have been twice that of Rouhani had it not been for “violations of the law” by the Rouhani-controlled Interior Ministry, which oversees elections.
An amazing assertion, isn’t it? But to the chagrin of the hardliners, the election of the relatively moderate Rouhani, rather than the more hardline Raisi, leaves in place the JCPOA (aka the Iran Nuclear Deal), and so the most easily understood result of recent years confrontation should remain inviolate – at least from that side of the table.
An immediate question is, of course, whether the current Trump Administration will “tear it up” as some of his rivals suggested, despite the judgment of most experts that it’s a good agreement. But I think a more subtle point, which this Administration may miss, is the continued and subtle influence on Iranian politics of previous Administration policies. Andrew Sullivan noted it in New York:
While Obama prudently leveraged the Shia-Sunni conflict by engaging Iran as well as the Sunni states, Trump has returned to the pro-Sunni and pro-Israeli playbook.
This was particularly weird on the same weekend that Iran — the focus of Trump’s ire — actually held an election, in which both men and women voted. Yes, of course, the choices were constrained by Tehran’s theocracy —but the reelection victory of Rouhani, the architect of the nuclear deal, was striking. Seventy percent of the country turned out, and Rouhani won by a near-20-point margin against his hard-line opponent. He has a mandate for more liberalization, and picked up momentum in the final weeks of the race by emphasizing more liberal themes. This is, of course, Obama’s long game vindicated. The former president gambled that by engaging Iran and getting a nuclear deal, he could buttress the resistance movement that fueled the Green Revolution, and slowly pull Iran back into a more moderate path. While the mullahs’ grip holds, it’s remarkable how successful Obama’s strategy has turned out to be:
Despite controlling most unelected councils, the conservative clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders have suffered a string of political defeats, starting with Mr. Rouhani’s election in 2013. That led to direct talks with their archenemy, the United States, and ultimately to the nuclear deal, which they opposed. Then moderate and reformist candidates made strong gains in last year’s parliamentary elections.
While Trump is little influenced on a fundamental level by GOP kant concerning an evil axis and all that, he is influenced to the extent that he sees it enhancing his reputation and political position to pursue Iranian policies which demonize them and result in little more than confrontation and hostility. While this is one avenue for influencing the behavior of an adversary, it rarely works as well as one might hope, and given the Iraq War debacle, in which we learned that dictator Saddam Hussein had, in fact, destroyed all of his WMDs in response to the American invasion following the repulse of Iraq from Kuwait, and was nevertheless invaded, hunted down, and taken prisoner years later in the Iraq War … well, the point being that even kowtowing to the postures of a bully is not enough to save your skin – or that of your nation.
The subtle engagement pursued by Obama may lack the high drama of bombs dropped and lives lost, the funerals to attend, and the broken families, but it does appear to have the advantage of being effective. President Washington famously advised the avoidance of foreign entanglements, but care must be taken in understanding his meaning – a care I fear is beyond the capabilities of the current Administration. To my ear, Washington’s advice may be best taken to have allies and adversaries – but not friends and enemies. To understand the importance of discarding emotions, instead evaluating each country on its own terms, to understand how you need them to behave in order to maximize your own position, and to take the steps necessary to induce such behavior – not through noxious posturing on a national stage, designed to induce hatred in our own people, but through engagements with the country or countries in question, using both carrot and stick as appropriate and possible.
The demonisation of Iran, fair or not, merely offends a prideful (a word I use deliberately) nation capable of producing nuclear bombs and waging ruinous war. We can engage in real war, in a war of words – or a subtle war of economic pressures which leave their more savage members beaten by their own countrymen, starved of the attention they crave. Is this not a better approach?
But I do not think the Trump Administration has the capacity to understand such a politically mature approach.
