{"id":9627,"date":"2017-05-27T19:11:03","date_gmt":"2017-05-28T00:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=9627"},"modified":"2017-05-27T19:11:03","modified_gmt":"2017-05-28T00:11:03","slug":"iranian-politics-ctd-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2017\/05\/27\/iranian-politics-ctd-15\/","title":{"rendered":"Iranian Politics, Ctd"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/strong><\/em> on the objections<\/a> of the hardliners to the results of the recent Presidential election<\/a> won by Reformist and current President Rouhani – and, somehow, their objections sound faintly familiar:<\/p>\n

In remarks published May 22\u00a0on the\u00a0Telegram channel of the hard-line Raja News, Ebrahim Raisi<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Ali Nikzad, head of Raisi\u2019s campaign, said that same day, \u201cSeyyed 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.\u201d In other words,\u00a0Nikzad is alleging\u00a0voting\u00a0fraud<\/a>, but for the sake of Iran\u2019s national security\u00a0Raisi has not publicly announced anything \u2014\u00a0and that is why Rouhani is now president.<\/p>\n

Raisi wrote a letter dated May 21 to\u00a0Ayatollah\u00a0Ahmad Jannati<\/a>, the conservative chairman of the Guardian\u00a0Council \u2014 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\u00a0to supposedly substantiate his allegations.<\/p>\n

On the same day, in an interview with the state-run Arabic news channel Al-Alam, Guardian Council\u00a0spokesman\u00a0Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaie\u00a0rejected the notion<\/a> that there had been major violations\u00a0during the voting process, stating, \u201cThough there were minor violations, fortunately the violations weren\u2019t so important that they would compel us to stop the election process.\u201d Moreover, in a short message published May 22\u00a0on his Telegram channel, Kadkhodaie advised Raisi and his supporters to accept the results<\/a> of the elections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A particularly striking echo:<\/p>\n

…\u00a0Hossein Shariatmadari \u2014\u00a0editor of the hard-line\u00a0daily Kayhan \u2014\u00a0claimed May 21\u00a0that Raisi\u2019s votes<\/a> could have been twice that of Rouhani had it not been for \u201cviolations of the law\u201d by the Rouhani-controlled Interior Ministry, which oversees elections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/strong><\/em> (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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in New York<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This was particularly weird on the same weekend that Iran \u2014 the focus of Trump\u2019s ire \u2014 actually held an election, in which both men and women voted. Yes, of course, the choices were constrained by Tehran\u2019s theocracy \u2014but 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\u2019s 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\u2019 grip holds, it\u2019s remarkable how successful Obama\u2019s strategy has turned out to be<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Despite controlling most unelected councils, the conservative clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders have suffered a string of political defeats, starting with Mr. Rouhani\u2019s election<\/a> in 2013. That led to direct talks with their archenemy, the United States, and ultimately to the nuclear deal<\/a>, which they opposed. Then moderate and reformist candidates made strong gains<\/a> in last year\u2019s parliamentary elections.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While Trump is little influenced on a fundamental<\/em> level by GOP<\/strong><\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

But I do not think the Trump Administration has the capacity to understand such a politically mature approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9628,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9627\/revisions\/9628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}