| Submit your comments on this article |
| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Iranian old guard worried by Ahmadinejad's young turks |
| 2006-03-27 |
| Nine months after the election of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, Iranian politics has shifted so sharply to the right that some traditional conservatives are warning of the dangers of radicalism. With reformists sidelined and Ahmadinejad setting a strident new tone on the global stage, figures from the extreme right of Iran's political spectrum are defining the terms of political debate in the country. In remarks that set off a domestic firestorm, a senior cleric close to the new president suggested in January that Iranian voters were largely irrelevant because the government requires only the approval of God. The remarks by Ayatollah Taqi Mesbah, and similar comments by an aide, were roundly criticized, even on the editorial page of Kayhan, a traditional showcase for hard-line thinking. Iranian political insiders said the flap offered a window on intense infighting at the highest reaches of Iran's theocracy just as world attention focused on the government's determination to proceed with a nuclear program that skeptics call a cover for atomic weapons. "Ayatollah Mesbah is an extremist," said one Iranian official close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the soft-spoken cleric who has been Iran's supreme leader since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. "Ayatollah Khomeini warned the people lots of times not to allow these people, the Shia Talibans, to come to power in Iran and have space," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, noting that Khamenei has judged it prudent to accommodate even extremists within the system and accord them respect. "Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei feel these people can do a lot of damage. They can damage Iran. They can damage Islam. They are like the Taliban. They are like al-Qaeda. They say they know what Allah expects from us -- that we should do what he wants from us without paying attention to the consequences. "And it's a very dangerous belief." The tension makes clear significant divisions within Iran's conservative camp, often viewed from outside the country as a turbaned monolith. In reality, 27 years after the 1979 revolution that brought Shiite clerics to power, Iranian politics is a nuanced landscape defined largely by the lessons taken from the previous quarter-century. Traditional conservatives describe themselves as firm but flexible. While remaining committed to the precept that clerics should hold ultimate authority, they were chastened in the 1990s when reformists -- determined to lessen the intrusion of the state into private lives and show greater tolerance for dissent -- won landslide electoral victories. Other conservatives, who proudly call themselves fundamentalists, argue that reformists were hollowing out the Islamic Republic from within. Equating dissent with treason, they demanded a hard-line defense of the revolution's tenets, including strident opposition to the United States and Israel. In recent years the two camps united at election time, making common cause against reformists. But after the votes were counted, moderate conservatives were unfulfilled. "There was a problem in our structure, our conservative political structure," said Amir Mohebian, a leader in a conservative faction that absorbed some reformist inclinations, including cautious engagement with the West. "We start very well, but the result was not under our control." Mohebian said the outcomes of 2003 elections for local councils, the 2004 contest for parliament, "and now the presidency," were "not our result." Each succeeding contest tightened the right's grip. One reason was the hard-line orientation of the Guardian Council, a screening panel that barred reformist candidates, producing a ballot skewed to the right. That amplified another factor: turnout. The Basij civilian militia, and in last June's presidential contest the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, showed most reliably at the polls, doing their duty as the core constituency Khamenei set out to create after succeeding Khomeini. "The Basij is mainly a creation of Mr. Khamenei," said one Iranian analyst, who declined to be quoted by name. "They spent a huge amount of money to reinforce these military groups. Basiji people and even the Revolutionary Guard people are really an artificial social class, like an artificial island." Ahmadinejad spent most of his career in both groups, and he wrote huge increases for each into his first budget as president. He commanded a Revolutionary Guard engineering unit during the 1980s war with Iraq, the defining experience for many hard-liners holding fast to the slogans of a then-young revolution, and he was a leader in the Basij. "He's a true believer in the revolutionary values, which we believe in, too," said Mohammad Ali Tai, 61, as he squatted on a curb at Tehran University, where Friday prayers are held in the capital. Usually, a few thousand people attend. Most are veterans like Tai, who returned home to lives that failed to improve materially while the governing elites grew wealthy. "I am a barber myself. I talk to many people," Tai said. "They are only tolerating this hardship because they believe in Islam. Some people who were in charge did not believe in these values, and this inequality is because of them." Each week, Tai attends a Basij meeting, and well as a gathering of his hayat, a community group that mounts celebrations for religious holidays. When Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran, he provided the groups rice at discount prices. "Everything we do is actually a matter of keeping alive the revolutionary spirit," said Tai, who said he voted in the previous two presidential contests for Mohammad Khatami, a reformist. "But this time the Basij told us: Only vote for Ahmadinejad, and don't vote for anybody else." If such groups were key to Ahmadinejad's electoral success, the cocooning cycle of their meetings -- offering mutual reinforcement and fealty to a shared vision -- provides insight into the staying power of his rigid outlook. Friends say he held to it stubbornly when others adjusted their views to the post-revolution realities that spawned Iran's reform movement. "He always thought that was a deviation from the true path of the revolution," said Nasser Hadian-Jazy, who has known Ahmadinejad since grade school. "Equality, justice, humility, being simple, supporting Muslims, opposing global arrogance -- he was never ashamed of these principles. Never." Hadian-Jazy, himself a revolutionary who evolved into a reformist, said he marveled at seeing his old friend wearing a checkered headdress around his shoulders on a university campus in 1998, a deeply unfashionable gesture at the height of the reform movement. "His sense of overconfidence, to me, that's not a positive point. But that's the way he is," said Hadian-Jazy, now a political scientist at Tehran University. "He's naive. The black and white area of his mind is a lot bigger than the gray area." Insiders say these are the qualities that keep Iran's hard-liners in the extremes. "Because of their religious beliefs, these people are inflexible," said a former senior official in Khatami's government, who declined to be identified further. "Although their number might be few, the certainty of their belief lets them resist a larger population. The supporters of civil society and reformists are less hard, less ready to be damaged because of their belief." "Whenever someone is fixed in his thinking, we call them hard-liners," said Mehdi Karrubi, a moderate cleric who lost narrowly to Ahmadinejad in the first round of last year's presidential balloting. "A group of people just come together. They talk to each other and say: This is what the society thinks!" Mesbah, the cleric whose speech touched off the current conflict in the conservative camp, is praised even by critics for his intellect. He leads a well-funded seminary in the holy city of Qom and has forged a reputation for steeling the resolve of Iran's harshest conservatives, famously declaring: "If someone tells you he has a new interpretation of Islam, sock him in the mouth!" A cartoonist dubbed him "Ayatollah Crocodile" for encouraging suppression of the press. One follower, now Ahmadinejad's intelligence minister, once bit a journalist on the shoulder. Another, now Ahmadinejad's interior minister, oversaw the execution of thousands of prisoners in the late 1980s. Many of Mesbah's former students hold places in the Revolutionary Guards' ideological and political section. He encourages students to study in Canada and the United States, which critics say does little to soften their views. Most eventually return to Qom. Mesbah's followers have now set their sights, Hadian-Jazy said, on gaining control of the panel of clerics that is empowered to name Iran's supreme leader -- an open-ended appointment that has been assumed to run a lifetime. Called the Assembly of Experts, the 86-member body will be elected in nationwide balloting set for October. Mesbah is expected to field a slate of graduates from his seminary, and in the preelection positioning now underway, some see preparations for a kind of coup. But the boldness hard-liners have shown since Ahmadinejad's surprise win -- on a populist platform that emphasized quality of life -- has unsettled many here. "I believe the traditional right wing is worried," said Saeed Laylaz, a respected analyst who served in the first reformist administration of Khatami. "Until now they used each other as a horse to ride from one place to the other, and each thought the other was the rider." Ahmadinejad's triumph, he said, clarified the driving force. "When you create radicals, they don't stop when you want them to," Laylaz said. "The leader can order when they leave the barracks, but they decide when to go back. This is the dangerous position of the supreme leader and the right wing right now." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #14 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the soft-spoken cleric who has been Iran's supreme leader since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. salt of the earth - trying to soften the hard core...BULLSHIT |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-03-27 20:21 |
| #13 Word. They know the big stick is headed their way and they want to change that. But dinnerjacket is channelling Saddam. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-03-27 18:30 |
| #12 Disinformation |
| Posted by: Captain America 2006-03-27 18:29 |
| #11 WAH! WAH! WAH! Poor murdering Black Hats. |
| Posted by: anymouse 2006-03-27 17:10 |
| #10 5089: I should have assumed that the article was already posted here. You guys don't miss much. |
| Posted by: Listen to Dogs 2006-03-27 15:29 |
| #9 Hum, on second thought, should be "beaten". Btw, really liked your what-if on Pakistan last day (sucking noises). |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-03-27 12:32 |
| #8 LTD : beat by that much ;-) |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-03-27 12:30 |
| #7 lotp: Never again. It is worth copying. |
| Posted by: Listen to Dogs 2006-03-27 08:43 |
| #6 Listen to dogs's article pegs the currency exchange at about 10,000 rial to the dollar that tells you they have been suffering severe inflation for a lot of years... so in order to preserve the fortune you made by stealing you have to keep stealing |
| Posted by: mhw 2006-03-27 08:01 |
| #5 The poor old dears -- they sowed the wind, and now are reaping the whirlwind. Serves them right! |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-03-27 07:44 |
| #4 Please just post a link, not the whole article. Thanks. |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-03-27 07:08 |
| #3 Sorry if posting this long article breaks rules, but it reveals the self-interest of Iran's parasitic mullah class of sweetheart contractors, strike-breakers and wage-squeezers: Iran Focus Tehran, Iran, Feb. 03 – Iran Focus has obtained exclusive information from a reliable source in Iran throwing light on sleaze at the senior echelons of officialdom in the Islamic Republic. The source has provided Iran Focus with a list of senior officials of the clerical regime and the personal fortune each one has amassed. Most of these officials have risen from lower middle class backgrounds to fabulous wealth gathered through corruption and embezzlement. At eighth place is Ali Jannati, son of powerful cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati and a senior official in Iran’s Interior Ministry. The Jannati family’s private wealth is estimated at two trillion Rials, the equivenlt of $220 million. Senior cleric Ahmad Jannati is the head of the powerful Guardians Council and a close advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At seventh place is Ayatollah Abolghassem Khazali, former member of the Guardians Council. The powerful council whose members are handpicked by the Supreme Leader is comprised of six clerics and six senior judges and has the power to veto any Majlis legislation. Khazali’s estimated wealth is 2.5 trillion Rials, the equivalent of $275 million, coming mostly from sea trading, paper imports, and book sales. At sixth place is Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, Iran’s former Judiciary Chief and another member of the Guardians Council. The senior cleric’s estimated wealth stands at three trillion Rials, the equivalent of $330 million. At fifth place is Iraqi-born Ayatollah Mohammad-Ali Taskhiri, who for years headed the Islamic Culture and Communications Organisation (ICCO). Since 1995, the ICCO has been active in exporting fundamentalism and propaganda directed against Iranian dissidents outside of Iran. Khamenei himself is in charge of the organisation’s policymaking council and its meetings are held at his residence. Adding up the lands in his name and his cash flow, Taskhiri’s personal wealth is above three trillion Rials, the equivalent of $330 million. Number four in Iran’s rich list is Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, Speaker of the Assembly of Experts, the exclusively clerical body that designates the country’s Supreme Leader. In a country where many of the theocracy’s ruling elite are in-laws, Meshkini is father in law to Mohammad Reyshahri, the Islamic Republic’s first Minister of Intelligence and Security. Meshkini’s personal wealth, coming in from mostly sugar trade and the industrial-scale printers, is well above three trillion Rials, the equivalent of $330 million. Well ahead at third place is the former Commandant of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Mohsen Rezai. Rezai, a close aide to former President Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has amassed a personal wealth of six trillion Rials, or $660 million. While at the top of the IRGC, Rezai was known by many titles ranging from Major General to “darsadgir General” (literally, the general that takes commissions). Number two on the list of officials who have become notoriously rich is Ayatollah Vaez Tabasi, known widely as the Sultan of Khorassan. Vaez Tabasi and his children have amassed an estimated fortune of seven trillion Rials, or $770 million. Their income primarily comes from sugar trade and the sale of real estate in Iran’s central Qods province. At the top slot comes, unsurprisingly to Iran observers, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose family rules over a vast financial and business empire. From the pistachio farms of his hometown Rafsanjan to huge oil trading companies, the ruling theocracy’s former president has used his power and influence to expand his wealth. Conservative estimates put his fortune at well beyond the 10 trillion Rial mark, the equivalent of $1.1 billion. Most of the powerful cleric’s enormous wealth is vested in the hands of his sons and daughters, as well as other close relatives such as his brothers, nephews, and bother-in-laws, and son-in-laws. One of his villas was sold in 2004 for roughly 29 billion Rials. His brother, Mohammad Hashemi, the former chief of the state broadcasting corporation, owns the company Taha, which imports industrial-scale printers. The image of “rich ayatollahs driving around in bullet-proof Mercedes” has become the butt of many jokes and the cause of much resentment in a country where, according to World Bank figures, the per capital income has fallen to a fifth of its 1970s value. Despite Iran’s huge export revenues and unexpected surpluses from the giant oil market jumps in recent months and years, the country’s budget is constantly in a state of flux showing no signs that it will sustain any time soon, inflation is at 16 percent and rising, and the economic growth rate is projected to fall throughout 2006. |
| Posted by: Listen to Dogs 2006-03-27 05:28 |
| #2 I tend to think that "right" and "left" break down when taken outside the context of the Western political system. Ahmadinejad's ideas on economics have more in common with Chavez's than the latter's admirers would ever like to admit, but he also exhibits a great deal of the traditional fascist regalia right down to the SS-style paramilitary squads in the Basiji. Look for the "we need to engage the Iranian traditionalists" narrative to appear now that the reformists are gone among the regime's Western fan club. |
| Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-03-27 03:33 |
| #1 figures from the extreme right of Iran's political spectrum These people should be described as being on the extreme left. Not least they conciously model their system on the old Soviet Union. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-03-27 03:22 |