Ryan Mauro: Iran after the Theocracy

The Iranian regime is increasingly unstable and its collapse has become a real possibility.

Economic and international pressure, fractures in the regime, and the increasing hostility of the majority of the population to the government are factors that could prove fatal to the theocracy.

As the Iranian government’s pillars continue to shake, a new generation of leaders is poised to fill the gap and take the country in a more positive direction. Let us take a closer look at this new generation of leaders to gauge what may ensue if the tyrannical theocracy falls.

The most talked about leader is Mir Hossein Mousavi, the real winner of the rigged presidential vote of June 12 that the enraged Iranian people rallied around in defiance of the regime’s security forces.

Millions of Iranians wore green, the color of his campaign and his new political party, the Green Path of Hope.

His popularity is likely the one factor stopping Khamenei from arresting and prosecuting him, despite the pressure of Ahmadinejad and other hardline officials. By demanding new elections, an initiative opposed only by the most ardent supporters of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, and not complete regime change, Mousavi is able to win support across-the-board.

While he’s certainly far more liberal than the current regime, he has not called for removing the post of Supreme Leader, the key feature of the theocracy. It is important for observers to remember that Mousavi is reported to have been one of the founders of Hezbollah, and he had to be approved by Khamenei to run in the first place.

At the same time, however, he should be seen not as the one leading the opposition movement, but as the one led by the opposition movement. His political base will quickly turn against him should he fail to pursue the wide-sweeping change they desire, and based on his recent experience battling the regime, he may very well share the same ambition but isn’t quite ready to cross the red line of vocalizing it. His stance on bringing about complete womens’ rights and free elections, however, would inevitably lead to the total end of the theocracy and he has to know it.

Mehdi Karroubi, another presidential candidate, has been acting more confrontational with the regime and is seeing his stock quickly rise. Emails I receive from Iranians mention his name far more than that of Mousavi now, as they respect his boldness and the fact that he is more liberal than Mousavi, having boldly criticized the Revolutionary Guards’ role in the government and consistently calling for broad civil rights for everyone.

He has publicly stated that he has proof that the security forces tortured and raped political prisoners, and continues to level the charge despite the regime’s closing of his offices, arresting of his advisors, and threats to arrest him.

He’s a growing threat to the regime, which is why they have opened up an investigation of him for possible prosecution.

While he’s calling for the civil rights the countries of the West enjoys, Karroubi has unfortunately said that he’d continue Iran’s support for Hamas if he was elected president, and like Mousavi, hasn’t explicitly called for regime change, although these actions may be attributable to political posturing.

Read it all at FrontPage Magazine.

Iran's Imperial Presidency

BY JAMSHEED K. CHOKSY

As the fallout continues from the June election, Ahmadinejad is working to consolidate power in his secular executive branch, and away from the mullahs. But what happens if his play backfires?

Taking advantage of the chaos following June's civic protests, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is moving to consolidate authority in the executive office -- and to wrest it away from the clerical wing of the Iranian government, particularly Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran's revolutionary leader, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had established a guardianship of Islamic jurists headed by a supreme leader to oversee the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of Iran's government.

Khamenei, who became supreme leader in 1989, was a mentor to Ahmadinejad and during June's protests, quickly endorsed his presidential candidacy to keep their relationship smooth.

Although Ahmadinejad had begun centralizing authority during his first presidential term, he usually deferred to Khamenei if there was a divergence of opinion.

But Ahmadinejad and his cohorts, junior members of the 1979 revolution who are just now coming into their own politically, are not themselves clerics. And though they claim deep religiosity, they are best described as secularists, as their primary aim is consolidating political power in their own hands.

Since the recent election, members of the executive branch are openly disregarding revolutionary or activist mullahs -- knowing full well that most clerics are quietists who prefer not to be directly involved in politics. Even Ahmadinejad's famous incident of kissing Khamenei's shoulder or characterizing their relationship as "like that of a father and son" is just etiquette, not a sincere sign of deference.

Ahmadinejad's secular political expansionism is made possible by the schisms and weaknesses that have emerged among fundamentalist clerics in the wake of this summer's election protests.

Most threatening for Iran's religious system of governance, the protesters' focus expanded from the rigged presidential election to the more basic question of why Iran needs a faith-based supreme leader.

The idea of cutting out the theocratic branch, while retaining the executive, legislative, and judicial ones, has gained considerable popularity.

Read more here,,,,

Source: Foreign Policy

Battle for Iran threatens theocracy

Correspondents in Tehran | July 22

IRAN'S election dispute has moved beyond mass street protests to a new phase: a fight for power within the ruling religious establishment itself, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard emerging as the driving force behind efforts to crush the opposition movement.

The 125,000-strong guard, formed following the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in an effort to consolidate several paramilitary forces into a single militia loyal to the regime, is seen at the vanguard of the post-election drive to silence dissenting views.

The Revolutionary Guard secures the regime and provides training support to terrorist groups throughout the region, and its role since the disputed June 12 presidential election has led political analysts to describe the poll as a military coup.

Rasool Nafisi, an expert in Iranian affairs and a co-author of an exhaustive study of the Guard for the Rand Corporation, told The New York Times yesterday: "It is not a theocracy any more. It is a regular military security government with a facade of a Shi'ite clerical system."

The comments came as the conflict escalated with the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, backed by hardline clerics and the Revolutionary Guard, issuing a warning to the opposition in general and powerful cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in particular.

"The elite should be watchful, since they have been faced with a big test. Failing the test will cause their collapse," Ayatollah Khamenei said in a speech marking a religious holiday. "Anybody who drives the society toward insecurity and disorder is a hated person in the view of the Iranian nation, whoever he is."

The opposition was emboldened when Mr Rafsanjani stepped into the fray with a Friday prayer sermon that sharply criticised the leadership's handling of the crisis. He has reignited the opposition, emerging as its leading patron.

"You are facing something new: an awakened nation, a nation that has been born again and is here to defend its achievements," opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi said in comments this week that appeared pointed directly at Ayatollah Khamenei, in a tone rarely used towards the Supreme Leader.

The defeated election candidate derided the claim by Ayatollah Khamenei and hardline clerics that the protest movement was a tool of foreign enemies.

"Who believes that (protesters) would conspire with foreigners and sell the interests of their own country?" he said. "Isn't this an insult to our nation?"

Analysts predicted Mr Rafsanjani's sermon could open the door to more anti-government comments from influential clerics. Mr Rafsanjani is a top cleric who helped found the Islamic republic and enjoys his own political base. The new assertiveness by leading opposition-minded clerics could reinvigorate a dwindling street movement, amid a government crackdown.

The clerical split has so far been limited to a war of words. But as the rhetoric ratchets up, the stakes for both sides do, too.

Ayatollah Khamenei and his clerics appear to be trying to reassert their once unquestionable authority. They also seem to be trying to avoid, for now, any drastic measure that could spark further violent protests on the streets, or a rebellion behind the scenes amid senior clerics.

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Source: The Australian

Obama's Persian Tutorial

The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets.

By FOUAD AJAMI

President Barack Obama did not "lose" Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America's 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.

Thus a man who had been uneasy with his middle name (Hussein) during the presidential campaign would descend on Ankara and Cairo, inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region; Mr. Obama offered it an olive branch and waited for it to "unclench" its fist.

Iranians continue to protest.

It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama. He was at once a herald of change yet a practitioner of realpolitik. He would entice the crowds, yet assure the autocrats that the "diplomacy of freedom" that unsettled them during the presidency of George W. Bush is dead and buried. Grant the rulers in Tehran and Damascus their due: They were quick to take the measure of the new steward of American power. He had come to "engage" them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions. The theocracy was said to be waiting on an American opening, and this new president would put an end to three decades of estrangement between the United States and Iran.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S.

For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted -- just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power. Iran's rulers have made their way in the world with relative ease. No White Army gathered to restore the dominion of the Pahlavis. The Cold War and oil bailed them out. So did the false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world.

Mr. Obama may believe that his offer to Iran is a break with a hard-line American policy. But nothing could be further from the truth. In 1989, in his inaugural, George H.W. Bush extended an offer to Iran: "Good will begets good will," he said. A decade later, in a typically Clintonian spirit of penance and contrition, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came forth with a full apology for America's role in the 1953 coup that ousted nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh.

Iran's rulers scoffed. They had inherited a world, and they were in no need of opening it to outsiders. They were able to fly under the radar. Selective, targeted deeds of terror, and oil income, enabled them to hold their regime intact. There is a Persian pride and a Persian solitude, and the impact of three decades of zeal and indoctrination.

The drama of Barack Obama's election was not an affair of Iran. They had an election of their own to stage. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- a son of the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary order, a man from the brigades of the regime, austere and indifferent to outsiders, an Iranian Everyman with badly fitting clothes and white socks -- was up for re-election.

The upper orders of his country loathed him and bristled under the system of controls that the mullahs and the military and the revolutionary brigades had put in place, but he had the power and the money and the organs of the state arrayed on his side. There was a discernible fault line in Iran.

There were Iranians yearning for liberty, but we should not underestimate the power and the determination of those moved by the yearning for piety. Ahmadinejad's message of populism at home and defiance abroad, his assertion that the country's nuclear quest is a "closed file," settled and beyond discussion, have a resonance on Iranian soil. His challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a generation older, could not compete with him on that terrain.

On the ruins of the ancien régime, the Iranian revolutionaries, it has to be conceded, have built a formidable state. The men who emerged out of a cruel and bloody struggle over their country's identity and spoils are a tenacious, merciless breed. Their capacity for repression is fearsome. We must rein in the modernist conceit that the bloggers, and the force of Twitter and Facebook, could win in the streets against the squads of the regime. That fight would be an Iranian drama, all outsiders mere spectators.

That ambivalence at the heart of the Obama diplomacy about freedom has not served American policy well in this crisis.

We had tried to "cheat" -- an opening to the regime with an obligatory wink to those who took to the streets appalled by their rulers' cynicism and utter disregard for their people's intelligence and common sense -- and we were caught at it. Mr. Obama's statement that "the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as had been advertised" put on cruel display the administration's incoherence. For once, there was an acknowledgment by this young president of history's burden: "Either way, we were going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons." No Wilsonianism on offer here.

Mr. Obama will have to acknowledge the "foreignness" of foreign lands. His breezy self-assurance has been put on notice. The Obama administration believed its own rhetoric that the pro-Western March 14 coalition in Lebanon had ridden Mr. Obama's coattails to an electoral victory. (It had given every indication that it expected similar vindication in Iran.)

But the claim about Lebanon was hollow and reflected little understanding of the forces at play in Lebanon's politics. That contest was settled by Lebanese rules, and by the push and pull of Saudi and Syrian and Iranian interests in Lebanon.

Mr. Obama's June 4 speech in Cairo did not reshape the Islamic landscape. I was in Saudi Arabia when Mr. Obama traveled to Riyadh and Cairo. The earth did not move, life went on as usual. There were countless people puzzled by the presumption of the entire exercise, an outsider walking into sacred matters of their faith. In Saudi Arabia, and in the Arabic commentaries of other lands, there was unease that so complicated an ideological and cultural terrain could be approached with such ease and haste.

Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America's relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution -- and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver.

Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter, another American president convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its "inordinate fear of communism," and to put aside its concern with "traditional issues of war and peace" in favor of "new global issues of justice, equity and human rights." We had betrayed our principles in the course of the Cold War, he said, "fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is quenched with water." The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979.

Mr. Carter would try an atonement in the last year of his presidency. He would pose as a born-again hawk. It was too late in the hour for such redemption. It would take another standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to see that great struggle to victory.

Iran's ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency. President Obama's Persian tutorial has just begun.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (Free Press, 2007).

Source: Wall Street Journal

Nick Cohen: Hatred is turning me into a Jew

February 12

The more the British Left indulges antisemitism, the more kosher I feel.

My name is Nick Cohen, and I think I’m turning into a Jew. Despite being called “Cohen”, I’ve never been Jewish before. It’s not simply that I am an atheist. My Jewish friends tell me that it is hard to find an educated London Jew who is not an atheist, but that I have no connection with Jewish culture.

The Jewish side of my family is my father’s (which is not a help, I gather). My great grandparents fled from the Tsarist Empire at the time of the pogroms, but their son, my grandfather, revolted. He became a Communist and married outside the faith. My father was brought up with no connection to Judaism and, inevitably, so was I.

My sole interest in Jewish concerns came from being a left-wing opponent of the far Right, and the blood-soaked antisemitic superstitions which turned Europe into a graveyard. When I was young, such attitudes seemed unproblematic. You did not have to be a Jew to oppose fascism; everyone I knew did that regardless of colour or creed.

Today the old certainties have gone because there are two far-right movements: the white neo-Nazi parties that the Left still opposes; and the clerical fascists of radical Islam which, extraordinarily, the modern Left succours and indulges. I am not only talking about Ken Livingstone, George Galloway and their gruesome accomplices in the intelligentsia. Wider liberal society is almost as complicit. It does not applaud the Islamist far Right, but it will not condemn it either. From the broadcasters, through the liberal press, the Civil Service, the Metropolitan Police, the bench of bishops and the judiciary, antisemitism is no longer an unthinkable mental deformation. As long as the conspiracy theories of the counter-enlightenment come from ideologues with dark rather than white skins, nominally liberal men and women will not speak out.

Fight back and you become a Jew, whether you are or not. Mark Lawson recently described an argument at the BBC over the corporation’s decision not to screen the charity appeal for Gaza. His furious colleague declared that the only reason Lawson supported the ban was because he was Jewish. Lawson had to tell him that he was, in fact, raised a Catholic.

A furious Labour MP was no different when he told a colleague of mine that I had gone off the rails when I married a “hard-right” Jewish woman from North London. My friend replied that this would be news to my wife, a liberal Catholic from Stoke-on-Trent.

It was kind of him to point that out, but I would no longer protest that I wasn’t Jewish, and I don’t think Lawson should either. It is cowardly to stammer that you are not a Jew because you concede the racist’s main point — that there is something suspect about being Jewish — as you do it.

In any case, my experience of left-wing antisemitism has changed the way I think and made me, if you like, more Jewish.

Although I want to see every Israeli settlement on the West Bank dismantled, it was clear to me that when Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Israel it had declared war and had to accept the consequences. I would not have thought that five years ago.

You do not need me to add that mine is a minority point of view among liberals, and that British Jews are living through a very dangerous period. They are the only ethnic minority whose slaughter official society will excuse. If a mass murderer bombed a mosque or black Pentecostal church, no respectable person would say that the “root cause” of the crime was an understandable repulsion at the deeds of al-Qaeda or a legitimate opposition to mass immigration. Rightly, they would blame the criminal for the crime.

If a synagogue is attacked, I guarantee that within minutes the airwaves will be filled with insinuating voices insisting that the “root cause” of the crime was a rational anger at the behaviour of Israel or the Jewish diaspora.

Put like this, the position of British Jewry sounds grim.

Remember, however, that the first aim of radical Islam is to subjugate Muslims. When brave feminists, gays, democrats and liberals in the Muslim world and in Britain’s Muslim communities make a stand, they, too, are accused of being the tools of Zionists.

As the struggle between theocracy and liberalism intensifies, I can see some being pushed into taking the same journey I have taken and finding their views towards Judaism and Israel softening as they realise that antisemitism helps drive the fascistic ideologies of the 21st century just as it drove the Nazism of the 20th.

I will tell them that the opponents of totalitarianism must never be frightened. If their enemies say they are Jews, they should shrug and say: “All right, I am.” As long as readers of the Jewish Chronicle don’t object, of course.

Nick Cohen is a columnist for The Observer. His latest collection of essays, ‘Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England’, is published this week

Source: Jewish Community Online

Obama Believes He Can Charm the Barbarians

These leaders tolerate, promote and commit the most horrifying acts imaginable - yet our new president is determined to "reach out."

By Phyllis Chesler

Western liberals - and in the past I have been a very good one - still refuse to describe any culture other than their own as “barbaric” lest they be maligned as “racists.” Now, America’s first (half) African-American president, whose first order of business was to reach out to the Muslim world on Al-Arabiya, has said he will actively negotiate with the Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Saudis.

I wish him well. But I also fear for him and hope he reads what I have to say. Read more ...

Source: Pajamas Media

Iran Mullahs' Blame Game

By Amil Imani

It is a fundamental human trait to locate the source of anything bad happening and try to neutralize it. There are, however, times that the source of the harm cannot be pinpointed or when successfully recognized it cannot be eliminated. Failure to recognize the source or neutralize it is frustrating. And frustration triggers a variety of emotions and reactions. The feeling of victimization is one possible reaction that frequently goes hand-in-hand with displaced aggression on a convenient safe target. The aggression can be verbal, physical, or a combination of the two.

The Mullahs presently ruling Iran are faced with monumental threats. Internally, the great majority of the populace is against their misrule. Labor unions, teachers associations, student groups, religious and ethnic minorities, journalists and many others have suffered and continue to suffer inordinate hardship under the heavy-handed Mullahs and their front-men. Externally, they are engaged in brinksmanship with the United States and Israel, while trying to wrestle the mantle of Islamic leadership from the Sunni Saudis and their Wahhabi cabal.

The Mullahs deflect responsibility for the mess they have made of Iran by skillfully playing the blame game. Blaming others for our problems seems to have become part of our national character, dating some 1400 years to the time when an army of bloodthirsty savages lofting the banner of Islam invaded our country. These barbarians hailed out of the Arabian Peninsula, heartlessly slaughtered innocent people, burned libraries, and took whatever they wanted, including women and children, as booty of war. Read more ...

Source: Islam Watch