Mousavi is the
affable front man for the mullahs, who fear that another four
years of Ahmadinejad would hurt their vested interests.
Ahmadinejad has already begun marginalizing the clergy from the
sinecures of power and the honey pots of the Iranian economy,
especially the oil industry… Washington is clueless about the
Byzantine world of Iranian clergy. Egged on by the Israeli
lobby, it is obsessed with "regime change". The temptation will
be to engineer a "color revolution". But the consequence will be
far worse than what obtains in Ukraine.
Mullahs behind Mousavi
By M K Bhadrakumar
China has broken silence on the developing situation in Iran.
This comes against the backdrop of a discernible shift in
Washington's posturing toward political developments in Iran.
The government-owned China Daily featured its main editorial
comment on Thursday titled "For Peace in Iran". It comes amid
reports in the Western media that the former president Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani is rallying the Qom clergy to put pressure on
the Guardians Council - and, in turn, on Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei - to annul last Friday's presidential election that
gave Mahmud Ahmadinejad another four-year term.
Beijing fears a confrontation looming and counsels Obama to keep
the pledge in his Cairo speech not to repeat such errors in
the US's Middle East policy as the overthrow of the elected
government of Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953. Beijing also
warns about letting the genie of popular unrest get out of the
bottle in a highly volatile region that is waiting to explode.
Tehran on Friday saw its sixth day of massive protests by
supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, whom they say was cheated out
of victory.
A parallel with Thailand
Meanwhile, China's special envoy on Middle East, Wu Sike, is
setting out on an extensive fortnight-long regional tour on
Saturday (which, significantly, will be rounded off with
consultations in Moscow) to fathom the political temperature in
capitals as varied as Cairo and Tel Aviv, Amman and Damascus,
and Beirut and Ramallah.
Beijing also made a political statement when a substantive
bilateral was scheduled between President Hu Jintao and
Ahmadinejad on Tuesday on the sidelines of the summit meeting of
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Yekaterinburg,
Russia.
Conceivably, Hu would have discussed the Iran situation with his
Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev during his official visit to
Moscow that followed the SCO summit. Earlier, Moscow welcomed
Ahmadinejad's re-election. Both China and Russia abhor "color"
revolutions, especially something as intriguing as Twitter,
which Moscow came across a few months ago in Moldova and raises
hackles about the US's interventionist global strategy.
China anticipated the backlash against Ahmadinejad's victory. On
Monday, The Global Times newspaper quoted the former Chinese
ambassador to Iran, Hua Liming, that the Iranian situation would
get back to normalcy only if a negotiated agreement was reached
among the "major centers of political power ... But, if not, the
recent turmoil in Thailand will possibly be repeated". It is
quite revealing that the veteran Chinese diplomat drew a
parallel with Thailand.
However, Hua underscored that Ahmadinejad does enjoy popularity
and has "lots of support in this nationalist country because he
has the courage to state his own opinion and dares to carry out
his policies". The consensus opinion of Chinese academic
community is also that Ahmadinejad's re-election will "test"
Obama.
Thus, Thursday's China Daily editorial is broadly in the nature
of an appeal to the Obama administration not to spoil its new
Middle East policy, which is shaping well, through impetuous
actions. Significantly, the editorial upheld the authenticity of
Ahmadinejad's election victory: "Win and loss are two sides of
an election coin. Some candidates are less inclined to accept
defeat."
The daily pointed out that a pre-election public opinion poll
conducted by the Washington Post newspaper showed Ahmadinejad
having a 2-1 lead over his nearest rival and some opinion polls
in Iran also indicated more or less the same, whereas, actually,
"he won the election on a lower margin. Thus, the opposition's
allegations against Ahmadinejad come as a trifle surprising".
The editorial warns: "Attempts to push the so-called color
revolution toward chaos will prove very dangerous. A
destabilized Iran is in nobody's interest if we want to maintain
peace and stability in the Middle East, and the world beyond."
It pointedly recalled that the US's "Cold War intervention in
Iran" made US-Iran relationship a troubled one, "with US
presidents trying to stick their nose into Iran's internal
business".
Theocracy versus republicanism
Beijing understands Iran's revolutionary politics very well.
China was one of the few countries that warmly hosted former
supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini (in 1981 and 1989). In
contrast, India, which professes "civilizational" ties with
Iran, was much too confused about Iran's revolutionary legacy to
be able to correctly estimate Khamenei's political instincts
favoring republicanism. Most of the Indian elites aren't even
aware that Khamenei studied as a youth in Moscow's Patrice
Lumumba University.
Be that as it may, the Hu-Ahmadinejad meeting in Yekaterinburg
on Tuesday once again shows Beijing has a very clear idea about
the ebb and flow of Iran's politics. Hu demonstrably accorded to
Ahmadinejad the full honor as Beijing's valued interlocutor.
Chinese media have closely followed the trajectory of the US
reaction to the situation in Iran, especially the "Twitter
revolution", which puts Beijing on guard about US intentions.
Indications are that the US establishment has begun meddling in
Iranian politics. Rafsanjani's camp always keeps lines open to
the West. All-in-all, a degree of synchronization is visible
involving the US's "Twitter revolution" route, Rafsanjani's
parleys with the conservative clergy in Qom and Mousavi's
uncharacteristically defiant stance.
Obama faces multiple challenges. On the one hand, as Helene
Cooper of The New York Times reported on Thursday, the
continuing street protests in Tehran are emboldening a corpus of
(pro-Israel)
conservatives in Washington to demand that Obama should take a
"more visible stance in support of the protesters". But then, a
regime change would inevitably delay the expected US-Iran direct
engagement and upset Obama's tight calendar to ensure the
negotiations gained traction by year's end, while Iran's
centrifuges in its nuclear establishments keep spinning.
Also, a fragmented power structure in Tehran will prove
ineffectual in helping the US stabilize Afghanistan. However,
top administration officials like Vice President Joseph Biden
and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would like the US to
"strike a stronger tone" on Iran's turmoil. Cooper reported they
are piling pressure on Obama that he might run the risk of
"coming across the wrong side of history at a potentially
transformative moment in Iran".
A Thermidorian reaction
No doubt, the turmoil has an intellectual side to it. Obama
being a rare politician gifted with intellectuality and a keen
sense of history would know that what is at stake is a
well-orchestrated attempt by the hardcore conservative clerical
establishment to roll back the four-year-old painful, zig-zag
process toward republicanism in Iran.
Mousavi is the affable front man for the mullahs, who fear that
another four years of Ahmadinejad would hurt their vested
interests. Ahmadinejad has already begun marginalizing the
clergy from the sinecures of power and the honey pots of the
Iranian economy, especially the oil industry.
The struggle between the worldly mullahs (in alliance with the
bazaar) and the republicans is as old as the 1979 Iranian
revolution, where the fedayeen of the proscribed Tudeh
party (communist cadres) were the original foot soldiers of the
revolution, but the clerics usurped the leadership. The highly
contrived political passions let loose by the 444-day hostage
crisis with the US helped the wily Shi'ite clerics to stage the
Thermidorian reaction and isolate the progressive revolutionary
leadership. Ironically, the US once again figures as a key
protagonist in Iran's dialectics - not as a hostage, though.
Imam Khomeini was wary of the Iranian mullahs and he created the
Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as an independent force to
ensure the mullahs didn't hijack the revolution. Equally, his
preference was that the government should be headed by
non-clerics. In the early years of the revolution, the
conspiracies hatched by the triumvirate of
Beheshti-Rafsanjani-Rajai who engineered the ouster of the
secularist leftist president Bani Sadr (who was Khomeini's
protege), had the agenda to establish a one-party theocratic
state. These are vignettes of Iran's revolutionary history that
might have eluded the intellectual grasp of George W Bush, but
Obama must be au fait with the deviousness of Rafsanjani's
politics.
If Rafsanjani's putsch succeeds, Iran would at best bear
resemblance to a decadent outpost of the "pro-West" Persian
Gulf. Would a dubious regime be durable? More important, is it
what Obama wishes to see as the destiny of the Iranian people?
The Arab street is also watching. Iran is an exception in the
Muslim world where people have been empowered. Iran's multitudes
of poor, who form Ahmadinejad's support base, detest the
corrupt, venal clerical establishment. They don't even hide
their visceral hatred of the Rafsanjani family.
Alas, the political class in Washington is clueless about the
Byzantine world of Iranian clergy. Egged on by the Israeli
lobby, it is obsessed with "regime change". The temptation will
be to engineer a "color revolution". But the consequence will be
far worse than what obtains in Ukraine. Iran is a regional power
and the debris will fall all over. The US today has neither the
clout nor the stamina to stem the lava flow of a volcanic
eruption triggered by a color revolution that may spill over
Iran's borders.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in
the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet
Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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