More analysis about Iranian politics
Albert R. Hunt, a columnist for Bloomberg News, offers another bit of good analysis of Iranian politics in the International Herald Tribune (republished by the New York Times).Much of his analysis is about the politics of American foreign policy, but his ideas on Iranian politics might offer a good teaching model, although integrating all of the op-ed pieces cited here recently would be better. Each points to a salient feature or two. Time will tell if one of them was significantly more prescient.
Iran’s Politics Is All About Survival
The big picture in Iran, even more than a bottom-up street insurgency, is the clash of leading political and clerical figures.
“We are seeing a real division in Iran’s establishment,” says William Quandt, a University of Virginia professor...
We will never know who actually won the June 12 election; Iran’s leadership is weaker than imagined...
Almost nobody believes the Iranian declaration that the election was a lopsided win for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is conceivable he captured a slim majority or a plurality...
That Mr. Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, felt it necessary to immediately claim a landslide victory illustrates what a fragile hold these hard-liners have.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, is convinced this signals “the beginning of the end for the Iranian equivalent of the neocons, the radical ayatollahs who see the world as a battle between good and evil.”
[T]he political struggle... is on two different levels. One is between the two factions of the 1978-79 revolution — one led by Ayatollah Khamenei, the other by Mr. Rafsanjani, a cunning and controversial figure...
The second struggle is generational. Both sides invoke the slogans and tactics of the campaign used to overthrow the hated shah. Some three-quarters of Iranians were born in the last 30 years and have experienced none of those moments...
Labels: elections, Iran, politics
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:25 AM
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