Poor prognosis for Iranian government
If you're a subscriber to The Economist (or you can use the library's subscription), you can access an analysis piece on politics in Iran. It would be a great bit of analysis to present to your students after they master the basics of the regime, politics, and actors. How would they evaluate the editors' pessimism? Will history prove them wrong? or right?A supreme leader at bay
Ever since last June’s disputed election, Mr Khamenei has striven to give an impression of firmness... Later, as the opposition “green” movement grew in strength, posing a challenge to the Islamic Republic in general and to Mr Khamenei’s sinecure, the “guardianship of the jurist” (a cleric at the apex of government) in particular, he let it be known through his ciphers that his critics’ only hope of leniency was to repent and throw themselves on his mercy.
The supreme leader’s inflexibility now looks like an error. He has infuriated those moderate conservatives who recognise that the events of the second half of last year have changed Iran irrevocably, and who advocate concessions in the name of national unity...
People who know the supreme leader are unsurprised by his obduracy. He spent the eight-year presidency of Muhammad Khatami, Iran’s only reformist president to date, obstructing far more innocuous measures than are now being proposed. To make concessions under pressure, the ayatollah apparently believes, is a sign less of wisdom than of weakness. So he has contented himself with vague calls for national unity, even as the baseej bash opposition heads and the nation’s prison officers gain notoriety as rapists and torturers.
Having survived more than two decades at the top of Iran’s power structure, Mr Khamenei is now looking acutely uncomfortable... As recently as a few months ago, few Tehranis would have dared whisper “Death to Khamenei”. Now that slogan has become a commonplace.
None of this means that the ayatollah is about to fall. Strikes, which ended the shah’s regime, are so far confined to students boycotting exams. No one in the opposition expects quick results... But many Iranians remain convinced less by democracy than by traditional notions of a just ruler, empowered by divine grace and legitimised as much by his ability to keep the country together as by his innate justice. This summer, that mantle started to slip from Mr Khamanei’s shoulders. It will take uncommon skill for him to stop it falling.
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Labels: dissent, Iran, politics, regime
posted by Ken Wedding @ 2:08 PM
1 Comments:
On the other hand...
Dilip Hiro, author of many books on the Middle East, including The Iranian Labyrinth wrote this in Asia Times Online:
Regime Change in Iran? Don't bet on it.
The dramatic images of protestors in Iran fearlessly facing - and sometimes countering - the brutal attacks of the regime's security forces rightly gain the admiration and sympathy of viewers in the West. They also leave many Westerners assuming that this is a preamble to regime change in Tehran...
Viewed objectively, though, this assumption is over-optimistic. It overlooks cardinal differences between the present moment and the 1978-1979 events that led to the overthrow of the shah of Iran and the founding of an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. History shows that a revolutionary movement triumphs only when two vital factors merge: it is supported by a coalition of different social classes and it succeeds in crippling the country's governing machinery and fracturing the state's repressive apparatus...
Today, the key question is: have the recent street protests, triggered by the rigged presidential poll of last June, drawn in one or more of those segments of society which originally ignored the electoral fraud or dismissed the claims to that effect?
The evidence so far suggests that the protests, while remaining defiant and resilient, have gotten stuck in a groove - even though on December 27 2009, the day of the Shi'ite holy ritual of Ashura - they spread to the smaller cities for the first time. What has remained unchanged is the social background of the participants. They are largely young, university educated, and well dressed, equipped with mobile phones, and adept at using the Internet, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter...
Naturally, then, Western reporters and commentators identify with this section of Iranian society, and focus largely on them, inadvertently or otherwise...
Now, the foremost question for Iran specialists ought to be: over the past six months have significant numbers of residents from downscale south Tehran, with its six million people, joined the protest? Going by the images on the Internet and Western TV channels, the answer is "no"...
So, have bazaar merchants begun to shut their shops in solidarity with the protestors - as they did during the anti-shah movement? No again...
Furthermore, the opposition suffers from the lack of a single overarching demand. During the 1978-1979 movement, Khomeini rallied diverse anti-shah forces - from Shi'ite clerics to Marxist-Leninist groups - around a maximum demand: dethrone the shah...
With a proud recorded history stretching back six millennia, Iranians have evolved into staunch nationalists in modern times. That is a simple, if overarching, fact that leaders in the West cannot afford to ignore.
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