“After the Ayatollahs…The Dark?”
from Heartland 4/2005
The unexpected victory of Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad in the presidential elections that took place on June 17-24 of this year marks the success of a sociopolitical bloc led by the pasdaran and the basiji, the parallel armed forces of the revolution, and reveals crisis of power of the Ayatollahs. The eight years of presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), exponent of the reformist clerisy, a the preceding presidency of the moderate conservative, Rafsanjani, have frustrated the hopes of a soft transition, piloted by religious potentates. Nor has the distance between Iran and the West been reduced. In a country that one hundred years ago gave itself a relatively advanced constitution, plowed by modernist ferments during the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79), with a population today made up of two thirds young men under thirty, the lack of horizons left by the reformist delusion has reduced the progressive movement to apathy.
Now the theocratic king is naked. In the baroque institutional architecture of the Islamic Republic, founded on the dominion of the clerisy and the duplication of autocratic religious structures with elective organs, the victory of the pasdarans overshadows the Supreme Leader of the Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has neither the charisma nor the authority of Khomeini. Theoretically he exercises supreme power in life; in reality he is anything but omnipotent. He ratifies more than he decides. And the more Ahmadi-Nejad hurls attacks against he “Great Satan” and its “Zionist” affiliates, the more he reduces Rafsanjani’s and Khameini’s space to maneuver. In a regime in which legitimacy is bestowed by anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment, Ahmadi-Nejad knows well that no one, much less the supreme authorities, can be allowed to appear soft towards the enemy.
The internal political dynamics are joined with regional strategic reality. A reality in which Iran feels encircled. In the last four years it has seen American soldiers encamped on its frontiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Relations with the other regional powers—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey—suffer from age-old frictions (Shiite minorities settled in oil-rich Saudi areas, Turkish-Israeli agreements and Turkish-American alliance, turbulence from drug traffic among the Baluchs along the Iran-Pakistan border) and more recent hostilities (Musharraf’s opening to Israel). The Syrian friend has cleared out of Lebanon, while the UN is engaged in disarming the Lebanese Shiite militias of Hizbullah, the long arm of Tehran on the border with Israel.
Of course, Iran can count on important energy convergences: with Russia, which views the Persian ports as ideal outlets for commercializing a significant quota of its energy riches; with China and India, on the hunt for oil and gas wherever they may be found. Nonetheless, Ahmadi-Nejad is prepared for the worst, convinced that in the coming month Israel can and will take recourse to force to prevent Iran from acquiring the Bomb.
Until that point, is Ahmadi-Nejad to be taken seriously, and until that point is he controllable? The sanctions threatened by Americans and Europeans in response to Tehran’s proclamations would end up damaging Westerns interests above all others, seeing as in the great geoenergy game underway it is difficult to imagine that the Russians, Indians and Chinese would pull out of Iran, the world’s third largest exporter of oil and second of natural gas. On the other hand, Bush does not seem today able to open another front in the Middle East, even if he wanted to.
In sum: if Ahmadi-Nejad wants the Bomb, he will have it. Unless at the last instant he obtains desirable economic and geopolitical promises. Or unless Sharon, more or less under American cover, manages to take the weapons from his grasp.