We have yet to see what the Iranian regime will be prepared to do in the face of real opposition. After all, the leaders of the opposition questioning the election results--Mir Hussein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Hashemi Rafsanjani, and others who have emerged as fellow travelers, including Ali Larijani and Mohammad Khatami--are each deeply routed in the Islamic revolution, and each served as either the leader of the parliament or the President of the Islamic republic.
More to the point, each rose to the top of Iran's tightly controlled political apparatus, gaining personal power through a political system that excludes ex ante any candidate deemed to be a threat to the ruling regime. Therefore, one can fairly wonder why the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei jumped the gun in declaring a winner, since the system was rigged before the vote. But apparently that was not enough.
Here in the realm of the Great Satan, we tend to view things through our own eyes. So before Michael Jackson, Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin drove Iran from our TV screens, we were fixated on the images of street protests in the wake of the Iranian election. For us, in Iran--as in Florida--the question was, "Who really won the vote."
But as the images of Tehran have faded, debates over who won have given way to a clear understanding that the integrity of the election in Iran is not the measure of democracy there. At the same time, the Iranian regime is coming to realize that the integrity of the election, or lack thereof--whether perceived or real--may be its undoing.
From the moment the polls closed, when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared the victory of President Ahmadinejad a "divine assessment," Khamenei undercut his own credibility as a dispassionate ruler committed to the integrity of the electoral process. While Iranians may have come to accept limitations on what candidates are allowed on the ballot, fundamental Shia principles of fairness and justice demand that the integrity of the process be respected.
Instead of showing patience and respecting the process, Khamenei undermined his own credibility. But more important, he opened the door for the narrative that soon emerged: Those who questioned the results were guilty of apostasy. And in Islam, apostasy is a mortal sin, and such accusations have justified the most extreme incidents of Islamist violence.
Today, even though the demonstrations in the streets have disappeared from cable news, the debate in Iran has been elevated from vote counting and ballots to treason and apostasy. It doesn't get much clearer than that.
The issue is no longer about the election results. The issue now is about the core principal of the Islamic Revolution--velayat-e faqih--that Islamic law requires that power over civil society must lie with the clerical order of Islamic jurists.
This debate is deeply rooted in the Islamic Revolution of 1979. At the time of the Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini was the most vocal proponent among the senior Shia clerics of velayat-e faqih, while he was opposed at the time by his peer and rival Ayatollah Abul-Qassim Khoi, who disagreed with that interpretation of Islamic law, and dissented from the urge to assert clerical dominion over civil society. While Khomeini won the day and dominated the revolution against the Shah of Iran, velayat-e faqih has never been accepted across the senior Shia clerical order as settled law.
The debate over velayat-e faqih has reemerged as the central issue in Iran. Today, even as the Revolutionary Guard--the Praetorian Guard founded by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 to defend the clerical regime--is asserting its control over the streets of Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei's impatience in handling the election may ultimately cost the regime its legitimacy.
A central figure in the debate over velayat-e faqih will be the leading protégé of Ayatollah Khoi, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Iranian cleric who is demonstrating the principals of his mentor in his patient oversight of civil society and the emerging democracy in Iraq. For Iranians in the streets, as well as clerics in the holy city of Qom, Sistani is among the most revered religious figures, and a cleric of greater authority and stature than Ali Khamenei himself.
The irony is that none of the leading actors the Iranian drama, Mousavi, Karroubi, Rafsanjani, Larijani or Khatami have identified themselves with Sistani or opposition to the existing order of clerical dominion over civil society. They are each products of the existing system. And yet the principle of velayat-e faqih is what is at stake and will emerge as the issue at hand.
The prospect of change--counterrevolution by any reasonable definition--in Iran poses real dangers, as any evolution to a more open democratic process and easing of clerical dominance will yet face many hurdles, and may take many years. As Ali Khamenei loses stature due to his mishandling of the post-election period, the winner over the near term may well be President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose ties to the Revolutionary Guard may allow him to assert greater power in Tehran, even as religious and legal arguments are debated in Qom. How the those debates play out in Qom may determine the long-term direction of the Iranian revolution, but how control over the Revolutionary Guard and the military evolves will likely determine whether the opposing camps in the post-election era reach a near-term accommodation, or Iran devolves instead toward a traditional dictatorship.
In Iran, appointing loyal hardline females to ministries does not translate into women's equal rights. It is another cunning strategy by Ahmadinejad's government to fool the world.
Shirin Sadeghi: Rape and the Republic: Iran's Victims Speak Out
This week, Mehdi Karroubi came under fire for stating what for decades has been public knowledge in Iran: The systematic rape of political prisoners as a means of permanently disabling them from society, let alone from political activity.
Jamsheed K. Choksy: Iran, Protest, and Intelligence: Why Strategic Reports Often Get it Wrong
Revolutions are accurately designated as such only after the fact, not when protests begin. The protests in Iran are not yet and may never become a revolution.
Keep up the good work.
Everyday that OIL prices stay low is great for the Greens!
http://www.memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD243909
The New Democrats
by Abbas Milani
An intellectual history of the Green Wave.
Post Date Wednesday, July 15, 2009
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=cd438858-9a24-4214-aa53-645c7fe476c7
If you read Persian: BTW, This article should be translated and read by all Iran experts!
http://jomhouri.com/a/04int/006984.php
Lyons: Spectre of Khomeini as religious radical still stalks Iran
Jonathan Lyons writes in a guest editorial for IC:
http://www.juancole.com/2009/07/lyons-spectre-of-khomeini-as-religious.html
But we see a glimpse of reality in this article. As the article correctly points out, Mr. Mousavi was an good boy of the regime. "since the system was rigged before the vote." The only rational explaination is that there was NO cheating. No vote rigging. Mr. Paul and others fail to provide any evidence or a rational explaination why they so firmly believe in vote rigging.
For years we have been subjected to false informations that the Iranian president is irrelevant and that the supreme leader has final say in all matter. Now, we are to believe that the presidency in Iran is so important that the Supreme Leader himself would authorize cheating and bring about into question the legitimacy of the regime and himself. Which is it Mr. Paul? Could it be that you have no clue, and you're making it up as you go along? Let's hope for the truth. Let's accept the fact that a large minority of Iranians oppose the clerical regime, and poured onto the street. The government cracked down hard. But that does not mean the incumbant did not win.
"the Iranian regime is coming to realize that the integrity of the election, or lack thereof--whether perceived or real--may be its undoing."
And that is what it comes down to. That there was a perception that this was stolen, said a lot of the trust people had in their government. Whether or not it was stolen has long since been relatively irrelevant to the larger foundational questions themselves.
Don't place much faith in the clerical order ever handing down power voluntarily, but what an interesting statement it would make if that were ever to take place.
Although it seems clear to me that the government has destroyed their claims of legitimacy by so blatantly stealing the election.
And once the government loses that legitimacy it is difficult to get it back.
I had wondered about Sistani's role in all of this. I guess I knew he was the senior cleric. It would seem that he has his hands full dealing with Iraq and doesn't need another destabilized country on his hands.
But from almost everything I have heard about him he is an intelligent and reasonable leader. With an eye on what is possible. And seems to favor democracy.
Which is not surprising since Iran has a long tradition of democratic institutions.
I read somewhere else, I think it was the LA Times, that the uprising in Iran was caused, in part, by Saddam's overthrowing and the institution of a workable (although imperfect) form of democracy there.
One important aspect of these events in Iran is being multilateral. The legitimacey of the regime is being challenged by people of Iran, muslim clerics and the international community. When we pass the critical mass, the ship will tip over.