Iran: election complicates engagement efforts

Iran’s presidential election campaign is due to start at the end of May, but the contest has already began, judging by the vitriolic nature of recent exchanges. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used the official Islamic New Agency to publish a scathing attack on reformist candidate and former president Muhammad Khatami.

The article, notes Amir Taheri claims that Khatami is part of an international conspiracy to subvert the Khomeinist revolution and turn the Islamic Republic into a secular state. The article’s author, Payam Fazli-Nejad, has since worked the claims up into a best-selling book, now in its 10^th edition, titled “Knights of the Cultural NATO”.

The book, published by the Kayhan Group controlled by the Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, details a conspiratorial network of NGOs, human rights groups, intelligence agencies and other actors orchestrated by the U.S. Government. Taheri notes.

It names most of the active figures of the internal opposition of being involved in the “conspiracy” and, in effect, working for US and other NATO intelligence services. The list of those accused amounts to a who-is-who of politicians, journalists, lawyers and human rights activists who try to oppose the system without breaking with it.

The Democracy for Endowment National [sic] is among the groups singled out by Payam Fazli-Nejad.

For the part, reformist factions are highlighting recently released archival documents that reveal the Supreme Leader’s association with the Soviet KGB intelligence agency and the Stasi, its East German equivalent. The revelations come from Mohzen Sazegara, a former aide to the “Supreme Leader” and a leading architect of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.

The Obama administration is committed to engaging Iran and the election’s outcome is vital to determining whether U.S. overtures will be met with a clenched fist or an open hand. 

Some insight into its likely approach may perhaps be gleaned from the thoughts of Dennis Ross, recently appointed as Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for The Gulf and Southwest Asia. He is critical of George W. Bush’s administration which, he believes, lacked a single, clear-cut policy. “Was it regime change or a change in the behavior of the regime? There were two schools of thought, and President Bush never made a choice between the two”: 

Consequently, there were elements of both present in the policy. For exam­ple, we would engage Iran on Afghanistan, but then include them in the Axis of Evil. Similarly, leading officials in the State Department were prepared to contemplate a “grand bargain” and engagement as the way to resolve the nuclear issue, even as those in the Pentagon and the White House rejected any readiness to make a deal with the Iranian government – emphasizing that any such deal would come at the expense of the true democrats in Iran and prolong the life of this unsavory regime.

The United States missed an opportunity to influence Iran’s political trajectory during Khatami’s term of office between 2002 and 2005, argues Iran expert Vali Nasr. The Islamic Republic now poses an even greater threat but the U.S. has fewer options, especially since “the policy of soft regime change that was to compli­ment it through millions of dollars earmarked for democracy promotion have proved elusive:”

The Iranian presidential elections of spring 2005 that were supposed to spark widespread protest in Iran turned into a rout of moderate voices, bringing to power an unbending and bombastic hardliner. Today it is conservatives rather than reformists or pro-democracy forces that are consolidating power within Iran, and a bullish Iran has taunted American power abroad in order to pursue its nuclear policy and extend its influence across the region.