Playing in a World Cup qualifying match today, players in Iran's national football team wore green wristbands in solidarity with pro-democracy protesters
The Islamic Republic is facing one of the greatest challenges of its 30-year history, says Stanford’s Abbas Milani, in part because Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei abandoned his characteristic caution, discounted Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani pre-election warning of a seething “volcano” of discontent and prematurely backed Mahmoud Ahmedinejad
“The regime still has the capacity to contain the disgruntled demonstrators and maybe even co-opt their leadership,” he notes, but a crackdown of the necessary magnitude will required will the Supreme Leader to cede much of his power to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
“Today, a substantial number of provincial governors, mayors, cabinet ministers, undersecretaries, ambassadors, and managers of major state companies are from the IRGC’s ranks,” Milani notes. If the regime does reconstitute along a consolidated hard-line axis, it will see a substantial transfer of power and authority from the clergy to the IGRC and a security state.
Writing in a valuable symposium over at Middle East Strategy at Harvard, Josef Joffe concurs. “The old theocratic revolution is dead, power has passed to the-let’s call them-”secularists.” They are still bearded, but they wear suits or the battle dress of the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guards.” The Guards’ extensive economic interests outweigh theological considerations and nationalism contends with Islamism for their primary allegiance.
The election “was a putsch at the ballot box, masterfully executed by Ahmedinejad and his henchmen, and it was directed not so much against the students and the wealthy denizens of Niavaran and Shemiran, but against Khamenei and his religious cohorts,” he contends.
Further to suggestions that the current crisis represents the culmination of a factional struggle within the ruling elite, academic analyst Arang Keshavarzian suggests that it’s hard to tell who is running the regime.
“One of the questions is how much Ahmedinejad is in the forefront and [Supreme Leader] Khamenei is following him, and how much it’s the other way around,” tells the Council on Foreign Relations. “Some of these events in the past few days suggest that it may in fact be Khamenei who is reluctantly following Ahmedinejad’s lead, rather than the other way around. However, this is difficult to tell.”
The reaction to the election has polarized the country and led to an unprecedented mobilization of forces demanding reform, “but the levers of power (and the weapons) seem to be firmly in the hands of the regime, and this is all that matters at the present time,” writes Walter Laqueur.
“Autocrats the world over rely on elections to provide them with a veneer of legitimacy,” notes J. Scott Carpenter. Even when elections are neither free nor fair, they are not without risk. “When even a horrendously flawed electoral process yields results that the Supreme Leader must further manipulate, what’s left of the system’s legitimacy degrades precipitously,” he writes.
The implications of the current upsurge for U.S. efforts to engage the Islamic Republic are the subject of debate. Commentators of varying ideological persuasion are assessing the events through a prism which says more about political positioning in Washington than events on the ground in Iran, writes George Packer.
“The silver lining to the cloud of dashed democratic expectations is that the odds of engagement succeeding are probably similar if not better under the conservatives, however noxious their overall policies,” claims Daniel Byman.
But others suggest that recent events not only spell an end to effort to establish a meaningful dialogue with the regime in Tehran but make a compelling case for what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called “crushing sanctions.”
“The dubious legitimacy of the Iranian government might now make that easier,” writes Hillel Fradkin. As it confirmed its credentials as a genuine rogue regime. “A regime prepared to shoot its own citizens to preserve itself will not negotiate away its nuclear program to the ‘Great Satan’, he notes.
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