Same old in Iran
THOMAS BARNETT
ARTICLE: Iran's Clerical Old Guard Being Pushed Aside, By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post, February 11, 2008; Page A01
Very good and useful analysis.
With any revolutionary state, the original leadership generation ages out, usually without grace and with plenty of regrets. They see what could have been and what it's turned out to be. They look back over past decisions, and realize they would have done things differently if given the chance again to rule. They typically split across two impulses: 1) they should have been more stringent re: the revolution; and 2) they should have moved more decisively to normalize the revolution's relationship with the outside world.
In China, for example, you saw both of these impulses with Mao: the Cultural Revolution and yet the opening to America, with his fear of the Sovs being a prime reason why Zhou and he started that process with Nixon. When, during their famous one-time F2F, the Great leader was prompted by Nixon to brag about how much he had changed the Chinese nation, Mao demurred, claiming that he had only changed bits and pieces in Beijing alone without really effectively any lasting transformation across the country. You could say he was being modest, but judging by how fast Deng resurrected the society's natural capitalist tendencies just a few years later, the harsh truth is that Maoism didn't take in China whatsoever, and in his old age Mao admitted as much to himself.
The aging cleric elite in Iran have reached similar conclusions about the Iranian revolution. They know it has failed. They see the ruination of the faith in society, primarily because of their own politicization of it (the fastest way to ruin faith). They realize that cutting the country off from globalization in general and the U.S. in particular has backfired. Iran's economy is in shambles. People are unhappy. There is a profound birth dearth and brain drain (the latter being the worst in the world, according to the World Bank). They would do things differently, if given the chance.
Unfortunately, they won't be given that chance.
The post-revolutionary generation has basically taken over, with two wings emerging (as I've noted in past posts over the last couple of years): one is associated with Ahmadinejad and the other is associated with Larijani (cited in this piece) and Ghalibef (the current mayor of Tehran, not mentioned in this piece).
Ahmadinejad's "principalists" want the revolution revived, and so they are called hardliners, but the technocrats have the same desire, so you begin to see the disutility of that term. In reality, both wings want to revitalize the revolution, albeit in different ways.
In Chavez-like, oil-fueled populism, Ahmadinejad promises much and delivers little across his presidency. As was noted a while back in a great WSJ analysis, Ahmadinejad has gone to great lengths to strengthen the power of the presidency, his aim being to create a non-mullah-based political party. By this article's analysis, he seems to be succeeding. But as we know from many analyses of the associated Revolutionary Guards mafia, they're a fairly parasitic bunch who, if given free reign, would surpass the corruption of previous ruling groups. Already, the Guards exist primarily to gain as much control of the economy as possible--a naturally self-interested and self-perpetuating nomenklatura in the best Soviet sense. Rhetorically, the Ahmadinejad crew talk a great game, but in execution, they accomplish nothing beyond intimidation accompanied by propaganda. Failing at home to maintain any real devotion, they externalize the revolution by seeking satellites and emphasizing foreign threats. "We will bury you!" we are constantly told. Oh yeah, and every so often at home we see campaigns of orthodoxy that go nowhere but serve simply to remind the masses who's in control.
The other wing is poorly covered in this article, and we have seen in recent Western press coverage two opinions of how strong it is, relative to the principalists. Many analyses suggest Ahmadinejad's crew is losing the Supreme Leader's support, suggesting that the Larijani/Ghalibef wing will attain power in 2009. This article suggests that the Ahmadinejad crowd is playing for the long haul, and doing fairly well.
A few things seem relatively clear to me:
Again, the clerics of the old guard are on their way out. Rafsanjani holds some king-making power in his position as head of the Assembly of Experts, but it's not clear how he actualizes that power, absent the Supreme Leader dropping dead. Of course, Rafsanjani, in his Andropov-like role, might re-emerge in supporting a Gorby-like technocratic revitalizer like Ghalibef to the presidency. What might happen then? Remember, Gorby did not begin, nor ever imagine himself to be, a reformer--but a revitalizer. I think the same will be true of the Larijani/Ghalibef wing. They will claim themselves to be revitalizers and updaters of the revolution, just like Ahmadinejad's crew does, but with very different tactics in mind. The technocrats tend to want to avoid unnecessary conflict, both at home and abroad (too inefficient), whereas the populists thrive on it, largely to cover up their personal greed (the Guards) and to cover up their economic incompetence (Ahmadinejad).
This duality can play out for quite some time: whenever the principalists are more powerful, they have to cover up their inefficiency with crackdowns, so they advance the revolution little. In contrast, the technocrats, whenever they have the upper hand, inevitably suffer all sorts of backstabbing activities from the ideologues, who can independently act to sour relations with the outside world. So until this or the next Supreme Leader decides to favor one group over the other for a sufficiently long time for them to gain supremacy (not good for the Supreme Leader, one thinks), a rough balancing means we watch Iran muddle through for quite some time in its Brezhnevian economic stupor.
Whether or not the Ghalibef wing takes the presidency in 2009, the Supreme Leader seems to be encouraging a sort of permanent competition between these two wings, in rough approximation of a ruling-versus-opposition-party dynamic with, of course, the Supreme Leader himself deciding when the two wings switch ruling status.
But again, it seems clear the Supreme Leader will likewise not allow the old clerics and their reformism back into the game, as evidence by this latest election, meaning we're firmly into the second-generation phase of the revolution, and we're looking at a long duel between these two successor wings: ideologues versus technocrats.
Fascinating stuff that shows, in my opinion, that Iran's revolution is hardly unique or unknowable or "irrational." Instead we see the same old, same old: corrupt ideologues versus less corrupt technocrats. Both think they can revitalize the failed revolution, and both are wrong. But with oil prices lubricating the regime's failures so nicely, the outcome of this yin-and-yang-like struggle may go on for a while, meaning we better be ready to seize our chances for soft-kill strategies when the technocrats are in power.
That, and we should pray for the Supreme Leader's imminent demise.
In the end, though, none of this changes my thinking on the mistakes of the Bush administration in rerunning the whole WMD drama with Tehran and buying the regime's intransigence on both Afghanistan and Iraq--plus Lebanon/Palestine. That strategy has cost a lot of American lives, I would wager, and to no good end. We get nothing with this strategy except a strengthening of Ahmadinejad's crowd. Iran, as I have noted for years now, gets the bomb anyway, and we get nothing in return for having destroyed their two worst enemies in the region pre-9/11, except more tail-wagging-the-dog dynamics from Saudi Arabia and Israel that push us into even more pointless confrontation with Iran. Why do I say pointless? Our disconnecting strategy cannot trump the combined connecting strategies of Russia, India and China. So the more we push, the more time (and lives) and opportunity we waste.
Instead, we need to take a page out of the Reagan-Gorby dialogue, because it was really both sides that "denied" the other its enemy. By getting all chummy in the final years, Reagan made Gorby confident enough to start pulling the thread of change that finally did in the long-fragile USSR. Can we hope to emulate that Reaganesque mix of strength and engagement (exactly what Fallon argues for)? Hard right now when we're so tied down in both Iraq and Afghanistan, so truth is, we need more FDR-like slipperiness than Reagan's square-jawed optimism. Then again, the time for any such clever diplomacy may already be gone, thanks to the Bush-Cheney legacy of sheer incompetence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that's why I worry the White House still dreams of starting a war with Iran before leaving. How else to break a strategic stalemate that deteriorates over the long haul? Having made Iran the regional kingpin, Bush-Cheney may be too tempted to try and suddenly reverse this outcome in its final months, thus locking the next president into an even more circumscribed pathway in the region, which, of course, would mean everybody there gets to abuse us further and longer, while other rising powers take advantage elsewhere around this world.
Isn't it amazing how the neocon primacy-defenders have, in their operational incompetency and strategic myopia, so radically hastened the loss of the very thing they sought so vociferously to defend? Kori Schake, Bush NSC vet, makes this basic point in the current National Journal.
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