Some Might Call It Treason: Republican Opportunists Interfering With Foreign Policy For Partisan Gain

Yesterday John McCain stepped up his participation in Republican Party obstructionism against Barack Obama. By noon he was yowling and howling about health care reform. McCain is firmly in the camp that wants no substantive change. And far be it from me to assign motives, although perhaps I should point out that McCain has received more direct payments from the Medical Industrial Complex ($8,887,912) and from the Insurance Industry ($2,895,602) than anyone else in either house of Congress. Yes, indeed; he's #1. And he's expected to sing for his supper. He backs the Insurance Industry's proposal that all Americans be given a tax credit so they can spend it the private insurers who most Americans-- those whose careers are not underwritten by them-- hate and distrust. Having defecated all over the reform plans, McCain scurried off to his true love: joining with 2 other horsemen of the Apocalypse, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, in stirring up a war scenario against Iran. In a stunning Time magazine essay, Joe Klein, fresh off the plane from Tehran, asserts that McCain is clearly unhinged. No, he wasn't singing "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" again-- not exactly, anyway.

For two years now, John McCain has been entirely consistent on Iran: every last statement he's made--at least, those that I've seen--has been (a) fabulously uninformed and (b) dangerously bellicose. He's still at it, apparently. There is no question that President Obama's more prudent path is the correct one right now. There is also no question that the neoconservatives are trying to gin up this situation into an excuse for not engaging with the Iranian government in the near future--and also as a rationale for their dearest, looniest dream, war with Iran... neoconservatives like McCain and Wehner just can't seem to quit their dangerous habit of making broad, extreme statements based on ideology rather than detailed knowledge of the situation in Iran and elsewhere. This was always the main problem with McCain's candidacy-- he would have been a trigger-happy President...

That doesn't mean the situation in Iran isn't dangerous. Fortunately we have a firm and thoughtful hand on the wheel of the ship of state-- not a homicidal maniac like Cheney, Lieberman or McCain or a cheap political opportunist like Mitt Romney, Mike Pence or Eric Cantor. In the new issue of The New Republic former CIA operative-- and author of The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower-- Robert Baer makes a great point: the election and the aftermath isn't really about Ahmadinejad; it's about Iran's real ruling elite for whom the clownish and bellicose Ahmadinejad is the front man: Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei and the heads of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the army and the hard-liners in the secret police who prop him up.

What makes this such a tenuous situation is that Khamenei's legitimacy has been in question from the day he succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. It was widely understood among intelligence analysts that Khamenei did not have the religious credentials to succeed Khomeini as supreme leader, Iran's head of state who is supposed to be the most learned religious cleric. In fact, Khamenei is not even really an ayatollah--his license was in effect bought--and he has no popular religious following as other legitimate ayatollahs do. It doesn't help that Iranian leaders of Khomeini's generation have never particularly liked Khamenei and see him as a man who muscled his way into power, perhaps even  by killing Khomeini's son, the person most likely to challenge his rule.

Baer suggests that a real senior ayatollah, Rafsanjani, Chairman of the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council, is where we should be looking for signs that Khamenei's run may be coming to a halt. Reporting from Tehran for McClatchy yesterday, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, point to a different senior ayatollah: Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri who publicly stated that the election was rigged. This is a big deal.

"No one in their right mind can believe" the official results from Friday's contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi's charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers "in the worst way possible."

"A government not respecting people's vote has no religious or political legitimacy," he declared in comments on his official Web site. "I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to 'sell their religion,' and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God."

If it's true that Rafsanjani has called an "emergency" meeting of the 86 clerics who make up the Assembly of Experts, as CNN is reporting, things could well come to a head-- and fast. They have the power, at least in theory, to replace Khamenei. Iran's right-wing government has started trying to control the flow of information, kicking out foreign journalists and it has apparently assassinated Mohammed Asgari, the Interior Ministry official who blew the whistle on the vote rigging: