Who was who in the Iranian presidential election? (UPDATE: And the winner is . . .)

Was Saeed Jalili, described in a February Reuters head as "rigid ideologue close to Khamenei," the Supreme Leader's guy in today's Iranian presidential election? Nobody seems to know.

"Where the Supreme Leader is concerned, [Mohammad Baqer] Qalibaf and [Hassan] Rowhani have got to be the two least attractive candidates. Neither has the profile of an ideological true believer or an unquestioningly faithful lieutenant. Khamenei has had enough of Presidents who challenge him from bases of power of their own. But to sideline these two relatively popular figures in favor of a dour foreign-policy bureaucrat would be a hard sell to the Iranian people. Iranian elections may not be transparent exercises in popular sovereignty, but neither are they decided by naked diktat. It will be interesting to see how this election reconciles the drives for legitimacy and for unity at the top."

-- Laura Secor, in a newyorker.com blogpost,
"Iran's Choice on Election Day"

by Ken

Possibly there are readers who, like me, have been sitting out the Iranian presidential election. It's not as if there's anything we can do about it, or for that matter any great likelihood that the winner, whoever he is, stands much chance of changing anything, with overall control of the country's affairs still pretty much at the mercy of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. But as Laura Secor, who has been covering Iran for The New Yorker, having visited since 2004, writes in her newyorker.com blogpost "Iran's Choice on Election Day":

There really is no such thing as a dull election in Iran. This alone is testament to the incurable persistence of dissent, or of fractiousness, within Iran's inner circle of power; to the relentless optimism of its voting public; to an irreducible flexibility at the core of the Islamic system, which bedevils those who would close its ranks.

About as much as I had gleaned about the election before reading Secor's piece was that the four candidates are mostly foreign-policy guys, and are all hard-liners. Well, that appears to be serious oversimplification. There are, it appears, two candidates who, as suggested in the quote above (the conclusion of the piece), aren't likely to ease the Supreme Leader's digestion. One of them, Hassan Rowhani, even has the support of two former presidents who are not at all favorites of Khamenei: the famously reformist Mohammad Khatami and the more distantly remembered Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was chairman of Iran's parliament from 1980 to 1989 and then succeeded (the not-yet-supreme) Khamenei as president. Khamenei is presumed to have been involved in the disqualification of Rafsanjani from running in this election.

HASSAN ROWHANI

Rowhani happens to have occupied the position now occupied by one of the front-runners, Saeed Jalili, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council ("the country's foreign-policy-making body"), from 1989 through 2005, and could hardly have approached the job more differently.

[H]is flexible approach was the one that Jalili reversed. Under Rowhani's stewardship, Iran had suspended uranium enrichment, a concession that was roundly criticized by hard-liners. Rowhani is a pragmatic figure, associated, above all, with former President Rafsanjani, who was himself disqualified for running in this election. Now Rafsanjani and another former President, the reformist Mohammad Khatami, have united behind Rowhani, throwing him the support of disaffected urban youth, and persuading another reformist candidate to withdraw in Rowhani's favor. Although his record on civil liberties is thin, Rowhani now carries that agenda into the race, along with the frustrated hopes of the vanquished Green Movement, whose leaders, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, remain under house arrest.

MOHAMMAD BAQER QALIBAF

"The candidate to watch for my money," Secor writes, "is the one nobody is talking about."

Unlike the others, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf does not come out of the foreign-policy establishment but out of the military; he served in the Iran-Iraq War and, later, as commander of the Revolutionary Guard's Air Force. Since 2005, he has been the mayor of Tehran. It is no accident that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held the same job. Ever since 1999, when the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami instituted popular elections for city and provincial councils, the municipality of Tehran has been a semi-independent political machine. The reformists, who held the city from 1999 to 2003, never managed to harness it to their ambitions. But the previously unknown faction of conservatives who succeeded them propelled their mayor, Ahmadinejad, to the Presidency, peopled his government, and gave the more traditional conservative establishment a run for its money.

Qalibaf has now had eight years at the capital's helm. He is a hard-liner with a security background, he's proud of his role in violently suppressing street demonstrations, and he's credited by his allies with efficiency. He has executive experience and close ties to the Revolutionary Guard. As a result, unlike Jalili or Velayati, Qalibaf brings his own money, popular appeal, and institutional support, most significantly from within the Revolutionary Guard. Unlike Rowhani, he does not carry the baggage of two former Presidents whom the Supreme Leader has worked tirelessly, and at cost, to exclude from the scene.

AS FOR THE FRONT-RUNNERS . . .

The curious thing is that no one seems to know which of the two, Jalili and Ali Akbar Velayati (who was minister of foreign affairs for 16 years, under both Khamenei and Rafsanjani, and "has been a close foreign-policy adviser to the Supreme Leader"), is favored by Khamenei. In a country where the leader has that much power, naturally a lot of people have wanted to know.

JALILI, Secor writes,

is the most rigid and ideological candidate in this Presidential race. Years ago, a European diplomat based in Tehran confided to me that he and his colleagues found Jalili impossible. You couldn't have a conversation with the guy, the diplomat said; he just recited positions as though he were reading from a script. This was no accident. Jalili, who is forty-seven, assumed the nuclear portfolio in 2007, and presided over a retrenchment of Iranian foreign policy under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Conciliatory gestures toward the West had availed Iran little, proponents of the new strategy argued, with some justification. Iran would do better to adopt a tougher stance. Kayhan, a newspaper associated with the office of the Supreme Leader, has praised Jalili, calling him a "super Hezbollahi," which is something many read as an endorsement. Curiously, though, Kayhan's repeated calls for conservatives to drop out of the race and unite behind a single candidate have gone unheeded.

VELAYATI, however, had been "pegged as the Leader's pick and as the odds-on favorite to carry the election," which left many observers puzzled by Kayhan's virtual endorsement of Jalili. As foreign minister, Velayati negotiated the end of the war with Iraq, and in his recent incarnation as a foreign-policy adviser to Khamenei, he has been --

so trusted, in fact, that for decades journalists leaned in closely when he spoke, hoping to read the Leader's intentions. In a debate this week, Velayati pounced on Jalili, accusing him of lecturing his European counterparts as though he were teaching a philosophy class and failing to move the ball even an inch. What, exactly, had Jalili accomplished in the past eight years, apart from bringing sanctions down on Iranians' heads? How could he hope to wring anything from the Americans without showing the slightest flexibility himself?

If this suggests some indecision about foreign policy at the higher policy-making levels, this is in fact what Secor herself divined when she covered the Iranian parliamentary elections last year. "A question I brought with me was whether there was a debate over the direction of Iranian foreign policy within the Islamic Republic's inner circle." And now here was an open rift between the two leading candidates in a presidential debate.

Of course, even with major foreign-policy issues confronting Iran (e.g., its nuclear policy and how to deal with the Syrian crisis), the president has very little say, since foreign-policy is exclusively the Supreme Leader's preserve. However, as Secor writes, "The choice of President is, at the very least, an indicator of the direction policy will take."

I don't know whether we'll know the election result by the time this appears. But whenever we do, at least now I will have some idea of what just happened.


UPDATE: AND THE WINNER IS . . . ROWHANI

From washingtonpost.com:

Moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani wins Iran’s presidential vote

By Jason Rezaian

TEHRAN — Hassan Rouhani, a moderate Shiite cleric known as one of Iran’s leading foreign policy experts, has won the election to succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Islamic Republic’s next president, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar announced Saturday evening.

With results from all the precincts in, Rouhani had won 50.7 percent of the votes, avoiding a runoff, Mohammad-Najjar said.

The mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, came a distant second, with 16.6 percent of the vote. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s hard-line nuclear negotiator, came third with 11.4 percent. A handful of other conservative candidates fared poorly.

After a surge of support in the final week of campaigning from Iranians who did not plan to vote, Rouhani won a surprising decisive majority in a field of six candidates considered loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. . . .

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Today I learned from pundit David Ignatius that something might be going on in Iran

Who ever had more "inside" dope than the big dope, Big Dick?

by Ken

This morning, against my better judgment, I decided to take a look at David Ignatius's Washington Post column, "For Iran's Spies, A Putsch." It was the fleetingest of impulses: that perhaps something is going on in Iran which I should know something about, and it should be possible to get some idea even from a pile of standard-issue Village hack punditry.

Wrong.

There appear to be some actual facts. In July, the minister and four deputies in Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security were relieved of their posts, presumably at the instigation of President Ahmadinejad, trying to consolidate his power in the face of difficulties with the country's still-supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

I'm prepared to accept all of this as fact, including the hypothesized tension between the president and the supreme leader. It's certainly not hard to believe that both Ahmadinejad's self-promoting stridency and his heavy-handed handling of the presidential election and its aftermath have created problems for Ayatollah Khamenei that he and his allies didn't need and don't appreciate, even if they did choose to stand behind his "reelection."

But the rest is all speculation and theorizing and claims and likenings and especially epithets. The decommissioned minister, for example, is "a ferocious cleric named Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei who is nicknamed 'the viper' by some Iranians." Once this has been poked around by enough "analysts," the removal of Mohseni-Ejei and the four deputies has blown up into a full-fledged "internal coup." And for sure, what less than a coup could bring down a ferocious viper?

Well, how about a Stalinist purge? That could bring down anybody. And sure enough, Ignatius has "one U.S. analyst" who "likened" the five apparent firings (I say "apparent" because it occurs to me that we don't actually know how and why each of the five departed gentlemen was separated from his job) to a Stalinist purge. "In the process," Ignatius adds, "Ahmadinejad made some potentially dangerous enemies."

Now I hate to be a party pooper, but in figuring out how much credence to give any particular pundit's punditry, one thing we have to do is apply our common sense. And a Stalinist purge in which none of the five purgees suffers any known consequences other than the occupational doesn't resemble any Stalinist purge I've ever heard of. In fact, as Ignatius himself informs us, "No sooner had Mohseni-Ejei been fired at the intelligence ministry than he resurfaced as the country's prosecutor general." Already this is looking like one sorry-ass Stalinist purge. And a Stalinist purge that created "potentially dangerous enemies"? I don't think so. Pretty much the whole point of Stalinist purges was to eliminate potentially dangerous enemies.

Ah, but you see, "as is usually the case with Iran, the situation is more complicated," and we are treated to a whole series of machinations by parties from various Iranian factions, all reported with about as close to no real-world documentation as you can get (which these days in the Washington Post appears to be pretty darned close). We get one morsel from "one Iranian political figure" (by way of "a Western intermediary") and another from "a second prominent Iranian politician, who is close to Khamenei."

Now, the reality is that any real information coming out of Iran might be "sourced" exactly this way, and I'm certainly not in any position to say that any of Ignatius's hypothesized facts and speculations are wrong. They just don't sound very credible, and it seems all to likely that their intent is simply to arouse American fears and to fortify resolve to take a tough line against those Stalinist Islamofascists. We are already warned -- not by Ignatius directly, of course, but by one of his Iranian "sources" (the one received through the "Western intermediary") that "the Obama administration may have unwittingly encouraged the regime's power grab" with two letters sent to Iran, which "may have emboldened Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to think they had a free hand on June 12."

Again, I can't say this isn't so. I just have the feeling that I know less about what's happening in Iran after reading Ignatius than I knew before. And I can't help feeling that what this column is really about is yet another burst of puffed-up Village Insider-itis -- a pundit either trying to make himself feel important or, more dangerously, trying to push an agenda based bits and pieces of "inside knowledge" that may or may not bear any relationship to reality.

I don't know much about Ignatius's particular agenda. Glancing at the comments appended to his column, I see that a lot of folks out there with computer access seem to think he's a shill for the Israeli regime, but then, the tone of their indictments suggests that these are people who are writing from the confines of their straitjackets after refusing to take their medications for a long period. In the end, I don't much care what Ignatius's agenda is. All I can get from his column is that something, possibly political and possibly involving President Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamanei, may be going on in Iran. Possibly. (But be warned: "On this issue, as with so many others, the adminsitration is nearing decision time.")

I might add that this is why I stay out of discussions of what we should be doing in Afghanistan. People I respect have widely divergent views of what we might hope to accomplish and how we might accomplish it. I respect the historical-continuity argument, pointing out just how difficult it is for outsiders to impose their will on Afghanistan, but the subject is just too complex for my limited understanding, which even so I suspect may be deeper than that of many partisans who have no hesitation in advancing their dead-certain views. As against the historical-futility argument, I think about the desirability of simply leaving the country to the Taliban. That worked out pretty well last time, didn't it? I just wish I knew who to listen to.

Still, I've built up a long list of connected "insiders" not to listen to. Shouldn't we have learned that lesson, if no others, from the carnival of catastrophe that was the Bush regime?

Nobody anywhere has ever had more "inside information" than Vice President "Big Dick" Cheney, and I'm unaware that among all that pile of unintelligence as much as a single fact ever crept out. If you were a foreigner peddling disinformation, or for that matter a domestic disinformant, "Big Dick" might as well have had a "FOOL ME" sign plastered across his big butt. Everybody on the planet, except the thugs, loons, and patsies of the American Right, knew that Cheney was a low-rent wackjob who had concocted a loony sci-fi-type fantasy universe in his sclerotic brain, and that his belief in his fantasy universe was so powerful that he would believe any bit of "intelligence," no matter how preposterous, that conformed to his lunacy and would dismiss absolutely any source, no matter how credible, that didn't.

Does the name of Ahmed Chalabi, first president of the united liberated Iraq, ring a bell?

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