Just World News with Helena Cobban

It was standing room only at the Carnegie Endowment today as the policy crowd gathered to hear Karim Sadjadpour, Abbas Milani, and Nick Burns discuss Iran, with David Ignatius moderating. Lots of interesting tidbits there, including some political ‘fashion notes’… Karim in a decidedly green shirt; Milani and Burns in ties that may (or may not) have qualified as ‘green’; Ignatius is a decidedly red tie and blue shirt.
Anyway, Milani talked at length, un-self-consciously and quite admiringly, about the events in Iran being a ‘color revolution.’ (So I wish his own choice of tie-color had been a bit more clearcut.)
I guess the main news, though, was Nick Burns– who resigned in April 2008 from being Condi Rice’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs– offering his fulsome praise for Obama’s slowly evolving stance on Iran.
He said,

He’s been measured, serious, thoughtful. He has a longterm viewpoint.
… He was quite right to underline, as he did in his speech today, that ‘What’s going on in Iran today is not about us; it’s about the Iranians.’

Burns also sent a barely camouflaged side-swipe to his former bosses in the Bush administration when he said they hadn’t always seemed to understand that “Sometime megaphone diplomacy doesn’t work.”
My understanding is that the main reason Burns retired from the Foreign Service at a relatively young age was because, in his role handling the Bush administration’s relations with Iran, he’d felt very constrained by the president’s insistence on confining those contacts strictly to a limited number of interactions with the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad.
Anyway, it was interesting to hear the intensity of the praise he sent Obama’s way. He also argued that the events of the past ten days have sent a shock to all those in the US who used to argue that the US would have to confront Iran militarily “because it is such a formidable monolith… But now, we’re seeing that it’s not.”
Burns was also, significantly, the only one of the three panelists to point out that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad undoubtedly has some popular real support inside Iran– though he, like the others thought the election results had clearly been falsified.
Sadjadpour, who runs the Iran-study programs at the Carnegie Endowment, and Milani, who works at the right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford University, were both unabashed supporters of the pro-Musavi movement, though Milani was more ideologically so than Sadjadpour. Sadjadpour seemed generally much more up-to-date with breaking events than Milani.
Sadjadpour said he had heard from Rafsanjani allies in Dubai that Rafsanjani had been trying to assemble a quorum of the Assembly of Experts, which is the only body that can rein in– or depose– the Supreme Leader (Khamenei). “There are around eighty of them. They are very old indeed– avergae age, ‘deceased’,” he said, “But thus far these efforts haven’t succeeded, because many of the ‘experts’ are actually dependent on Khamenei in one way or another.”
He also predicted that, with the diminution in the size of the pro-Musavi demonstrations,

Now, the opposition will move to trying to paralyze the Iranian economy– the oil sector, the bazaars, the bus system, and so on.

He said that, having completed an in-depth study of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s published sermons and writings last year, he was convinced that Khamenei hated to bow under pressure, seeing that as a sign of weakness; but that Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards were also very capable of calibrating the amount of repression they brought to bear:

This is another lesson they took from their own revolution in 1978-79, when they saw how the Shah’s use of excessive repression had merely fueled the revolution. This regime has the science of repression down to a science.

For his part, Milani said he had evidence that,

three years ago, Khamenei ordered his social scientists to study all the color revolutions of recent years, figuring out what their early warning signs are, and how to deflect or counter them. But he forgot the close links these color revolutions have with the people, and how creative the people can be in organizing them.

There was quite a lot of discussion about the effects these events in Iran can be expected to have on the diplomacy and balance of power both in the Middle East and globally.
Burns advocated a measured approach to the issue of when Washington should move to re-engage with a post-election Tehran. He spoke quite clearly in favor of the US having a broad and serious negotiation with Iran. But he also said,

We’ve got to be careful not to give too much, too soon. It would be a mistake for us to rush to negotiations on nuclear weapons or anything else.
Once we’ve concluded there has been a resolution of the dispute in Tehran we’ll need to make a decision on that. That may be one month from now, or one year.
But the Iranian government that emerges, whatever kind it is, will be weaker than what we’ve gotten accustomed to– for a number of reasons, but including the new problems they’ve been experiencing in Iraq.
I don’t want us to rush to give Ahmedinejad any legitimacy until we are absolutely sure that the reformers can’t succeed.

During the Q&A period, one of the early questions was from a Turkish journalist, who pointed out that Iran’s neighbors may see their interests differently. She noted that Iranian neighbors like Turkey, Iraq, and Azerbaijan have all now congratulated Ahmedinejad on his election victory.
In Burns’s reply he added that Russia and China have also now congratuated Ahmedinejad. He said he strongly hoped that some other democracies and regional powers would join the US in withholding their endorsement of the Ahmedinejad victory. “It can’t be that Obama, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Angela Merkel are the only heads of government who withhold their endorsement.”
Sadjadpour said he was “very disappointed” with the Turkish government’s position.
(Actually, this whole question of “recognition” of other governments, as constituting a non-trivial part of the de-facto legitimacy of any government, is something I have long been fascinated by. In democratic theory, of course, political legitimacy is supposed to derive from “the consent of the governed.” But who makes the determination of how to read that consent? Election officials, I suppose. But what if the election process itself is corrupt?)
My bottom line from the discussion: These individuals– including Ignatius– seemed generally to agree that there would be no quick resolution to the current crisis and that the Iranian regime would emerge noticeably weakened by it. Burns was the panelist who spoke out most strongly in favor of diplomatic engagement– at some point, yet to be determined. Milani and Sadjadpour seemed to be the most hopeful that Musavi could somehow stay the course and emerge the winner, though neither of them was joining the chorus of rightwing pundits who have been calling for Obama to come out much more loudly for Musavi. Both men seemed to recognize that that could well be a huge negative for Musavi’s chances, though Sadjadpour was more openly supportive than Milani of Obama’s restraint on the Iran issue.
My impression is that the opinions expressed by these two men were pretty representative of the views of most Iranian-Americans. Of course, the big question is how representative they are of Iranians inside Iran. That still remains to be seen.

Two of the people in the US who understand the most about Iranian politics and the dangers of its sometimes toxic intersection with US politics are Gary Sick, who was Pres. Jimmy Carter’s adviser on Iranian affairs back at the time of the Iranian revolution, and Trita Parsi, a younger scholar and activist who has done an amazing job building up an organization called the National Iranian American Council. NIAC has been a consistent voice organizing the hundreds of thousands of Iranian-origined Americans into a powerful and anti-war force in US politics.
Today, both these men have published good, strong commentaries– that in important ways reinforce some of the key points I’ve been making here over the past ten days.
Parsi’s main argument is one of support for the nuanced but basically restrained, and non-interventionist, position that Obama has maintained throughout Iran’s current turmoil.
However, I imagine that Parsi may be under some non-trivial pressure from his own constituency (that is, in his case, a constituency that he has done a lot to organize and create.) Many Iranian Americans are strong supporters of the Mousavi (Rafsanjani) movement in Iran. So Parsi adds this to his piece:

But here is one legitimate criticism , the Iranians are missing two words from Obama: “I condemn.” Protesters and political leaders I’ve spoken to in Iran want the US to speak out forcefully against the government’s human rights abuses and condemn the violence.

Well, I am all for condemning violence. But it should be a universal condemnation, given that the protesters have also used some violence. (Update 10 a.m.: Laura Rozen is reporting that Obama will do some “condemning” at a news event at 12:30 today.)
Sick’s piece, on his blog today, is a magisterial view of what’s really been at stake in Iran.
Some highlights from what he argues there:

1. “Don’t expect that this will be resolved cleanly with a win or loss in short period of time… This is not a sprint; it is a marathon. Endurance is at least as important as speed.”
2. “There may not be a clear winner or loser.”
3. Gary’s clear assessment that what is happening is not primaily between Ahmedinejad and Musavi but between Khamene’i and Rafsanjani. (I made that point here on June 15— though at that point I thought it was already over and Khamene’i had won.) In Gary’s post today, he adds the significant point that “President Ahmadinejad has largely vanished from sight, which adds to the impression that he is more of a pawn than a prime mover in this affair.”
4. He emphasizes the size of the stakes and the extreme uncertainty surrounding the outcome.
5. He gives even stronger suport than Parsi does to Obama’s stance of non-intervention:
Wouldn’t it feel good to give full throated expression to American opposition to the existing power structure in Iran? Perhaps so — but it could also be a fatal blow to the demonstrators risking their lives on the streets of Tehran, and it could scotch any chance of eventual negotiations with whatever government emerges from this trial by fire.
The crisis in Iran is an Iranian crisis and it can only be resolved by the Iranian people and their leaders.

The point Gary makes regarding the size of the stakes, for Iran’s Islamist political order and its people, is a crucial one. Regarding Khamene’i and Rafsanjani he writes:

The irony of two former colleagues now competing for power over the expiring corpse of the Islamic Republic that they created with such grandiose expectations, is lost on no one. The important sub text, however, is that these two understand very well what they are doing. They know how a revolt can be turned into a revolution. They also know they have everything to lose. The shared consciousness of high stakes has until now prevented an all out political confrontation between rival factions in the elite. That may help explain why the rahbar [leader, i.e. Khamene’i] and the Revolutionary Guards were so reckless in their insolent contempt of the reformers and the public. They may have believed that no one would dare take it to this level.
Now that it has arrived at this point, both protagonists are faced with decisions of unprecedented gravity. There has been nothing like this in the thirty year history of the Islamic Republic, and today there is no Khomeini father figure to moderate and mediate among the warring factions. They must improvise in conditions of severe uncertainty. If anyone tells you that they know how this will turn out, treat their words with the same regard you would have for any fortune teller peering into a crystal ball.

The only thing I’d disagree with there is his description of the Islamic Republic as an “expiring corpse.” I think that’s ill-considered language that actually undermines the important argument that he makes later on there: “If anyone tells you that they know how this will turn out… ”
Numerous well-meaning people in this country who are supporters of the pro-Mousavi movement in Iran have taken to calling that movement an “intifada.” (Interesting that this Palestinian-origined term is now one seen as having overwhelmingly good vibes within our discourse here in the US.) But the etymological root to “intifada” has to do with “shaking off.” And it occurs to me that one of the big questions about the pro-Mousavi movement has been that it’s never been clear what exactly they were seeking to “shake off”– that is, how deep of a revolt/revolution/counter-revolution they were agitating for.
Some, it seems, were seeking “only” a correction of a claimed error in the operation of the Islamic republic’s own rules– that is, to restore integrity to the existing system.
Others seemed more intent on effecting either deep change within the system, or its complete overthrow. (Seeing Baby Shah leaping into action in Washington DC yesterday as certainly a blast from the past.)
The Mousavists did what they could to dress their actions up in the symbolism of the Islamic revolution, including by their appropriation/expropriation of the “green” color-theme and the use of “Allahu Akbar” as a rallying cry.
Frankly, I was struck by a bit of cognitive dissonance thinking about all these Iranian glamor-puss young women with their streaked hair, nose jobs, tight jeans, etc, out there shouting “Allahu Akbar” to express their feelings. But the more important question is “What do all these people who have rallied around Mousavi’s electoral claims actually want?”
Gary Sick is right (in everything but the “expiring corpse” thing.) This is a big-stake confrontation within the heart of the Islamic Republic. Sort of Stalin vs.Trotsky if you will. (But hard to distribute these roles appropriately among today’s main antagonists. Regarding continuing to expand or consolidating the revolution, Khamene’i is more Trotskyist than Rafsanjani. Regarding the dictatorialness of his rule, he seems more Stalinist– but this judgment is based on the notion than Trotsky, if he’d won, would have been less dictatorial than Stalin, which obviously is quite unknowable.)
My judgment is that the Mousavi/Rafsanjani camp has done quite a lot to provoke the most recent confrontation. Mousavi (who’s the front man) has been just as confrontational in his way as Khamene’i in his. What pushed the M/R camp to take this stand? Did they get spooked by the prospect that a re-elected Ahmedinejad would start to take some significant actions against the extremely profitable Rafsanjani-led economic enterprises, and therefore they decided to plan a big pre-emptive push against allowing that to happen?
There is certainly a large-scale, intra-regime back-story to everything that’s going on in the Tehran streets these days… I imagine we won’t learn about that part of the story for a long time yet, if ever.
Meanwhile, for us Americans, non-intervention has to continue to be the watchword.
(By the way, am I the only person to think that all this business in Tehran may well also be connected in important ways to the fact that the US forces are about to leave the cities of Iraq?)

(title tip to Gary Sick’s stimulating blog. )
Four compelling commentaries about Iran developments:
1. Suzanne Maloney’s “Clerical Error,” on Council on Foreign Relations web site:

The convergence of… — mass mobilization and elite infighting — has produced the most serious threat to the survival of the Islamic Republic since the early years of its existence. However the election turmoil plays out, it has irreparably shattered the Islamic Republic’s most important underlying assets — elite cooperation and popular participation….

Four weeks ago in these pages, I reviewed why “elite cooperation” was key to Iran’s complex decision making. Whether the consensus forming mechanisms can be restored is indeed a vital question.

The closest parallel to the current protests is the mass mobilization that preceded the 1979 revolution. Then, as is happening now, disciplined crowds spanning Iranian society’s traditional cleavages among generations, ethnic groups, and social classes poured into the streets…. The dissent that Mousavi is encouraging violates the central tenet of the Islamic Republic’s political culture, which is based on a shared commitment among “khodi,” or insiders, to the preservation of the system….

Maloney is less convincing on where this is going, yet provocative:

“The reformists on the streets and in the corridors of power have emphasized the moderate nature of their demands; neither group is seeking to overturn the Islamic system. This caution may help enable the regime to prevail, but its short-term survival may leave it fatally weakened. In the aftermath of a stolen election, Iranians will remain mobilized in unprecedented numbers against their government and the leadership will be undercut by profound internal cleavages…. What follows will — in either the short or long term — represent a genuine improvement for both the Iranian people and the international community.”

2. Anything by Roger Cohen, including his on-the-street account on Sunday, and especially his take in tomorrow’s NYTimes on “The Children of Tomorrow.”
Among keepers in his Sunday essay, Cohen observes how Supreme Leader Khamenei “factionalized himself” by taking sides in a dispute central to the system. Instead of soothing the wounds, last Friday’s sermon catalyzed further broad demonstrations by “people of all ages. — an old man on crutches, middle-aged office workers and bands of teenagers.”
To Cohen’s doubts about whether the world, or the UN could help the protesters, one woman tellingly realized: “So, we are on our own.”
Even as the world indeed is watching, “in the end that is true. Iranians have fought this lonely fight for a long time: to be free, to have a measure of democracy.” Therein may be their best “weapon,” in the Iranian context — self-reliance.
For tomorrow’s column, Cohen movingly writes:

Continue reading “Scott’s choices (re. Iran matters)”

Pres. Obama has been coming under a lot of pressure to express a more forthright stand in favor of the pro-Musavi demonstrators in Iran. He is quite right to resist those pressures, for a number of reasons.
Meanwhile, the deep split within the Iranian regime that was dramatically revealed by Rafsanjani’s absence from Khamenei’s sermonizing yesterday raises a whole new set of sobering prospects– for Americans and for everyone else.
The first and most compelling reason why Obama’s stand of non-intervention in Iranian politics is the right one is that this is a core principle of international affairs that goes back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. This principle, remember, underlay the international order in Europe in which liberal democracy had the space to evolve in, in the first place.
Sticking to the principle of non-intervention doesn’t at all preclude Obama or anyone else from expressing a strong preference for non-violence and the rule of law. But it really does preclude our government’s leaders from expressing sympathy for one side or the other in a conflict inside another country.
Especially after eight years of rabid and disastrous George Bush interventionism overseas, restating the principle of non-intervention– and acting in accordance with it– is more necessary than ever.
Secondly, a more “instrumentalist” consideration: It is highly likely that any open expression of sympathy by our president for the pro-Musavi side would backfire. (Update Sun a.m.: See Joe Klein on this, too.: “it seemed clear to me when I was in Iran–and even more clear, given the events of the past few days–that the protesters realize that they have to do this on their own. And that an American endorsement would taint their movement, perhaps fatally.”)
Many Americans like to think that now that we have a new president, and especially after Obama’s great speech in Cairo, Muslims everywhere must suddenly love America. That is absolutely not proven. If there is a deep change in Muslim attitudes to Washington, it will happen over time, and will be informed by Washington’s actions not just our president’s words.
In the GWB era, most of my friends in pro-democracy movements in Muslim countries were quite clear that the loud support that Bush expressed for their aspirations was a “kiss of death” for the movements they hoped to build. That may be changing in the Obama era. But it is far too early to say, yet, that what some people like to call “the Obama effect” has turned things completely around.
In Iran, the situation is further complicated by the involvement of the US government– as started by Bush but also, sadly, continued by Obama– in covert projects to foment dissent inside different parts of the country. And of course also by the tragic record of what happened in Iraq under a US occupation regime that for several years tried to justify its existence primarily in terms of a campaign for “democratization.”
Bottom line here: An open “embrace” by Obama or the US Congress of the pro-Musavi movement is much more likely to backfire than to help Musavi.
Finally, and most importantly, we as the US citizenry need to keep our eye on the main ball in this question of our relationship with Iran.
As Americans, our strongest duty in all this to do what we can to avoid our government getting rushed, by anyone, into a military attack against Iran; and indeed to ensure that our government speedily ramps down the very dangerous degree of tension against Iran that it got locked into over the past 16 years.
We urgently need Washington to sit down the Iranian government in a constructive and broad-ranging negotiation over a number of issues including: Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran’s nuclear program, the punishing sanctions we have maintained against Iran for many years, and how to coexist within a strategically rebalanced Persian Gulf region over the years ahead.
From this point of view, the present situation of unresolvedness in the leadership struggle in Tehran is quite possibly the worst outcome. For three reasons:

1. If there is no single, uncontested authority in Tehran, no-one there can make any strategic-level decisions concerning, or within, a big negotiation with Washington.
2. Instead of the US-Iran negotiation being conducted (or even planned) in an atmosphere of calm and realism on both sides, it will itself become inevitably tangled up with the leadership struggle in Tehran.
3. So long as internal dissension continues inside Tehran, there will be powerful voices in Washington that argue against any negotiations with it.

There is a very significant matter of timing here, too. We know that Israeli PM Netanyahu is eager to have a speedy deadline before which he wants the attempt at negotiation to show success. (And if it’s not met, he will presumably sharply escalate his calls for a military attack.) We also know that Obama has said he wants to get the talks well underway by the end of the year.
Trita Parsi is the only other person I’ve seen who has zeroed in on this crucial issue of timing. He wrote:

if political paralysis reigns in Iran, valuable time to address the nuclear issue through diplomacy will be lost.

He wrote that, with great prescience, a week ago. Now, a week later, it is quite evident that what is underway inside Iran is a deep split within the core of the regime that will certainly take a long time to heal, and perhaps even to resolve.
As Gary Sick noted about Khamenei’s fateful sermon yesterady — and I’ll quote this in full–

First, and perhaps more important than the words themselves, was the fact that Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani did not attend. This is extraordinary. Khamene’i and Rafsanjani were fellow revolutionaries in 1978-79. They have been associates – sometimes close colleagues – for more than 50 years. Many believe that Rafsanjani was instrumental in getting Khamene’i his position as Leader. Rafsanjani today heads the Assembly of Experts, which is responsible for monitoring the performance of the Leader, among other things. This was possibly the single most fateful speech by Khamene’i in his 20 years as Leader of the Islamic Republic. How could Rafsanjani not attend? Did he simply boycott the event? Was he under house arrest? It probably didn’t help that several of Rafsanjani’s children were arrested in the previous 24 hours. We have never had such a graphic demonstration of political differences within Iran’s ruling elite.

This split within the regime is now so deep that “resolution” of it, and repairing the regime from its after-effects even once it has been resolved– even if that were to happen tomorrow, which it almost certainly will not– will probably take many months, if not a number of years.
A deep split in the heart of a regime that commands considerable capabilities in nuclear technology: That is another big consideration.
The fact of this split itself might well further propel the efforts of those in the regime who want to hasten the “breakout” from a civilian nuclear program to a military nuclear program. As happened in Pakistan, these people might well see this as their best defense against those from outside who want to continue to foment trouble inside their country.
… And meanwhile, the time-period within which the split inside the Iranian regime gets resolved and healed, or doesn’t get resolved and healed, bumps up against the deadline that Netanyahu and his many remaining supporters in the US Congress have established for “resolving” the Iranian nuclear question.
Dangerous months ahead, I think.