red42
04-26-2006, 10:12 PM
THE ROVING EYE
What's really happening in Tehran
By Pepe Escobar
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HD26Ak02.html
"Tehran appears hell-bent on defying the international community and pursuing a nuclear program that is of growing concern."
- Sean McCormack, US State Department spokesman. This followed a rare press conference with the international media in Tehran on Monday in which Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad suggested that Tehran might withdraw from the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency and the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and also said "there is no need" for US-Iranian talks on Iraq.
Because of the opacity of Iran's theocratic nationalism, outsiders may be tempted to assume that the official Iranian position is the one expressed last week in Baku, Azerbaijan, by Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar: "The United States has been threatening Iran for 27 years, and this is not new for us. Therefore, we are never afraid of US threats."
President George W Bush and other US administration officials have frequently said that "all options are on the table" with regard to Iran's nuclear program, which the United States suspects is designed to develop nuclear weapons.
Last month, the United Nations Security Council passed a statement asking Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei to report simultaneously to the council and the IAEA board by April 28 on whether Iran had halted enriching uranium, a process that can produce fuel for nuclear warheads. To date, Tehran has refused to do so.
The key question is which Iranian leadership will have the final say. There are at least four main factions in the complex Iranian game of power politics.
The first faction is a sort of extreme right, closely aligned from the beginning to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and involved with a rapprochement with Sunni Arabs in general, while opposing even a tactical rapprochement with the US.
The second key faction is composed of provincial clerics, whose master is the supreme leader himself. These are pure conservatives, attached to the purity of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and more patriotic than the first faction. They are not interested in more integration with Sunni Arabs. Faithful to the supreme leader, they want to keep both progressives and extremists "in the same house" (Ahl al Bait) , with the velayat-e-faqih - the role of jurisprudence - as the supreme law of the land.
The third faction is the left - initially former partisans of the son of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ahmad Khomeini, who died in mysterious circumstances in the 1990s. After that they operated a spectacular mutation from Soviet-style socialism into some sort of religious democracy, which found its icon in former president Khatami of "dialogue of civilizations" fame. They became the so-called progressives - and even if they lost the 2004 and 2005 elections, they are still a force, although already debilitated by the slow awakening of a younger, more secular and more radical opposition.
The fourth and most unpredictable faction is Rafsanjani's. The consummate Machiavellian masterfully retained his own power from the late 1990s, juggling between Khamenei and Khatami. He may be the ultimate centrist, but Rafsanjani is and will always remain a supporter of the supreme leader. What he dearly wants is to restore Iran's national might and regional power, and reconcile the country with the West, for one essential reason: he knows an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the youth in Iran's big cities.
What's really happening in Tehran
By Pepe Escobar
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HD26Ak02.html
"Tehran appears hell-bent on defying the international community and pursuing a nuclear program that is of growing concern."
- Sean McCormack, US State Department spokesman. This followed a rare press conference with the international media in Tehran on Monday in which Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad suggested that Tehran might withdraw from the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency and the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and also said "there is no need" for US-Iranian talks on Iraq.
Because of the opacity of Iran's theocratic nationalism, outsiders may be tempted to assume that the official Iranian position is the one expressed last week in Baku, Azerbaijan, by Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar: "The United States has been threatening Iran for 27 years, and this is not new for us. Therefore, we are never afraid of US threats."
President George W Bush and other US administration officials have frequently said that "all options are on the table" with regard to Iran's nuclear program, which the United States suspects is designed to develop nuclear weapons.
Last month, the United Nations Security Council passed a statement asking Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei to report simultaneously to the council and the IAEA board by April 28 on whether Iran had halted enriching uranium, a process that can produce fuel for nuclear warheads. To date, Tehran has refused to do so.
The key question is which Iranian leadership will have the final say. There are at least four main factions in the complex Iranian game of power politics.
The first faction is a sort of extreme right, closely aligned from the beginning to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and involved with a rapprochement with Sunni Arabs in general, while opposing even a tactical rapprochement with the US.
The second key faction is composed of provincial clerics, whose master is the supreme leader himself. These are pure conservatives, attached to the purity of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and more patriotic than the first faction. They are not interested in more integration with Sunni Arabs. Faithful to the supreme leader, they want to keep both progressives and extremists "in the same house" (Ahl al Bait) , with the velayat-e-faqih - the role of jurisprudence - as the supreme law of the land.
The third faction is the left - initially former partisans of the son of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ahmad Khomeini, who died in mysterious circumstances in the 1990s. After that they operated a spectacular mutation from Soviet-style socialism into some sort of religious democracy, which found its icon in former president Khatami of "dialogue of civilizations" fame. They became the so-called progressives - and even if they lost the 2004 and 2005 elections, they are still a force, although already debilitated by the slow awakening of a younger, more secular and more radical opposition.
The fourth and most unpredictable faction is Rafsanjani's. The consummate Machiavellian masterfully retained his own power from the late 1990s, juggling between Khamenei and Khatami. He may be the ultimate centrist, but Rafsanjani is and will always remain a supporter of the supreme leader. What he dearly wants is to restore Iran's national might and regional power, and reconcile the country with the West, for one essential reason: he knows an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the youth in Iran's big cities.