Perry's historiography, Newt's 'compassion'

A couple of notes on tonight's GOP foreign policy debate:

1. Perry, good fundamentalist or imitation thereof,  trusts to God to destroy countries he regards as accursed. Asked to name a major threat to the country, he named China, and said that it is destined for the ash heap of history because it is "not a country of virtue." Exhibit A: the millions of abortions the government countenances or encourages. He thus revealed a historiography akin to that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was infamously reported to have said (citing Ayatollah Khomeini) that Israel should be wiped off the map.  Literally, Ahmadinejad said, "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." That was part of a broader recollection that Khomeini predicted the destruction of four regimes, three of which have in fact "vanished": the Shah's, the Soviet Union, and Saddam's.  Countries that are not "of virtue" get wiped off  the record -- i.e., end up in the ash heap.  Of course, that last image belongs to Marx, another theologian certain in his forecasts regarding history's inevitable course.

Palestinian Authority highlights Ahmadinejad's stolen authority

Considering that hatred of Israel is a central pillar of the Iranian regime's ideology (along with crocodile tears on behalf of the Palestinians), this rejoinder from the Palestinian Authority to Iranian interference is rich. 

According to Iran's Fars News agency, Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Arab leaders who met with Obama and Netanyahu at the kickoff of  peace talks in Washington this week were "betraying their nations."  The PA's response:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, reportedly said that Ahmadinejad "does not represent the Iranian people, forged elections, suppresses the Iranian people and stole the authority. [He] is not entitled to talk about Palestine, or the president of Palestine."

"President Abu Mazen [Abbas] is the elected president of free and fair elections in which more than two thousand international observers [participated]," Abu Rudeineh said. "We have fought for Palestine and Jerusalem, and the Palestinian leadership has provided thousands of martyrs and tens of thousands wounded and prisoners."

The U.S.-Israeli-Nazi-al Qaeda-Saudi plot against Iran

Over the past seven months -- or for that matter, over the past thirty years -- the most casual reader of news from Iran will have grown familiar with the regime's fulminations about the U.S.-U.K.-Israel nexus. But what about the U.S.-Israel-Nazi-Saudi-al Qaeda nexus?

While some western analysts suggest that U.S. military involvement in Muslim countries plays into al Qaeda's hands, lending credence to their narrative of Western crusaders seeking to occupy sacred Muslim soil, Ahmadinejad flips that story line on its head, suggesting that al Qaeda provides a pretext for U.S. military adventure.

Ahmadinejad bait

Ahmadinejad, following in the august footsteps of the Ayatollah Khomeini, is fond of blaming all of Iran's woes on Israeli-led machinations.  But of course the paranoid often have reason (and generate reason) to be paranoid, and demonized enemies do act as enemies.

The Jersusalem Post reports that an Egyptian paper has lionized the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, for effective covert action against Iran on various fronts: 

Without Mossad director Meir Dagan, the Iranian nuclear program would have been successfully completed years ago, Egyptian daily Al-Ahram claimed in an op-ed published Saturday.

"Over the past seven years, he has worked in silence, away from the media," the op-ed read. "He has dealt painful blows to the Iranian nuclear program … he is the Superman of the Jewish state."

Among the steps taken by Dagan against Teheran, Al-Ahram listed diplomatic action to embarrass the Islamic republic, action to fuel opposition protests, assassinations and covert attacks against nuclear facilities.

Old dogs, old tricks, tired people

Americans and Zionists are the sole audience of a play they have commissioned and sold out.

                - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Dec. 29, 2009, explaining the Ashura Day antigovernment protests

US President Barack Obama and the leaders in Israel have revealed their agenda by supporting the Iranian opposition.

              -  Iranian Intelligence Minister Heydar] Moslehi, paraphased by PressTV (Iranian government media), Jan. 4, 2010

Israel does not wish the Qur'an to exist in this country. Israel does not wish the 'ulama to exist in this country. It was Israel that assaulted the Fayziyeh Madrasa by means of its sinister agents. It is still assaulting us, and assaulting you, the nation; it wishes to seize your economy, to destroy your trade and agriculture, to appropriate your wealth. Israel wishes to remove by means of its agents anything it regards as blocking its path...In order for Israel to attain its objectives, the government of Iran has continually affronte us in accordance with goals and plans conceived in Israel.

            - Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, June 3, 1963, "The Afternoon of Ashura," speech denouncing a raid by the Shah's police on the Madrasa from which Khomeini habitually delivered his speeches, in which several students were killed.    

"Not Gaza, not Lebanon. I die only for Iran."

  - Green movement protesters, Tehran, Sept. 18, 2009   (Quds Day, the anti-Zionist extravaganza)

2006 flashback: the enrichment of Iran's Revolutionary Guards

UPDATE: Iran said today that it would be willing to swap nuclear material with the West in Turkey, as opposed to Russia. Cf. Ray Takeyh, 12/21, below: "In Tehran, no deal ever dies. So it's entirely possible that the LEU export proposition could be resurrected..."
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In the wake of Iran's stolen election last June, observers including Gary Sick and the Times' Neil MacFarquhar  brought attention to a stealth militarist takeover of Iran's religious establishment over the past several years, emphasizing that Ahmadinejad had packed key government posts with Revolutionary Guard officers and veterans.

In Today's Times, Michael Slackman cites "the rise of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as the most powerful decision-making bloc in the country" while reporting that Iran's intransigence on the nuclear issue has reached a new level, as the post-election crackdown has "made it nearly impossible for anyone to support nuclear cooperation without being accused of capitulating to the West." Ironically, on this issue Ahmadinejad has reportedly been more pragmatic and conciliatory than political opponents inside and out of power, including Mousavi.

The militarization of Iran's theocracy is not a new story. Ray Takeyh's account of the Guards' economic empowerment in  The Hidden Iran, published in 2006, sounds very like reports that have reached the newspapers in recent months -- and would have provided a basis to forecast the regime's reaction to the outbreak of demand for reform that crested so suddenly in the runup to the June election:

A Distant Mirror in Iran

Mohammad Sahimi at Tehran Bureau has a magisterial, level-headed, fact-crammed, on-the-on-hand-on-the-other-hand overview of the situation in Iran that should not be missed (h/t Gary Sick). It's a Rorschach test for those with hopes or fears or strong opinions about Iran, in that it details the weaknesses of the hardliners' position as well as the full implications of the fact that the ruling clique has all the guns and Mafioso-style control of the economy.

I would not presume to add my thinly informed two cents to this deeply informed analysis. But one free association is perhaps worth recording. It was triggered by one item in a list of challenges faced by the ruling hardliners:

Secondly, the Ahmadinejad group is totally devoid of intellectuals and deep thinkers who can lead or even show the way to improving the economy. Most moderate conservative experts have fled the Ahmadinejad camp. The composition of his new government, which is totally devoid of any “heavy weight” expert, is highly illustrative of that fact.

This gave me a flash image of the U.S. after a Palin-led or other extreme rump Republican takeover -- enabled perhaps after a nuclear terrorist attack (Joe the President, anyone?). Our system has stronger antibodies than Iran's, but who's to say it couldn't happen? The Bush Administration went a ways down this road, packing the Justice Department, EPA and countless other agencies with faith-based ideologues and industry shills; it went a long way toward bankrupting the country with a 1-2-3 punch of tax cuts for the wealthy, entitlement giveaways and unnecessary war; it further undermined institutional norms and taboos by cooking the intelligence-gathering process and instituting a torture regime; it stimulated and materially aided what Andrew Sullivan calls "movement conservatism, the business," i.e. the entertainment juggernaut of mainstreamed Father Coughlin-level demagoguery.

We're in partial remission at the moment. But the radicalization of the Republican rump is dangerous; demagogues are waiting in the wings. The country needs two parties capable of governing. As of now, we don't have that.

A prayerful assembly in Iran

From Green Brief 31, perhaps the best current source for news inside Iran, a couple of snippets highlighting the tenor of state-sanctioned worship in the Islamic Republic:

Karroubi was assaulted in front of Tehran University as he tried to enter the compound to join the prayers.

It is worth mentioning that there was a loudspeaker inside the mosque which chanted, "Death to America!", but every time that slogan was heard, people loudly replied with, "Death to Russia, Death to China!"

Many women were reportedly stabbed with knives by Basijis dressed as women. Several mosques around the city were packed with Basijis waiting to come out and clash with protesters...Basijis even attacked people who had come to prayers.

The Basij are religiously indoctrinated from an early age as they're trained in the means of state terror. This is the modus vivendi of the theocracy established by Ayatollah Khomeini, the "enlightened Imam," according to Mousavi, who brought "unprecedented enlightenment" to Iranian society -- and who, according to Rafsanjani yesterday, "always said that without the participation of the people the Islamic government would never be successful."

Let's recall that compared to Khomeini, the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad thugocracy is kind and gentle. Instead of mass beatings, the enlightened Imam went in for mass executions, untold tortures, and, when war came, human wave sacrifices of indoctrinated teens. He also empowered a cadre of theocrats, starting with himself, to place their own authority ahead of that of the Koran -- let alone the people.

Can those who devoted their life's service, and continue to pay lip service -- and probably heart service -- to one of the twentieth centuries last great killers lead a movement for meaningful change? Perhaps, for a season. Gorbachev did it.

Wings beating against a web, III: Iran's frozen-out elite

Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has distinguished himself as one of the best-informed analysts of the post-election situation in Iran. His 7/16 q-and-a includes several crucial points about the coterie now in control, the opposition's prospects, the likely course of nuclear negotiations and the regime's vulnerabilities.

In sync with those who have detailed the militarist takeover that has progressed over the course of Ahmadinejad's four years in power, Sadjadpour stresses that not only the Iranian masses but large swaths of the country's elite, are now beating their wings against the tightly spun web of the current ruling coterie:

First of all, the idea of the Islamic Republic of Iran is now over. It has lost any claims of being a ‘republic.’ Past Iranian governments didn’t necessarily represent a wide swath of Iranian society, but they certainly encompassed a fairly wide swath of the Iranian political elite. Now the country is being run by a small cartel, which I would argue, reflects not only a very narrow swath of Iranian society, but also a narrow swath of Iran’s political elite. It’s a cartel of hardline clerics and Revolutionary Guardsmen who have benefitted tremendously from the oil bonanza of the last few years. They made nearly $300 billion in oil revenue the last four years and don’t want to share power. They are self-proclaimed ‘principlists’ but in reality their only real principles are power and money.

This duality runs throughout Sadjadpour's exposition: the regime lacks legitimacy, and the means to sustain the economy and social peace -- but as of now it has the guns. Some key points on both sides of this equation:

On who's really in control (after acknowledging opposition to regime among top-level clergy):

What we’ve seen in Iran over the last decade, however, is that the institution of the Revolutionary Guards has eclipsed the institution of the clergy, in terms of their political and economic clout. So while the cleavages amongst clerical elite is certainly significant, what would be a far more fatal blow to Ahmadinejad and Khamenei would be open dissent amongst the Revolutionary Guard elite, which we haven’t yet seen.

On the prospects for "cracking" the Revolutionary Guard:

The senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards were handpicked by Khamenei, they owe their positions to Khamenei, and at the moment at least I think they’re unlikely to challenge him. But there’s a lot of anecdotal and some empirical evidence to show that the rank and file of the Revolutionary Guards is more reflective of Iranian society at large. They are not simply 120,000 radicals who are ready to martyr themselves to retain Ahmadinejad’s presidency, as one of the senior commanders recently alluded.

On negotiating with the current regime:

...I understand the Obama administration has decided that the nuclear clock is too urgent an issue to delay negotiations. But we should be clear about something: The problem we have with Iran has far more to do with the character of the regime than their nuclear program. The reality is that as long as Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and company are in power, we’re never going to reach a nuclear accord which sufficiently allays our suspicions—and Israel’s suspicions—that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. Any such accord would not only require Tehran to significantly curtail enrichment and agree to an intrusive inspections regime, it will also require them to modify their hostility toward Israel and alter their relationship with groups like Hezbollah. The chances of this happening as long as Ahmadinejad is president and Khamenei is Supreme Leader are very slim

On oil as arbiter:

But the country that has the greatest potential to influence internal Iranian affairs in the short term is Saudi Arabia. The Iranian economy is heavily reliant on oil revenue, and each one dollar drop in oil prices is nearly one billion dollars of lost annual revenue for Iran. If Saudi Arabia—whose relations with Iran have deteriorated since Ahmadinejad became president—were to quietly increase output in order to provoke a price drop it could prove devastating to Iran, far more damaging than any sanctions that are now being deliberated.

That last point is pretty arresting. It lead me to dream of political impossibilities: suppose the Obama Administration and Congress could get its act together and impose a hefty tax on oil whenever it hit a given price floor - say, $60/barrel? That would cut consumption and keep the price of oil down, which also "would be more damaging than any sanctions that are now being deliberated."

The Guard that has the whip hand in Iran

The Wall Street Journal's Farnaz Fassihi has given us an in-depth portrait of a fanatically devoted 24 year-old "mid-ranking" Basij, Mehdi Moradani, who during the massive street demonstrations in Iran mobilized a 12-man Basij motorcycle posse that spent the days beating and arresting demonstrators.

"I was defending my country and our revolution and Islam. Everything was at risk," Mardini explains. And, "I will give my life in a heartbeat if the regime asks me."

As a representative Basij, Moradani illustrates the formidable barriers to regime change or reform in Iran. The primary enforcers are not disaffected Soviet-style conscripts, but rather true believers indoctrinated from early childhood.

Moradani was inducted at age 9 by his Revolutionary Guard father into the Basij youth club, "a mix between the Boy Scouts and Bible School," where children were primed "to defend Islam, even at the expense of death, or martyrdom." At age 14, he was mobilized to beat up student demonstrators in the 1999 uprisings. The walls of his shop are adorned with framed posters of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and Hezbollah leader Narsrallah - "My heroes." His cell ring is a famous religious song about a Shiite saint. There are somewhere between 1 and 4 million Basij, similarly trained.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of Fassihi's portrait is its revelation that Moradani is not fanatic enough to make the Revolutionary Guard, the elite 125,000-man military corps whose top commander defines its primary mission as " guarding the revolution and its achievements against internal threats." Ahmadinejad, a Guard veteran, has packed the government bureaucracy, governorships, media and other organs of power with fellow veterans; the Guard also controls large swaths of Iran's economy, as well as the Basij and other paramilitary groups.

For Moradani, Guard membership remains an aspiration:

He has taken the Guard's rigorous entrance exam twice, passing the ideology and the written portions both times. But he failed the final hurdle: an intense interview that lasts six to eight hours. Applicants must discuss why they are loyal to the regime and the Supreme Leader. He intends to try again.

And yet, on the other side of the coin, not every Iranian raised under a conservative ethos like Mr. Moradani has responded as he has. Having cross-sectioned the Basij with this portrait, Fassihi ends by cross-sectioning the divided society:

For Mr. Moradani, the biggest shock during the election turmoil came in his personal life. He had recently gotten engaged to a young woman from a devout, conservative family. A week into the protests, he says, his fiancée called him with an ultimatum. If he didn't leave the Basij and stop supporting Mr. Ahmadinejad, he recalls her saying, she wouldn't marry him.

He told her that was impossible. "I suffered a real emotional blow," he says. "She said to me, 'Go beat other people's children then,' and 'I don't want to have anything to do with you,' and hung up on me."

She returned the ring he gave her, and hasn't returned his phone calls. "The opposition has even fooled my fiancée," he says.

The Horrid fascination of history

Jeffrey Goldberg to Michael J. Totten:

Jews are floating around in the Persian Gulf with nuclear weapons in German subs that are aimed at the new Hitler. If you step away from your personal feelings about it, it’s just fascinating.

Hopeful developments in Iran

As Khamenei and Ahmadinejad continue to arrest and torture protesters and ramp up threats against Mousavi, Karroubi and their supporters, two more hopeful signs arise of resistance within Iran's ruling elite:

1) A group of top-tier religious leaders has ramped up its opposition to the official election results and the crackdown, the NYT reports:

The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.

A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible...

The clerics’ statement chastised the leadership for failing to adequately study complaints of vote rigging and lashed out at the use of force in crushing huge public protests.

It even directly criticized the Guardian Council, the powerful group of clerics charged with certifying elections.

“Is it possible to consider the results of the election as legitimate by merely the validation of the Guardian Council?” the association said.

Perhaps more threatening to the supreme leader, the committee called on other clerics to join the fight against the government’s refusal to adequately reconsider the charges of voter fraud. The committee invoked powerful imagery, comparing the 20 protesters killed during demonstrations with the martyrs who died in the early days of the revolution and the war with Iraq, asking other clerics to save what it called “the dignity that was earned with the blood of tens of thousands of martyrs.”

2) Rafsanji, still cryptic, appears to point toward some solution other than acquiescence to the official election results. CNN:

"People from across the country participated in the elections, with excitement," ILNA quoted Rafsanjani as saying in Saturday's story. "But unfortunately the events that occurred after that and the difficulties created for some left a bitter taste, and I don't think that any wakened consciousness would be satisfied with the resulting situation."

He referred to the recent expressions of opinions across the country regarding the election crisis as a reflection of a power struggle "at the highest levels of the system."

"I hope that with proper management and fortitude, in the next few days, we can be witnesses to the betterment of the situation, resolution of the difficulties and the decrease in the number of the families waiting for their loved ones," Rafsanjani said. "We must think about safeguarding the long term interests and benefits of the system."

Everything Rafsanjani has said publicly since the election can be read two ways, e.g., his call on Mousavi et al to work through legal channels (June 27) and his dubbing the election aftermath “a tangled mess, perpetrated by suspicious sources whose objectives are to create differences and separations between the people and the system and eroding the trust of the people in the Islamic system" (June 29).

Ahmadi non grata?

Neil MacFarquhar and Gary Sick have both emphasized the extent to which Ahmadinejad has packed the organs of government with his loyalists over the past four years. Both sketch out a stealth militarist takeover of Iran's religious establishment -- with the extent of Khamenei's assent or leadership left somewhat ambiguous.

In today's New York Post, Amir Tahen shows the other side of the coin -- the pushback against Ahmadinejad and his power grab at all levels of Iranian society:

His legitimacy is challenged at all levels of Iranian society, including every segment of the Khomeinist establishment. He has to invoke Khamenei's authority in support of every move he makes. He is the first Islamic Republic president to have split the Khomeinist camp so deeply, and perhaps permanently.

Whenever I think, 'no government can long stand after such a loss of legitimacy,' I remember: the former Soviet Union. Cuba. Burma. North Korea. But still...Iranian society has been more free than any of those. Memory of its last revolution is still fresh. Powerful factions in its existing power structure dislike Ahmadinejad and resent the coup. There is reason to hope

Wings beating against a web?

As Roger Cohen movingly pointed out this past weekend, the uprising in Iran has doubtless humanized the country in many Americans' eyes: at the moment, "Iran" is likelier to evoke "Neda" than "mullah."

It's a sad irony that this humanization may be occurring at the precisely the moment that the current regime becomes most dangerous. The popular uprising, and the old-guard reformist movement to which it responded, may represent the beating of wings against a tightening web.

As Neil MacFarquhar and Gary Sick have both detailed, the advent of Ahmadinejad in the wake of the reformist Khatami was not just a swing of the political pendulum. Ahmadinejad has rather accelerated a militarist takeover, packing the bureacracy, state-run media, educational institutions, and state-controlled major economic enterprises with allies from the Revolutionary Guard; and pursuing an ultra hard-line foreign policy that includes full-throttle pursuit of nuclear fuel processing capability.

While it's generally been assumed that Khameini controls Ahmadinejad, both Sick and MacFarquhar suggest that the reverse may be closer to the truth. Sick:

Over the 20 years that Ayatollah Khamenei has been the rahbar, or leader, he has allied himself ever more closely with the Revolutionary Guards—to such an extent that it is no longer apparent to me who is leading and who is following. The Revolutionary Guards have been granted extraordinary influence over all functions of the Islamic republic—military, political, economic, and even Islamic. Technically, they take their orders from the leader, but has he ever dared to contradict them? On the contrary, he seems always to court them by granting them ever-greater influence and responsibilities.

If it's true, as Sick suggests, that Ahmadinejad's advent in 2005 marked the beginning of a quasi-fascist transformation of the Iranian theocracy, it's interesting to note that Ahmadinejad, like Hitler, led a coterie of extremist veterans of a long, brutal, ultimately losing war effort into positions of power approximately 15 years after the war's end.

After two years' overexposure to John McCain's fulminations, Americans should be skeptical of the propensity to compare every dictatorial regime that represses its own people and poses a security threat of some kind to the Nazis. Iranians have given the world reason to hope that the hardliners' days in power are numbered -- and no one should underestimate the staying power of the children of the people who ousted the Shah. The current system may also yet evolve from within, as faction within the power structure push to respond to public pressure. But the uprising has also thrown into sharp relief just what the Iranian people are up against.

A Freudian slip for Obama?

Much as I admire the overall tenor of Obama's statements about Iran, there's one remark that perhaps gives Iranian propaganda something to chew on:

Mr. Obama did not acquiesce, saying, “I don’t take Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements seriously about apologies, particularly given the fact that the United States has gone out of its way not to interfere with the election process in Iran.”

How do you go out of your way not to interfere? What does that suggest about the normal course of U.S. policy?

Perhaps Obama meant that he has gone out of his way to communicate that the U.S. is not interfering?

Mousavi's Paradise Lost: Khomeini's Republic

There is much to honor in Mousavi's statement issued today: his pledge never to hurt a countryman, his call for freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, rule of law.

And yet, he advances those principles in service of a delusion: that to uphold them is to return the revolution coopted by Ayatollah Khomeini to its pure origins, in which these principles flourished. From the start of his campaign, Mousavi has called for a restoration of the rule of law as established by the Islamic Republic. That is, for restoration of something that never was. Today, he laid out a vision of paradise lost, paradise to be regained:

30 years ago, in this country a revolution became victorious in the name of Islam, a revolution for freedom, a revolution for reviving the dignity of men, a revolution for truth and justice. In those times, especially when our enlightened Imam [Khomeini] was alive, large amount of lives and matters were invested to legitimize this foundation and many valuable achievements were attained. An unprecedented enlightenment captured our society, and our people reached a new life where they endured the hardest of hardships with a sweet taste. What this people gained was dignity and freedom and a gift of the life of the pure ones [i.e. 12 Imams of Shiites]. I am certain that those who have seen those days will not be satisfied with anything less. Had we as a people lost certain talents that we were unable to experience that early spirituality? I had come to say that that was not the case. It is not late yet, we are not far from that enlightened space yet.

The "enlightened Imam" would be the man who massacred tens of thousands of opponents and crushed all dissent, who prolonged ruinous war with Iraq for six fruitless years after turning back Iraq's initial territorial gains, and in that war sent teens and even preteens in waves of thousands to clear minefields with their bodies (the first Basiji, today's murderous militia); who imprisoned women in the hijab and generally set women's rights back fifty years: who murdered the leaders of the Baha'is and made second-class citizens of the rest; who impoverished the country with his contempt for economic management; who united the people by demonizing the United States (against whom Iranians did have ample cause for resentment) and institutionalizing the murderous Antisemitism that now, adopted in full by Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, threatens the world's stability -- who in short, made Khamenei look like a piker when it comes to crushing human rights and subverting the Republican government Mousavi professes to value.

Mousavi casts his current rivals as destroyers of "Republicanism"and hence of the Revolution:

If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hays of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and in practice, the ideology that Islam and Republicanism are incompatible will be proven. This outcome will make two groups happy: One, those who since the beginning of revolution stood against Imam and called the Islamic state a dictatorship of the elite who want to take people to heaven by force; and the other, those who in defending the human rights, consider religion and Islam against republicanism. Imam’s fantastic art was to neutralize these dichotomies. I had come to focus on Imam’s approach to neutralize the burgeoning magic of these.

He treasures the notion that Islam and Republicanism are compatible. Perhaps they are. But Khomenei united them in demonic form by modeling the Islamic Republic after Plato's Republic -- the oldest blueprint we have for totalitarianism. The Guardian Council that falsified the vote count last week was a real-world enfranchisement of Plato's ruling class of philosopher kings. Khomeini's republicanism like Plato's, is based in absolute faith in the absolute wisdom of an educated elite invested with absolute power.

His rewriting of the history of the Islamic Republic notwithstanding, Mousavi has committed himself to the human rights that Obama today cast as the universal law of humanity:

As I am looking at the scene, I see it set for advancing a new political agenda that spreads beyond the objective of installing [sic] an unwanted government. As a companion who has seen the beauties of your green wave, I will never allow any one’s life endangered because of my actions. At the same time, I remain undeterred on my demand for annulling the election and demanding people’s rights. Despite my limited abilities, I believe that your motivation and creativity can pursue your legitimate demands in new civil manners.

We advise the authorities, to calm down the streets. Based on article 27 of the constitution, not only provide space for peaceful protest, but also encourage such gatherings. The state TV should stop badmouthing and taking sides. Before voices turn into shouting, let them be heard in reasonable debates. Let the press criticize, and write the news as they happen. In one word, create a free space for people to express their agreements and disagreements. Let those who want, say “takbeer” and don’t consider it opposition. It is clear that in this case, there won’t be a need for security forces on the streets, and we won’t have to face pictures and hear news that break the heart of anyone who loves the country and the revolution.

Leaders can be transformed by the contract forged with their followers in the crucible of events. Mousavi's pledges to institute the rule of law and respect human rights constitute a religious man's strongest oath to his people, made with the world listening, in mortal political combat with those whom he charges with trampling those rights. Let's hope that if by some miracle he does come into power he will work to fulfill these pledges, whatever his delusions about the blood-soaked Khomeinist past -- and his own role in it.

Gary Sick's pre-election call

As the world wonders whether the post-election unrest will delegitimize the Iranian regime that's been headed for the past twenty years by Ayatollah Khamenei, it's worth stepping to recognize that election contest prior to the vote laid the groundwork.

Back on June 10, Gary Sick noted that Ahmadinejad's debate performances must have triggered cognitive dissonance for millions of Iranians on several fronts -- most notably in his implicit indictment of his own purported puppet master:

[Ahmadinejad] broke crockery left and right by associating his opponents with what he claimed was a history of corruption and catastrophic errors dating back to the earliest days of the Islamic Republic. That, of course, is the system that he represents and that he extolls in every public appearance.

The 40 million Iranian voters who watched this astonishing spectacle, and who had never heard a serious word of criticism about the Islamic government on national TV, scarcely knew what to think. His accusations, if true, cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the revolutionary state.

Although Ahmadinejad’s barbs were aimed primarily at former president Rafsanjani, whom he suspects of orchestrating the opposition, these charges also apply even more directly to the Leader, Ayatollah Khamene`i, who has had supreme authority over the Islamic Republic since at least 1989. If Iran is this wasteland of corruption, inefficiency and strategic mistakes, what does that say about the wizard who has been guiding this process almost since its inception?

Indeed, Sick's June 10 post highlights the deep fissure within the Iranian regime that pointed toward a rigged election. Its prescience about the likely rigging -- and Khamenei's likely acquiesence -- lends authority to Sick's conclusion:

No one in Iran appears to be fully in control of events that have a potential to mark a turning point in the history of the Islamic revolution.

Of course, the unlikelihood that the status quo in Iran can be restored does not rule out the possibility that the crisis will produce a more repressive regime.

Reza Pahlavi seconds Nate Silver

Nate Silver's blog tagline, "Politics done right," amounts to an admonition: "do the math." To a verbally inclined baby boomer who felt free to blow off math in mid-eleventh grade, 538 has offered a sobering demonstration that while the truth may set you free, the math very often reveals the truth.

On Monday, Silver took a dive into Iranian pre-election polling data, which according to pollsters Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty of Terror Free Tomorrow showed that Ahmadinejad was indeed likely to win the "real" vote count. Focusing on the large number of respondents who would not reveal or had not made a choice, paired with wide margins in favor of reformist policy positions, Silver found evidence of multi-level voter intimidation. His conclusion:

The point that few commentators are realizing -- Al Giordano is an exception -- is that this story really isn't about the way that the votes were counted. It's about whether Iran is capable at this point of having an election in which the democratic will of its electorate is properly reflected. If Ahmadinejad hired a bunch of thugs to hold every Iranian at gunpoint while they were casting their ballots, it would not have been difficult for him to get 63 percent of the vote -- indeed, he'd probably have wound up with very close to 100 percent. This would be an election -- and there would be no need at all to tamper with the results. But it wouldn't be an expression of democracy. We need to separate out those two concepts. Ahmadinejad, as far as we know, did not go so far as to hold anyone at gunpoint. But the tentacles of fear in Iran run deep.

Are good math skills are proxy for experience? Exiled Reza Pahlavi, the 48-year-old son of the last Shah of Iran, needs no numbers crunching to assess the regime that deposed his father. Here's what he told the WSJ:

"We have a major paradigm change right now," he said. "It's a mockery to call any of these theatrics an election process. However, given the limits the Iranian people have, that was the only way to show the whole world they are against the established regime. Now they have gone to questioning the very legitimacy of the regime, and it's unfolding before our very eyes."

Of course, Pahlavi is hardly an unbiased observer. Nonetheless, the congruence with Silver's analysis is striking.

I should add, too, that it doesn't require advanced math skills to contrast the poll numbers for the candidates with the poll numbers for policy positions. But it's the habit of mind that counts. And often, Silver's mathematical analysis goes far deeper.

A running mate for Ahmadinejad?

Today, Ahmadinejad displayed his understanding of the democratic process:

When asked about protests and complaints, Ahmadinejad said that it was important to ask the opinions of "true Iranians" on the elections. "Like the people you meet at my rallies," he said.

Great minds think alike:

"We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe" -- here the audience interrupted Palin with applause and cheers -- "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

Come to think of it, they're both pretty good at handing out petrodollars, too.

The Amalek connection: Goldberg protests too much

Jeffrey Goldberg has responded to those who have seized on his report that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu views Iran as a modern incarnation of Israel's Biblical enemy Amalek by pointing out that Netanayahu never made the equation himself -- an aide told Goldberg that Amalek is the frame in which Netanyahu views Iran. Part of Goldberg's response is directed at Andrew Sullivan, who protested that the Amalek meme indicates little about Israeli intent but is harmful to its public diplomacy. Both Goldberg and Sullivan downplay the significance of God's command to Saul in 1 Samuel 15 to massacre the Amelekites down to the last head of cattle.

Three points in response:

1) Netanyahu may not himself have mentioned Amalek to Goldberg, but Goldberg quoted an aide assuring readers that Netanyahu views Iran as Amalek. He then tied this historically Jewish reflex -- viewing all subsequent enemies as reincarnations of the Biblical bogeys -- to Netanyahu's father's scholarship, the central theme of which he portrayed as the irreducible racial hatred borne against the Jewish people by the perpetrators of the Spanish Inquisition. If readers concluded that Netanyahu views Iran as Amalek, Goldberg bears some responsibility (and credit!) for that.

2) Andrew Sullivan, by emphasizing the damage that the Amalek-Iran equation does to Israel's diplomatic stance rather than what it says about Israeli leadership's unspoken worldview, got the problem backwards (and gave Goldberg the opportunity to focus much of his defense on a red herring - Israel's diplomatic acumen). The whole point of Goldberg's unveiling of the Amalek metaphor is that it gets at the Israeli unconscious.

That's what's so disturbing -- we have the leadership of a powerful modern nation state viewing its enemies in terms of the stylized, moralized victors' history codified in a 2000+ year-old chronicle. Of course Israel is not planning to massacre tens of millions. But atavistic fears underpin Israel's response to current dangers that are alarming enough. And however softened and spiritualized by the rabbis over 2000 years, the Biblical demonization of Israel's enemies remains an important element in Jewish consciousness -- and Israeli action.

3) Goldberg protests:

In any case, this whole debate is a perversion, and not only because genocide is the specialty of other religions, and not Judaism. Iran has called for the elimination of the Jewish state, and seems to be building nuclear weapons that could make that a reality; Israel simply seeks to protect itself from a country that wants to exterminate it. If Israel does strike Iran, it would bomb military targets while trying to minimize civilian casualties. Iran, through its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, already has a long and distinguished record of murdering Jewish children. There's simply no equivalence here. Yes, Israel does various idiotic and immoral things. But it isn't, even on its worst day, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

All true, to a point. Iran has called for the elimination of the Jewish state, though its leaders always carefully avoid suggesting that Iran itself plans to effect that elimination by military means. But Goldberg here reproduces the endless disconnect -- which I think Ezra Klein pointed out -- between Israel's focus on intent and its Muslim neighbors' focus on action. Yes, Israeli action against Iran would focus on military targets. But it's likelier that Israel will make that attack, and kill hundreds or thousands of Iranians in its targeted strike, than that Iran will deploy nuclear weapons or otherwise directly attack Israel. Israel may indeed try to minimize civilian casualties, while Hezbollah and Hamas directly attack civilians. But Israel has killed a lot more civilians in its struggles with Hezbollah and Hamas than those enemies have Israelis. That's a difference in power, not intent. But Israel's neighbors focus on the body count.

One could counter that the number of Iranian civilians killed by the Iranian revolutionary regime probably outstrips the number of civilians that Israeli armed forces have killed in the country's entire history. I agree with Goldberg that there's "no moral equivalence" between Israel and Iran. But an Israeli preemptive attack on Iran would bring equivalence a lot nearer. And the Amalek mindset makes such an attack a lot more likely.