Brown Daily Herald
Professors move to a different beat
Non-music professors find time to pursue musical endeavors
By Sara Walter
Published: Friday, October 14, 2005
As a student, it is hard to envision one's favorite professor or dean out of the classroom context. But Associate Dean of Biology for Undergraduate Education Marjorie Thompson, Professor of Anthropology William Beeman and Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine Scott Allen are just three Brown faculty members who find time between class and research to explore another talent: music.
"Whatever is worth doing is worth overdoing"
Marjorie Thompson loves her job. A teacher and mentor for undergrads and graduate students, she has been at the University for 25 years. But when she was growing up she had a "three-pronged interest" that included not only science, but music and art as well.
In the mid-1960s, as folk music came to the fore, Thompson began playing the guitar. She "lived and breathed folk music" and took lessons in country blues finger-style guitar from Southern-trained artists in New York.
Today, Thompson performs in a variety of venues including clubs, theaters, taverns, coffee houses, house concerts, festivals, radio stations and public access television - though her personal favorite was the International Guitar Festival in Italy.
The back-and-forth transition between teaching and music is natural, Thompson said. "Teach-ing in itself is a communication art" because you are "trying to evoke a response" from students, she said.
Thompson called herself a guitar "hobbyist" from 1965 through 1999, at which point she attended a guitar camp in southern Ohio. The owner of the camp was Jorma Kaukoner, the lead guitarist of Jefferson Airplane, and Thomp-son says it was only after studying with an "idol" that she started playing guitar seriously. In 2001, she began composing her own original songs. Encouraged to record and perform the songs, she has since released four CDs.
"Whatever is worth doing is worth overdoing," Thompson said. At this point in her folk music career, she performs an average of 75 shows a year.
Thompson also indulges her artistic passion by trying her hand at biomedical illustration and making custom jewelry based on the makeup of cells, which is sold in the Brown Bookstore. She said that people should not have to choose between their interests - it is "exciting to have alternatives," she said, adding that everyone should have a passion like hers.
Folk music is "like oxygen and you need it," Thompson said. She plans to continue working with biology at Brown, recording and "performing at better and better venues, and increasing (my) recognition in the music world."
Thompson said she is "intensely organized and fills up every possible moment of every day." She plans to perform at a study break in Arnold Lounge on Oct. 18 and has a Web site, www.mosugarmusic.com, for her music.
Musical therapy
Scott Allen is a musician, activist and doctor. It leads to a workload that has reduced the number of live performances he can play in recent years, thus pushing his musical expression more into recording his folk music on piano and guitar.
"I think I've pretty much always had a fascination with" folk and popular music, Allen said. His interests include a combination of folk and rock music, but he has always been interested in the acoustic side of music. "I like music that is very simple and straightforward ... (there is) something nice and effective about simpler arrangements," he said.
Allen was a piano player in his late teens and early 20s, but was working at the time in Southeast Asia, where pianos were hard to find. As a result, he learned how to play guitar, and today it is his instrument of choice, though he writes, arranges, records and plays both instruments.
Allen works with Brown students who are residents at his clinical practice site. Until last year, he worked at a prison where students studying community health clerkships did clinical rotations. Now he works at the state hospital.
Despite his love for music, Allen says that even if he were able to make a living out of it - which, he said, musicians have not been able to do successfully for a long time - he would still practice medicine.
Allen also has a family, a Soros fellowship to do advocacy work in the area of human rights and is associated with Musicians for Human Rights in Cambridge, Mass., and Physician Advocacy, which works for freedom and democracy.
For Allen, the worlds of music and medicine constantly intertwine. His job in medicine has a "profound impact on the subject material of (my) music." The majority of his new CD was influenced by the time that he spent working in the prison. "If it's what you're living, it's what comes out," Allen said.
Allen currently performs about three or four times a year, as opposed to the three or four times a month he used to. He said that being in a band would be too much of an ongoing time commitment. Working individually, he said, he can "take an hour here, an hour there and not have to coordinate it." Consequently, individual recording plays a big role in his musical career.
Allen also finds music to be therapeutic. When he was in high school, he said it was very common for his peers to use marijuana and drink, but he turned to music as an escape. Allen tries to use this passion for music to help his patients.
"You can have an interest or a passion that can be therapeutic or healing. ... (I) try to ask patients what they find self-healing, such as music, sports, reading, (or) some other hobby they might have," he said.
Though he cannot perform often, Allen shares his music over the Internet. His site, www.milomusic.com, has 1,500-2,000 visitors a month.
"It really is a strong passion," said Allen. "If no one listened or no one was interested, I would still do it. I don't do it for praise, approval, or money - if that happens, it's wonderful."
Take a bow and an encore
Folk music isn't the only genre of music that University professors perform. William Beeman, professor of anthropology, has a background in linguistic anthropology, theater, speech, dance performance and performance theory. After working in Japan, India and the Middle East, Beeman said he realized that "(you) have to be a performer to understand what it is to perform," and he no longer wanted to only observe musical performances.
Many forms of musical performance in these cultures require training as a child. Beeman did have musical training and knew he could be a professional singer. He began attending the Boston Conser-vatory and commuted there for seven years while teaching a full course load at Brown.
Beeman has performed all over the world and came close to leaving teaching for good after a singing stint in Germany. Locally, he has performed in Providence, Boston, New York and Connecticut. Just last year, Beeman took a year off from teaching to write and perform. He has performed between five and six operas a year in Europe, North America and Japan.
While at the Boston Conservatory, Beeman did six apprenticeships, which he says is "how you really learn to work on stage with your voice." The apprenticeships provided him with the rigorous training for opera - in opera, if you don't have the correct vocal training, you can burn out your voice, Beeman said. Training is a huge time commitment and you have to be willing to train on a regular basis to be a successful opera singer. "(Performing opera is) an athletic activity in the end," Beeman said, because the singer is supposed to make it look easy while moving the audience emotionally and acting in a convincing way.
Beeman later took a three-year leave of absence from Brown to work at an opera theater in Germany. Though he had the opportunity to stay at the theater in Germany, he made the hard decision to come back to teaching at the University, partly because German labor laws were likely to limit the amount of time he could work there. Beeman returned to the United States and cut down his performances.
Every other year, Beeman teaches a music theater workshop that combines opera and music theater because he believes that the technique for both should be the same. He also composes music on the side and has two books in the works: "Iraq, a State in Search of a Nation" and "The Meistersinger - Artistry and Identity," which is about his experiences at the German opera house.
This coming spring, Beeman plans to begin auditioning again and set up a full performance schedule for next year. He said performing is a "terrific rush" and that there is "almost nothing more gratifying."
Beeman is a bass, which will allow him to sing much later into life than if he were any other voice type.
"If I live that long (I will sing) into my 80s or 90s," he said.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Monday, October 10, 2005
The Perpetual Hostage Crisis
The Perpetual Hostage Crisis
by William O. Beeman
American diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian dissidents, who were unhappy at the insults that Washington had leveled against the Islamic Republic. The diplomats were then held, helpless, by their Iranian captors for more than a year despite protests, threats and entreaties.
This describes the events of 1979-1980 during the Hostage Crisis following the Iranian Revolution, when U.S. embassy personnel were held captive for 444 days by Iranians protesting the U.S. admission of an ailing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to American soil. However this also describes the present state of the United States today vis-à-vis Iran. Washington still has a failed Iran policy, or rather "non-policy," after more than 25 years, and American diplomats are still held hostage to a regime that bests them at every turn.
American dealings with Iran have failed in large part because the United States has never articulated any goals in its dealings with Iran that make any sense either to Iranians or to Americans. They mostly consist of calls for Iran to cease actions that Iran claims are not being carried out in the first place, such as developing nuclear weaponry, supporting Al-Qaeda, and providing arms to Iraqi insurgents. The United States then tries to prove that Iran is indeed carrying out the things of which it is accused. The Iranians counter with further proof that the accusations are baseless, and so it goes, ad infinitum.
As if to demonstrate that Iran is indeed an evildoer, despite lack of any proof, the United States then tries to impose unilateral punishment for the things it accuses Iran of doing. Washington's recent machinations designed to haul Iran before the United Nations Security Council for purported nuclear arms control violations is an example. The Iranians get angry, claiming that they are being unjustly singled out for opprobrium and circumvent the punishment by, for example, making sure that any future Security Council sanctions against it will be vetoed by one of its reliable trade partners.
It doesn't help the United States press its case when it is demonstrably powerless to back up either its accusations or its sanctions. The disastrous current state of the Bush administration with a losing undermanned war, scandals galore, and the President's own party in revolt against him makes that patently clear. It doesn't help, either, that Iranian leaders know all this, and realize that they consequently don't have to pay much attention to Washington. The Iranians then continue doing whatever it was they were doing that made Washington mad in the first place. The cycle of vituperation and recrimination continues to escalate with a lot of huffing and puffing, but no action. This is the pitiful result of the diplomatic encounter between the two states.
If this all sounds childish, it is no accident. The world is cursed with a stubborn American administration that symbolically holds its breath and stomps its feet when thwarted, and an Iranian regime full of proud people who believe that compromise is capitulation. Both American and Iranian leaders are painfully naïve in the area of international relations. Their relations are the diplomatic equivalent of an ignorant irresistible force meeting an ignorant immovable object.
However, the sides are not equal. Iran is a very immovable object indeed, and as long as U.S. diplomats are trapped in a monomaniacal policy of futilely pushing against Tehran, they can neither move forward nor backward. They are as captive as if they were tied and blindfolded in the cellar of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
The current standoff could be dismissed as the ridiculous, ineffectual posturing that nations occasionally fall into (á la Greece and Turkey for so many years) if the stakes were not so high. Both Iran and the United States know that Iran is the most powerful nation in the Middle East today. It is the key to long-term peace, stability and uninterrupted energy supplies in the region. The Iranians have little to lose by standing pat against empty American threats. It is for this reason that the United States must alter its pointless current strategy, and release itself from the captivity of unrealistic expectations, by beginning the slow and painful process of genuinely engaging with Iran.
William O. Beeman is professor of Anthropology at Brown University, and president-elect of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. His current book is The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Praeger).
Copyright 2005 William O. Beeman
by William O. Beeman
American diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian dissidents, who were unhappy at the insults that Washington had leveled against the Islamic Republic. The diplomats were then held, helpless, by their Iranian captors for more than a year despite protests, threats and entreaties.
This describes the events of 1979-1980 during the Hostage Crisis following the Iranian Revolution, when U.S. embassy personnel were held captive for 444 days by Iranians protesting the U.S. admission of an ailing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to American soil. However this also describes the present state of the United States today vis-à-vis Iran. Washington still has a failed Iran policy, or rather "non-policy," after more than 25 years, and American diplomats are still held hostage to a regime that bests them at every turn.
American dealings with Iran have failed in large part because the United States has never articulated any goals in its dealings with Iran that make any sense either to Iranians or to Americans. They mostly consist of calls for Iran to cease actions that Iran claims are not being carried out in the first place, such as developing nuclear weaponry, supporting Al-Qaeda, and providing arms to Iraqi insurgents. The United States then tries to prove that Iran is indeed carrying out the things of which it is accused. The Iranians counter with further proof that the accusations are baseless, and so it goes, ad infinitum.
As if to demonstrate that Iran is indeed an evildoer, despite lack of any proof, the United States then tries to impose unilateral punishment for the things it accuses Iran of doing. Washington's recent machinations designed to haul Iran before the United Nations Security Council for purported nuclear arms control violations is an example. The Iranians get angry, claiming that they are being unjustly singled out for opprobrium and circumvent the punishment by, for example, making sure that any future Security Council sanctions against it will be vetoed by one of its reliable trade partners.
It doesn't help the United States press its case when it is demonstrably powerless to back up either its accusations or its sanctions. The disastrous current state of the Bush administration with a losing undermanned war, scandals galore, and the President's own party in revolt against him makes that patently clear. It doesn't help, either, that Iranian leaders know all this, and realize that they consequently don't have to pay much attention to Washington. The Iranians then continue doing whatever it was they were doing that made Washington mad in the first place. The cycle of vituperation and recrimination continues to escalate with a lot of huffing and puffing, but no action. This is the pitiful result of the diplomatic encounter between the two states.
If this all sounds childish, it is no accident. The world is cursed with a stubborn American administration that symbolically holds its breath and stomps its feet when thwarted, and an Iranian regime full of proud people who believe that compromise is capitulation. Both American and Iranian leaders are painfully naïve in the area of international relations. Their relations are the diplomatic equivalent of an ignorant irresistible force meeting an ignorant immovable object.
However, the sides are not equal. Iran is a very immovable object indeed, and as long as U.S. diplomats are trapped in a monomaniacal policy of futilely pushing against Tehran, they can neither move forward nor backward. They are as captive as if they were tied and blindfolded in the cellar of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
The current standoff could be dismissed as the ridiculous, ineffectual posturing that nations occasionally fall into (á la Greece and Turkey for so many years) if the stakes were not so high. Both Iran and the United States know that Iran is the most powerful nation in the Middle East today. It is the key to long-term peace, stability and uninterrupted energy supplies in the region. The Iranians have little to lose by standing pat against empty American threats. It is for this reason that the United States must alter its pointless current strategy, and release itself from the captivity of unrealistic expectations, by beginning the slow and painful process of genuinely engaging with Iran.
William O. Beeman is professor of Anthropology at Brown University, and president-elect of the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. His current book is The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Praeger).
Copyright 2005 William O. Beeman
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Understanding an 'Islamic' state of Iraq--New York Daily News
Printer Friendly Version - Understanding an 'Islamic' state of Iraq: "New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Understanding an 'Islamic' state of Iraq
By WILLIAM O. BEEMAN William O. Beeman:
Wednesday, August 10th, 2005
The deadline for drafting an Iraqi constitution is Monday, and there is increasing dread in the West of a de facto 'Islamic republic.' However, the idea of an Islamic republic in the minds of Western observers is far worse than the reality.
The simple truth is that even if a nation labels itself as an Islamic republic, only the smallest part of specific governmental structures can actually be determined by Sharia (sacred law). Islamic governance is mostly just plain governance, with special attention to structures that do not controvert the small body of specific laws incumbent on Muslims. Beyond this, Islamic government incorporates a broad set of principles that few in the West would disagree with, namely that resources are for the good of all, that honesty should be a hallmark of public life and that the disadvantaged should be provided for. The illegitimate use of Islam as an excuse to violate human rights is simple garden-variety repression.
Of course, Islam does have a specific set of laws, including family law and laws governing certain aspects of personal behavior (such as personal dress). However, these laws are applied flexibly from country to country. For example, the law that allows a man to have four wives is frequently modified by the equally important religious demand that he prove that he will be able to treat all of his wives equally. Many laws involving the rights of women are creatively modified in this way. Sharia law makes no mention of the veil, for instance, only that both men and women dress modestly. The Islamic state is free to interpret this any way it wishes.
It is somewhat odd that many in the West find it difficult to accept the desire to preserve a small number of religious structures in the laws of the state. Many religious-minded people in the U.S. would find such laws welcome and regularly lobby for them. The opposition to same-sex marriage on religious grounds is a reality in American politics today, having resulted in legal prohibitions.
The U.S. in particular would do well not to obsess over the potential Islamic nature of the Iraqi constitution. The Iraqis writing their constitution are intelligent, sensitive and competent. They have some horrendously difficult problems to confront, such as problems with sharing power among ethnic groups, distributing oil resources and establishing public safety. Islamic Sharia law provides no specific solution to these matters.
Beeman is director of Middle East Studies at Brown University.
Understanding an 'Islamic' state of Iraq
By WILLIAM O. BEEMAN William O. Beeman:
Wednesday, August 10th, 2005
The deadline for drafting an Iraqi constitution is Monday, and there is increasing dread in the West of a de facto 'Islamic republic.' However, the idea of an Islamic republic in the minds of Western observers is far worse than the reality.
The simple truth is that even if a nation labels itself as an Islamic republic, only the smallest part of specific governmental structures can actually be determined by Sharia (sacred law). Islamic governance is mostly just plain governance, with special attention to structures that do not controvert the small body of specific laws incumbent on Muslims. Beyond this, Islamic government incorporates a broad set of principles that few in the West would disagree with, namely that resources are for the good of all, that honesty should be a hallmark of public life and that the disadvantaged should be provided for. The illegitimate use of Islam as an excuse to violate human rights is simple garden-variety repression.
Of course, Islam does have a specific set of laws, including family law and laws governing certain aspects of personal behavior (such as personal dress). However, these laws are applied flexibly from country to country. For example, the law that allows a man to have four wives is frequently modified by the equally important religious demand that he prove that he will be able to treat all of his wives equally. Many laws involving the rights of women are creatively modified in this way. Sharia law makes no mention of the veil, for instance, only that both men and women dress modestly. The Islamic state is free to interpret this any way it wishes.
It is somewhat odd that many in the West find it difficult to accept the desire to preserve a small number of religious structures in the laws of the state. Many religious-minded people in the U.S. would find such laws welcome and regularly lobby for them. The opposition to same-sex marriage on religious grounds is a reality in American politics today, having resulted in legal prohibitions.
The U.S. in particular would do well not to obsess over the potential Islamic nature of the Iraqi constitution. The Iraqis writing their constitution are intelligent, sensitive and competent. They have some horrendously difficult problems to confront, such as problems with sharing power among ethnic groups, distributing oil resources and establishing public safety. Islamic Sharia law provides no specific solution to these matters.
Beeman is director of Middle East Studies at Brown University.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
Ahmadinejad not man in Tehran Embassy Photo--CIA
The Gulf/2000 Project - SIPA - COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050729/ts_nm/iran_usa_dc
Ahmadinejad not man in Tehran embassy photo - CIA
Fri Jul 29, 5:44 PM ET
A CIA analysis has concluded a hostage-taker pictured in an old photo at
the U.S. Embassy in Tehran is not Iranian President-elect Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, a U.S. official said on Friday.
The analysis compared photos of Ahmadinejad and an embassy hostage-taker
whom former U.S. hostages identified as the newly elected Iranian leader.
It found discrepancies serious enough to suggest the two are different
men.
"If there's a case to made that Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage-takers,
it will not be made on the basis of those photographs," said the official,
who spoke on condition of anonymity because of sensitive nature of the
subject matter.
The photos were widely published in the U.S. media late last month.
The official said the photo analysis was only one part of a broad
inter-agency investigation into Ahmadinejad's role in the aftermath of the
1979 revolution that severed U.S.-Iranian relations and brought Islamic
rule to Iran.
Several American hostages have said they recognized Ahmadinejad from
pictures published after his election, and that they believed he was one
of the captors.
U.S. intelligence agencies and the State Department are trying to
determine what role Ahmadinejad may have played, officials said.
Authorities have so far been able to confirm only that he was a leader of
the student movement that organized the 444-day siege of the embassy in
Tehran.
Ahmadinejad, who takes office on Tuesday, has denied he was involved in
storming the embassy and holding 52 hostages.
The United States has not resumed diplomatic relations with Iran since
that 1979-1981 hostage crisis and considers the Islamic Republic to be a
state sponsor of terrorism.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York, President
Bush labeled Iran a member of an "axis of evil" along with North Korea and
Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The Bush administration is pursuing diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to
abandon civilian uranium enrichment, which American officials say is a
cover for nuclear arms development, a charge Tehran denies.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050729/ts_nm/iran_usa_dc
Ahmadinejad not man in Tehran embassy photo - CIA
Fri Jul 29, 5:44 PM ET
A CIA analysis has concluded a hostage-taker pictured in an old photo at
the U.S. Embassy in Tehran is not Iranian President-elect Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, a U.S. official said on Friday.
The analysis compared photos of Ahmadinejad and an embassy hostage-taker
whom former U.S. hostages identified as the newly elected Iranian leader.
It found discrepancies serious enough to suggest the two are different
men.
"If there's a case to made that Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage-takers,
it will not be made on the basis of those photographs," said the official,
who spoke on condition of anonymity because of sensitive nature of the
subject matter.
The photos were widely published in the U.S. media late last month.
The official said the photo analysis was only one part of a broad
inter-agency investigation into Ahmadinejad's role in the aftermath of the
1979 revolution that severed U.S.-Iranian relations and brought Islamic
rule to Iran.
Several American hostages have said they recognized Ahmadinejad from
pictures published after his election, and that they believed he was one
of the captors.
U.S. intelligence agencies and the State Department are trying to
determine what role Ahmadinejad may have played, officials said.
Authorities have so far been able to confirm only that he was a leader of
the student movement that organized the 444-day siege of the embassy in
Tehran.
Ahmadinejad, who takes office on Tuesday, has denied he was involved in
storming the embassy and holding 52 hostages.
The United States has not resumed diplomatic relations with Iran since
that 1979-1981 hostage crisis and considers the Islamic Republic to be a
state sponsor of terrorism.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York, President
Bush labeled Iran a member of an "axis of evil" along with North Korea and
Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The Bush administration is pursuing diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to
abandon civilian uranium enrichment, which American officials say is a
cover for nuclear arms development, a charge Tehran denies.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
TomPaine.com - Anatomy Of A Neocon Smear--William O. Beeman
TomPaine.com - Anatomy Of A Neocon Smear: "Anatomy Of A Neocon Smear
William O. Beeman
July 06, 2005
Anatomy Of A Neocon Smear
William O. Beeman
July 06, 2005
William O. Beeman is professor of anthropology and director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. His forthcoming book is The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Praeger).
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had not even been officially declared the winner of Iran's presidential contest before the attacks began.
American neoconservatives were clearly not to be deprived of their cherished canard that the "mullahs were manipulating the election." Certain that Ahmadinejad's rival, former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, would win, they first denounced his comeback as "due not to popular demand, but to machinations of mullahs," as Danielle Pletka asserted in The New York Times on June 16, before the final voting. Once Ahmadinejad had been declared the surprise victor, the neoconservatives began to denounce him as the candidate of religious leader Ali Khamene'i, claiming that the election was fixed by the clerical establishment. Clearly, the election was to be demonized, whoever won.
Neocon (and Karl Rove confidant) Michael Ledeen couldn't even wait to find out who won. In a statement in the National Review Online on June 24, he wrote, "Iran today reminds me very much of the death struggle between Hitler and the SA, the brown-shirted thugs who led the Nazi 'revolution'. At a certain point, Hitler knew they were a potential threat to his rule, and they were violently purged." It is unclear whether Ledeen's reference to the SA applies to Hashemi-Rafsanjani or to Ahmadinejad. Presumably, either would have served his rhetorical purpose.
Then, on the day Ahmadinejad's victory was declared, the perpetual enemies of the Islamic Republic, the Mojaheddin-Khalq (MEK) released a photo purporting to show the newly elected president with a blindfolded American hostage during the hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981. The photo was immediately distributed around the world, and accusations that Ahmadinejad was a "hostage taker" flew fast and furious. Some of the former hostages, still bitter because they had been prevented from suing Iran for their long captivity, thought they remembered him from their experience 25 years ago.
It was all a lie. Sa'id Hajjarian, an aide to outgoing president Mohammad Khatami and one of the original planners of the hostage crisis, quickly verified that the man depicted in the photo was not Ahmadinejad, but rather Taqi Mohammadi, one of the young men involved in the hostage taking. Mohammadi later joined the MEK, ironically, and died in prison. Hajjarian had publically criticized Ahmadinejad during the presidential campaign, and had no reason to lend him undue support. Even without Hajjarian's statement, numerous testimonials from multiple sources, including the family of Taqi Mohammadi, contradicted the false assertion that Ahmadinejad was the man in the widely distributed photo.
So, what is really going on here?
Clearly, a large number of people in the world are interested in discrediting the Iranian government and the newly elected president, even when they must resort to outright lies or absurdly twisted logic. The MEK, who participated in the Iranian Revolution of 27 years ago but were cut out of power six months later, still harbor fantasies of marching on Tehran and taking over the nation. They have created a shadow government outside of Iran, and have a coterie of aging troops massed near the Iranian border in Iraq with the blessing of the United States government. In an astonishingly effective political coup, they have co-opted a number of American legislators who support them with American taxpayer dollars. Among them are Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida. The MEK has somehow convinced these American officials that they plan to bring "democracy" to Iran. The fact that they are still on the U.S. government list of terrorist groups, having killed American citizens during the time of the shah, seems not to faze Santorum, Brownback or Ros-Lehtinen.
The neoconservatives, such as Ledeen, Pletka and others including Richard Pearle, Patrick Clawson and Daniel Pipes—all Bush administration confidantes—still harbor the hope that the United States will launch a military strike against Iran, largely driven by the conviction that Iran poses a danger to Israel. The discrediting of Iran's new president seems to be yet another reason to put forward to the Bush administration why the government in Tehran must go.
What the neocons and the MEK are trying to hide from the American people is that Ahmadinejad is in fact a departure from the Iranian regime of the past. He is a religious conservative but not a cleric, and he has embraced some of the domestic agenda of Iran's reformers. These include economic development, anti-poverty programs, and anti-corruption reforms—things vital to an Iranian electorate sick of the nepotism and outright theft that has crept into 27 years of clerical rule, liabilities that many saw embodied in Ahmadinejad's rival, Ayatollah Hashemi-Rafsanjani.
Ahmadinejad lacks practical experience in legislative matters. He has a Ph.D. in civil engineering specializing in transportation, and ran a tight ship as Tehran's mayor. His modest life style and sober demeanor gained him the trust of many Iranian voters. He might just be a bridge-builder to the world—if the world would meet him halfway.
The danger in attacking him before he even gets started in office is that he, and the Iranian government, may turn further inward, adopting a defensive, defiant posture to the world. The United States should fervently hope that this does not happen. This is why the Bush administration should ignore the naysayers. With patience and care, Ahmadinejad, along with Iran's young and rising generation, can be brought productively into cooperation with the United States. But first, a quarter century of bitterness between the two nations must cease. Rejecting the slander against Ahmadinejad would be an excellent first step.
Copyright Agence Global, 2005
William O. Beeman
July 06, 2005
Anatomy Of A Neocon Smear
William O. Beeman
July 06, 2005
William O. Beeman is professor of anthropology and director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. His forthcoming book is The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Praeger).
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had not even been officially declared the winner of Iran's presidential contest before the attacks began.
American neoconservatives were clearly not to be deprived of their cherished canard that the "mullahs were manipulating the election." Certain that Ahmadinejad's rival, former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, would win, they first denounced his comeback as "due not to popular demand, but to machinations of mullahs," as Danielle Pletka asserted in The New York Times on June 16, before the final voting. Once Ahmadinejad had been declared the surprise victor, the neoconservatives began to denounce him as the candidate of religious leader Ali Khamene'i, claiming that the election was fixed by the clerical establishment. Clearly, the election was to be demonized, whoever won.
Neocon (and Karl Rove confidant) Michael Ledeen couldn't even wait to find out who won. In a statement in the National Review Online on June 24, he wrote, "Iran today reminds me very much of the death struggle between Hitler and the SA, the brown-shirted thugs who led the Nazi 'revolution'. At a certain point, Hitler knew they were a potential threat to his rule, and they were violently purged." It is unclear whether Ledeen's reference to the SA applies to Hashemi-Rafsanjani or to Ahmadinejad. Presumably, either would have served his rhetorical purpose.
Then, on the day Ahmadinejad's victory was declared, the perpetual enemies of the Islamic Republic, the Mojaheddin-Khalq (MEK) released a photo purporting to show the newly elected president with a blindfolded American hostage during the hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981. The photo was immediately distributed around the world, and accusations that Ahmadinejad was a "hostage taker" flew fast and furious. Some of the former hostages, still bitter because they had been prevented from suing Iran for their long captivity, thought they remembered him from their experience 25 years ago.
It was all a lie. Sa'id Hajjarian, an aide to outgoing president Mohammad Khatami and one of the original planners of the hostage crisis, quickly verified that the man depicted in the photo was not Ahmadinejad, but rather Taqi Mohammadi, one of the young men involved in the hostage taking. Mohammadi later joined the MEK, ironically, and died in prison. Hajjarian had publically criticized Ahmadinejad during the presidential campaign, and had no reason to lend him undue support. Even without Hajjarian's statement, numerous testimonials from multiple sources, including the family of Taqi Mohammadi, contradicted the false assertion that Ahmadinejad was the man in the widely distributed photo.
So, what is really going on here?
Clearly, a large number of people in the world are interested in discrediting the Iranian government and the newly elected president, even when they must resort to outright lies or absurdly twisted logic. The MEK, who participated in the Iranian Revolution of 27 years ago but were cut out of power six months later, still harbor fantasies of marching on Tehran and taking over the nation. They have created a shadow government outside of Iran, and have a coterie of aging troops massed near the Iranian border in Iraq with the blessing of the United States government. In an astonishingly effective political coup, they have co-opted a number of American legislators who support them with American taxpayer dollars. Among them are Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida. The MEK has somehow convinced these American officials that they plan to bring "democracy" to Iran. The fact that they are still on the U.S. government list of terrorist groups, having killed American citizens during the time of the shah, seems not to faze Santorum, Brownback or Ros-Lehtinen.
The neoconservatives, such as Ledeen, Pletka and others including Richard Pearle, Patrick Clawson and Daniel Pipes—all Bush administration confidantes—still harbor the hope that the United States will launch a military strike against Iran, largely driven by the conviction that Iran poses a danger to Israel. The discrediting of Iran's new president seems to be yet another reason to put forward to the Bush administration why the government in Tehran must go.
What the neocons and the MEK are trying to hide from the American people is that Ahmadinejad is in fact a departure from the Iranian regime of the past. He is a religious conservative but not a cleric, and he has embraced some of the domestic agenda of Iran's reformers. These include economic development, anti-poverty programs, and anti-corruption reforms—things vital to an Iranian electorate sick of the nepotism and outright theft that has crept into 27 years of clerical rule, liabilities that many saw embodied in Ahmadinejad's rival, Ayatollah Hashemi-Rafsanjani.
Ahmadinejad lacks practical experience in legislative matters. He has a Ph.D. in civil engineering specializing in transportation, and ran a tight ship as Tehran's mayor. His modest life style and sober demeanor gained him the trust of many Iranian voters. He might just be a bridge-builder to the world—if the world would meet him halfway.
The danger in attacking him before he even gets started in office is that he, and the Iranian government, may turn further inward, adopting a defensive, defiant posture to the world. The United States should fervently hope that this does not happen. This is why the Bush administration should ignore the naysayers. With patience and care, Ahmadinejad, along with Iran's young and rising generation, can be brought productively into cooperation with the United States. But first, a quarter century of bitterness between the two nations must cease. Rejecting the slander against Ahmadinejad would be an excellent first step.
Copyright Agence Global, 2005
Monday, July 04, 2005
Providence Journal--Iran May Still Reform under New President--William O. Beeman
projo.com | Providence, R.I. | Opinion: Contributors: "William O. Beeman: Iran may still reform under new president
01:00 AM EDT on Monday, July 4, 2005
William O. Beeman: Iran may still reform under new president
01:00 AM EDT on Monday, July 4, 2005
MANY PEOPLE IN IRAN and around the world are greeting the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran with trepidation, given his conservative credentials. Yet an examination of Iran's broad cultural patterns suggests that social progress is far from over in the Islamic Republic, and will, in fact, advance under Mr. Ahmadinejad's leadership.
From my observer's post, in Tehran, Ahmadinejad seemed to be completely out of the running before the election. With a 7-percent margin in the pre-election polls, his stunning victory took the world by surprise.
There may indeed have been shenanigans in the Iranian presidential election, as many have charged. However, an examination of the voting patterns both in the first election and in the runoff conform to expected patterns, making it unlikely that the election was stolen. What is more likely is that the pollsters and observers failed to tap into Ahmadinejad's support.
In assessing the Iranian political climate, Westerners -- and Westernized Iranians -- tended to ignore the traditional population in South Tehran and outside the capital. It is largely these people who elected Ahmadinejad.
The great fear of many in Iran is that progress made in recent years in personal liberty, increased opportunities for women, and advances in social justice will be turned back to the repressive days following the Revolution of 1978-79. However, an examination of the broad social trends that brought Mr. Ahmadinejad to office should give those who view his election with trepidation hope that things are not likely to be as bad as they envision.
In all societies, the push toward change is matched by a tendency to maintain "traditional" values, whatever they are. U.S. citizens have witnessed this in recent years, and Iran provides an example of the same tendencies.
In Iran, the push toward modernization in the Pahlavi era was met by the conservatism of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 -- tendencies that hark back to at least the 18th Century, when clerics became disillusioned with the corruption of the rulers of the Safavid Empire. Modernization as an Iranian trend dates back to the first contacts with Europe in this period.
However, in Iran the desire to be spiritually pure runs against the desire to be modern, and to gain respect from the great nations of the world. Iranians are as proud of their spirituality as they are of their status as an advanced nation, and this is reflected in the attitudes of both conservatives and social progressives.
Among my deeply Islamic friends in South Tehran on my recent trip, I saw anger that the West seems to be impeding Iran from developing nuclear industries, and failing to recognize Iran for its burgeoning computer and industrial base. My friends were voting for Ahmadinejad. As my friend Hamid, a pious engineering student, exclaimed, citing one of Ahmadinejad's campaign speeches: "He says it right -- we have to achieve on our own. We have to stop worrying whether the United States or Europe will approve of what we do." And there is some truth to that.
In North Tehran, at a chic salon, I ran into young people who confessed that their lives seemed increasingly to lack meaning. "So what if I can drink and see pornography -- what does that prove?" said one 19-year-old, who was planning to join a Sufi (Islamic mystical) order.
The most popular political writers in recent years appeal to balancing these tendencies; some, unknown in the West, such as Ali Shari'ati and Abdulkarim Soroush, become immediate cult figures. They provide cultural sustenance to people who are very hungry indeed.
Mr. Ahmadinejad represents several departures from recent leaders. Some Iranian commentators have already noted that, far from being a tool of the ruling clerics, he seems to represent a rejection of everything the public dislikes about them.
First, he is not a cleric. The first president of the Islamic Republic, Abol-Hasan Bani-Sadr, was also not a cleric, but he was quickly removed from office. The next three presidents, Khamene'i, Hashemi-Rafsanjani, and Khatami, were all mullahs. For Iranians who consider themselves good Muslims but who are tired of clerical rule, Ahmadinejad's election is a fresh approach to leadership.
Second, Mr. Ahmadinejad is a technocrat-civil engineer, with a Ph.D., who is deeply committed to Iran's progress in technology, medical science and industry, including nuclear power. He has the expertise to lead the country in this direction, which is fervently desired by the population.
Third, he appears to be modest, honest and pious. The population of Iran is all too aware that the clergy have become corrupt in their leadership -- enriching themselves and their families, and becoming a kind of new royalty for the nation. Mr. Ahmadinejad is the antithesis of this image.
Finally, like most Iranians, Mr. Ahmadinejad is a fierce nationalist. He is utterly uninterested in kowtowing to the United States, and has expressed a desire to make Iran, independently, a great economic and intellectual power.
His early pronouncements have dealt with the respect due to women as equal partners in society, the need for improvement in economic conditions for the poor, and the advancement of education. These statements hardly sound reactionary -- they sound just like the aspirations of Iran's reformists.
Time will tell whether Mr. Ahmadinejad makes good on his early pronouncements. However, he deserves a chance to show his mettle. Certainly his ascension to office should be greeted with cautious respect.
William O. Beeman, a Brown University professor of anthropology and the director of its Middle East Studies, monitored the Iranian presidential election in Tehran. His forthcoming book is The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
01:00 AM EDT on Monday, July 4, 2005
William O. Beeman: Iran may still reform under new president
01:00 AM EDT on Monday, July 4, 2005
MANY PEOPLE IN IRAN and around the world are greeting the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran with trepidation, given his conservative credentials. Yet an examination of Iran's broad cultural patterns suggests that social progress is far from over in the Islamic Republic, and will, in fact, advance under Mr. Ahmadinejad's leadership.
From my observer's post, in Tehran, Ahmadinejad seemed to be completely out of the running before the election. With a 7-percent margin in the pre-election polls, his stunning victory took the world by surprise.
There may indeed have been shenanigans in the Iranian presidential election, as many have charged. However, an examination of the voting patterns both in the first election and in the runoff conform to expected patterns, making it unlikely that the election was stolen. What is more likely is that the pollsters and observers failed to tap into Ahmadinejad's support.
In assessing the Iranian political climate, Westerners -- and Westernized Iranians -- tended to ignore the traditional population in South Tehran and outside the capital. It is largely these people who elected Ahmadinejad.
The great fear of many in Iran is that progress made in recent years in personal liberty, increased opportunities for women, and advances in social justice will be turned back to the repressive days following the Revolution of 1978-79. However, an examination of the broad social trends that brought Mr. Ahmadinejad to office should give those who view his election with trepidation hope that things are not likely to be as bad as they envision.
In all societies, the push toward change is matched by a tendency to maintain "traditional" values, whatever they are. U.S. citizens have witnessed this in recent years, and Iran provides an example of the same tendencies.
In Iran, the push toward modernization in the Pahlavi era was met by the conservatism of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 -- tendencies that hark back to at least the 18th Century, when clerics became disillusioned with the corruption of the rulers of the Safavid Empire. Modernization as an Iranian trend dates back to the first contacts with Europe in this period.
However, in Iran the desire to be spiritually pure runs against the desire to be modern, and to gain respect from the great nations of the world. Iranians are as proud of their spirituality as they are of their status as an advanced nation, and this is reflected in the attitudes of both conservatives and social progressives.
Among my deeply Islamic friends in South Tehran on my recent trip, I saw anger that the West seems to be impeding Iran from developing nuclear industries, and failing to recognize Iran for its burgeoning computer and industrial base. My friends were voting for Ahmadinejad. As my friend Hamid, a pious engineering student, exclaimed, citing one of Ahmadinejad's campaign speeches: "He says it right -- we have to achieve on our own. We have to stop worrying whether the United States or Europe will approve of what we do." And there is some truth to that.
In North Tehran, at a chic salon, I ran into young people who confessed that their lives seemed increasingly to lack meaning. "So what if I can drink and see pornography -- what does that prove?" said one 19-year-old, who was planning to join a Sufi (Islamic mystical) order.
The most popular political writers in recent years appeal to balancing these tendencies; some, unknown in the West, such as Ali Shari'ati and Abdulkarim Soroush, become immediate cult figures. They provide cultural sustenance to people who are very hungry indeed.
Mr. Ahmadinejad represents several departures from recent leaders. Some Iranian commentators have already noted that, far from being a tool of the ruling clerics, he seems to represent a rejection of everything the public dislikes about them.
First, he is not a cleric. The first president of the Islamic Republic, Abol-Hasan Bani-Sadr, was also not a cleric, but he was quickly removed from office. The next three presidents, Khamene'i, Hashemi-Rafsanjani, and Khatami, were all mullahs. For Iranians who consider themselves good Muslims but who are tired of clerical rule, Ahmadinejad's election is a fresh approach to leadership.
Second, Mr. Ahmadinejad is a technocrat-civil engineer, with a Ph.D., who is deeply committed to Iran's progress in technology, medical science and industry, including nuclear power. He has the expertise to lead the country in this direction, which is fervently desired by the population.
Third, he appears to be modest, honest and pious. The population of Iran is all too aware that the clergy have become corrupt in their leadership -- enriching themselves and their families, and becoming a kind of new royalty for the nation. Mr. Ahmadinejad is the antithesis of this image.
Finally, like most Iranians, Mr. Ahmadinejad is a fierce nationalist. He is utterly uninterested in kowtowing to the United States, and has expressed a desire to make Iran, independently, a great economic and intellectual power.
His early pronouncements have dealt with the respect due to women as equal partners in society, the need for improvement in economic conditions for the poor, and the advancement of education. These statements hardly sound reactionary -- they sound just like the aspirations of Iran's reformists.
Time will tell whether Mr. Ahmadinejad makes good on his early pronouncements. However, he deserves a chance to show his mettle. Certainly his ascension to office should be greeted with cautious respect.
William O. Beeman, a Brown University professor of anthropology and the director of its Middle East Studies, monitored the Iranian presidential election in Tehran. His forthcoming book is The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Election of Ahmadinejad Custom-Made for Neocons (from uruknet)
uruknet (Italy)
Election of Ahmadinejad Custom-Made for Neocons
Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire
original:
<http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m13168&l=i&size=1&hd=0>
June 28, 2005
For the Straussian neocons, the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran is Christmas in June. It firms up their argument that the country is trapped in a mullah-instigated vapor-lock and in order for "democracy" (i.e., neocons and neolib carpet-baggers allowed to make the country Israel-friendly and turn off the oil burglar alarms) to prevail, invasion (or shock and awe) is the only choice, since we all know Iran's mullahs are obsessive-compulsive on the idea of stocking nukes. However, as William O. Beeman <http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=9da0bcd682e7e4b57ad05d619b4a18c3> points out, attacking Iran, as the attack against Iraq, will be no cakewalk. "Ahmadinejad's persona and his message are clearly irresistible to people who see the original ideals of the revolution slipping away through the increasingly Westernized behavior and sensibilities of the salons and boutiques of North Tehran," writes Beeman.
In short, the social forces that brought Ahmadinejad to the presidency are real, broad and clearly very powerful. Any American move to attack Iran, or to try to achieve regime change through the narrow measure of trying to topple [Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, considered the Supreme Leader of Iran] or any limited group of individuals will fail. The Iranian public supporting Ahmadinejad and what he represents will reject any replacement for the current government, and the rest of the Iranian population will consider anything initiated by the United States to be tainted.
In other words, the neocons are walking the same tight rope they walked a couple years ago with Iraq and the result will be about the same-no, far worse, since Iran has a population of 69,018,924 people, 89% of them Shi'a Muslims (Iraq's population stands at 24,683,313 and only a small number of minority Sunnis are actively resisting, with predictably results for the U.S. military). It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize very few Iranians will assent to the invasion of their country and the imposition of a government hand-picked by the Muslim-hating neocons. As I pointed out in February (If Bush Attacks Iran, there will be Hell to Pay in Iraq: Iran prepares for Asymmetrical Warfare <http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NIM502B.html> ), the Iranians fully expect Bush to attack in one way or another and they will not sit idly by and allow the United States to undermine their government, as it did when Mohammed Mossadeq was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup and the dictator Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was installed. Iranians remember this betrayal and will fight tooth and nail to make sure the United States doesn't impose another monarchy or dictatorial regime, selected by a gaggle of Muslim-hating Strausscons.
Beeman makes mention of an editorial by one Ray Takeyh, a "senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations," who claims
that the "counter reform" movement that led to Ahmadinejad's victory at the polls is entirely the doing of Iranian chief jurisprudent Ali Khamene'i. Takeyh's analysis echoes an infamous paper issued by the Committee on the Present Danger-an organization of ex-Cold Warriors that has retooled itself as an anti-terrorist organization. That report, issued Dec. 20, 2004, was entitled "Iran: A New Approach," and was authored by Mark Palmer and George Schultz. Its main point was to paint Khamene'i as a Saddam-style dictator.
It should be noted that the current iteration of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) is strictly a neocon deal, fronted by that premier neocon organization (a cabal or war criminals), the American Enterprise Institute. "[CPD] was first founded in 1950 to combat the 'red menace' of communism," writes Tom Regan <http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/mideast/iraq/2293.html> for the Christian Science Monitor. "It came back in the mid-70s for another crack at the Soviet Union. Now a group of lawmakers, academics, and business people has relaunched the Committee on the Present Danger, specifically to fight 'Islamic terrorism.' Honorary chairmen, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), along with former CIA director James Woolsey, announced the reorganization of the group." Lieberman, of course, is a pro-Likudite dem-neocon, and Woolsey, former spook of spooks at the CIA, has, as of late, gone by the moniker "Mr. World War IV" (World War III, according to the neocons, was in fact the Cold War). Michele Steinberg <http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3126cpd_iii.html> calls the CPD the "Committee To Blow Up the World," beginning with the Muslim Middle East.
"Israel, a nation dependent upon U.S. military aid and unable to withstand detente between the Soviet Union and the U.S. because of its need for U.S. military aid, had built up significant influence in the CPD. The primary contact person was Michael Ledeen who was connected with Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair," explains Right Web <http://rightweb.irc-online.org/groupwatch/cpd.php> . It should be noted that Ledeen's pet project for some time now has been convincing the United States it must attack Iran and render its mullahs useless (all the problems in the world, according to Ledeen, stem from Iranian mullahs).
So here we have the CFR agreeing with the CPD and its neocon front organizations (including the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, and the Alliance for Democracy in Iran) that Ahmadinejad is a Khamenei puppet and Khamenei is a "Saddam-style dictator" and we know what these guys did to Saddam, or more significantly the Iraqi people in the name of eliminating Saddam.
Get used to war and more war, or I should say more shock and awe and, down the road a piece, American soldiers dying like they now are in Iraq (in fact, if the neocons pull this one off, more soldiers will die in Iraq, since the Shi'a in Iraq will be agitated considerably by any attack on their brother Shi'a in Iran).
The election of Ahmadinejad is Christmas morning for the Strausscons and the Likudites because they really don't want change through the ballet box but through bunker-buster diplomacy. Iranian elections will satisfy the neocons. It's all about bombing the heck out the place-not only taking out the alleged nuke development sites, but, as in Iraq, the civilian infrastructure, pitching the country back into the Dark Ages, as demanded by Operation Chaos and Kill Muslims-and then imposing another Shah or equally sadistic and repressive dictator who will recognize Israel and give Iran's oil back to its rightful owners, the transnational oil corporations.
Of course, this will not work and the Iranians will fight to the death to defend their country, thus necessitating (as "we stay the course" again) a fresh influx of conscripted bullet-stoppers. It remains to be seen if this will nudge the American citizen-consumer out of his or her somnolence or if they will remain anchored on the sofa with the reality shape-shifting remote control in hand.
William O. Beeman
Professor, Anthropology; and Theatre, Speech and Dance
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
Tel: (401) 863-3251
Academic Papers and Vita: http://www.williambeeman.com
Blog and current Op-ed pieces--Culture and International Affairs http://www.wbeeman.com
(2004-2005 Visiting Professor, Cultural and Social Anthropology,
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305)
My latest book: The "Great Satan" vs. The "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other. (Praeger/Greenwood).
More information at: http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail.asp?sku=C8214
Saturday, June 25, 2005
t r u t h o u t - William O. Beeman | Ignorance on Iran May Lead to an Unwise Attack
t r u t h o u t - William O. Beeman | Ignorance on Iran May Lead to an Unwise Attack
Ignorance on Iran May Lead to an Unwise Attack
By William O. Beeman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 24 June 2005
Tehran - The United States may still attack Iran, and for all the wrong reasons.
Two recent analyses, both appearing a day before the final runoff to determine the Iranian presidency (June 23, 2005) reveal how this may happen, and what the logic behind such an attack may be.
The first analysis, by former United Nations nuclear arms inspector Scott Ritter, distributed through the Al Jazeera website, claims that the United States' assault on Iran has already begun. Ritter asserts that the terrorist organization Mujaheddin-e Khalg (known as the MEK or MKO in the West) is operating as a strike force under CIA direction, and that the United States is preparing to stage military attacks from Azerbaijan.
The second analysis appears in the Boston Globe, by Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who claims that the "counter reform" movement has led to the successful candidacy of former mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the first round of presidential elections in Iran - and possibly in the runoff as well - is entirely the doing of Iranian chief jurisprudent Ali Khamene'i. Takeyh's analysis echoes an infamous paper issued by the Committee on the Present Danger - an organization of ex-Cold Warriors that has retooled itself as an anti-terrorist organization. The paper, issued December 20, 2004 was entitled "Iran: A New Approach" and was authored by Mark Palmer and George Schultz. The main point of the paper was to paint Khamene'i as a Saddam-style dictator.
Both of these analyses have inherent flaws, but taken together they spell something quite ominous. I'm not quite ready to believe Ritter's pronouncement that the attack is already underway, despite the fact that Seymour Hersh predicted that it would happen about now in "The Coming Wars," in The New Yorker on January 24 and 31 of this year. However, I do believe that Ritter is reporting on a movement that significant elements in the Bush administration want to happen, and for which they may have laid the groundwork.
There are a lot of random facts that lend credence to Ritter's claims. Last year, there were fake elections in Azerbaijan. The ex-dictator of that country, octogenarian Haidar Aliev, was rumored to have already been dead two months before the election. The installation of his unqualified ne'er do well son Ilham, to applause from the Bush administration, allowed the completion of an oil pipeline from the Caspian region across former Soviet Georgia to Turkey, bypassing Iran.
Additionally, there have been continued contacts between Iranian Azerbaijani separatist Mahmudali Chehregani and the Bush administration. Moreover, there are apparently real plans for the Bush administration to establish a military base in the Republic of Azerbaijan, the better to stage the kind of attack on Iran about which Ritter is writing.
There is continued administration contact and support for the MEK, and support from a number of US senators and congresspeople. Ritter's scenario begins to look probable if not real.
However, Takeyh's piece (along with the paper from the Committee on the Present Danger) is the more dangerous of the two analyses, because of its attribution of a genuine social movement to a single person. This makes it tempting for administration hawks of limited intelligence (of all sorts), susceptible to the avalanche of neoconservative blather on Iranian politics, to think that all one has to do is topple Khamene'i and the whole Islamic Republic will fall like a house of cards. This is truly dangerous thinking, and it is blatantly not in the long term interests of the United States or Iran for the US Government to act upon such a flawed assumption.
The elections took almost all Iranian analysts by surprise, because of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's strong showing. However, this development should not have been unforeseen.
Iran is still engaged with internal revolutionary dialog. The original Revolution of 1978-79 was a drive for purification of the Iranian soul as much as anything else. This need for spiritual and moral purity was the element that engaged the middle and upper classes in the end, encouraging them to oust the shah against their own economic interests (something that should not surprise Americans, given the past two presidential elections).
The pull of the spiritual is obviously still strong in Iran, and Ahmadinejad has been able to embody this in his image of simplicity, humility and spirituality successfully. He further combines his image with an economic message that promises that the fruits of the revolution - namely the elevation of the mostazefin (downtrodden) - can still be achieved.
Ahmadinejad's persona and his message are clearly irresistible to people who see the original ideals of the revolution slipping away, through the increasingly Westernized behavior and sensibilities of the salons and boutiques of North Tehran. In short, the social forces that are driving the Ahmadinejad supporters are real, broad, and clearly very powerful. Any American move to attack Iran, or to try to achieve regime change through the narrow measure of trying to topple Khamene'i or any limited group of individuals, will fail. The Iranian public supporting Ahmadinejad and what he represents will reject any replacement for the current government, and the rest of the Iranian population will consider anything initiated by the United States to be tainted.
The day may come when Washington will finally try to understand Iran on its own terms, but I think the world will have to wait for a very long time for this to take place.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William O. Beeman has been observing the Iranian presidential elections from Tehran. He is professor of Anthropology and Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. His forthcoming book is The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Praeger).
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Go to Original
Iranians Vote in Tight Presidential Run-Off
By Edmund Blair
Reuters
Friday 24 June 2005
Iranians streamed to the polls on Friday in a presidential run-off that could toughen policy toward the West and end tentative moves toward liberalization if a hardline candidate beats Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Voters stood in long lines in poor south Tehran, a stronghold of ultra-conservative Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has won over Iran's religious poor with promises to share out Iran's oil wealth more fairly.
"I will vote for Ahmadinejad because he wants to cut off the hands of those who are stealing the country's national wealth. He wants to fight poverty, fraud and discrimination," said Rahmatollah Izadpanah, 41, queuing in south Tehran.
In wealthier uptown parts of the capital, Rafsanjani voters turned out in fear Ahmadinejad would revive the strictures and purges that followed the 1979 Islamic revolution. Some polling stations were busy but many in north Tehran were quiet at first.
"Our freedom is at stake. I have asked all my friends to cast their votes as early as possible," said Somayeh, 23, in a veil but with make-up that conservatives frown upon.
Political analysts say the election result is too close to call, with the contest reflecting deep social divisions apparent in the Islamic Republic's population of 67 million people.
Rafsanjani, a cleric bidding to regain the post he held from 1989 to 1997, has recast himself as a liberal with vows to preserve the reforms of outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, who loosened Islamic social rules and pursued detente with the West.
"I intend to play a historic political role ... to stop the domination of extremism," Rafsanjani, 70, said after voting.
Ahmadinejad, 48, a surprise contender in the run-off, says ties with Washington are not a priority. He is a staunch supporter of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in matters of state in Iran's system of clerical rule.
Fears of a Purge
"Today is the beginning of a new political era for the Iranian nation," Ahmadinejad said when he voted.
Opponents fear Ahmadinejad will purge ministries and other bodies, citing what he did to municipal bodies as Tehran mayor.
The interior, culture and economy ministries are among those held by Khatami-backed reformists. Bijan Zanganeh, oil minister of OPEC's second largest producer, made his loyalties clear by turning up at a Rafsanjani rally this week.
Washington says the election is unfair because an unelected religious body blocked the vast majority of would-be candidates.
Many analysts say the US criticism may have spurred turnout in last week's first round, helping it to reach 63 percent of the 47 million eligible voters.
"The more people who participate in the election, the better it will be for the next president and for protecting Iran, and achieving our goals," said Khamenei, one of the first to cast a ballot in the second round.
The run-off is between the top two of seven candidates from the first round. It is the first time since the 1979 revolution that a presidential poll has gone to a second vote.
The election has exposed deep splits among Iran's mostly youthful electorate. The minimum voting age is 15.
Rafsanjani voters tend to be from upper and middle classes who are tired of Iran's isolation, want more social freedom and back his plans to liberalize the state-dominated economy.
Ahmadinejad, a former instructor of the Basij militia, zealous guardians of the revolution's ideals, has support among the religiously conservative working-class, who struggle to make ends meet and for whom strict Islamic codes are no worry.
To them, Ahmadinejad is an outsider challenging the vested business interests of Rafsanjani's wealthy family and others they believe have benefited most from booming oil prices.
Reformist candidates beaten in the first round and now backing Rafsanjani accuse the hardline Revolutionary Guards and Basij of backing Ahmadinejad, charges dismissed by Ahmadinejad.
Polls are due to close at 7 p.m. (1430 GMT) but may be extended up to 11 p.m. (1830 GMT), as in the first round.
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Ignorance on Iran May Lead to an Unwise Attack
By William O. Beeman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 24 June 2005
Tehran - The United States may still attack Iran, and for all the wrong reasons.
Two recent analyses, both appearing a day before the final runoff to determine the Iranian presidency (June 23, 2005) reveal how this may happen, and what the logic behind such an attack may be.
The first analysis, by former United Nations nuclear arms inspector Scott Ritter, distributed through the Al Jazeera website, claims that the United States' assault on Iran has already begun. Ritter asserts that the terrorist organization Mujaheddin-e Khalg (known as the MEK or MKO in the West) is operating as a strike force under CIA direction, and that the United States is preparing to stage military attacks from Azerbaijan.
The second analysis appears in the Boston Globe, by Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who claims that the "counter reform" movement has led to the successful candidacy of former mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the first round of presidential elections in Iran - and possibly in the runoff as well - is entirely the doing of Iranian chief jurisprudent Ali Khamene'i. Takeyh's analysis echoes an infamous paper issued by the Committee on the Present Danger - an organization of ex-Cold Warriors that has retooled itself as an anti-terrorist organization. The paper, issued December 20, 2004 was entitled "Iran: A New Approach" and was authored by Mark Palmer and George Schultz. The main point of the paper was to paint Khamene'i as a Saddam-style dictator.
Both of these analyses have inherent flaws, but taken together they spell something quite ominous. I'm not quite ready to believe Ritter's pronouncement that the attack is already underway, despite the fact that Seymour Hersh predicted that it would happen about now in "The Coming Wars," in The New Yorker on January 24 and 31 of this year. However, I do believe that Ritter is reporting on a movement that significant elements in the Bush administration want to happen, and for which they may have laid the groundwork.
There are a lot of random facts that lend credence to Ritter's claims. Last year, there were fake elections in Azerbaijan. The ex-dictator of that country, octogenarian Haidar Aliev, was rumored to have already been dead two months before the election. The installation of his unqualified ne'er do well son Ilham, to applause from the Bush administration, allowed the completion of an oil pipeline from the Caspian region across former Soviet Georgia to Turkey, bypassing Iran.
Additionally, there have been continued contacts between Iranian Azerbaijani separatist Mahmudali Chehregani and the Bush administration. Moreover, there are apparently real plans for the Bush administration to establish a military base in the Republic of Azerbaijan, the better to stage the kind of attack on Iran about which Ritter is writing.
There is continued administration contact and support for the MEK, and support from a number of US senators and congresspeople. Ritter's scenario begins to look probable if not real.
However, Takeyh's piece (along with the paper from the Committee on the Present Danger) is the more dangerous of the two analyses, because of its attribution of a genuine social movement to a single person. This makes it tempting for administration hawks of limited intelligence (of all sorts), susceptible to the avalanche of neoconservative blather on Iranian politics, to think that all one has to do is topple Khamene'i and the whole Islamic Republic will fall like a house of cards. This is truly dangerous thinking, and it is blatantly not in the long term interests of the United States or Iran for the US Government to act upon such a flawed assumption.
The elections took almost all Iranian analysts by surprise, because of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's strong showing. However, this development should not have been unforeseen.
Iran is still engaged with internal revolutionary dialog. The original Revolution of 1978-79 was a drive for purification of the Iranian soul as much as anything else. This need for spiritual and moral purity was the element that engaged the middle and upper classes in the end, encouraging them to oust the shah against their own economic interests (something that should not surprise Americans, given the past two presidential elections).
The pull of the spiritual is obviously still strong in Iran, and Ahmadinejad has been able to embody this in his image of simplicity, humility and spirituality successfully. He further combines his image with an economic message that promises that the fruits of the revolution - namely the elevation of the mostazefin (downtrodden) - can still be achieved.
Ahmadinejad's persona and his message are clearly irresistible to people who see the original ideals of the revolution slipping away, through the increasingly Westernized behavior and sensibilities of the salons and boutiques of North Tehran. In short, the social forces that are driving the Ahmadinejad supporters are real, broad, and clearly very powerful. Any American move to attack Iran, or to try to achieve regime change through the narrow measure of trying to topple Khamene'i or any limited group of individuals, will fail. The Iranian public supporting Ahmadinejad and what he represents will reject any replacement for the current government, and the rest of the Iranian population will consider anything initiated by the United States to be tainted.
The day may come when Washington will finally try to understand Iran on its own terms, but I think the world will have to wait for a very long time for this to take place.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William O. Beeman has been observing the Iranian presidential elections from Tehran. He is professor of Anthropology and Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. His forthcoming book is The "Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Praeger).
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Go to Original
Iranians Vote in Tight Presidential Run-Off
By Edmund Blair
Reuters
Friday 24 June 2005
Iranians streamed to the polls on Friday in a presidential run-off that could toughen policy toward the West and end tentative moves toward liberalization if a hardline candidate beats Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Voters stood in long lines in poor south Tehran, a stronghold of ultra-conservative Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has won over Iran's religious poor with promises to share out Iran's oil wealth more fairly.
"I will vote for Ahmadinejad because he wants to cut off the hands of those who are stealing the country's national wealth. He wants to fight poverty, fraud and discrimination," said Rahmatollah Izadpanah, 41, queuing in south Tehran.
In wealthier uptown parts of the capital, Rafsanjani voters turned out in fear Ahmadinejad would revive the strictures and purges that followed the 1979 Islamic revolution. Some polling stations were busy but many in north Tehran were quiet at first.
"Our freedom is at stake. I have asked all my friends to cast their votes as early as possible," said Somayeh, 23, in a veil but with make-up that conservatives frown upon.
Political analysts say the election result is too close to call, with the contest reflecting deep social divisions apparent in the Islamic Republic's population of 67 million people.
Rafsanjani, a cleric bidding to regain the post he held from 1989 to 1997, has recast himself as a liberal with vows to preserve the reforms of outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, who loosened Islamic social rules and pursued detente with the West.
"I intend to play a historic political role ... to stop the domination of extremism," Rafsanjani, 70, said after voting.
Ahmadinejad, 48, a surprise contender in the run-off, says ties with Washington are not a priority. He is a staunch supporter of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in matters of state in Iran's system of clerical rule.
Fears of a Purge
"Today is the beginning of a new political era for the Iranian nation," Ahmadinejad said when he voted.
Opponents fear Ahmadinejad will purge ministries and other bodies, citing what he did to municipal bodies as Tehran mayor.
The interior, culture and economy ministries are among those held by Khatami-backed reformists. Bijan Zanganeh, oil minister of OPEC's second largest producer, made his loyalties clear by turning up at a Rafsanjani rally this week.
Washington says the election is unfair because an unelected religious body blocked the vast majority of would-be candidates.
Many analysts say the US criticism may have spurred turnout in last week's first round, helping it to reach 63 percent of the 47 million eligible voters.
"The more people who participate in the election, the better it will be for the next president and for protecting Iran, and achieving our goals," said Khamenei, one of the first to cast a ballot in the second round.
The run-off is between the top two of seven candidates from the first round. It is the first time since the 1979 revolution that a presidential poll has gone to a second vote.
The election has exposed deep splits among Iran's mostly youthful electorate. The minimum voting age is 15.
Rafsanjani voters tend to be from upper and middle classes who are tired of Iran's isolation, want more social freedom and back his plans to liberalize the state-dominated economy.
Ahmadinejad, a former instructor of the Basij militia, zealous guardians of the revolution's ideals, has support among the religiously conservative working-class, who struggle to make ends meet and for whom strict Islamic codes are no worry.
To them, Ahmadinejad is an outsider challenging the vested business interests of Rafsanjani's wealthy family and others they believe have benefited most from booming oil prices.
Reformist candidates beaten in the first round and now backing Rafsanjani accuse the hardline Revolutionary Guards and Basij of backing Ahmadinejad, charges dismissed by Ahmadinejad.
Polls are due to close at 7 p.m. (1430 GMT) but may be extended up to 11 p.m. (1830 GMT), as in the first round.
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Monday, June 20, 2005
CFR Publications: Beeman: Rafsanjani Victory Probable, But Not Certain, in Iran's 'Real Election'
CFR Publications: Beeman: Rafsanjani Victory Probable, But Not Certain, in Iran's 'Real Election'
William O. Beeman, professor of anthropology at Brown University and an expert on Iran's culture and social patterns, says he was stunned on his recent trip to Tehran by the Western-style campaigning underway for the June 17 presidential elections. Most surprising to him was the strong support shown by young women and men for the frontrunner, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Iran's electorate, Beeman says, is largely united on the need for social reform in the country and the desirability of a peaceful nuclear-energy program. But they have divided their support between three leading candidates, and a Rafansanji victory is not assured. Despite the role of the conservative Council of Guardians in selecting the presidential candidates, "there's no question that this is a real election and it really is happening," he says. "And this is not an election that is controlled and it's not an election where we know the outcome."
Beeman, whose latest book, The 'Great Satan' vs. The 'Mad Mullahs': How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other, will be published soon, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on June 15, 2005.
Other Interviews
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You've just come back from a visit to Iran where you got a flavor of the presidential election campaign that just wrapped up. Can you give us a brief description of what you saw?
What's fascinating about this campaign is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a very Western-style campaign. The candidates, even the frontrunner, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, have lucid [campaigning] techniques that we would think of as being essentially Western for the election. Obviously, they're all taking the election quite seriously. Hashemi Rafsanjani has also put in his platform--in fact, all of the candidates have put in their platforms--measures that we associate with the reformist movement.
Like what?
Well, for instance, for Rafsanjani, one of the more important points of his campaign is increased rights for women and attention to the needs of young people. It's very interesting. Among his campaigners, he actually has some very powerful spokeswomen, who are out on the stump with him and are, I'd say, doing a fantastic job in representing him as a can-do candidate who can really mediate between the demands of the public--which is increasingly requiring or demanding that the government liberalize in important ways--and the traditional mullahs, who still hold significant power in the country. He also has recruited, it seems, hundreds of very young people to run the streets and hand out flyers and buttonhole people. It's amazing to see the impression that this gives--that it is women and youth for Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is 70.
Why do you think these young people, who might normally be supporting the reformist candidate, Mustafa Moin, are supporting him?
Well, he actually trucked in [to Tehran] hundreds of folks from his native province in Iran. He comes from the area around Yazd. And it seems a lot of his relatives, and a lot of his relatives' friends, and people who would like to see him elected from his local area have made the trip to Tehran and are doing this work. I think that it would be wrong to characterize them entirely as coming from that area, but that's certainly where a bunch of them came from.
Have there been any reliable political polls?
Well, we've seen political polls. Now, it's hard to tell whether they are reliable or not, because they've varied tremendously from day-to-day. Earlier, around the 8th of June, the polls suggested the second-place runner was Mohammed Baqur Qalibaf, who used to be chief of police in Tehran. And his campaign has been the slickest thing I've ever seen. I am astonishingly impressed with the print and media images he has been able to generate. He has been turned into an absolute glamour boy.
He also has a pilot's license and a PhD in geography. He's not a person without accomplishments. He was also an early member of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, so it's very interesting. He led a crackdown on the student population in 1999, but he also has this very, very modern image.
He's in his early 40s, and I actually have a collection of posters of him that were really impressive. In one, he is in a pilot's uniform next to an Iranian jet, looking like a glamorous aviator. There's another one that's a poster in a very untraditional format. It's in a long, horizontal strip that simply has the upper part of his face kind of staring out at you, and it's all black and white, except they have enhanced his blue eyes. So you see this black and white poster with these electric blue eyes staring out at you, and in Iran, of course, most people have brown eyes. There are people who do have blue eyes--they're thought to be the descendants of Alexander the Great--it's one of the myths people have. The poster projects an extraordinarily arresting image, and he's attracted a lot of young people, who believe him to be, again, a person who has a kind of can-do attitude and is very powerful.
What about the great bugaboo, the "Great Satan"? Have any of the candidates talked much about the United States?
Rafsanjani has, of course, and in fact--in very coded terms--he has come out and said he is the one who can actually deliver on creating a rapprochement with what he calls "the world community," or "nations outside of Iran." He doesn't say the United States directly, but I think everybody who hears his campaign material knows that's what he's talking about. After all, he has an extraordinary advantage in Iranian politics, in my opinion, and that is that he was involved with the Iran-Contra affair directly [in which elements in the Reagan administration secretly sold missiles to Iran and used the proceeds to fund illegal covert actions in Nicaragua]. Despite being up close and friendly with the United States at that time, he has not suffered politically at all. The great danger in Iran has always been that the person who would try to achieve some kind rapprochement with the United States would immediately be tainted politically by his enemies in such a way that would make him ineffective. In this particular case, Rafsanjani has been completely, seemingly unscathed. So he has already, in important ways, addressed particular problems politicians have had. I think he feels he can go forward.
How does this election work? Does there have to be a run-off if no candidate wins a majority?
Yes. I think everyone feels that Rafsanjani will be the frontrunner, and probably will win between 30 percent and 40 percent of the vote.
And who will be second?
Up until last week, Qalibaf was running second. But just before I left, a new poll came out, which actually put Moin, the reform candidate, in second place. So that was a big surprise and we don't know exactly what it all means. I had a chance to chat with Moin's chief spokesperson, who's also a woman, and she's a formidable lady who is quite confident he will do extremely well in the election.
And what is Moin's background?
He's held a number of government posts, including minister of culture, I believe. But he's been continually involved with the government, and I think that's one of the reasons why he was allowed into the election. The important thing is people did see him as a serious challenge. He was originally excluded from the list of candidates by the Guardian Council. When people essentially expressed dismay about this--and there was a very widespread feeling that this was too heavy-handed on the part of the Guardian Council--[Supreme Leader] Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei personally requested that he and another candidate be included again.
During the last parliamentary election, two years ago, there was a boycott of the election. Why was that?
The reason people were trying to boycott the elections was because the Guardian Council had excluded nearly 2,300 candidates.
Is there another boycott going on?
There has been an attempt to boycott this election, but not a very well-organized one. In talking to people around Tehran, lots of folks expressed real dismay at the election, and said they were really unhappy that the candidates they feel would be strong reformists were excluded again from the candidate list by the Guardian Council. So there are a number of people who plan not to vote. Actually, though, when you talk to them--you can't do a huge sample just talking to people informally--but I was struck by the fact that not everybody who plans not to vote was doing so out of political protest. A lot of them were just unexcited by the list of candidates. No one really seemed to fire them up. Moin, as thoughtful and important a candidate he is in terms of representing the reformers, is extremely dull.
I heard he's a terrible speaker.
He's quite a bad speaker. Also, what the public is expressing, as is reflected in candidates' statements designed to attract votes, is an insistence that the reform movement go forward. And they want any candidate that will move the reform movement forward, even incrementally. A lot of people are saying, "You know, we don't really like Mr. Hashemi [Rafsanjani]. He's kind of a very clever, old-style politician and all that. But he is the one that is likely to be able to actually deliver on some of the points of the reform movement that we insist on. And Moin, as much as we like his philosophy--he's not going to be able to deal with the clerics and the clerical establishment.'' Qalibaf, also, is favored largely because he's seen as a very strong figure. So the strength in these candidates actually turns out to be a very important point.
It's interesting that all the conservatives couldn't coalesce behind one candidate.
There's a fourth candidate, cleric Mehdi Karrubi, who is a very interesting person. He was a speaker in parliament who ran afoul of the other clerics and he has been a rather important protest figure from within the clerical establishment. He has tried to circumvent them by wrapping himself in the mantel of the late Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini [the Islamic Republic's founder] in his campaigning. His campaign pieces that appear on TV--again, very slick pieces of work--start out with a big picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the camera pans out, and you see Khomeini speaking to a crowd, and there's Karrubi right there next to him. So people who might be uncomfortable voting for a completely secular candidate, or who feel the flames of the revolution are still alive, might be more comfortable voting for Karrubi, even though right now the current clerical establishment is not very happy with him.
Does the clerical establishment back Rafsanjani?
Actually, they don't. They're backing Qalibaf. Rafsanjani has been a real political survivor. I mean, not only did he serve as president twice already, but he also headed up a body called the Expediency Council. This is an unelected post that, more or less, he created himself, and it was a council designed to mediate between the parliament [the Majlis] and the clerical establishment. It was created because, during the reform presidencies of [Mohammed] Khatami in his two terms [1997-2005], the Majlis was continually coming up with laws that were vetoed by the Guardian Council, and it really made the public furious. So there was a need for somebody to step in and try and resolve this.
There are two major international issues for Iran: the nuclear issue--which has involved the European Union and the United States--and Iraq. Do these issues come up in the campaign?
The nuclear issue does come up, but I think there is no question that the public, all the candidates, and the current establishment are completely unified on this point: Iran should be developing its nuclear industry.
Here's one point that utterly escapes us in the United States, and I really wish people in power could understand: The discourse on the nuclear question between the United States and Iran is almost a complete disconnect. The United States, not to put too fine a point on it, thinks Iran is going after nuclear weapons in order to do some damage to the United States and its allies. To put it really crudely, as one adviser connected to the White House told me, "Look, we know Iran wants to develop a nuclear bomb to drop on Tel Aviv." This kind of statement just utterly and completely floors me.
The Iranian side of the discourse is that they want to be known and seen as a modern, developing state with a modern, developing industrial base. The history of relations between Iran and the West for the last hundred years has included Iran's developing various kinds of industrial and technological advances to prove to themselves--and to attempt to prove to the world--that they are, in fact, that kind of country.
The nuclear-power issue is exactly that. When Iranians talk about it, and talk about the United States, they say, "The United States is trying to repress us; they're trying to keep us down and keep us backward, make us a second-class nation. And we have the ability to develop a nuclear industry, and we're being told we're not good enough, or we can't." And this makes people furious--not just the clerical establishment, but this makes the person on the street, even 16- and 17-year-olds, absolutely boil with anger. It is such an emotional issue that absolutely no politician could ever back down on this question. But again, the public, when you ask them about nuclear weapons, they just sort of look at you like you are crazy. Because that's not even close to what it means to them.
Shifting gears, do you think there is any possibility the young people of Iran might attempt to spearhead a revolution against the government?
In the last 15 years, the youth of the country have now come to the fore in massive numbers. Right now, of course, we know that something like 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25. But what is really important is that, although the population as a whole is very youthful, it will be within the next five years that the majority of the voting population will have no knowledge of the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini or anything that went on in 1978 and 1979. My prediction is that, within five to ten years, there's going to be such a change in Iran that it will make our heads spin.
The young people are absolutely hell-bent on reform. But they're willing to wait. The students, the really kind of intrepid students at the University of Tehran, are not interested in violence and they're quite articulate about it. They certainly don't want a foreign-installed government of any sort, and they said, "We're engaged in a quiet revolution."
And what are the main reforms they want?
First of all, they're concerned with personal liberty. The simple fact is that, at least in Tehran, I would say everybody does just about anything they want in private. The government has absolutely stopped going into people's houses and, in fact, private behavior is now, I would say, virtually completely free. The government has repressed people who've been expressing opposition opinions in very prominent places. They've arrested some bloggers and one student at the University of Tehran who wrote a letter to [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan that got a lot of attention, and he was put in jail for a few months. But it was the government itself that released him eventually, which is quite interesting. So the young people would like the de facto personal liberties, which people have just sort of seized for themselves, to be essentially acknowledged by the government as a whole.
The women in particular, who staged a demonstration while we were there for women's rights, want important reforms within the legal system to reach an accommodation between Islamic law and what they would consider to be a modern stance for family law, in particular. The question of whether women can participate in public life has been absolutely resolved. There is just no question. Women are there and in every way, in every area of public life, and they're not going to go away. They are actually one of the strongest forces for reform in the country. And anybody in the United States who still believes women in Iran are somehow helpless victims of male hegemony is expressing an incredibly inaccurate and outmoded view.
They're still required to wear head coverings. But beyond that, you see everything in the world. What it is, is modest dress. And modest dress is, by the way, incumbent upon both men and women. But what the women have done is to develop all sorts of very stylish ways to achieve that. So they'll have a head covering that may expose a lot more hair, which is considered erotic in Iran, and maybe a very light coat that they'll be wearing with pants. We see, for young girls, it's evolved into kind of a head covering, a jacket over a blouse, and maybe even jeans. The whole thing has become extraordinarily fashionable.
After the election, should the United States say anything?
I think that the United States should certainly not undercut the election, whatever happens. The Bush administration has the most unfortunate habit of saying negative things just when things are starting to get better. We had an enormously important possibility of an opening to Iran after the Bam earthquake [December 2003] only to have President Bush, on New Year's Day, come out and again make hugely negative remarks about Iran. If the administration can't say anything nice, then they really should say nothing. Whether one likes the fact that candidates were vetted before the election or not, there's no question that this is a real election and it really is happening. And this is not an election that is controlled and it's not an election where we know the outcome. And if it does go into a run-off, even though Rafsanjani is now a favored candidate, it's not clear that he would win, because the other candidates, and there are several, might throw their support to his opponent.
William O. Beeman, professor of anthropology at Brown University and an expert on Iran's culture and social patterns, says he was stunned on his recent trip to Tehran by the Western-style campaigning underway for the June 17 presidential elections. Most surprising to him was the strong support shown by young women and men for the frontrunner, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Iran's electorate, Beeman says, is largely united on the need for social reform in the country and the desirability of a peaceful nuclear-energy program. But they have divided their support between three leading candidates, and a Rafansanji victory is not assured. Despite the role of the conservative Council of Guardians in selecting the presidential candidates, "there's no question that this is a real election and it really is happening," he says. "And this is not an election that is controlled and it's not an election where we know the outcome."
Beeman, whose latest book, The 'Great Satan' vs. The 'Mad Mullahs': How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other, will be published soon, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on June 15, 2005.
Other Interviews
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You've just come back from a visit to Iran where you got a flavor of the presidential election campaign that just wrapped up. Can you give us a brief description of what you saw?
What's fascinating about this campaign is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a very Western-style campaign. The candidates, even the frontrunner, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, have lucid [campaigning] techniques that we would think of as being essentially Western for the election. Obviously, they're all taking the election quite seriously. Hashemi Rafsanjani has also put in his platform--in fact, all of the candidates have put in their platforms--measures that we associate with the reformist movement.
Like what?
Well, for instance, for Rafsanjani, one of the more important points of his campaign is increased rights for women and attention to the needs of young people. It's very interesting. Among his campaigners, he actually has some very powerful spokeswomen, who are out on the stump with him and are, I'd say, doing a fantastic job in representing him as a can-do candidate who can really mediate between the demands of the public--which is increasingly requiring or demanding that the government liberalize in important ways--and the traditional mullahs, who still hold significant power in the country. He also has recruited, it seems, hundreds of very young people to run the streets and hand out flyers and buttonhole people. It's amazing to see the impression that this gives--that it is women and youth for Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is 70.
Why do you think these young people, who might normally be supporting the reformist candidate, Mustafa Moin, are supporting him?
Well, he actually trucked in [to Tehran] hundreds of folks from his native province in Iran. He comes from the area around Yazd. And it seems a lot of his relatives, and a lot of his relatives' friends, and people who would like to see him elected from his local area have made the trip to Tehran and are doing this work. I think that it would be wrong to characterize them entirely as coming from that area, but that's certainly where a bunch of them came from.
Have there been any reliable political polls?
Well, we've seen political polls. Now, it's hard to tell whether they are reliable or not, because they've varied tremendously from day-to-day. Earlier, around the 8th of June, the polls suggested the second-place runner was Mohammed Baqur Qalibaf, who used to be chief of police in Tehran. And his campaign has been the slickest thing I've ever seen. I am astonishingly impressed with the print and media images he has been able to generate. He has been turned into an absolute glamour boy.
He also has a pilot's license and a PhD in geography. He's not a person without accomplishments. He was also an early member of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, so it's very interesting. He led a crackdown on the student population in 1999, but he also has this very, very modern image.
He's in his early 40s, and I actually have a collection of posters of him that were really impressive. In one, he is in a pilot's uniform next to an Iranian jet, looking like a glamorous aviator. There's another one that's a poster in a very untraditional format. It's in a long, horizontal strip that simply has the upper part of his face kind of staring out at you, and it's all black and white, except they have enhanced his blue eyes. So you see this black and white poster with these electric blue eyes staring out at you, and in Iran, of course, most people have brown eyes. There are people who do have blue eyes--they're thought to be the descendants of Alexander the Great--it's one of the myths people have. The poster projects an extraordinarily arresting image, and he's attracted a lot of young people, who believe him to be, again, a person who has a kind of can-do attitude and is very powerful.
What about the great bugaboo, the "Great Satan"? Have any of the candidates talked much about the United States?
Rafsanjani has, of course, and in fact--in very coded terms--he has come out and said he is the one who can actually deliver on creating a rapprochement with what he calls "the world community," or "nations outside of Iran." He doesn't say the United States directly, but I think everybody who hears his campaign material knows that's what he's talking about. After all, he has an extraordinary advantage in Iranian politics, in my opinion, and that is that he was involved with the Iran-Contra affair directly [in which elements in the Reagan administration secretly sold missiles to Iran and used the proceeds to fund illegal covert actions in Nicaragua]. Despite being up close and friendly with the United States at that time, he has not suffered politically at all. The great danger in Iran has always been that the person who would try to achieve some kind rapprochement with the United States would immediately be tainted politically by his enemies in such a way that would make him ineffective. In this particular case, Rafsanjani has been completely, seemingly unscathed. So he has already, in important ways, addressed particular problems politicians have had. I think he feels he can go forward.
How does this election work? Does there have to be a run-off if no candidate wins a majority?
Yes. I think everyone feels that Rafsanjani will be the frontrunner, and probably will win between 30 percent and 40 percent of the vote.
And who will be second?
Up until last week, Qalibaf was running second. But just before I left, a new poll came out, which actually put Moin, the reform candidate, in second place. So that was a big surprise and we don't know exactly what it all means. I had a chance to chat with Moin's chief spokesperson, who's also a woman, and she's a formidable lady who is quite confident he will do extremely well in the election.
And what is Moin's background?
He's held a number of government posts, including minister of culture, I believe. But he's been continually involved with the government, and I think that's one of the reasons why he was allowed into the election. The important thing is people did see him as a serious challenge. He was originally excluded from the list of candidates by the Guardian Council. When people essentially expressed dismay about this--and there was a very widespread feeling that this was too heavy-handed on the part of the Guardian Council--[Supreme Leader] Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei personally requested that he and another candidate be included again.
During the last parliamentary election, two years ago, there was a boycott of the election. Why was that?
The reason people were trying to boycott the elections was because the Guardian Council had excluded nearly 2,300 candidates.
Is there another boycott going on?
There has been an attempt to boycott this election, but not a very well-organized one. In talking to people around Tehran, lots of folks expressed real dismay at the election, and said they were really unhappy that the candidates they feel would be strong reformists were excluded again from the candidate list by the Guardian Council. So there are a number of people who plan not to vote. Actually, though, when you talk to them--you can't do a huge sample just talking to people informally--but I was struck by the fact that not everybody who plans not to vote was doing so out of political protest. A lot of them were just unexcited by the list of candidates. No one really seemed to fire them up. Moin, as thoughtful and important a candidate he is in terms of representing the reformers, is extremely dull.
I heard he's a terrible speaker.
He's quite a bad speaker. Also, what the public is expressing, as is reflected in candidates' statements designed to attract votes, is an insistence that the reform movement go forward. And they want any candidate that will move the reform movement forward, even incrementally. A lot of people are saying, "You know, we don't really like Mr. Hashemi [Rafsanjani]. He's kind of a very clever, old-style politician and all that. But he is the one that is likely to be able to actually deliver on some of the points of the reform movement that we insist on. And Moin, as much as we like his philosophy--he's not going to be able to deal with the clerics and the clerical establishment.'' Qalibaf, also, is favored largely because he's seen as a very strong figure. So the strength in these candidates actually turns out to be a very important point.
It's interesting that all the conservatives couldn't coalesce behind one candidate.
There's a fourth candidate, cleric Mehdi Karrubi, who is a very interesting person. He was a speaker in parliament who ran afoul of the other clerics and he has been a rather important protest figure from within the clerical establishment. He has tried to circumvent them by wrapping himself in the mantel of the late Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini [the Islamic Republic's founder] in his campaigning. His campaign pieces that appear on TV--again, very slick pieces of work--start out with a big picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the camera pans out, and you see Khomeini speaking to a crowd, and there's Karrubi right there next to him. So people who might be uncomfortable voting for a completely secular candidate, or who feel the flames of the revolution are still alive, might be more comfortable voting for Karrubi, even though right now the current clerical establishment is not very happy with him.
Does the clerical establishment back Rafsanjani?
Actually, they don't. They're backing Qalibaf. Rafsanjani has been a real political survivor. I mean, not only did he serve as president twice already, but he also headed up a body called the Expediency Council. This is an unelected post that, more or less, he created himself, and it was a council designed to mediate between the parliament [the Majlis] and the clerical establishment. It was created because, during the reform presidencies of [Mohammed] Khatami in his two terms [1997-2005], the Majlis was continually coming up with laws that were vetoed by the Guardian Council, and it really made the public furious. So there was a need for somebody to step in and try and resolve this.
There are two major international issues for Iran: the nuclear issue--which has involved the European Union and the United States--and Iraq. Do these issues come up in the campaign?
The nuclear issue does come up, but I think there is no question that the public, all the candidates, and the current establishment are completely unified on this point: Iran should be developing its nuclear industry.
Here's one point that utterly escapes us in the United States, and I really wish people in power could understand: The discourse on the nuclear question between the United States and Iran is almost a complete disconnect. The United States, not to put too fine a point on it, thinks Iran is going after nuclear weapons in order to do some damage to the United States and its allies. To put it really crudely, as one adviser connected to the White House told me, "Look, we know Iran wants to develop a nuclear bomb to drop on Tel Aviv." This kind of statement just utterly and completely floors me.
The Iranian side of the discourse is that they want to be known and seen as a modern, developing state with a modern, developing industrial base. The history of relations between Iran and the West for the last hundred years has included Iran's developing various kinds of industrial and technological advances to prove to themselves--and to attempt to prove to the world--that they are, in fact, that kind of country.
The nuclear-power issue is exactly that. When Iranians talk about it, and talk about the United States, they say, "The United States is trying to repress us; they're trying to keep us down and keep us backward, make us a second-class nation. And we have the ability to develop a nuclear industry, and we're being told we're not good enough, or we can't." And this makes people furious--not just the clerical establishment, but this makes the person on the street, even 16- and 17-year-olds, absolutely boil with anger. It is such an emotional issue that absolutely no politician could ever back down on this question. But again, the public, when you ask them about nuclear weapons, they just sort of look at you like you are crazy. Because that's not even close to what it means to them.
Shifting gears, do you think there is any possibility the young people of Iran might attempt to spearhead a revolution against the government?
In the last 15 years, the youth of the country have now come to the fore in massive numbers. Right now, of course, we know that something like 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25. But what is really important is that, although the population as a whole is very youthful, it will be within the next five years that the majority of the voting population will have no knowledge of the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini or anything that went on in 1978 and 1979. My prediction is that, within five to ten years, there's going to be such a change in Iran that it will make our heads spin.
The young people are absolutely hell-bent on reform. But they're willing to wait. The students, the really kind of intrepid students at the University of Tehran, are not interested in violence and they're quite articulate about it. They certainly don't want a foreign-installed government of any sort, and they said, "We're engaged in a quiet revolution."
And what are the main reforms they want?
First of all, they're concerned with personal liberty. The simple fact is that, at least in Tehran, I would say everybody does just about anything they want in private. The government has absolutely stopped going into people's houses and, in fact, private behavior is now, I would say, virtually completely free. The government has repressed people who've been expressing opposition opinions in very prominent places. They've arrested some bloggers and one student at the University of Tehran who wrote a letter to [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan that got a lot of attention, and he was put in jail for a few months. But it was the government itself that released him eventually, which is quite interesting. So the young people would like the de facto personal liberties, which people have just sort of seized for themselves, to be essentially acknowledged by the government as a whole.
The women in particular, who staged a demonstration while we were there for women's rights, want important reforms within the legal system to reach an accommodation between Islamic law and what they would consider to be a modern stance for family law, in particular. The question of whether women can participate in public life has been absolutely resolved. There is just no question. Women are there and in every way, in every area of public life, and they're not going to go away. They are actually one of the strongest forces for reform in the country. And anybody in the United States who still believes women in Iran are somehow helpless victims of male hegemony is expressing an incredibly inaccurate and outmoded view.
They're still required to wear head coverings. But beyond that, you see everything in the world. What it is, is modest dress. And modest dress is, by the way, incumbent upon both men and women. But what the women have done is to develop all sorts of very stylish ways to achieve that. So they'll have a head covering that may expose a lot more hair, which is considered erotic in Iran, and maybe a very light coat that they'll be wearing with pants. We see, for young girls, it's evolved into kind of a head covering, a jacket over a blouse, and maybe even jeans. The whole thing has become extraordinarily fashionable.
After the election, should the United States say anything?
I think that the United States should certainly not undercut the election, whatever happens. The Bush administration has the most unfortunate habit of saying negative things just when things are starting to get better. We had an enormously important possibility of an opening to Iran after the Bam earthquake [December 2003] only to have President Bush, on New Year's Day, come out and again make hugely negative remarks about Iran. If the administration can't say anything nice, then they really should say nothing. Whether one likes the fact that candidates were vetted before the election or not, there's no question that this is a real election and it really is happening. And this is not an election that is controlled and it's not an election where we know the outcome. And if it does go into a run-off, even though Rafsanjani is now a favored candidate, it's not clear that he would win, because the other candidates, and there are several, might throw their support to his opponent.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
POLITICS-US: Bush and Hawks Try Pre-Emptive Strike Vs. Iran Vote
POLITICS-US: Bush and Hawks Try Pre-Emptive Strike Vs. Iran Vote
WASHINGTON, Jun 18 (IPS) - A familiar clutch of hardline U.S. hawks who led the march to war against Iraq have tried to carry out yet another pre-emptive strike. But this time it wasn't military.
As millions of Iranians prepared to vote for the successor to Pres. Mohammed Khatami Friday, the group, helped along by a strong denunciation by Bush himself, mounted what could only be described as an orchestrated public-relations campaign to discredit the elections even before they took place.
”Today Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world,” Bush declared in a statement issued by the White House Thursday afternoon. ”Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy.”
Bush's statements, which were echoed by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and to a somewhat less categorical extent by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, offered some reassurance to the hawks, particularly some prominent neo-conservatives outside the administration who have pressed their own longstanding campaign for ”regime change” in Teheran with growing intensity.
At the same time, however, their own efforts to discredit the election at the eleventh hour highlight their growing concern that a new president in Iran may actually be someone with whom, as Margaret Thatcher first observed about incoming Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev 20 years ago, the West might actually be able to do business.
That concern rose sharply late last month when State Department officials quietly urged both the Republican Congressional leadership to hold off action on the Iran Freedom Support Act that would impose new sanctions on Iran pending ongoing negotiations between the so-called EU-3 -- Britain, France, and Germany -- and Iran over its nuclear programme.
”These guys want regime change,” said one knowledgeable source who asked not to be identified, ”and they're very worried about anything that could divert from that. They want to ensure that the White House won't get any funny ideas about making a deal with a new Iranian government.”
Thus, the hawks' mantra Thursday on the eve of the balloting, was that the elections won't make any difference because hardline elements led by the unelected supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and the Guardian Council, which did so much to hobble outgoing Pres. Mohammed Khatami and the reformists, will continue running the country regardless of who wins.
”Any normal person familiar with the Islamic republic knows that these are not elections at all...,” wrote Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in an article headlined ”When Is an Election Not an Election?” posted on National Review Online (NRO) Thursday morning.
”They are a mise en scene, an entertainment, a comic opera staged for our benefit. The purpose of the charade, pure and simple, is to deter us from supporting the forces of democratic revolution in Iran.”
That theme was echoed in a series of events and other columns published Thursday, including one, by Kenneth Timmerman in NRO (and reprinted Friday by the Washington Times) entitled ”Fake Election, Real Threats” in which he predicted that no more than five percent of eligible voters in Teheran would turn out.
Another appeared in the Washington Times by Nir Boms, vice president of the new Centre for Freedom in the Middle East and previously vice president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Elliott Chodoff entitled ”Facing the Iranian Elections,” and a third in the New York Times by AEI vice president Danielle Pletka, entitled ”Not Our Man in Iran,” a reference to the front-runner, former President Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose presumed victory, she wrote, was due to the ”machinations of the mullahs.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Sam Brownback, a Christian Right leader close to both hard-line neoconservatives and Iranian-American followers of Reza Pahlevi, the ambitious, U.S.-based son of the former Shah, charged in a floor speech that the elections were ”bogus,” while at AEI headquarters across town, a discussion on the elections featured a presentation by founder of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohsen Sazegara of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who predicted, ”No matter who wins the presidential elections, there will be no real changes in Iran's domestic or foreign policy.”
Despite the certainty with which these views were expressed, many U.S.-based Iran specialists, while agreeing that powers of Khameini and the Guardian's Council clearly circumscribed what an elected president could do, said that the depiction of the election as a sham was simplistic at best, a deliberate distortion at worst.
Contrary to Pletka's assertion that Rafsanjani was chosen by the mullahs, said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University, ”Those who are closest to the actual election process have stated repeatedly that Rafsanjani was seen as dividing the mullahs and was not-so-subtly opposed in his candidacy by Khamenei.”
That view was echoed by Abbas Milani and Michael McFaul, directors of the Project on Iranian Democracy at the conservative Hoover Institution in California, in an article in Friday's International Herald Tribune. Rafsanjani and Khamenei, they wrote, ”now àare at each other's political throats,” signaling ”clear division within the ruling elite” of the kind that could well presage ”the beginning of political liberalisation.”
What's more, according to Milani and McFaul, Rafsanjani and Mostafa Moin, a reformist who is tipped to be Rafsanjani's likely rival in a run-off Jul. 1, have both gone further than Khatami ”in challenging the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic and its current leadership” and in advocating improved relations with the United States.
A close reading of the hawks themselves also disclosed serious inconsistencies. While insisting, for example, that ”millions of 'officially cast' ballots (were) manufactured weeks ago, to ensure the right guy wins and that enough votes will have been cast,” Ledeen confessed that even he didn't know who would win.
Like Pletka, Ledeen had assumed ”that Rafsanjani would walk away with it.” But since Khameini overruled the Guardian Council so that Moin (”a nasty pseudo-reformer”) could join the field, he was no longer so sure. Moin ”might be more convincing as he plays that most difficult role,” Ledeen went on: ”the moderate face of islamofascism.”
To some Iran specialists, such speculation serves only to demonstrate that, as in the run-up to the war in Iraq, some hard-liners are trying to fit the facts into their preferred policy.
”Michael Ledeen has never been to Iran; he speaks no Persian,” said Brown University Professor William Beeman, who observed the campaign in Teheran during the past week. ”He has minimal credibility in assessing the Iranian elections, or evaluating the political situation there.
”It is clear that the neo-cons are desperate to deny any credibility to the Iranian people in this election àby continuing to promulgate the image of helpless Iranians cowering under tyrannical rule -- the better to justify some kind of attack leading to 'regime change,”' Said Brown, author of a forthcoming book, ”The 'Great Satan' vs. the 'Mad Mullahs:' How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.' (END/2005)
WASHINGTON, Jun 18 (IPS) - A familiar clutch of hardline U.S. hawks who led the march to war against Iraq have tried to carry out yet another pre-emptive strike. But this time it wasn't military.
As millions of Iranians prepared to vote for the successor to Pres. Mohammed Khatami Friday, the group, helped along by a strong denunciation by Bush himself, mounted what could only be described as an orchestrated public-relations campaign to discredit the elections even before they took place.
”Today Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world,” Bush declared in a statement issued by the White House Thursday afternoon. ”Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy.”
Bush's statements, which were echoed by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and to a somewhat less categorical extent by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, offered some reassurance to the hawks, particularly some prominent neo-conservatives outside the administration who have pressed their own longstanding campaign for ”regime change” in Teheran with growing intensity.
At the same time, however, their own efforts to discredit the election at the eleventh hour highlight their growing concern that a new president in Iran may actually be someone with whom, as Margaret Thatcher first observed about incoming Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev 20 years ago, the West might actually be able to do business.
That concern rose sharply late last month when State Department officials quietly urged both the Republican Congressional leadership to hold off action on the Iran Freedom Support Act that would impose new sanctions on Iran pending ongoing negotiations between the so-called EU-3 -- Britain, France, and Germany -- and Iran over its nuclear programme.
”These guys want regime change,” said one knowledgeable source who asked not to be identified, ”and they're very worried about anything that could divert from that. They want to ensure that the White House won't get any funny ideas about making a deal with a new Iranian government.”
Thus, the hawks' mantra Thursday on the eve of the balloting, was that the elections won't make any difference because hardline elements led by the unelected supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and the Guardian Council, which did so much to hobble outgoing Pres. Mohammed Khatami and the reformists, will continue running the country regardless of who wins.
”Any normal person familiar with the Islamic republic knows that these are not elections at all...,” wrote Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in an article headlined ”When Is an Election Not an Election?” posted on National Review Online (NRO) Thursday morning.
”They are a mise en scene, an entertainment, a comic opera staged for our benefit. The purpose of the charade, pure and simple, is to deter us from supporting the forces of democratic revolution in Iran.”
That theme was echoed in a series of events and other columns published Thursday, including one, by Kenneth Timmerman in NRO (and reprinted Friday by the Washington Times) entitled ”Fake Election, Real Threats” in which he predicted that no more than five percent of eligible voters in Teheran would turn out.
Another appeared in the Washington Times by Nir Boms, vice president of the new Centre for Freedom in the Middle East and previously vice president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Elliott Chodoff entitled ”Facing the Iranian Elections,” and a third in the New York Times by AEI vice president Danielle Pletka, entitled ”Not Our Man in Iran,” a reference to the front-runner, former President Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose presumed victory, she wrote, was due to the ”machinations of the mullahs.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Sam Brownback, a Christian Right leader close to both hard-line neoconservatives and Iranian-American followers of Reza Pahlevi, the ambitious, U.S.-based son of the former Shah, charged in a floor speech that the elections were ”bogus,” while at AEI headquarters across town, a discussion on the elections featured a presentation by founder of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohsen Sazegara of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who predicted, ”No matter who wins the presidential elections, there will be no real changes in Iran's domestic or foreign policy.”
Despite the certainty with which these views were expressed, many U.S.-based Iran specialists, while agreeing that powers of Khameini and the Guardian's Council clearly circumscribed what an elected president could do, said that the depiction of the election as a sham was simplistic at best, a deliberate distortion at worst.
Contrary to Pletka's assertion that Rafsanjani was chosen by the mullahs, said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University, ”Those who are closest to the actual election process have stated repeatedly that Rafsanjani was seen as dividing the mullahs and was not-so-subtly opposed in his candidacy by Khamenei.”
That view was echoed by Abbas Milani and Michael McFaul, directors of the Project on Iranian Democracy at the conservative Hoover Institution in California, in an article in Friday's International Herald Tribune. Rafsanjani and Khamenei, they wrote, ”now àare at each other's political throats,” signaling ”clear division within the ruling elite” of the kind that could well presage ”the beginning of political liberalisation.”
What's more, according to Milani and McFaul, Rafsanjani and Mostafa Moin, a reformist who is tipped to be Rafsanjani's likely rival in a run-off Jul. 1, have both gone further than Khatami ”in challenging the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic and its current leadership” and in advocating improved relations with the United States.
A close reading of the hawks themselves also disclosed serious inconsistencies. While insisting, for example, that ”millions of 'officially cast' ballots (were) manufactured weeks ago, to ensure the right guy wins and that enough votes will have been cast,” Ledeen confessed that even he didn't know who would win.
Like Pletka, Ledeen had assumed ”that Rafsanjani would walk away with it.” But since Khameini overruled the Guardian Council so that Moin (”a nasty pseudo-reformer”) could join the field, he was no longer so sure. Moin ”might be more convincing as he plays that most difficult role,” Ledeen went on: ”the moderate face of islamofascism.”
To some Iran specialists, such speculation serves only to demonstrate that, as in the run-up to the war in Iraq, some hard-liners are trying to fit the facts into their preferred policy.
”Michael Ledeen has never been to Iran; he speaks no Persian,” said Brown University Professor William Beeman, who observed the campaign in Teheran during the past week. ”He has minimal credibility in assessing the Iranian elections, or evaluating the political situation there.
”It is clear that the neo-cons are desperate to deny any credibility to the Iranian people in this election àby continuing to promulgate the image of helpless Iranians cowering under tyrannical rule -- the better to justify some kind of attack leading to 'regime change,”' Said Brown, author of a forthcoming book, ”The 'Great Satan' vs. the 'Mad Mullahs:' How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.' (END/2005)
Friday, June 17, 2005
Q&A: William Beeman on Iran's Election - New York Times
Q&A: William Beeman on Iran's Election - New York Times
Iran's electorate, Beeman says, is largely united on the need for social reform in the country and the desirability of a peaceful nuclear-energy program. But they have divided their support between three leading candidates, and a Rafansanji victory is not assured. Despite the role of the conservative Council of Guardians in selecting the presidential candidates, "there's no question that this is a real election and it really is happening," he says. "And this is not an election that is controlled and it's not an election where we know the outcome."
Beeman, whose latest book, "The 'Great Satan' vs. The 'Mad Mullahs': How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other," will be published soon, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on June 15, 2005.
You've just come back from a visit to Iran where you got a flavor of the presidential election campaign that just wrapped up. Can you give us a brief description of what you saw?
What's fascinating about this campaign is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a very Western-style campaign. The candidates, even the frontrunner, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, have lucid [campaigning] techniques that we would think of as being essentially Western for the election. Obviously, they're all taking the election quite seriously. Hashemi Rafsanjani has also put in his platform--in fact, all of the candidates have put in their platforms--measures that we associate with the reformist movement.
Like what?
Well, for instance, for Rafsanjani, one of the more important points of his campaign is increased rights for women and attention to the needs of young people. It's very interesting. Among his campaigners, he actually has some very powerful spokeswomen, who are out on the stump with him and are, I'd say, doing a fantastic job in representing him as a can-do candidate who can really mediate between the demands of the public--which is increasingly requiring or demanding that the government liberalize in important ways--and the traditional mullahs, who still hold significant power in the country. He also has recruited, it seems, hundreds of very young people to run the streets and hand out flyers and buttonhole people. It's amazing to see the impression that this gives--that it is women and youth for Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is 70.
Why do you think these young people, who might normally be supporting the reformist candidate, Mustafa Moin, are supporting him?
Well, he actually trucked in [to Tehran] hundreds of folks from his native province in Iran. He comes from the area around Yazd. And it seems a lot of his relatives, and a lot of his relatives' friends, and people who would like to see him elected from his local area have made the trip to Tehran and are doing this work. I think that it would be wrong to characterize them entirely as coming from that area, but that's certainly where a bunch of them came from.
Have there been any reliable political polls?
Well, we've seen political polls. Now, it's hard to tell whether they are reliable or not, because they've varied tremendously from day-to-day. Earlier, around the 8th of June, the polls suggested the second-place runner was Mohammed Baqur Qalibaf, who used to be chief of police in Tehran. And his campaign has been the slickest thing I've ever seen. I am astonishingly impressed with the print and media images he has been able to generate. He has been turned into an absolute glamour boy.
He also has a pilot's license and a PhD in geography. He's not a person without accomplishments. He was also an early member of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, so it's very interesting. He led a crackdown on the student population in 1999, but he also has this very, very modern image.
He's in his early 40s, and I actually have a collection of posters of him that were really impressive. In one, he is in a pilot's uniform next to an Iranian jet, looking like a glamorous aviator. There's another one that's a poster in a very untraditional format. It's in a long, horizontal strip that simply has the upper part of his face kind of staring out at you, and it's all black and white, except they have enhanced his blue eyes. So you see this black and white poster with these electric blue eyes staring out at you, and in Iran, of course, most people have brown eyes. There are people who do have blue eyes--they're thought to be the descendants of Alexander the Great--it's one of the myths people have. The poster projects an extraordinarily arresting image, and he's attracted a lot of young people, who believe him to be, again, a person who has a kind of can-do attitude and is very powerful.
What about the great bugaboo, the "Great Satan"? Have any of the candidates talked much about the United States?
Rafsanjani has, of course, and in fact--in very coded terms--he has come out and said he is the one who can actually deliver on creating a rapprochement with what he calls "the world community," or "nations outside of Iran." He doesn't say the United States directly, but I think everybody who hears his campaign material knows that's what he's talking about. After all, he has an extraordinary advantage in Iranian politics, in my opinion, and that is that he was involved with the Iran-Contra affair directly [in which elements in the Reagan administration secretly sold missiles to Iran and used the proceeds to fund illegal covert actions in Nicaragua]. Despite being up close and friendly with the United States at that time, he has not suffered politically at all. The great danger in Iran has always been that the person who would try to achieve some kind rapprochement with the United States would immediately be tainted politically by his enemies in such a way that would make him ineffective. In this particular case, Rafsanjani has been completely, seemingly unscathed. So he has already, in important ways, addressed particular problems politicians have had. I think he feels he can go forward.
How does this election work? Does there have to be a run-off if no candidate wins a majority?
Yes. I think everyone feels that Rafsanjani will be the frontrunner, and probably will win between 30 percent and 40 percent of the vote.
And who will be second?
Up until last week, Qalibaf was running second. But just before I left, a new poll came out, which actually put Moin, the reform candidate, in second place. So that was a big surprise and we don't know exactly what it all means. I had a chance to chat with Moin's chief spokesperson, who's also a woman, and she's a formidable lady who is quite confident he will do extremely well in the election.
And what is Moin's background?
He's held a number of government posts, including minister of culture, I believe. But he's been continually involved with the government, and I think that's one of the reasons why he was allowed into the election. The important thing is people did see him as a serious challenge. He was originally excluded from the list of candidates by the Guardian Council. When people essentially expressed dismay about this--and there was a very widespread feeling that this was too heavy-handed on the part of the Guardian Council--[Supreme Leader] Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei personally requested that he and another candidate be included again.
During the last parliamentary election, two years ago, there was a boycott of the election. Why was that?
The reason people were trying to boycott the elections was because the Guardian Council had excluded nearly 2,300 candidates.
Is there another boycott going on?
There has been an attempt to boycott this election, but not a very well-organized one. In talking to people around Tehran, lots of folks expressed real dismay at the election, and said they were really unhappy that the candidates they feel would be strong reformists were excluded again from the candidate list by the Guardian Council. So there are a number of people who plan not to vote. Actually, though, when you talk to them--you can't do a huge sample just talking to people informally--but I was struck by the fact that not everybody who plans not to vote was doing so out of political protest. A lot of them were just unexcited by the list of candidates. No one really seemed to fire them up. Moin, as thoughtful and important a candidate he is in terms of representing the reformers, is extremely dull.
I heard he's a terrible speaker.
He's quite a bad speaker. Also, what the public is expressing, as is reflected in candidates' statements designed to attract votes, is an insistence that the reform movement go forward. And they want any candidate that will move the reform movement forward, even incrementally. A lot of people are saying, "You know, we don't really like Mr. Hashemi [Rafsanjani]. He's kind of a very clever, old-style politician and all that. But he is the one that is likely to be able to actually deliver on some of the points of the reform movement that we insist on. And Moin, as much as we like his philosophy--he's not going to be able to deal with the clerics and the clerical establishment.'' Qalibaf, also, is favored largely because he's seen as a very strong figure. So the strength in these candidates actually turns out to be a very important point.
It's interesting that all the conservatives couldn't coalesce behind one candidate.
There's a fourth candidate, cleric Mehdi Karrubi, who is a very interesting person. He was a speaker in parliament who ran afoul of the other clerics and he has been a rather important protest figure from within the clerical establishment. He has tried to circumvent them by wrapping himself in the mantel of the late Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini [the Islamic Republic's founder] in his campaigning. His campaign pieces that appear on TV--again, very slick pieces of work--start out with a big picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the camera pans out, and you see Khomeini speaking to a crowd, and there's Karrubi right there next to him. So people who might be uncomfortable voting for a completely secular candidate, or who feel the flames of the revolution are still alive, might be more comfortable voting for Karrubi, even though right now the current clerical establishment is not very happy with him.
Does the clerical establishment back Rafsanjani?
Actually, they don't. They're backing Qalibaf. Rafsanjani has been a real political survivor. I mean, not only did he serve as president twice already, but he also headed up a body called the Expediency Council. This is an unelected post that, more or less, he created himself, and it was a council designed to mediate between the parliament [the Majlis] and the clerical establishment. It was created because, during the reform presidencies of [Mohammed] Khatami in his two terms [1997-2005], the Majlis was continually coming up with laws that were vetoed by the Guardian Council, and it really made the public furious. So there was a need for somebody to step in and try and resolve this.
There are two major international issues for Iran: the nuclear issue--which has involved the European Union and the United States--and Iraq. Do these issues come up in the campaign?
The nuclear issue does come up, but I think there is no question that the public, all the candidates, and the current establishment are completely unified on this point: Iran should be developing its nuclear industry.
Here's one point that utterly escapes us in the United States, and I really wish people in power could understand: The discourse on the nuclear question between the United States and Iran is almost a complete disconnect. The United States, not to put too fine a point on it, thinks Iran is going after nuclear weapons in order to do some damage to the United States and its allies. To put it really crudely, as one adviser connected to the White House told me, "Look, we know Iran wants to develop a nuclear bomb to drop on Tel Aviv." This kind of statement just utterly and completely floors me.
The Iranian side of the discourse is that they want to be known and seen as a modern, developing state with a modern, developing industrial base. The history of relations between Iran and the West for the last hundred years has included Iran's developing various kinds of industrial and technological advances to prove to themselves--and to attempt to prove to the world--that they are, in fact, that kind of country.
The nuclear-power issue is exactly that. When Iranians talk about it, and talk about the United States, they say, "The United States is trying to repress us; they're trying to keep us down and keep us backward, make us a second-class nation. And we have the ability to develop a nuclear industry, and we're being told we're not good enough, or we can't." And this makes people furious--not just the clerical establishment, but this makes the person on the street, even 16- and 17-year-olds, absolutely boil with anger. It is such an emotional issue that absolutely no politician could ever back down on this question. But again, the public, when you ask them about nuclear weapons, they just sort of look at you like you are crazy. Because that's not even close to what it means to them.
Shifting gears, do you think there is any possibility the young people of Iran might attempt to spearhead a revolution against the government?
In the last 15 years, the youth of the country have now come to the fore in massive numbers. Right now, of course, we know that something like 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25. But what is really important is that, although the population as a whole is very youthful, it will be within the next five years that the majority of the voting population will have no knowledge of the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini or anything that went on in 1978 and 1979. My prediction is that, within five to ten years, there's going to be such a change in Iran that it will make our heads spin.
The young people are absolutely hell-bent on reform. But they're willing to wait. The students, the really kind of intrepid students at the University of Tehran, are not interested in violence and they're quite articulate about it. They certainly don't want a foreign-installed government of any sort, and they said, "We're engaged in a quiet revolution."
And what are the main reforms they want?
First of all, they're concerned with personal liberty. The simple fact is that, at least in Tehran, I would say everybody does just about anything they want in private. The government has absolutely stopped going into people's houses and, in fact, private behavior is now, I would say, virtually completely free. The government has repressed people who've been expressing opposition opinions in very prominent places. They've arrested some bloggers and one student at the University of Tehran who wrote a letter to [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan that got a lot of attention, and he was put in jail for a few months. But it was the government itself that released him eventually, which is quite interesting. So the young people would like the de facto personal liberties, which people have just sort of seized for themselves, to be essentially acknowledged by the government as a whole.
The women in particular, who staged a demonstration while we were there for women's rights, want important reforms within the legal system to reach an accommodation between Islamic law and what they would consider to be a modern stance for family law, in particular. The question of whether women can participate in public life has been absolutely resolved. There is just no question. Women are there and in every way, in every area of public life, and they're not going to go away. They are actually one of the strongest forces for reform in the country. And anybody in the United States who still believes women in Iran are somehow helpless victims of male hegemony is expressing an incredibly inaccurate and outmoded view.
They're still required to wear head coverings. But beyond that, you see everything in the world. What it is, is modest dress. And modest dress is, by the way, incumbent upon both men and women. But what the women have done is to develop all sorts of very stylish ways to achieve that. So they'll have a head covering that may expose a lot more hair, which is considered erotic in Iran, and maybe a very light coat that they'll be wearing with pants. We see, for young girls, it's evolved into kind of a head covering, a jacket over a blouse, and maybe even jeans. The whole thing has become extraordinarily fashionable.
After the election, should the United States say anything?
I think that the United States should certainly not undercut the election, whatever happens. The Bush administration has the most unfortunate habit of saying negative things just when things are starting to get better. We had an enormously important possibility of an opening to Iran after the Bam earthquake [December 2003] only to have President Bush, on New Year's Day, come out and again make hugely negative remarks about Iran. If the administration can't say anything nice, then they really should say nothing. Whether one likes the fact that candidates were vetted before the election or not, there's no question that this is a real election and it really is happening. And this is not an election that is controlled and it's not an election where we know the outcome. And if it does go into a run-off, even though Rafsanjani is now a favored candidate, it's not clear that he would win, because the other candidates, and there are several, might throw their support to his opponent.
Iran's electorate, Beeman says, is largely united on the need for social reform in the country and the desirability of a peaceful nuclear-energy program. But they have divided their support between three leading candidates, and a Rafansanji victory is not assured. Despite the role of the conservative Council of Guardians in selecting the presidential candidates, "there's no question that this is a real election and it really is happening," he says. "And this is not an election that is controlled and it's not an election where we know the outcome."
Beeman, whose latest book, "The 'Great Satan' vs. The 'Mad Mullahs': How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other," will be published soon, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on June 15, 2005.
You've just come back from a visit to Iran where you got a flavor of the presidential election campaign that just wrapped up. Can you give us a brief description of what you saw?
What's fascinating about this campaign is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a very Western-style campaign. The candidates, even the frontrunner, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, have lucid [campaigning] techniques that we would think of as being essentially Western for the election. Obviously, they're all taking the election quite seriously. Hashemi Rafsanjani has also put in his platform--in fact, all of the candidates have put in their platforms--measures that we associate with the reformist movement.
Like what?
Well, for instance, for Rafsanjani, one of the more important points of his campaign is increased rights for women and attention to the needs of young people. It's very interesting. Among his campaigners, he actually has some very powerful spokeswomen, who are out on the stump with him and are, I'd say, doing a fantastic job in representing him as a can-do candidate who can really mediate between the demands of the public--which is increasingly requiring or demanding that the government liberalize in important ways--and the traditional mullahs, who still hold significant power in the country. He also has recruited, it seems, hundreds of very young people to run the streets and hand out flyers and buttonhole people. It's amazing to see the impression that this gives--that it is women and youth for Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is 70.
Why do you think these young people, who might normally be supporting the reformist candidate, Mustafa Moin, are supporting him?
Well, he actually trucked in [to Tehran] hundreds of folks from his native province in Iran. He comes from the area around Yazd. And it seems a lot of his relatives, and a lot of his relatives' friends, and people who would like to see him elected from his local area have made the trip to Tehran and are doing this work. I think that it would be wrong to characterize them entirely as coming from that area, but that's certainly where a bunch of them came from.
Have there been any reliable political polls?
Well, we've seen political polls. Now, it's hard to tell whether they are reliable or not, because they've varied tremendously from day-to-day. Earlier, around the 8th of June, the polls suggested the second-place runner was Mohammed Baqur Qalibaf, who used to be chief of police in Tehran. And his campaign has been the slickest thing I've ever seen. I am astonishingly impressed with the print and media images he has been able to generate. He has been turned into an absolute glamour boy.
He also has a pilot's license and a PhD in geography. He's not a person without accomplishments. He was also an early member of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, so it's very interesting. He led a crackdown on the student population in 1999, but he also has this very, very modern image.
He's in his early 40s, and I actually have a collection of posters of him that were really impressive. In one, he is in a pilot's uniform next to an Iranian jet, looking like a glamorous aviator. There's another one that's a poster in a very untraditional format. It's in a long, horizontal strip that simply has the upper part of his face kind of staring out at you, and it's all black and white, except they have enhanced his blue eyes. So you see this black and white poster with these electric blue eyes staring out at you, and in Iran, of course, most people have brown eyes. There are people who do have blue eyes--they're thought to be the descendants of Alexander the Great--it's one of the myths people have. The poster projects an extraordinarily arresting image, and he's attracted a lot of young people, who believe him to be, again, a person who has a kind of can-do attitude and is very powerful.
What about the great bugaboo, the "Great Satan"? Have any of the candidates talked much about the United States?
Rafsanjani has, of course, and in fact--in very coded terms--he has come out and said he is the one who can actually deliver on creating a rapprochement with what he calls "the world community," or "nations outside of Iran." He doesn't say the United States directly, but I think everybody who hears his campaign material knows that's what he's talking about. After all, he has an extraordinary advantage in Iranian politics, in my opinion, and that is that he was involved with the Iran-Contra affair directly [in which elements in the Reagan administration secretly sold missiles to Iran and used the proceeds to fund illegal covert actions in Nicaragua]. Despite being up close and friendly with the United States at that time, he has not suffered politically at all. The great danger in Iran has always been that the person who would try to achieve some kind rapprochement with the United States would immediately be tainted politically by his enemies in such a way that would make him ineffective. In this particular case, Rafsanjani has been completely, seemingly unscathed. So he has already, in important ways, addressed particular problems politicians have had. I think he feels he can go forward.
How does this election work? Does there have to be a run-off if no candidate wins a majority?
Yes. I think everyone feels that Rafsanjani will be the frontrunner, and probably will win between 30 percent and 40 percent of the vote.
And who will be second?
Up until last week, Qalibaf was running second. But just before I left, a new poll came out, which actually put Moin, the reform candidate, in second place. So that was a big surprise and we don't know exactly what it all means. I had a chance to chat with Moin's chief spokesperson, who's also a woman, and she's a formidable lady who is quite confident he will do extremely well in the election.
And what is Moin's background?
He's held a number of government posts, including minister of culture, I believe. But he's been continually involved with the government, and I think that's one of the reasons why he was allowed into the election. The important thing is people did see him as a serious challenge. He was originally excluded from the list of candidates by the Guardian Council. When people essentially expressed dismay about this--and there was a very widespread feeling that this was too heavy-handed on the part of the Guardian Council--[Supreme Leader] Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei personally requested that he and another candidate be included again.
During the last parliamentary election, two years ago, there was a boycott of the election. Why was that?
The reason people were trying to boycott the elections was because the Guardian Council had excluded nearly 2,300 candidates.
Is there another boycott going on?
There has been an attempt to boycott this election, but not a very well-organized one. In talking to people around Tehran, lots of folks expressed real dismay at the election, and said they were really unhappy that the candidates they feel would be strong reformists were excluded again from the candidate list by the Guardian Council. So there are a number of people who plan not to vote. Actually, though, when you talk to them--you can't do a huge sample just talking to people informally--but I was struck by the fact that not everybody who plans not to vote was doing so out of political protest. A lot of them were just unexcited by the list of candidates. No one really seemed to fire them up. Moin, as thoughtful and important a candidate he is in terms of representing the reformers, is extremely dull.
I heard he's a terrible speaker.
He's quite a bad speaker. Also, what the public is expressing, as is reflected in candidates' statements designed to attract votes, is an insistence that the reform movement go forward. And they want any candidate that will move the reform movement forward, even incrementally. A lot of people are saying, "You know, we don't really like Mr. Hashemi [Rafsanjani]. He's kind of a very clever, old-style politician and all that. But he is the one that is likely to be able to actually deliver on some of the points of the reform movement that we insist on. And Moin, as much as we like his philosophy--he's not going to be able to deal with the clerics and the clerical establishment.'' Qalibaf, also, is favored largely because he's seen as a very strong figure. So the strength in these candidates actually turns out to be a very important point.
It's interesting that all the conservatives couldn't coalesce behind one candidate.
There's a fourth candidate, cleric Mehdi Karrubi, who is a very interesting person. He was a speaker in parliament who ran afoul of the other clerics and he has been a rather important protest figure from within the clerical establishment. He has tried to circumvent them by wrapping himself in the mantel of the late Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini [the Islamic Republic's founder] in his campaigning. His campaign pieces that appear on TV--again, very slick pieces of work--start out with a big picture of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the camera pans out, and you see Khomeini speaking to a crowd, and there's Karrubi right there next to him. So people who might be uncomfortable voting for a completely secular candidate, or who feel the flames of the revolution are still alive, might be more comfortable voting for Karrubi, even though right now the current clerical establishment is not very happy with him.
Does the clerical establishment back Rafsanjani?
Actually, they don't. They're backing Qalibaf. Rafsanjani has been a real political survivor. I mean, not only did he serve as president twice already, but he also headed up a body called the Expediency Council. This is an unelected post that, more or less, he created himself, and it was a council designed to mediate between the parliament [the Majlis] and the clerical establishment. It was created because, during the reform presidencies of [Mohammed] Khatami in his two terms [1997-2005], the Majlis was continually coming up with laws that were vetoed by the Guardian Council, and it really made the public furious. So there was a need for somebody to step in and try and resolve this.
There are two major international issues for Iran: the nuclear issue--which has involved the European Union and the United States--and Iraq. Do these issues come up in the campaign?
The nuclear issue does come up, but I think there is no question that the public, all the candidates, and the current establishment are completely unified on this point: Iran should be developing its nuclear industry.
Here's one point that utterly escapes us in the United States, and I really wish people in power could understand: The discourse on the nuclear question between the United States and Iran is almost a complete disconnect. The United States, not to put too fine a point on it, thinks Iran is going after nuclear weapons in order to do some damage to the United States and its allies. To put it really crudely, as one adviser connected to the White House told me, "Look, we know Iran wants to develop a nuclear bomb to drop on Tel Aviv." This kind of statement just utterly and completely floors me.
The Iranian side of the discourse is that they want to be known and seen as a modern, developing state with a modern, developing industrial base. The history of relations between Iran and the West for the last hundred years has included Iran's developing various kinds of industrial and technological advances to prove to themselves--and to attempt to prove to the world--that they are, in fact, that kind of country.
The nuclear-power issue is exactly that. When Iranians talk about it, and talk about the United States, they say, "The United States is trying to repress us; they're trying to keep us down and keep us backward, make us a second-class nation. And we have the ability to develop a nuclear industry, and we're being told we're not good enough, or we can't." And this makes people furious--not just the clerical establishment, but this makes the person on the street, even 16- and 17-year-olds, absolutely boil with anger. It is such an emotional issue that absolutely no politician could ever back down on this question. But again, the public, when you ask them about nuclear weapons, they just sort of look at you like you are crazy. Because that's not even close to what it means to them.
Shifting gears, do you think there is any possibility the young people of Iran might attempt to spearhead a revolution against the government?
In the last 15 years, the youth of the country have now come to the fore in massive numbers. Right now, of course, we know that something like 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25. But what is really important is that, although the population as a whole is very youthful, it will be within the next five years that the majority of the voting population will have no knowledge of the revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini or anything that went on in 1978 and 1979. My prediction is that, within five to ten years, there's going to be such a change in Iran that it will make our heads spin.
The young people are absolutely hell-bent on reform. But they're willing to wait. The students, the really kind of intrepid students at the University of Tehran, are not interested in violence and they're quite articulate about it. They certainly don't want a foreign-installed government of any sort, and they said, "We're engaged in a quiet revolution."
And what are the main reforms they want?
First of all, they're concerned with personal liberty. The simple fact is that, at least in Tehran, I would say everybody does just about anything they want in private. The government has absolutely stopped going into people's houses and, in fact, private behavior is now, I would say, virtually completely free. The government has repressed people who've been expressing opposition opinions in very prominent places. They've arrested some bloggers and one student at the University of Tehran who wrote a letter to [U.N. Secretary General] Kofi Annan that got a lot of attention, and he was put in jail for a few months. But it was the government itself that released him eventually, which is quite interesting. So the young people would like the de facto personal liberties, which people have just sort of seized for themselves, to be essentially acknowledged by the government as a whole.
The women in particular, who staged a demonstration while we were there for women's rights, want important reforms within the legal system to reach an accommodation between Islamic law and what they would consider to be a modern stance for family law, in particular. The question of whether women can participate in public life has been absolutely resolved. There is just no question. Women are there and in every way, in every area of public life, and they're not going to go away. They are actually one of the strongest forces for reform in the country. And anybody in the United States who still believes women in Iran are somehow helpless victims of male hegemony is expressing an incredibly inaccurate and outmoded view.
They're still required to wear head coverings. But beyond that, you see everything in the world. What it is, is modest dress. And modest dress is, by the way, incumbent upon both men and women. But what the women have done is to develop all sorts of very stylish ways to achieve that. So they'll have a head covering that may expose a lot more hair, which is considered erotic in Iran, and maybe a very light coat that they'll be wearing with pants. We see, for young girls, it's evolved into kind of a head covering, a jacket over a blouse, and maybe even jeans. The whole thing has become extraordinarily fashionable.
After the election, should the United States say anything?
I think that the United States should certainly not undercut the election, whatever happens. The Bush administration has the most unfortunate habit of saying negative things just when things are starting to get better. We had an enormously important possibility of an opening to Iran after the Bam earthquake [December 2003] only to have President Bush, on New Year's Day, come out and again make hugely negative remarks about Iran. If the administration can't say anything nice, then they really should say nothing. Whether one likes the fact that candidates were vetted before the election or not, there's no question that this is a real election and it really is happening. And this is not an election that is controlled and it's not an election where we know the outcome. And if it does go into a run-off, even though Rafsanjani is now a favored candidate, it's not clear that he would win, because the other candidates, and there are several, might throw their support to his opponent.
Providence Journal: Election in Iran is Lovely, Real (Beeman)
projo.com | Providence, R.I. | Opinion: Contributors: "TO THOSE in Washington who doubt that today's presidential election in Iran is a real election: They should have seen the excitement during the campaign.
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/projo_20050617_17ctbeex.1eae680.html
TO THOSE in Washington who doubt that today's presidential election in Iran is a real election: They should have seen the excitement during the campaign.
This week was kicked off by a an dramatic, unexpected win by the Iranian soccer team over Bahrain -- a feat that qualified the Iranians for a spot in the World Cup championship. The soccer match became inextricably linked with the presidential campaign when women defied the ban on their presence in the soccer stadium (a longstanding provision to prevent mixing of the sexes), forcing their way into the game with chants and political slogans.
These women are viewed as heroic by almost everyone.
And once the game was won, the women began removing their head scarves -- a definite move of protest. They were then amazed, again, when nothing happened to them.
As always, there are a variety of explanations: too many people, too dangerous a situation for the police, no one wanting the police beating up women on the eve of a national election. Still, the acts of these women -- intrepid by Iranian standards -- set a new standard for public behavior in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
After removing their head scarves, the women began mixing with their male friends in massive demonstrations of exuberance. The mixing of young men and women in the post-game festivities was notable, as well as the extensive dancing in the streets, where men and women danced together.
It was the women dancing in public with no head scarves and no restriction by the police or others that astonished the public -- even the Westernized folks who are now living a pretty unfettered life in Tehran, with all the accoutrements of the United States. Excerpts of the soccer game are being rebroadcast continually.
On June 12, another organized demonstration for women's rights, with both male and female participants, was held at the University of Tehran, further cementing the power of women's political opinion. The public is now asking whether this all means a thaw in personal-behavior restrictions -- or the calm before a storm that will make landfall after the election.
The campaign itself has been a festival of advertising media, making everyone conclude that some high-powered consultants were involved. Some of the campaign material is amazingly effective, pushing all the cultural buttons. The most wonderful posters are of Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who has been given the glam treatment. This 40ish guy, a former member of the Islamic Guard, now looks like a movie star: In most of the representations he has been given electric-blue eyes, a cultural turn-on in mostly brown-eyed Iran. As icing on the cake, he has turned his name into a stylish calligraphic logo.
Ex-Majlis (Parliament) Speaker Mehdi Karroubi uses images of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni with himself in the background, as a young cleric. Not to put too fine a point on it, the TV ads all circle his face in the background. He appears benign and avuncular. This is very interesting, since he showed himself to be quite a firebrand in the past.
The TV ads have surely attracted a number of folks who are religiously oriented. What was wonderful about one of them was that long, boring images of Karroubi campaigning were surrounded with a frame of beautiful calligraphic poetry and tasteful music. This provided an amazing double message for Iran, where everyone is a poet.
Former President Akbar Hashemi (Rafsanjani) is running on a platform that features rapprochement with "the world" (read "the United States"), empowerment of youth, and increased rights for women. He has phalanxes of young people handing out fliers all over Tehran, presumably capturing the youth vote.
He also has an astonishing female spokesperson, Soheila Jelodarzadeh, a former labor organizer. She is one of the greatest political speakers I have ever seen or heard. She is Rafsanjani's Karen Hughes.
The "reformist" candidate, Dr. (as he bills himself) Mostafa Mo'in, seems to have fewer resources, but he, too, has some arresting graphic posters. He was weakened by exclusion from the original presidential list by Iran's Guardian Council, then let back on it only after Iran's Spiritual Leader and Head of State Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i intervened.
The biggest push is actually just to get people to vote. A lot of folks in Tehran are refusing to do so, for various reasons. They sound like Americans non-voters when they say, "It won't matter"; "X is going to be elected, anyway"; "They're all the same"; "I don't know enough."
Of course, there are the protest non-voters, as well. It should also be pointed out that although most people think that Hashemi (Rafsanjani) will win, the election is by no means a foregone conclusion. There are many supporters of other candidates, who are optimistic that their candidate will win.
A puzzling series of bomb blasts -- killing at least 10 people and injuring dozens more on June 11 and 12 in the cities of Ahwaz and Tehran -- may also dampen participation in today's election, especially if such blasts continue. Although the Iranian government has blamed Arab irredentist groups, their apparent purpose is unclear.
The bets on the street are that the election will be a runoff between Hashemi and Qalibaf, with the further results difficult to predict.
In a race between Hashemi and Qalibaf, the conservative candidates who don't enter the runoff may throw their support to Qalibaf -- giving Iran a whole new political ballgame. However, the polls change daily. On June 12, Mo'in was said to be in second place after Hashemi.
Whatever the outcome, the Iranian people are the winners in this campaign. They have shown that they know what an election is, and they are shaping their nation's future.
William O. Beeman, an occasional contributor, is a professor of anthropology and the director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. His forthcoming book is "The Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/projo_20050617_17ctbeex.1eae680.html
TO THOSE in Washington who doubt that today's presidential election in Iran is a real election: They should have seen the excitement during the campaign.
This week was kicked off by a an dramatic, unexpected win by the Iranian soccer team over Bahrain -- a feat that qualified the Iranians for a spot in the World Cup championship. The soccer match became inextricably linked with the presidential campaign when women defied the ban on their presence in the soccer stadium (a longstanding provision to prevent mixing of the sexes), forcing their way into the game with chants and political slogans.
These women are viewed as heroic by almost everyone.
And once the game was won, the women began removing their head scarves -- a definite move of protest. They were then amazed, again, when nothing happened to them.
As always, there are a variety of explanations: too many people, too dangerous a situation for the police, no one wanting the police beating up women on the eve of a national election. Still, the acts of these women -- intrepid by Iranian standards -- set a new standard for public behavior in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
After removing their head scarves, the women began mixing with their male friends in massive demonstrations of exuberance. The mixing of young men and women in the post-game festivities was notable, as well as the extensive dancing in the streets, where men and women danced together.
It was the women dancing in public with no head scarves and no restriction by the police or others that astonished the public -- even the Westernized folks who are now living a pretty unfettered life in Tehran, with all the accoutrements of the United States. Excerpts of the soccer game are being rebroadcast continually.
On June 12, another organized demonstration for women's rights, with both male and female participants, was held at the University of Tehran, further cementing the power of women's political opinion. The public is now asking whether this all means a thaw in personal-behavior restrictions -- or the calm before a storm that will make landfall after the election.
The campaign itself has been a festival of advertising media, making everyone conclude that some high-powered consultants were involved. Some of the campaign material is amazingly effective, pushing all the cultural buttons. The most wonderful posters are of Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who has been given the glam treatment. This 40ish guy, a former member of the Islamic Guard, now looks like a movie star: In most of the representations he has been given electric-blue eyes, a cultural turn-on in mostly brown-eyed Iran. As icing on the cake, he has turned his name into a stylish calligraphic logo.
Ex-Majlis (Parliament) Speaker Mehdi Karroubi uses images of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni with himself in the background, as a young cleric. Not to put too fine a point on it, the TV ads all circle his face in the background. He appears benign and avuncular. This is very interesting, since he showed himself to be quite a firebrand in the past.
The TV ads have surely attracted a number of folks who are religiously oriented. What was wonderful about one of them was that long, boring images of Karroubi campaigning were surrounded with a frame of beautiful calligraphic poetry and tasteful music. This provided an amazing double message for Iran, where everyone is a poet.
Former President Akbar Hashemi (Rafsanjani) is running on a platform that features rapprochement with "the world" (read "the United States"), empowerment of youth, and increased rights for women. He has phalanxes of young people handing out fliers all over Tehran, presumably capturing the youth vote.
He also has an astonishing female spokesperson, Soheila Jelodarzadeh, a former labor organizer. She is one of the greatest political speakers I have ever seen or heard. She is Rafsanjani's Karen Hughes.
The "reformist" candidate, Dr. (as he bills himself) Mostafa Mo'in, seems to have fewer resources, but he, too, has some arresting graphic posters. He was weakened by exclusion from the original presidential list by Iran's Guardian Council, then let back on it only after Iran's Spiritual Leader and Head of State Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i intervened.
The biggest push is actually just to get people to vote. A lot of folks in Tehran are refusing to do so, for various reasons. They sound like Americans non-voters when they say, "It won't matter"; "X is going to be elected, anyway"; "They're all the same"; "I don't know enough."
Of course, there are the protest non-voters, as well. It should also be pointed out that although most people think that Hashemi (Rafsanjani) will win, the election is by no means a foregone conclusion. There are many supporters of other candidates, who are optimistic that their candidate will win.
A puzzling series of bomb blasts -- killing at least 10 people and injuring dozens more on June 11 and 12 in the cities of Ahwaz and Tehran -- may also dampen participation in today's election, especially if such blasts continue. Although the Iranian government has blamed Arab irredentist groups, their apparent purpose is unclear.
The bets on the street are that the election will be a runoff between Hashemi and Qalibaf, with the further results difficult to predict.
In a race between Hashemi and Qalibaf, the conservative candidates who don't enter the runoff may throw their support to Qalibaf -- giving Iran a whole new political ballgame. However, the polls change daily. On June 12, Mo'in was said to be in second place after Hashemi.
Whatever the outcome, the Iranian people are the winners in this campaign. They have shown that they know what an election is, and they are shaping their nation's future.
William O. Beeman, an occasional contributor, is a professor of anthropology and the director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. His forthcoming book is "The Great Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.
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