Jeff Weintraub

Crunch time in the Senate (E.J. Dionne)

2009-11-21T17:01:00.009-05:00

The upcoming Senate vote on whether to cut off a Republican filibuster of the health care reform bill has been looming as a moment of legislative high drama. Quite aside from the merits of the bill itself, this vote shapes up as a crucial test for the essentially monolithic strategy of all-out obstructionism (applied across the board, not just with respect to this bill) that the Congressional Republicans have pursued, with considerable skill and success, ever since Obama's inauguration. Will they be able to prevent the health care bill from even reaching the floor for debate?

Probably not (according to the latest speculation by the best-informed political junkies). But it's going to be a squeaker, and we won't know for sure until the actual voting later tonight.

One of the reasons that the Congressional Republicans have been able to get away with this strategy of unrelenting obstructionism without seeming to pay significant political costs for it--at least, so far--is that many people (including many alleged political journalists) don't seem to have a clear grasp of what's going on. So a recent Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne, written a few days before this Senate showdown, performed a useful service by explaining this political background and its implications.

Democrats in the Senate -- the House is not the problem -- need to have a long chat with themselves and decide whether they want to engage in an act of collective suicide.

But it's also time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machiavellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit. [....]

Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there's so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin? [....]

Republicans are using the filibuster to stall action even on bills that most of them support. Remember: The rule is to keep Democrats from ever reaching the exit.

As of last Monday, the Senate majority had filed 58 cloture motions requiring 32 recorded votes. One of the more outrageous cases involved an extension in unemployment benefits, a no-brainer in light of the dismal economy. The bill ultimately cleared the Senate this month by 98 to 0. [....]

The filibuster is not a new practice (though it was certainly never contemplated by the Founding Fathers). It evolved over time as a last-ditch tool for Senate minorities to use in exceptional situations. But the filibuster (and a range of other stalling devices) have never been used so routinely and promiscuously as the Republicans have been using them in this Congress.

The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent.

If the Democrats can't manage to clear this hurdle tonight, that probably means they should just give up, fold their tents, and go home. Meanwhile, read Dionne's whole piece (below).

--Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Washington Post
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The GOP's no-exit strategy
By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Normal human beings -- let's call them real Americans -- cannot understand why, 10 months after President Obama's inauguration, Congress is still tied down in a procedural torture chamber trying to pass the health-care bill Obama promised in his campaign.

Last year, the voters gave him the largest popular-vote margin won by a presidential candidate in 20 years. They gave Democrats their largest Senate majority since 1976 and their largest House majority since 1992.

Obama didn't just offer bromides about hope and change. He made specific pledges. You'd think that the newly empowered Democrats would want to deliver quickly.

But what do real Americans see? On health care, they read about this or that Democratic senator prepared to bring action to a screeching halt out of displeasure with some aspect of the proposal. They first hear that a bill will pass by Thanksgiving and then learn it might not get a final vote until after the new year.

Is it any wonder that Congress has miserable approval ratings? Is it surprising that independents, who want their government to solve a few problems, are becoming impatient with the current majority?

Democrats in the Senate -- the House is not the problem -- need to have a long chat with themselves and decide whether they want to engage in an act of collective suicide.

But it's also time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machiavellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit.

We know what happens when drivers just sit there when they're supposed to be moving. They get grumpy, irascible and start turning on each other, which is exactly what the Democrats are doing.

Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there's so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin?

Yet there was a small break in the Curtain of Obstruction this week when Republican senators unashamedly ate every word they had spoken when George W. Bush was in power about the horrors of filibustering nominees for federal judgeships. On Tuesday, a majority of Republicans tried to block a vote on the appointment of David F. Hamilton, a rather moderate jurist, to a federal appeals court.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama explained the GOP's about-face by saying: "I think the rules have changed."

That was actually a helpful comment, because the Republicans have changed the rules on Senate action up and down the line. Hamilton's case is just the one instance that finally got a little play.

Thankfully, this filibuster failed because some Republicans were embarrassed by it. But Republican delaying tactics have made Obama far too wary about judicial nominations for fear of controversy. He is well behind his predecessor in filling vacancies, a shameful capitulation to obstruction. There's also the fact that the nomination of Christopher Schroeder as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, which helps to vet judges, is snarled -- guess where? -- in the Senate.

Republicans are using the filibuster to stall action even on bills that most of them support. Remember: The rule is to keep Democrats from ever reaching the exit.

As of last Monday, the Senate majority had filed 58 cloture motions requiring 32 recorded votes. One of the more outrageous cases involved an extension in unemployment benefits, a no-brainer in light of the dismal economy. The bill ultimately cleared the Senate this month by 98 to 0.

The vote came only after the Republicans launched three filibusters against the bill and tried to lard it with unrelated amendments, delaying passage by nearly a month. And you wonder why it's so hard to pass health care?

Defenders of the Senate always say the Founders envisioned it as a deliberative body that would cool the passions of the House. But Sessions unintentionally blew the whistle on how what's happening now has nothing to do with the Founders' design.

The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent. By using Republican obstructionism as a vehicle for forcing through their own narrow agendas, supposedly moderate Democratic senators will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation.

ejdionne@washpost.com

More mysteries of Afghan public opinion (via Mark Kleiman)

2009-11-21T15:59:00.005-05:00

That Oxfam survey of Afghans that I just discussed reminded me of a recent post by Mark Kleiman about the Asia Foundation’s survey of 6000 Afghans conducted in the summer of 2009.

Mark pointed out that the results of the Asia Foundation survey raise some interesting questions. In the US and Europe, current discussions about Afghanistan take for granted a situation of crisis and impending catastrophe (for which some evidence does, indeed, exist). But the responses to the Asia Foundation's survey suggest that most Afghans feel the situation in their country (though terrible) is actually improving. For example:

• In 2009, 42 percent of respondents say that the country is moving in the right direction.
This figure is higher than in 2008 (38%). Similarly, 29 percent feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction compared to 32 percent in 2008, signaling a check on the trend of declining optimism that had been evident since 2006.
• The main reason for optimism continues to be good security which has been mentioned by an increasing proportion of respondents each year, from 31 percent in 2006 to 44 percent in 2009. More respondents in 2009 also mention reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

And so on. Of course, responses varied significantly between different parts of the country (and thus, presumably, between different ethnic groups). Still, as Mark (correctly) observed:

Maybe things have gotten worse since the summer [JW: the election debacle can't have helped matters], but this is hardly the picture of hopelessness I’ve been getting from the newspapers.

What should be make of this--if anything? I'm not sure. But these somewhat counter-intuitive polling results (see the rest of Mark's post below) may help remind us of how complex, multi-leveled, murky, and uncertain the situation in Afghanistan actually is. So we should probably be cautious about jumping to conclusions, and perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to panic, either (though only a fool would feel complacent).

--Jeff Weintraub
=========================
Mark Kleiman (The Reality-Based Community)
October 30, 2009
Is Afghanistan on the “right track”?

Key findings from the Asia Foundation’s survey of 6000 Afghans, conducted over the summer:

• In 2009, 42 percent of respondents say that the country is moving in the right direction.
This figure is higher than in 2008 (38%). Similarly, 29 percent feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction compared to 32 percent in 2008, signaling a check on the trend of declining optimism that had been evident since 2006.

• The main reason for optimism continues to be good security which has been mentioned by an increasing proportion of respondents each year, from 31 percent in 2006 to 44 percent in 2009. More respondents in 2009 also mention reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

• Insecurity also remains the most important reason for pessimism, cited by 42 percent of respondents. However, the proportion of respondents that highlight insecurity in 2009 has fallen since 2008 when half of respondents (50%) emphasized this factor.

• Insecurity (including attacks, violence and terrorism) is identified as the biggest problem in Afghanistan by over a third of respondents (36%), particularly in the South East (48%), West (44%) and South West (41%). However, concern about other issues such as unemployment (35%), poor economy (20%), corruption (17%), poverty (11%) and education (11%) has increased in 2009 compared to 2008.

Maybe things have gotten worse since the summer, but this is hardly the picture of hopelessness I’ve been getting from the newspapers.

"Jerusalem, Sababa Bien" - Chilean Zionist rap video makes a small plea for sanity

2009-11-21T11:08:00.006-05:00

As the ever-informative Jeffrey Goldberg puts it, here is "Yet Another Chilean Zionist Rap Containing the Word 'Manichaean'". (More precisely, Chileno-Israeli.) Along the way, it gently satirizes hysterical anti-Zionism, pervasive anti-semitic stereotypes, and obsessive demonization of Israel in general.

"Jerusalem, Sababa Bien" is part of the refrain. As far as I know, this "sababa" is not a Spanish word, but an Israeli slang term meaning, roughly, "cool." Anybody out there know better?

Anyway, this video clip is pretty cool.

Shalom,
Jeff Weintraub

Oxfam poll: Afghans want an exit from 30 years of endless war

2009-11-21T08:46:00.008-05:00

Ever since the overthrow of Daoud Khan's regime by the Afghan Communists in 1978 touched off a civil war, leading in turn to a Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghans have lived through three decades of continual war, devastation, and other horrors. For most Afghans, conditions now are better than they were during the 1980s and 1990s (when, among other things, about a million Afghans died and millions more fled the country). But things are still terrible, and right now prospects for peace and reconstruction are not encouraging.

The blogger Andrew Sprung (in a post flagged by Andrew Sullivan) picked up on a recent survey by Oxfam that asked Afghans to reflect on all this: "The Cost of War: Afghan Experiences of Conflict, 1978-2009". The results are interesting, sobering, and in some ways illuminating.

As Sprung says, this Oxfam survey "reveals untold suffering--1 in 5 say they've been tortured, three quarters have been forced to leave their homes at some point in the endless civil war, 43% have had property destroyed." At the same time, bad as things are right now, "after 30 years of civil war, only 3% named the current conflict as the most harmful period (though the report cautions that areas where the current fighting is worst are underrepresented)." But that's just the starting-point.

Of course, one always has to approach survey results with caution, especially in war-torn and technologically backward societies, and in this case (as noted) there is the special complication that the parts of Afghanistan currently experiencing the most violence are probably under-represented. But the overall patterns in Afghans' responses here largely accord with information available from other sources, and in some cases they bring out the implications more fully and vividly.

Sprung's useful and intelligent overview of the Oxfam report (interspersed with some of my own remarks) is below. It's worth reading.

--Jeff Weintraub
==============================
XPOSTFACTOID (Andrew Sprung)
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Oxfam's survey of Afghans: Their wishes are no mystery

An Oxfam poll of 704 randomly selected Afghans reveals untold suffering--1 in 5 say they've been tortured, three quarters have been forced to leave their homes at some point in the endless civil war, 43% have had property destroyed.

[JW:Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those surveyed are sick of this and wish it would end. What factors do they think are most important in keeping the conflict going now?]

The survey also has what would seem to be some moderately encouraging findings regarding the counterinsurgency: 70% see unemployment and poverty as a key driver of civil war; 48% blame the government's weakness and corruption; 36% point to the Taliban; 25% to interference by neighboring countries; just 18% to the presence of international forces; another 18% to al Qaeda--and another 17% to the lack of support from the international community.

[JW:These responses offer a lot of food for thought. For the moment, I will just highlight one point that accords with what we know from other sources about the attitudes of ordinary Afghans: Only a small minority of Afghans believe that the presence of US & allied forces is a major factor driving and prolonging the civil war, or that pulling out those foreign troops would miraculously bring the violence to an end. Thus, it is probably not surprising that despite increasing unhappiness about declining security and inadequate reconstruction, and despite widespread complaints and resentments about specific actions by US & allied forces, all the polling results and other relevant information I've seen indicate that most Afghans still support the continued presence of these forces. It's a general rule that, at some point, foreign troops eventually overstay their welcome anywhere, even if they were greeted warmly at first (as they were by most Afghans in 2001); but despite everything, this point hasn't yet been reached in Afghanistan (see, e.g., question #27 here).

(There may be good reasons to argue that, at this point, it is in Americans' interest to pull the plug and abandon Afghanistan--that's a separate discussion--but one shouldn't pretend that this is what most Afghans want.)

Also, before that initial catalogue of long-term suffering and catastrophe leaves us entirely depressed and despairing, here's another point that is worth re-emphasizing:]

After 30 years of civil war, only 3% named the current conflict as the most harmful period (though the report cautions that areas where the current fighting is worst are underrepresented).

[JW:The problem is that in substantial portions of Afghanistan, the situation seems to be getting worse rather than better. So the question is whether and how a downward spiral can be avoided--and what the US, in particular, can and should do to help avert disaster. Those are matters for long, difficult, and complicated discussion. But in the meantime, what would the Afghans surveyed by Oxfam like to see happen?:]

The Oxfam recommendations, channeled through selected comments of the surveyed Afghans, are not surprisingly a mirror of McChrystal's stated goals and strategies: provide not only more aid but more effective aid; root out Afghan government corruption; stop killing civilians via airstrikes; desist from invasive and violence house searches; hold coalition forces that kill or abuse the population accountable for their actions; respect the local culture.]

In the abstract, it's hard to disagree. But can these policies actually be made to work, and would they actually improve matters in the long run--or would they amount, in the end, to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? As I said, those are matters for separate discussion.

=> What's more interesting is that Oxfam, channeling its Afghan respondents, also has some recommendations for the Taliban:]

Oxfam adds "recommendations" for the Taliban, delivered deadpan, without irony--which in a sense produces its own irony. Most western observers are hyper-conscious by now that killing civilians undermines support; but both the survey numbers and the quoted comments make it clear that the Taliban's wanton killings make it less popular than the coalition forces or the government. Likewise, what seems a bold speculative move to some western strategists comes across as a weary necessity from Afghan civilians:

Our message to the Taliban is that they should take part in the government - Male, Herat

The Taliban should not fight; they should express their demands through dialogue - Male, Kabul

Our message to the Taliban is that if they are really Muslim, then why are they fighting against the government since the government is also an Islamic government? - Male, Baikh

[JW: Neither Afghans nor the rest of us should hold our breaths waiting for the Taliban to take this advice.]

One gets the impression that the Afghans have no illusions about their government, and also no illusions about the Taliban. They are more war weary than we can fathom--and like Richard Holbrooke, they will know success--any modicum of peace, justice and development--when they see it . Or rather, they would know it if they were ever to see it. They were apparently not surveyed as to hopes.

Selfish egoism and mutual indifference as a political creed ...

2009-11-19T09:47:00.008-05:00

... or, what Republican opponents of health care reform really believe, deep down--once we get past the cynical demagoguery about "death panels" and the pseudo-concern about "pulling the plug on Grandma".

I happened to be reminded today of this exchange between Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan (on September 25, 2009), which I thought at the time was one of the most deeply revelatory moments in the whole health care debate.

--Jeff Weintraub

(P.S. To anticipate one possible reaction: Of course, there are a lot of serious and legitimate questions to be raised about how the dysfunctional US health care system can and should be reformed. And accepting the basic principle that in a decent society we have some mutual responsibilities toward each other is compatible with a range of possible constructive alternatives to the specific proposals embodied in the highly imperfect bills emerging from the legislative sausage-grinder.

But no serious person can pretend that either the Congressional Republicans or major Republican figures outside Congress, with the partial exception of some retired ex-officeholders like Bob Dole or Bill Frist, have actually tried to enter into an honest or constructive debate about how to implement serious reform. Instead, they have almost monolithically pursued a strategy of pure obstructionism--though few have been willing to acknowledge and advocate this as openly as, say, Bill Kristol--supplemented by systematic dishonesty, hypocrisy, and cynical fear-mongering. Some Republican and/or conservative readers may find that judgment a bit harsh, but facts are facts.)

Jon Stewart does Glenn Beck

2009-11-08T19:47:00.008-05:00

I just ran across John Stewart's hilarious parody of the right-wing nutcase-pundit Glenn Beck. To fully appreciate it, though, it helps if you've actually seen Beck's TV show on Fox "News". If you have--once or twice is enough--you will realize that Stewart isn't really exaggerating that much in his imitation of Beck's characteristic loopy paranoid-conspiratorial style.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

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Then here is Beck himself, trying to strike a serious and reflective note in a Fox News discussion (July 29, 2009). This is beyond parody:

Humor aside, what's genuinely appalling is that millions of people don't just watch Glenn Beck's TV show but apparently take him and his poisonous nonsense seriously. He may be a joke, but it's a bad joke.

=> Of course, some people respond that its unfair and disingenuous to pick on Glenn Beck, since there are equally outrageous and irresponsible prominent TV pundits on the pro-Democratic, left-liberal side of the mass media spectrum. The example most often mentioned is MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. But--how can I put this delicately?--that's silly. If Olbermann is the best counter-example they can find, that just underlines the asymmetry involved.

Yes, Olbermann is unapologetically partisan--which by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing--and he can get overheated, self-important, and tendentious in a way that I sometimes find irritating and objectionable myself. Nor is that purely a matter of bashing Republicans. During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, the persistent anti-Clinton and pro-Obama bias displayed by both Olbermann and Chris Matthews on MSNBC was pretty disgusting. But there's a fundamentally serious core to Olbermann, even when he gets carried away, and there's an important difference of degree between being a bit tendentious and being a crackpot fantasist unmoored from reality. In my humble opinion, anyone who doesn't recognize that Glenn Beck falls in the second category is fooling himself or herself, and trying to make excuses for Glenn Beck by equating him with Keith Olbermann is a case of mindless moral equivalence run amok.

--Jeff Weintraub

A surprise father-daughter reunion

2009-11-08T10:00:00.006-05:00

A very moving video clip that has been making the rounds. I've watched it several times, not least because the vividness and complexity of the emotions displayed here are fascinating. This is what the expression "overcome by emotion" actually means.

Watch it HERE.

--Jeff Weintraub

“That the race and name of that people may be annihilated” (with Mark Kleiman)

2009-11-07T13:47:00.006-05:00

[This originated in an e-mail exchange with Mark Kleiman (of The Reality-Based Community) provoked by a passing remark he made in a post about Simon de Montfort, regarded by one tradition as the "Father of Parliament" in England. Mark noted that, if one goes with that account, "it’s not hard to find irony in the fact that de Montfort’s father (also named Simon) was one of the military leaders of the crusade against the Albigenses, perhaps the first action in European history that deserves to be called genocide."

Leaving the de Montforts aside ... alas, this was not really "the first action in European history that deserves to be called genocide." Unfortunately, it's not hard to think of previous examples, but in particular I mentioned one episode from Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars that "has always struck me as particularly chilling." Mark was good enough to post part of this exchange on his blog (by mutual agreement). --Jeff Weintraub]

November 7th, 2009
“That the race and name of that people may be annihilated”
by Mark Kleiman

I spoke too loosely in describing the extirpation of the Albigenses as the first genocide in European history. It would have been more precise to say “post-Classical European history,” as a Jeff Weintraub points out:
-------------------------
One passage in Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars has always struck me as particularly chilling. In Book 6 Caesar describes how he defeated a string of revolts, culminating in the great rebellion led by Vercingetorix. One of those was the revolt of the Eburones, a Belgic tribe, led by a certain Ambiorix. They managed to ambush and either wipe out or devastate several units of Roman soldiers. When Caesar arrived with his main army, looking for revenge, Ambiorix fled across the Rhine, and the rest of the Eburones scattered into the forests for safety. Caesar writes:

There was, as we have above observed, no regular army, nor a town, nor a garrison which could defend itself by arms; but the people were scattered in all directions. Where either a hidden valley, or a woody spot, or a difficult morass furnished any hope of protection or of security to any one, there he had fixed himself. These places were known to those who dwelt in the neighborhood, and the matter demanded great attention, not so much in protecting the main body of the army (for no peril could occur to them altogether from those alarmed and scattered troops), as in preserving individual soldiers; which in some measure tended to the safety of the army. [.....]

Caesar dispatches messengers to the neighboring peoples [civitates]; by the hope of booty he invites all to him, for the purpose of plundering the Eburones, in order that the life of the Gauls might be hazarded in the woods rather than the legionary soldiers; at the same time, in order that a large force being drawn around them, the race and name of that people may be annihilated [stirps ac nomen civitatis tollatur] for such a crime. A large number from all quarters speedily assembles. [.....]

We still have the name of the Eburones, thanks to Caesar. But as for the Eburones themselves, my impression is that as a people they were indeed effectively destroyed, and their territory was taken over by other neighboring tribes. (Or perhaps Caesar was boasting about a genocidal mass murder he didn’t fully accomplish? Either way, as I said, I’ve always found that passage a bit chilling.)

We should note that this particular episode had nothing to do with religion. Caesar was mostly just trying to make a point.

Also note that De Bello Gallico was not intended only as an historical account. It was also a public-relations document highlighting Caesar’s military triumphs on behalf of the republic. It might even be called a campaign document, since top figures in the Roman political elite were, effectively, involved in a never-ending “campaign.” In that context, the matter-of-fact tone in which Caesar announces his intention that “the race and name of that people may be annihilated” is especially striking. There is no trace of embarrassment, euphemism, or circumlocution about it.
-------------------------

So it’s fair to say that there has been some moral progress in 2000 years. At least, modern advocates of genocide tend to use euphemisms.

Posted by Mark Kleiman: Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 8:47 am

Janet Daley on capitalism and "the human condition" - Vulgar Smithianism resurgent (yet again)

2009-11-05T09:11:00.007-05:00

[An e-mail message to Norman Geras that he guest-posted on Normblog. This began with Norm's post responding to a column by Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph.]

Hi Norm,

In your post "The human condition has been around for ages" you nicely picked up on Janet Daley's confusion. If I were a Marxist, I might even go further than mere "confusion" and describe her statement as a typical example of a certain type of widespread ideological mystification.

But in some ways I thought your interpretation of her remarks was actually too generous. You said:

Daley surely wouldn't want to assert that the human condition, with its mix of vices and virtues, was absent from pre-capitalist or other non-capitalist social formations. Did, and do, the denizens of non-capitalist societies not experience such features of the human condition as birth and death, joy and grief, love, hatred, illness, old age, indigestion and that dream where you're trying to get away from some looming threat and your legs just won't move fast enough, if they'll move at all? What Daley means to say, I think, is not that capitalism is just the human condition, as if other types of society might not be the human condition, but that capitalism is the optimal form of society for bringing out the best in human nature.

My guess is that she really did mean to say that capitalism just is "the human condition"--unless it is artificially and/or coercively interfered with. This comes out even more clearly, I think, if one quotes the key sentence from her piece without ellipses:

Properly speaking, capitalism is not a system at all (which is why most of its supporters prefer the term "free market economics"): it is just the human condition in economic form.

You talk about "pre-capitalist or other non-capitalist social formations," but that takes for granted precisely what Daley would probably deny or find baffling--i.e., the idea that, even before 20th-century Communism, there were coherent non-capitalist socio-economic systems that could be seen as alternatives to a capitalist market economy, rather than simply imperfect or underdeveloped forms of a capitalist market economy. As Daley says, capitalism is not just one system among other systems. It is human nature unleashed.

In this respect, the mentality I am attributing to Daley is actually very widespread in the modern world (whether or not the people who hold it could or would spell it out explicitly). And people who think this way have a powerful and respectable theoretical warrant for their perspective, whether or not they are fully aware of its origin.

What I'm talking about is what might be called everyday Smithianism. (This is largely equivalent to economic liberalism, in the proper 19th-century sense of that phrase, but to avoid distracting details I will just refer to the interlocking visions of human nature and social order laid out by Adam Smith in Books I-II of The Wealth of Nations.)

Smith is actually a very complex, interesting, and illuminating social theorist--more than most Smithians, in fact--so one shouldn't oversimplify or casually dismiss him. But in the core doctrine of The Wealth of Nations he did offer one of the most powerful and systematic arguments in favor of the propositions that the market economy and market activity are "natural" and--unless 'artificially' interfered with--also universal and trans-historical, not least because they're rooted in central and trans-historical features of human nature. ("Natural" is the word that Smith himself uses, repeatedly and systematically.) With variations in detail and explicit terminology, these beliefs are at the heart of an orientation that for centuries now has been one of the most durable, pervasive, and influential theoretical and ideological perspectives in the modern world.

This Smithian perspective is important and worth taking seriously, and in certain circumstances it can even help illuminate important aspects of social and historical reality. But, like you (and Marx), I believe that, taken as a whole, it's oversimplified, incorrect, and profoundly misleading (theoretically, historically, practically, etc).

However, it is also important to recognize that for a great many people (including, over the years, a lot of vulgar Marxists) this perspective and its central premises look like obvious common sense and/or the deepest and most sophisticated theory. That is, if you just clear away 'artificial' obstacles to individual action and the free expression of the defining propensities of human nature, something like "free market economics" spontaneously emerges.

(And one doesn't have to go to the Daily Telegraph to find these underlying assumptions. This is a pervasive phenomenon, of which I will offer one small academic example. I've recently been having a small exchange with a friend of mine, an archaeologist, about the latest fashions in the economic archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, which seem to involve yet another of the perennial resurgences of Smithianism. Nowadays a lot of archaeologists working on such issues--including the kinds of ex-Marxists or semi-post-Marxists who have gone "post-modern"--see themselves as reacting against the kinds of positions they attribute to Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley as those were caricatured in the misbegotten "formalist vs substantivist" debates in economic anthropology and economic history. Both Polanyi and Finley had appropriately pointed out that it is wildly misleading to simply equate "economic" activity with market activity and to treat all past socio-economic formations as though they were simply imperfect or rudimentary market economies. The latest fashion is to dismiss this sensible perspective as 'primitivist', and instead to keep repeating the brilliant point that even back in the Bronze Age one can find examples of people engaged in exchanges, trucking and bartering, using money, and acting intelligently--as though any of that had ever been the point of the argument. In short, straightforward vulgar Smithianism is once again being triumphantly rediscovered and trotted out as super-sophisticated innovative wisdom--or so it appears to me. Of course, I'm not questioning any specific archaeological analyses, which would obviously be far beyond my expertise, just the larger theoretical and ideological orientations that inform how the implications are interpreted.)

In short... does Daley really believe "that capitalism is just the human condition"? Probably.

(Jeff Weintraub)

Iran - Is an elite "compromise" (or counter-coup) in the works?

2009-06-26T02:02:00.003-04:00

The unfolding political crisis in Iran has many layers and dimensions, some more readily visible than others. The most conspicuous and inspiring part of this drama has been the confrontation between the popular movement led, or rather represented, by the reluctant semi-revolutionary Mir Hossein Moussavi and the escalating repression unleashed by the hard-liners. That's going on in plain view, relatively speaking.

But the crisis also involves complicated struggles between different factions and power centers within the political elite (discussed, for example, here & here & here), not least the long-term conflict between Khamenei and Rafsanjani. As the Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour recently put it:

At a political level what’s taking place now, among many other things [!], is the 20-year rivalry between Khamenei and Rafsanjani coming to a head [....] It’s an Iranian version of the Corleones and the Tattaglias; there are no good guys and bad guys [in that particular fight--JW], only bad and worse.

Those dynamics have been more opaque, but a lot of analysts and observers believe that they may ultimately be most decisive in shaping the immediate outcomes. Everyone assumes that there is frantic maneuvering going on behind the scenes, and rumors are rife.

=> A number of factions within the elite, including elements of the higher clergy, are more or less hostile to the Khamenei/Republican Guard/Ahmadinejad axis and feel threatened by its increasing grip on power, which the election coup was intended to consolidate. Some of the most dramatic rumors, or informed speculations, suggest that Rafsanjani may be able to "assemble a religious and political coalition to topple the supreme leader and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." On Thursday a piece in the Nation by an Iranian journalist writing under the pseudonym Babak Sarfaraz reiterated this scenario:

Khamenei’s anguished sermon on June 19 was not provoked simply by the popular uprising in the streets. According to a well-placed source in the holy city of Qom, Rafsanjani is working furiously behind the scenes to call for an emergency meeting of the Khobregan, or Assembly of Experts — the elite all-cleric body that can unseat the Supreme Leader or dilute his prerogatives. [....] Rafsanjani’s purported plan is to replace Khamenei’s one-person dictatorship with a Leadership Council composed of three or more high-ranking clerics; this formula was proposed and then abandoned in 1989 by several prominent clerics. [....]

=> Another variant of this rumor suggests that behind the scenes a "compromise" solution is in the works that would allow a run-off election between Ahmadinejad and Moussavi. Here's one version from the Iranian-American writer and academic Reza Aslan in the Daily Beast:

Reliable sources in Iran are suggesting that a possible compromise to put an end to the violent uprising that has rocked Iran for the past two weeks may be in the works. I have previously reported that the second most powerful man in Iran, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Assembly of Experts (the body with the power to choose and dismiss the Supreme Leader) is in the city of Qom—the country’s religious center—trying to rally enough votes from his fellow Assembly members to remove the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from power. News out of Iran suggests that he may be succeeding. At the very least, it seems he may have gained enough support from the clerical establishment to force a compromise from Khamenei, one that would entail a run-off election between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main reformist rival Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Reports of the possible compromise, though unconfirmed, are coming from multiple sources. [....]

This would be a remarkable denouement, since it would not really be a "compromise" so much as an acceptance of the central demand of the Moussavi camp. After everything that Supreme Leader Khamenei, in particular, has said and done so far, I imagine he would see this as a devastating blow to his credibility (even if Ahmadinejad and the forces he represents manage to win or steal a hypothetical second-round vote).

Partly for those reasons, I confess that I am very skeptical about this scenario. But I wouldn't mind being proved wrong, since if something like this did happen, it would represent a significant defeat for the hard-line Khamenei/Republican Guard/Ahmadinejad bloc. They would have managed to provoke an effective coalition against them by the other major elite factions--backed up by the pressure of the popular movement out in the streets and, no doubt, a desire by sectors of the elite to avoid the political risks of very large-scale bloodshed. And, under the circumstances, the results could help move Iran in the direction of a more open and democratic society.

Thus, I hope this scenario is less implausible than it looks to me right now. It would have to be rammed down the throat of the hard-liners, and they do happen to control the most armed force, but they might be hesitant to attempt a crudely overt military coup against the institutions of the Islamic Republic if the rest of the elite were united against them. When people are really backed into a corner politically, they sometimes wind up doing a lot of things they don't really want to do.

=> Mehdi Noorbaksh, another Iranian-American academic with extensive contacts in Iran, assembled a range of recent developments and other possible clues into an analysis arguing that a behind-the-scenes elite "compromise" along these lines might be in the cards. He's given me permission to post it (below).

Noorbaksh is careful to indicate that this prognosis is speculative. But a lot of things going on in Iran are sufficiently fluid and murky that I suppose it can't be ruled out. So Noorbaksh's analysis is worth considering. And if something like this actually happens, you read it here first. (Unless, of course, you already got this rumor from another source.)

Watching and waiting,
Jeff Weintraub

-----------------------------------
June 25, 2009]

There is a possibility, and I am saying a possibility, for a compromise on the election result among the involved parties in Iran in the next couple of days. I received a call from Iran late last night indicating that there is a possibility for a runoff between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad. There are a few points that we should consider in this context.

1. The Guardian Council all but acknowledged election irregularities a few days ago and indicated that it involved 3 million votes. This body did not restrict these irregularities to a few thousand or even a hundred thousand votes, but millions. That was a face saving gesture to open the door for a possible future compromise in the event of mounting pressure. There are other irregularities having the same nature. Many districts, up to 170, show voter turnout of 95% to 140% of the eligible voters.

2. Ali Larijani, the head of the Iranian parliament, is trying to convince the leadership on the side of the supreme leader to give national TV time to Mousavi to talk to the Iranian people. In his TV talk a couple of days ago, Larijani was critical of the Iranian national TV for not allowing Mousavi to use that medium of communication to talk to the Iranian people. He also announced that a few members of the Guardian Council were biased toward one candidate, namely Ahmadinejad, in the election.

3. There is report that Rafsanjani has succeeded to get the signatures and support of many of the high clerics in Qom denouncing the election. If they openly denounce the election that could be a colossal blow to the supreme leader, and the much diminished legitimacy of the institution of Velayat-e Faqih and his authority.

4. The Guardian Councils’ investigation of the vote fraud has been extended, possibly to gain more time in negotiating a solution to the conflict.

5. There are reports that divisions within the Revolutionary Guard are beginning to surface. There is speculation that one of the commanders, Afzali, has either resigned or been abdicated from his post.

6. Rallies are expanding in many other cities of Iran, and street demonstrations have not been diminished in Tabriz, Isfahan, Kermanshah and other cities. Although the size of the demonstrations is smaller, they are more violent and forceful.

7. The killings of demonstrators will definitely result in more defiance and bolder actions of the protesters and gain more legitimacy for the green movement and its leadership. More killings will definitely delegitimize further the supreme leader’s authority. Imposing a government, after mass killings, on the Iranian people is a much more difficult task.

Mehdi Noorbaksh
Associate Professor of International Affairs
Harrisburg University of Science and Technology

John Simpson - "Secret voices of the new Iran" (BBC)

2009-06-25T18:32:00.004-04:00

That title, I might note, has several layers of meaning.

John Simpson, World Affairs Editor of the BBC, left Iran on Sunday. A very interesting piece by Simpson, blending analysis, reflection, and historical background with striking anecdotes, appeared today. Some selections:

For reasons best not explained, I've come to know a former member of the Revolutionary Guards really well.

He's done some pretty dreadful things in his life, from attacking women in the streets for not wearing the full Islamic gear to fighting alongside Islamic revolutionaries in countries abroad.

And yet now, in the tumult that has gripped Iran since its elections last week, he's had a change of heart.

He's become a backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist candidate who alleges fraud in the elections. He's saved up the money to send his son to a private school abroad, and he loathes President Ahmadinejad.

He's not the only one.

I had to leave Iran last Sunday, when the authorities refused to renew my visa. But before I left, another former senior Revolutionary Guard came to our hotel to see us.

"Remember me," he pleaded. "Remember that I helped the BBC."

I realised that even a person so intimately linked to the Islamic Revolution thinks that something will soon change in Iran. [....]

It illustrates the split that goes all the way through Iranian society. [....]

The 11 extraordinary days I spent there was my 20th visit in 30 years. I've been reviewing the material we recorded, taking a second look at what was really going on.

I think that these last weeks may turn out to be as momentous as the Islamic Revolution I witnessed there 30 years ago. [....]

But in some ways Simpson's piece has its own split personality. Despite the massive popular upheaval shaking Iran today, Simpson nevertheless thinks that what is central to the crisis is the culmination of a decades-long personal and factional power struggle at the heart of the regime:

It's as if the fabric of the Islamic Revolution itself has been torn; so much so that individual government ministers, civil servants, Republican Guards, senior military men, and all sorts of others, have taken sides, reflecting a power struggle at the very top. [....]

On one side is Ayatollah Khameinei, the arch conservative who keeps the Islamic revolution together. On the other, a cynical figure who has made a pile of money since the revolution: former President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani. [....]

But while the idealistic young people rally behind the slogan: "Death to the Dictator," I am not fully convinced that a Rafsanjani Iran necessarily offers the more open form of government they are risking their lives for.

Both sides in this struggle are strong believers in the Islamic Republic.

It may change, but it isn't finished. And the great mass of people who've taken part in the demonstrations could find themselves just looking on from the outside, as they did before.

Could be. Read the whole thing.

--Jeff Weintraub

Who has the oil?

2009-06-24T20:18:00.005-04:00

And who uses it? (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Click on the map to expand. --Jeff Weintraub

Rami Khouri - "The Arabs Watch Iran with Forlorn Envy" (Beirut Daily Star)

2009-06-24T18:48:00.006-04:00

The Palestinian-Jordanian-American journalist Rami Khouri, who at different times has been Editor-in-Chief of the Beirut Daily Star and the Jordan Times (among other things), is always worth reading (or almost always), whether or not one fully agrees with him.

In the piece below he offers some thoughtful, acute, and illuminating reflections on the political drama unfolding in Iran and the deeply ambivalent reactions to this spectacle in the Arab world. I have some thoughts about this piece myself, but for the moment I will just pass it on. Some highlights:

------------------------------
I started writing this column Sunday in Amman, Jordan, and finished writing it Tuesday in Beirut, Lebanon [....] Jordan and Lebanon contain extremes visible in the Arab world, including pro-American and pro-Iranian sentiments, Islamists, monarchists, and an assortment of tribal, Arab nationalist, state-centered and democratic values.

All of them, without exception, are reacting to events in Iran with fascination, confusion, and concern, reflecting self-inflicted political incoherence and mediocrity that are hallmarks of the modern Arab world. Broadly speaking, the Arab world has maneuvered itself into a lose-lose situation with regard to developments in Iran, despite the different views expressed toward the Islamic Republic.

The uncomfortable common denominator is that for both the people and the ruling power elites of the Arab world, whatever happens in Iran will largely be perceived negatively by a majority in the Middle East. This is a sad commentary on the condition of Arab political culture, which remains autocratic and rigid at the top, and passive and frustrated at the grassroots. [....]

Arab regimes and leaders have worked themselves into a lose-lose situation whereby they would be unhappy if the Iranian regime stayed in power and unhappy if it were removed through popular challenge. The same awkwardness defines the perspectives of Arab citizens. [....]

At the same time, ordinary Arabs would feel jealous were the demonstrators in Iran able to topple their regime for the second time in 30 years; this would highlight the chronic passivity and powerlessness of Arab citizens who must suffer permanent subjugation in their own long-running autocratic systems without being able to do anything about it. Whether Iranian street demonstrations challenged the shah or the Islamists who toppled him, Arabs watch all this on television with a forlorn envy.
------------------------------

=> And for anyone who might be interested, here is a collection of pieces commissioned by the New York Times: "The Arab World Reacts (or Doesn't)"

--Jeff Weintraub

=========================
Daily Star (Beirut, Lebanon)
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The Arabs watch Iran with forlorn envy
By Rami G. Khouri

I started writing this column Sunday in Amman, Jordan, and finished writing it Tuesday in Beirut, Lebanon - a short journey that captured how the dynamic events in Iran are playing out in very different ways in a largely passive and vulnerable Arab world. Jordan and Lebanon contain extremes visible in the Arab world, including pro-American and pro-Iranian sentiments, Islamists, monarchists, and an assortment of tribal, Arab nationalist, state-centered and democratic values.

All of them, without exception, are reacting to events in Iran with fascination, confusion, and concern, reflecting self-inflicted political incoherence and mediocrity that are hallmarks of the modern Arab world. Broadly speaking, the Arab world has maneuvered itself into a lose-lose situation with regard to developments in Iran, despite the different views expressed toward the Islamic Republic.

The uncomfortable common denominator is that for both the people and the ruling power elites of the Arab world, whatever happens in Iran will largely be perceived negatively by a majority in the Middle East. This is a sad commentary on the condition of Arab political culture, which remains autocratic and rigid at the top, and passive and frustrated at the grassroots.

Most Arab regimes do not like Iran, they even fear it, because of its capacity to inspire revolutionary Islamism or at least mildly insurrectionary movements within their countries. A few Arab leaders even speak of Iran's predatory or hegemonic ambitions in the Gulf, Lebanon, Iraq and other lands. Only isolated pockets of power in the Arab world like or support the Iranian regime, including Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and some other Islamist or nationalist forces. Yet even the few isolated exceptions, like Hamas and Hizbullah, that have effectively carved out small domains of their own sovereignty are in an uncomfortable zone regarding events in Iran.

Arab public opinion, for its part, views Iran with much more nuance. Many Arabs cheered the Iranian Revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi 30 years ago, and continue to enjoy Iran's defiance of the US, Israel, UN sanctions and conservative Arab leaderships. Others in the Arab world see Iran's Islamic Revolution as a nasty export commodity that has only spelled trouble for Arab societies. Places like Lebanon and Palestine, especially, are offered the unattractive option of perpetual warfare with Israel, which entails the regular destruction of swaths of their society.

The irony today is that the Iranian regime and its policies are viewed very differently throughout the Arab world; but removing or reconfiguring the Islamic regime through street demonstrations or even through democratic elections seems problematic for virtually everyone in Arab society.

You would think that Arab governments would be pleased to see Iran's regime toppled, or tempered by its own people. Yet, if such change were to occur through street demonstrations choreographed via a web of digital communications, whispered messages, and rooftop religious chants in the middle of the night, autocratic Arab leaders would cringe - because they would sense in this their own vulnerability to similar mass political challenges. The fact is lost on no one that the Iranian regime has effectively withstood American, Israeli, European, and UN pressures, threats and sanctions for years, but found itself much more vulnerable to the spontaneous rebellion of many of its own citizens who felt degraded by the falsification of election results by the government.

(An intriguing side note: Events inside Iran picked up steam at the same time as the Iranian presidential elections coincided with the Obama administration's change of policy, as Washington backed off the threats and aggressiveness of the Bush years, and offered to engage with Iran on the basis of mutual respect. Would a more detached US policy toward Arab autocrats similarly open space for Arab domestic effervescence and indigenous calls for more liberal, honest politics?)

Arab regimes and leaders have worked themselves into a lose-lose situation whereby they would be unhappy if the Iranian regime stayed in power and unhappy if it were removed through popular challenge. The same awkwardness defines the perspectives of Arab citizens. Most Arabs do not want to live in an Iranian-style political system that blends theocracy with autocracy; but many were pleased to see the pro-American shah overthrown by Koran-carrying demonstrators. They would also be unhappy to see the Iranian regime overthrown because they enjoy its defiance of the US, Israel and the UN in particular, along with its development of a nuclear capability.

At the same time, ordinary Arabs would feel jealous were the demonstrators in Iran able to topple their regime for the second time in 30 years; this would highlight the chronic passivity and powerlessness of Arab citizens who must suffer permanent subjugation in their own long-running autocratic systems without being able to do anything about it. Whether Iranian street demonstrations challenged the shah or the Islamists who toppled him, Arabs watch all this on television with a forlorn envy.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice-weekly by The Daily Star.

Bloody confrontation in Baharestan Square

2009-06-24T18:22:00.003-04:00

Following up a previous post ... it appears that there was indeed a large-scale blow-up today in Baharestan Square in Tehran, by the Parliament building. Here are some highlights from the Washington Post report, which conveys a sense of what the street confrontations in the capital look like since Saturday, when the regime began to ratchet up the level of violent force used against demonstrators:

Iran's supreme leader told a group of lawmakers Wednesday that "neither the system nor the people will submit to bullying" over the results of the disputed presidential election, and riot police backed by militiamen later forcibly broke up a demonstration at the parliament building in support of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. [....]

Security forces -- including regular police from all over Tehran, helmeted riot police officers and members of a force known as "Robocops" for their full body armor and special equipment -- converged on Baharestan Square to prevent a demonstration from taking shape. They were supported by members of the pro-government Basij militia and plainclothes agents who infiltrated the protesters, witnesses said.

"Robocops" riding motorcycles fired large handguns into the air as they charged up and down Republic Street and other nearby avenues, one witness said. A helicopter circled overhead. Some of the police carried paintball guns, which have been used in recent demonstrations to mark protesters for arrest. [....]

In one confrontation between protesters and Basij members, a middle-aged woman wearing a light-blue headscarf and a black coat angrily refused orders to leave. "I'm going to stay here and see how many people you kill today," she told the Basij. A plainclothes agent emerged from the crowd, swore at the woman and took out a pair of handcuffs to arrest her. Other people tried to stop the agent, but Basij members rushed them and beat them with clubs, the witness said. [....]

Bystanders and protesters alike were caught up in the violence.

At a corner of Republic Street, a main center for printing shops, a young engaged couple fled into an alley to escape a charge by club-wielding security forces. "Why are they attacking me?" the woman cried. "I only came here to print my wedding cards!"

The situation appeared to grow more violent as dusk fell, witnesses said.

In Twitter feeds, people who said they witnessed the crackdown described protesters with broken limbs and cracked heads, saying there was "blood everywhere" from the beatings. One said many people had been arrested. Another said people were being beaten "like animals." [....]

Andrew Sullivan highlighted this bit:

In an unusual exchange, he said, a child walked up to a regular police colonel and, gesturing toward truckloads of riot police, asked him, "Who are those guys?" The colonel replied with apparent disdain, "They're cows."

Meanwhile:

Hundreds of Iranians have been arrested since the elections. A senior official of Iran's judiciary, which is controlled by the ruling Shiite Muslim clerics, said a special court would try detained protesters, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported. The government has vowed to make an example of detained "rioters."

"Those arrested in recent events will be dealt with in a way that will teach them a lesson," the official, Ibrahim Raisi, was quoted as saying. "The rioters should be dealt with in an exemplary way, and the judiciary will do that." Raisi did not elaborate.

--Jeff Weintraub

Engagement With a Post-Crackdown Iran? (Matthew Yglesias)

2009-06-24T16:48:00.004-04:00

In terms of the foreign-policy picture (which I have largely, and deliberately, left alone), what's likely to happen after the dust settles?

My guess is that what Matt Yglesias says here is probably right--especially in his second-to-last paragraph, which cuts through a lot of distractions and zeroes in on the most crucial factors. Possibilities for diplomatic re-"engagement" between the US and Iran will depend not only on what the US government does or is willing to do, but also on who is running Iran after this crisis and what they want to do. In that respect, a realistic (as distinct from "realist") prognosis suggests that the prospects are not very encouraging.

Of course, right now all that remains speculative to some degree.

--Jeff Weintraub

=========================
Matthew Yglesias
Jun 23rd, 2009 at 9:56 am

With the possibility of brutal suppression of the current round of protests very real, the question naturally arises as to what such a turn of events would mean for Barack Obama’s proposed policy of engagement with Iran. Robert Farley comments:

If the regime survives, it will be because of the loyalty and brutality of its security forces. With that brutality on display on US televisions (if only rarely) it will be much more difficult for Obama to build any domestic support for talks. Moreover, it’s not clear that he should; knowing that the Iranian regime was repressive before these latest incidents, and acknowledging that many US allies in the region don’t even bother with the fiction of elections doesn’t change the fact that it’s an ugly bit of business. I’d rather, other things being equal, not have my President engage with Iran while the current group of thugs is in power. Finally, I do think that the repression has opened greater opportunity for what might be termed a non-interventionist coercive strategy; this is to say that more and tougher sanctions against the regime are on the table now than was the case two weeks ago.

I would add to that the observation that a regime win would simply make me much less confident that engagement will work. The hope behind an engagement strategy was that the Supreme Leader might be inclined to side with the more pragmatic actors inside the system—guys like former president Rafsanjani and former prime minister Mousavi. With those people, and most of the Iranian elites of their ilk, now in open opposition to the regime, any crackdown would almost by definition entail the sidelining of the people who might be interested in a deal. Iran would essentially be in the hands of the most hardline figures, people who just don’t seem interested in improving relations with other countries.

Under the circumstances, the whole subject of American engagement may well wind up being moot.

Iran - Protests continue, repression escalates

2009-06-24T15:25:00.009-04:00

Iran's political crisis continues, but the visible part of it seems to be be somewhat reduced in size and intensity for a few days. Not really a lull, but probably a pause in the storm ... while the opposition figures out what to do next and frantic maneuvers within and between different elite factions go on behind the scenes. Reuters:

TEHRAN (Reuters) – A security crackdown appears to have quelled street rallies against Iran's disputed poll, but the leadership faced a new challenge on Wednesday from calls by reformist clerics for national mourning for dead protesters. [....]

At least 10 protesters were killed in the worst violence on Saturday, and about seven more early last week. Many of the deaths have been filmed by fellow demonstrators, posted on the Internet and viewed by thousands around the world.

U.S. President Barack Obama toughened his stance on Tuesday and said he was "appalled and outraged" by Iran's crackdown.

Iran has accused the protesters of being backed by the West, the United States and Britain in particular, and have paraded arrested young demonstrators on state television confessing to being incited by foreign news broadcasts. [....]

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a dissident but yet one of the most senior clerics in Iran, called for three days of national mourning from Wednesday for those killed. [....]

Montazeri was once named successor to Ayatollah Rohullah Khomeini, but fell out with the founder of the Islamic Republic shortly before his death in 1989. Montazeri has been under house arrest in the holy city of Qom for around a decade.

Reformist cleric Mehdi Karoubi who came third in the election also signaled opposition would continue, calling on Iranians to hold ceremonies on Thursday to mourn the dead. [....]

By comparison with last week's massive demonstrations, street protests do seem to be happening on a smaller scale. But they're continuing, and there are various reports of policy and basijis beating up crowds and even firing on them.

=> One of these attacks on demonstrators seems to have occurred in and around Baharestan Square, near the Parliament building. Here is a phone interview televised by CNN:

And here is a partial transcript (via Andrew Sullivan:

"I was going towards Baharestan with my friend. This was everyone, not just supporters of one candidate or another. All of my friends, they were going to Baharestan to express our opposition to these killings and demanding freedom. The black-clad police stopped everyone. They emptied the buses that were taking people there and let the private cars go on. We went on until Ferdowsi then all of a sudden some 500 people with clubs came out of [undecipherable] mosque and they started beating everyone. They tried to beat everyone on [undecipherable] bridge and throwing them off of the bridge. And everyone also on the sidewalks. They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband, he fainted. They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre. They were trying to beat people so they would die. they were cursing and saying very bad words to everyone. This was exactly a massacre... I don't know how to describe it."

Nico Pitney reports:

Another Iranian who has been reliable in the past posts on Facebook, "In Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher . . . Fighting in Vanak Sq, Tajrish sq, Azadi Sq - now . ."

=> The Guardian's report today was headlined "Iran protesters in 'bloody clashes' with riot police". Some highlights

Bloody clashes broke out in Tehran today as Iran's supreme leader said he would not yield to pressure over the disputed election.

The renewed confrontation took place in Baharestan Square, near parliament, where hundreds of protestors faced off against several thousand riot police and other security personnel.

Witnesses likened the scene to a war zone, with helicopters hovering overhead, many arrests and police beating demonstrators. [....] With the independent media banned from covering street protests, the reports could not be verified. [....]

The latest confrontations came as the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose authority has been challenged by massive grassroots protests, said on state television: "I had insisted and will insist on implementing the law on the election issue. Neither the establishment nor the nation will yield to pressure at any cost."

But the opposition was just as unyielding. One of the defeated presidential candidates, Mehdi Karroubi, stepped up his challenge to the regime, describing the government as illegitimate. Rejecting the outcome of the 12 June vote, the reformist cleric and most liberal of the presidential candidates said on his website: "I do not accept the result and therefore consider as illegitimate the new government. Because of the irregularities, the vote should be annulled."

In another act of blatant defiance, the wife of defeated opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi called on the authorities to immediately release Iranians who had been detained.

In remarks posted on her husband's website, Zahra Rahnavard said: "I regret the arrest of many politicians and people and want their immediate release. It is my duty to continue legal protests to preserve Iranian rights." [....]

Meanwhile according to Agence France-Presse:

The authorities have also intensified a crackdown on opposition leader and defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, with the arrest of staff at his newspaper and vitriolic attacks from the hardline press. [....]

Mousavi, who was premier in the post-revolution era, has urged supporters to keep demonstrating but to use "self-restraint" to avoid further bloodshed while another defeated candidate Mehdi Karroubi called for a mourning ceremony on Thursday for slain protesters.

Police have arrested 25 journalists and other staff at Mousavi's Kalemeh Sabz (Green Word) newspaper -- which was shut down about 10 days ago -- one of its editors said. [....]

As far as I can tell, Moussavi's own whereabouts are uncertain. On Saturday, according to several reports, Moussavi called for a general strike if he was arrested and declared to his supporters,“I am ready for martyrdom.”

I expect the next phase of the storm to break out soon, but we'll have to wait and see what happens next.

--Jeff Weintraub

Neda - A demonstrator's death puts a face on the Iranian protest movement

2009-06-24T14:52:00.006-04:00

I have been waiting to say anything about this now-famous video until the facts became clearer. It has gone around the world has been widely discussed, so many of you have probably seen it already. If not, let me say that it's very powerful. It has provided one of the most iconic images to come out of the ongoing political upheaval in Iran.

It turns out that the young woman whose death is shown in this video was the 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan. Under the circumstances, the facts about this incident are still not entirely crystal-clear. But the basic outlines of what is known are conveyed in the LA Times article by Borzou Daragahi below.

Neda and three others, including her music teacher Hamid Panahi, were on their way to one of the demonstrations in Tehran on Saturday. (Panahi may be the man in the blue-and-white striped shirt in the video. Another man in the video, apparently, was a doctor named Arash Hejazi who tried to help save Neda in her last moments. Hejazi has fled to Britain--where he gave this interview.) Their car got stuck in traffic near the edge of the crowd, and when they got out to look, Neda Agha-Soltan was killed by a single shot through the chest.

Who shot her? Her fiance Caspian Makian told the BBC Persian Service:

Eyewitnesses and video footage of the shooting clearly show that probably Basij paramilitaries in civilian clothing deliberately targeted her. Eyewitnesses said they clearly targeted her and she was shot in the chest.

That's certainly plausible, though so far I don't know whether there's conclusive proof. At all events, this claim appears to be widely believed in Iran, and not only by supporters of the opposition.

According to the Guardian:

The Iranian authorities have ordered the family of Neda Agha Soltan out of their Tehran home after shocking images of her death were circulated around the world. [....] The police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said. [....]

The government is also accusing protesters of killing Soltan, describing her as a martyr of the Basij militia. Javan, a pro-government newspaper, has gone so far as to blame the recently expelled BBC correspondent, Jon Leyne, of hiring "thugs" to shoot her so he could make a documentary film.

Soltan was shot dead on Saturday evening near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators, turning her into a symbol of the Iranian protest movement. Barack Obama spoke of the "searing image" of Soltan's dying moments at his press conference yesterday

=> A few thoughts:

First, this event underlines the extent to which, in political conflicts as in many other areas of life, images are often more powerful than arguments. It's also true that for many people watching the death of one concrete person has a much bigger impact than reading about the deaths of thousands or hundreds of thousands. In an era when TV and now the internet can spread videos quickly around the world, the images that they capture are especially potent.

(One lesson that repressive and murderous regimes have learned is that it's very important to keep journalists away, and especially TV crews. In Iran this strategy has been undermined by the fact that so many people can take pictures with their cameras and cell-phones and then disseminate them via the internet.)

Second, Neda's family and friends have all indicated that she was not a political activist, and in fact it sounds as though she wasn't a very politically engaged person. Nor, according to what they say, was she necessarily a supporter of Moussavi's candidacy. What moved her to go join the protests was her sense of outrage at the fraudulent election results. "She couldn't stand the injustice of it all," according to Panahi. "All she wanted was the proper vote of the people to be counted."

To put it more precisely, what outraged her was that she believed the official election results were fraudulent. But that underlines the key point. We can all argue about whether or not the election was stolen--it certainly looks that way, but of course there's no hard proof yet. However, it's clear that millions of Iranians, including people who were not politically mobilized before June 12, agree with Grand Ayatollah Montazeri that the official voting figures announced by the government were "results that no one in their right mind can believe." Even the Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani, who supported Ahmadinejad and who claims that he really did win the election, conceded on Iranian TV that "a majority of people are of the opinion that the actual election results are different than what was officially announced.” That's a crucial social fact about Iran today.

--Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Los Angeles Times
June 23, 2009
Family, friends mourn 'Neda,' Iranian woman who died on video
By Borzou Daragahi

Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, 'was a beam of light' and not an activist, friends say. The video footage of her bleeding on the street has turned her into an international symbol of the protest movement.

Reporting from Tehran — The first word came from abroad. An aunt in the United States called her Saturday in a panic. "Don't go out into the streets, Golshad," she told her. "They're killing people."

The relative proceeded to describe a video, airing on exile television channels that are jammed in Iran, in which a young woman is shown bleeding to death as her companion calls out, "Neda! Neda!"

A dark foreboding swept over Golshad, who asked that her real name not be published. She began calling the cellphone and home numbers of her friend Neda Agha-Soltan -- who had gone to the chaotic demonstration with a group of friends -- but Neda didn't answer.

At midnight, as the city continued to smolder, Golshad drove to the Agha-Soltan residence in the Tehran Pars section in the eastern part of the capital.

As she heard the cries and wails and praising of God reverberating from the house, she crumpled, knowing that her worst fears were true.

"Neda! Neda!" the 25-year-old cried out. "What will I do?"

Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, was shot dead Saturday evening near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators who allege rampant vote fraud in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The jittery cellphone footage of her bleeding on the street has turned "Neda" into an international symbol of the protest movement that erupted after the June 12 balloting. Images of her final moments have spread virally on social networks, been beamed across the world on cable and held aloft on placards on the streets of Tehran.

'A beam of light'

To those who knew and loved Agha-Soltan, she was far more than an icon. She was a daughter, sister and friend, a music and travel lover, a beautiful young woman in the prime of her life.

"She was a person full of joy," said her music teacher and close friend Hamid Panahi, who was among the mourners at her family home Sunday, awaiting word about her burial. "She was a beam of light. I'm so sorry. I was so hopeful for this woman."

Security forces urged her friends and family not to hold memorial services for her at a mosque and asked them not to speak publicly about her, associates of the family said. Authorities even asked the family to take down the black mourning banners in front of their house, aware of the potent symbol she had become.

But some insisted on speaking out anyway, hoping to make sure the world would not forget her.

Neda Agha-Soltan was born in Tehran, they said, to a father who worked for the government and a homemaker mother.

They were a family of modest means, part of the country's emerging middle class who built their lives in rapidly developing neighborhoods on the eastern and western outskirts of the city.

Like many in her neighborhood, Agha-Soltan was loyal to the country's Islamic roots and traditional values, friends say, but also curious about the outside world, which was easily accessed through satellite TV, the Internet and occasional trips abroad.

The second of three children, she studied Islamic philosophy at a branch of Tehran's Azad University until deciding to pursue a career in tourism. She took private classes to become a tour guide, including Turkish-language courses, friends said, hoping to someday lead groups of Iranians on trips abroad.

Travel was her passion, and with her friends she saved up enough money for package tours to Dubai, Turkey and Thailand. Two months ago, on a trip to Turkey, she relaxed along the beaches of Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast.

She also loved music, especially Persian pop, and was taking piano lessons, according to Panahi and other friends. She was also an accomplished singer, they said.

But she was never an activist, they added, and she began attending the mass protests only because she was outraged by the election results.

'Neda, don't go'

Her parents and others told her it would be dangerous to go to Saturday's march, said Golshad.

On Friday, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had warned in his weekly sermon that demonstrators would be responsible for any violence that broke out. Even Golshad stayed away. At 3:30 p.m., the two friends spoke.

"I told her, 'Neda, don't go,' " she recalled, heaving with sobs.

But Agha-Soltan was as stubborn as she was honest, Golshad said.

"She said, 'Don't worry. It's just one bullet and its over.' "

Her friends say she, Panahi and two others were stuck in traffic on Karegar Street, east of Tehran's Azadi (Freedom) Square, on their way to the demonstration sometime after 6:30 p.m.

After they stepped out of the car to get some fresh air and crane their necks over the jumble of cars, Panahi heard a crack from the distance. In the blink of an eye, he realized Agha-Soltan had collapsed to the ground.

"We were stuck in traffic and we got out and stood to watch, and without her throwing a rock or anything they shot her," he said. "It was just one bullet."

Blood poured from the right side of her chest and began bubbling out of her mouth and nose as her lungs filled up.

"I'm burning, I'm burning!" Panahi recalled her saying, her final words.

Those nearby gathered around. A doctor tried to help, Panahi said, telling him to put his palm over the wound and apply pressure. A driver coming from the other direction urged the crowd to put her into his car.

A frantic search for a hospital followed. They took a wrong turn down a dead end and switched her limp body to another car.

Along the way, protesters and others screamed at drivers to clear a path in the snarled traffic.

The medical staff of Shariati Hospital made a heroic effort to rush her into surgery, but it was too late. She was dead by the time she arrived at the emergency room, Panahi said.

"This is a crime that's not in support of the government," he said. "This is a crime against humanity."

Iranian authorities have strenuously denied that police were using lethal force to quell the protest.

During tours of the riot scene before, during and after the worst of the melee, there were no signs of security officials using guns.

Investigation begun

The prosecutor general's office has launched an investigation into the killing of "several people" Saturday and arrested one "armed terrorist," the website of Iran's Press TV said. At least 13 people were killed in Saturday's rioting.

"Policemen are not authorized to use weapons against people," said Tehran Police Chief Azizollah Rajabzadeh, according to Press TV. "They are trained to only use anti-riot tools to keep the people out of harm's way."

The government has suggested that loyalists to the exiled, outlawed opposition group Mujahedin Khalq may bear responsibility for the killings.

But family members and friends suspect that zealous pro-government paramilitaries, the Basiji or Ansar-e Hezbollah, might have been responsible.

Panahi said witnesses at the scene said the shooter was not a police officer but among a group of plainclothes security officials or militiamen lurking in the area.

On Sunday at the Agha-Soltan residence, friends and relatives came in droves, weeping and bent over, clutching one another.

A steady murmur of sobs and wails emanated from the apartment.

Mascara stained the cheeks of the women, some in sweeping black chadors and others in shapely designer mini-coats and sunglasses.

The men's eyes looked sore and bloodshot. Two helped a distraught young man walk along the hallway, one of Agha-Soltan's two brothers, someone said.

"She died full of love," Golshad said.

The relatives and friends piled into minivans for the hourlong trek to Tehran's Behesht Zahra cemetery, where she was buried. Her loved ones were outraged by the authorities' order not to eulogize her, to loudly sing her praises and mourn her loss. But they were too afraid and distraught to speak out, except for Panahi, who said he had nothing more to lose.

"They know me," he said. "They know where I am. They can come and get me whenever they want. My time has gone. We have to think about the young people."

Neda, he said, was smart and loving. She had a mischievous streak, gently teasing her friends and causing them to laugh. She was passionate about life and meant no one any harm.

In the election unrest, friends found in her an unexpected daring, a willingness to take risks for her beliefs.

"She couldn't stand the injustice of it all," Panahi said. "All she wanted was the proper vote of the people to be counted.

"For pursuing her goals, she didn't use rocks or clubs," he said. "She wanted to show with her presence that 'I'm here. I also voted. And my vote wasn't counted.' It was a very peaceful act of protest, without any violence."

As to the person or persons responsible for her death, they will not be forgiven, he said.

"When they kill an innocent child, this is not justice. This is not religion. In no way is this acceptable," he said. "And I'm certain that the one who shot her will not get a pass from God."

daragahi@latimes.com

Actually, the protests in Iran are all a CIA plot

2009-06-24T11:55:00.007-04:00

Via Nico Pitney's Huffington Post blog on Monday, here is a cover story in Iran's most important hard-line newspaper, Keyhan:

I don't know Farsi, but apparently the banner headline reads: "$400 Million CIA Budget For Creating Riots After The Election".

As everyone knows, back in 1953 there really was a CIA-organized plot that toppled an Iranian regime--the notorious overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and his government, which was replaced by the autocratic rule of the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (who was overthrown a quarter-century later in the 1979 revolution). That traumatic event is burned into Iran's collective memory, so it's not surprising that the Iranian regime and its supporters would try to invoke its echo in order to smear the opposition.

This time around, the notion that the CIA (in cahoots with the BBC?) could have masterminded the political struggle now going on in Iran, including the nation-wide upheaval that has brought millions of people into the streets, is fanciful.

According to Nico Pitney, several readers have e-mailed to say that the Keyhan article is based in part on "a piece by Paul Craig Roberts, likely this one," in the reliably anti-American-dictatorship-friendly nutcase-left newsletter CounterPunch. (To be fair, I should add that some sane, decent, and intellectually serious people also publish stuff occasionally in CounterPunch, though I'm not sure why.) So anyone who wants to read an English-language version of this conspiracy theory can find it here.

=> For the word from the horse's mouth, which vividly conveys the paranoid vision that guides the Iranian regime and its supporters, I recommend watching an Iranian government TV broadcast from 2008 that explains How the Iranian Intelligence Ministry sees the world.

(As Daniel Finkelstein, the Comment Editor of the London Times, remarked at the time: "This TV broadcast from the Iranian Intelligence Ministry is simultaneously absolutely hilarious and blood-chilling." Hard to disagree.)

--Jeff Weintraub

Iran - Surprise announcement from the Guardian Council

2009-06-23T09:35:00.002-04:00

This just in:

On Press TV, the English-language state television satellite broadcaster, Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesman for the Guardian Council, declared: “If a major breach occurs in an election, the Guardian Council may annul the votes that come out of a particular affected ballot box, polling station, district, or city.”

“Fortunately, in the recent presidential election we found no witness of major fraud or breach in the election,” he said.

“Therefore, there is no possibility of an annulment taking place.” He was speaking late on Monday in Tehran and his remarks were posted early Tuesday, Tehran time.

Well, we were all on tenterhooks.

More seriously ... this is further confirmation that the government has totally rejected the key demand of the opposition--which is not surprising.

--Jeff Weintraub

Further confirmation that the Iranian election results look phony (from Chatham House)

2009-06-22T03:57:00.014-04:00

The more closely the official results of Iran's presidential election are considered, the less believable they look. (For some examples, see here & here.)

The credibility of those results now been further undermined by a study issued jointly by Chatham House, the prominent British think tank, and the University of St. Andrews: "Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election". (A compact summary by two of the authors is here.)

Based on a detailed province-by-province analysis of the voting statistics from Iran's Interior Ministry for both the 2005 and 2009 presidential elections, the authors conclude that there are a lot of reasons to regard the 2009 figures with, let us say, great skepticism. Here are some of those reasons (for the rest, see the full study):

------------------------------
· In two conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of more than 100% was recorded.

· If Ahmadinejad's victory was primarily caused by the increase in voter turn-out [JW: i.e., if a previously silent hard-line majority suddenly turned out to vote, which is an implausible idea on the face of it], one would expect the data to show that the provinces where there was the greatest 'swing' in support to Ahmadinejad would also be the provinces with the greatest increase in voter turnout. That is not the case.

· In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.

· In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas. That the countryside always votes conservative is a myth. The claim that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces flies in the face of these trends.
------------------------------

Juan Cole comments:

Note that many reformists did not vote in 2005, because they had become discouraged by the way the hard liners had blocked all their programs. Some 10.5 million persons who did not vote in 2005 did vote in 2009. It is highly unlikely that most of these non-voters in 2005 were conservatives who now came out for Ahmadinejad in 2009. But to do as well as the regime claimed, Ahmadinejad would have needed to attract substantial numbers of these voters to himself. [....]

As I had noted earlier, the official results ask us to believe that rural ethnic minorities (some of them Sunni!) who had long voted reformist or for candidates of their ethnicity or region, had switched over to Ahmadinejad. We have to believe that Mehdi Karroubi's support fell from over 6 million to 330,000 over all, and that he, an ethnic Lur, was defeated in Luristan by a hard line Persian Shiite. Or that Ahmadinejad went from having 22,000 votes in largely Sunni Kurdistan to about half a million! What, is there a new organization, "Naqshbandi Sunni Sufis for Hard Line Shiism?" It never made any sense. People who said it did make sense did not know what a Naqshbandi is. (Quick, ask them before they can look it up at wikipedia). [....]

When people, including myself, said that rural people liked Ahmadinejad, we meant Shiites living in Persian-speaking villages on the Iranian plateau, in fair proximity to cities such as Isfahan, Tehran and Shiraz. We weren't talking about Turkmen or Kurds (both Sunnis), or about Lurs (everyone suspected Karroubi would get that vote). I suspect that some of those to whom we referred as rural are being categorized as living in 'small towns' by the Chatham House authors. But field workers even in the Shiite, Persian-speaking villages point out that they often encounter anti-Ahmadinejad sentiments there, as well.

But that is neither here nor there. The numbers do not add up. You can't have more voters than there are people. You can't have a complete liberal and pragmatic-conservative swing behind hard liners who make their lives miserable.

The election was stolen. It is there in black and white. Those of us who know Iran, could see it plain as the nose on our faces, even if we could not quantify our reasons as elegantly as Chatham House.

--Jeff Weintraub

Update: The Guardian Council "announced on Monday that the number of votes recorded in 50 cities exceeded the number of eligible voters there by [a total of] three million." No doubt there's some perfectly comprehensible explanation for this discrepancy, but to a suspicious mind it looks a little fishy. And three million questionable votes out of about 40 million reported overall might ordinarily seem like a significant amount. But fortunately the powers-that-be had taken the precaution of awarding Ahmadinejad a lead of about 11 millions votes, so a mere three million would not be enough to change the outcome.

“I don’t think they actually counted the votes, though that’s hard to prove,” said Ali Ansari, a professor at the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and one of the authors of a study of the election results issued by Chatham House, a London-based research group.

Why bother?

Update #2: For more on this announcement and its implications, and on the statistical implausibilities of the official vote totals more generally, see this piece by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, who is an acknowledged expert at crunching election statistics: "Worst. Damage Control. Ever."

This leaves only two possibilities: that there was widespread ballot-stuffing or that the results in some or all areas don't reflect any physical count of the ballots but were fabricated whole hog on a spreadsheet.

The Two Irans (Robert Worth)

2009-06-21T20:26:00.001-04:00

A good piece by Robert Worth in today's New York Times "Week in Review".

Although it seems clear that the presidential election was stolen--or, at the very least, that the official election results wildly inflated the number of votes for Ahmadinejad--it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad and the forces he represents also enjoy real popular support. Worth concludes:

Both sides now view themselves as the true Iranian majority. It is not yet clear how any future vote count might persuade either side otherwise.

I recommend reading the whole article. Some highlights are below.

--Jeff Weintraub

-----------------------------------
Ascertaining what the true Iran is has never been harder. What is clear, though, is that the electoral dispute has exposed a deep rift in Iranian society, one that cannot be measured or healed by vote counts. On each side, faith merges with perception, making the partisans believe with fierce certainty that they represent the country’s true majority.

The difference is sometimes caricatured as one between a Westernized urban elite and the pious lower classes. In fact, it is not that simple, even if there is little doubt about who all those fashionable Tehrani women in jeans and loose head scarves voted for. A vast opposition rally on Monday — in which more than a million people are believed to have taken part — was also full of people who looked more like Ahmadinejad supporters: women in traditional Islamic garb, and working-class men.

In essence, the core of the struggle is between two competing views of what this country’s Islamic revolution sought to achieve.

“One side wants a gradual evolution of democratic institutions and a more democratic reading of Islamic institutions,” said Kavous Seyed-Emami, a political science professor at Imam Sadeq University in Tehran. “The other side is for a populist and more or less authoritarian reading of Islam.”

Over the past week, those differences have often been boiled down to slogans. “Death to the dictator!” chanted supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the lead opposition candidate. “Death to those who oppose the rule of the clerics!” was the refrain on the other side. [....]

In part, the split revolves around opposed understandings of Iran’s political evolution since the 1979 revolution. For the opposition, a defining moment came in 1997, when the reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami won the presidency in a landslide. Many in the opposition see that as a natural growth from the incendiary radicalism that founded the Islamic Republic to a more mature and democratic style of governance. Mr. Khatami’s broad victory margin — which was repeated in 2001 — still feeds their sense that they are the country’s true majority.

On the other side, many people see the same years as a gradual falling away from the zeal of the republic’s early years. Even those who admire Mr. Khatami often complain about corruption among leading officials, especially former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

For them, Mr. Ahmadinejad was the first president who seemed to understand Iran’s poor and working class, and who seemed capable of fulfilling the revolution’s promises of economic and social justice. They also respond to his aggressive nationalist rhetoric, which is rooted in a longstanding fear that Iran has been bullied, politically and culturally, by the West. By contrast, many younger and more cosmopolitan Iranians would like firmer connections to the outside world.

The past few weeks have helped widen the gulf. After years in which they felt downcast and helpless, opposition partisans saw the sudden birth of a popular movement in support of Mr. Moussavi that exceeded their hopes. Rallies began drawing tens of thousands of cheering people. The streets of Tehran and other major cities began exploding after dark with carnivalesque street celebrations, in which young people danced and dressed in the signature bright-green color of the Moussavi campaign. Word of the events spread by Facebook, which — like other new Internet technologies — proved a challenge for the authorities to control. Women became a driving force, emboldened by Mr. Moussavi’s ground-breaking decision to campaign alongside his wife, the distinguished political scientist Zahra Rahnavard.

As the rallies gathered force in Tehran and elsewhere, a conviction began to ripen: the country belonged, once again, to the partisans of democratic reform. Large numbers of Iranians who had voted for Mr. Khatami, and who — frustrated by his failure to put his ideas into practice — had sat out the vote in 2005, said they would return to the polls. The result seemed inevitable. A number of polls by opposition researchers suggested that Mr. Moussavi would not only survive to the second round; he would win in the first, by a decisive margin. [....]

But on the other side, there was no lack of confidence. Many Iranians said they thought Mr. Ahmadinejad had won the nationally televised debates, despite the criticism he received for his aggressive style. He had spent much of the previous four years traveling around Iran, visiting big cities and small towns in a way that no previous president had done. [....]

A few days before the election, Hossein Shariatmadari, the general director of the hard-line government newspaper Kayhan and a close confidant of Iran’s supreme leader, offered his own serenely confident prediction. Mr. Ahmadinejad would win easily.

“President Ahmadinejad is well-embraced by all the people,” said Mr. Shariatmadari, a courtly man who has links to the intelligence services and is widely feared in Iran. “He has special characteristics that people want in an ideal president.”

In retrospect, many Iranians now read such predictions as a wink from the clerical elite. They did not just want Mr. Ahmadinejad to win, it is said. They wanted him to win big, so as to persuade the reformers that they were a minority, and to erase the stain of Mr. Khatami’s reformist landslides.

Instead, the election and the dispute that followed had an entirely different and unexpected result: Both sides now view themselves as the true Iranian majority. It is not yet clear how any future vote count might persuade either side otherwise.

The end of the Iranian model? (Gershon Shafir)

2009-06-21T19:29:00.007-04:00

Whatever the short-term outcome of Iran's current political crisis turns out to be, the effects of this popular upheaval and its suppression will almost certainly include a severe blow to the (already much eroded) legitimacy of the theocratic-authoritarian regime. And it's likely that this effect will not be confined to Iran itself.

Khomeini's 1979 revolution inspired and electrified a wide range of people throughout the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world (and alarmed or terrified a number of others). The ongoing events in Iran, by contrast, should help to undermine the remaining appeal of the whole Iranian model launched by Khomeini. That could be enough, by itself, to give these events a world-historical importance.

(Perhaps the popular uprising going on in Iran today might even help to establish a new Iranian model--that of a democratic intifada? Well, we shouldn't let optimism carry us away ...)

My friend Gershon Shafir reflects on the wider ideological impact of the current political upheaval in Iran.

--Jeff Weintraub

=========================
Informed Comment - Global Affairs
Saturday, June 20, 2009
The Failure of the Iranian Model
By Gershon Shafir

Twelve years ago, with the election of Khatami as President of Iran, it became obvious that in large cross sections of Iranian society the revolutionary zeal had petered out. The clergy was determined to keep the revolution that brought it to power alive and prevent its moderation and for that aim went to great length to limit free elections and democracy. With Ahmedinejad’s first (and only) election there was an attempt to revive its zeal internally and, as is customary with revolutions, project it outwards by linking it with local grievances, in this case, in Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The rigging of the elections and the violent clampdown on peaceful protestors that began today, demonstrates that the uneasy combination of an Islamic state and democracy has failed. By choosing revolution [JW: i.e., the continuation of an allegedly "revolutionary" regime] over the remaining vestiges of democracy, the clergy ensured that Iran will no longer serve as a model of mass supported Islamic Revolution. While internally the revolution has been saved, its foreign influence is likely to vane. Nor, as we learned, is it possible to make a peaceful transition from an Islamic to a democratic state, as happened in the aftermath of communism. Instead, Iran is coming to resemble the authoritarian regimes of the region.

Rafsanjani's daughter arrested in Iran

2009-06-21T18:39:00.005-04:00

A further sign of splits within the elite. This one looks like a big deal.

I have seen reports about this in several places, but here's how the Times of India put it:

TEHRAN: The daughter of Iran's former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani and four relatives were arrested over their involvement in protests against alleged election fraud in Iran, the Fars news agency reported on Sunday.

Faezeh Hashemi, a renowned women's rights activist, former parliament deputy and head of women sports in Iran, has in the recent years emerged, like her father, as one of the main opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad had before the June 12 election accused Rafsanjani and his children of corruption.

Fars said that Faezeh, her daughter and three other relatives were arrested during Saturday's demonstrations for 'agitating' the protestors.

("Renowned women's rights activist"? That seems a little overdone. At all events, it's worth noting that Rafsanjani and his family are not universally beloved in Iran. Rafsanjani is the epitome of the clerico-kleptocratic 'establishment' wing of the ruling elite, and Ahmadinejad's charges of corruption gave high-level expression to beliefs that are widely shared.)

Juan Cole remarks:

The regime has arrested Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, daughter of the former president, who spoke at a pro-Mousavi rally, along with 4 other members of that family. This step is typical of an old Iranian ruling technique, of keeping provincial tribal chieftains in check by keeping some of their children hostage at the royal court. It is widely suspected that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a multi-billionaire who is well connected politically, is funding and aiding the reform movement's protests.

--Jeff Weintraub

Update: Apparently, they have now been released. Maybe this was just a warning shot?

Iran - Can the armed forces be counted on to repress the people? Probably. (Laura Secor)

2009-06-21T18:30:00.011-04:00

Students of revolutions, rebellions, revolts, and insurrections know that the moment when urban protests and street fighting turn into a revolution is often the moment when the armed forces--or a sizable portion of them--refuse to fire on the people. If that doesn't happen, and the regime is willing to make full use of the instruments of coercion at its disposal, then even the most large-scale unrest can usually be crushed.

That moment of truth is probably approaching in Iran. So far, in the face of massive, largely peaceful, marches and demonstrations, the regime has held back from a full-scale brutal crackdown on the opposition. That may strike some readers as an odd thing to say, given the deaths, beatings, arrests, and other forms of repression that have been going on for a week now, and that escalated sharply this weekend. As Laura Secor reported on Saturday:

The footage from Tehran today looks like urban warfare. Gone are the massive crowds. Instead we see bands of civilians under attack from bands of thugs, gunshots, flames, thin crowds chased through side streets. If the authorities succeed in keeping demonstrators dispersed and on the run, they could swiftly seize the upper hand. The Web site Tehran Bureau is reporting forty dead and more than two hundred wounded. The victims are seeking aid in foreign embassies rather than hospitals, according to Twitter reports from Tehran.

But if Iran's rulers had abandoned all restraint they could be killing people by the thousands, not dozens or hundreds. Some of the more cool-headed people within the regime's decision-making circles no doubt realize that even though they could probably crush all opposition effectively, unrestricted use of deadly force could lead to a large-scale bloodbath--which would shatter what remains of the regime's legitimacy. But the odds are that sometime fairly soon, unless the mobilization of popular protest simply runs out of steam--which is unlikely--they will decide that using the iron fist is preferable to backing down or losing control of the situation.

When that moment arrives, is there any possibility that significant portions of the regime's coercive apparatus might be unwilling to do the job? From what I know, and in the opinion of many people with a lot more expertise about Iran than I have, that seems unlikely. Even if some elements in the police or in the rank-and-file of the Republican Guard might waver, which is already just a hypothetical possibility, the storm-troopers of the paramilitary Basij militia should be completely reliable.

Still, one never knows for sure until the test comes. Looking ahead to that moment, Laura Secor considers the possibilities (see below). She is not optimistic. Iran in 2009 is not like east/central Europe in 1989 or Milosevic's Serbia in 2000.

The Islamic Republic [....] was born in a people’s revolution and built on faith in a religion that is deeply held by most Iranians. The state’s ideology is not the hollow construct of political elites, as communism was by the time it collapsed in much of Eastern Europe. Rather, Iranian Islamism was forged over decades, in long struggle with the despotic regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, and from the potent raw materials of Iranian nationalism and Islam. Although the country’s constituency for democracy is vast and growing, the regime has a constituency, too, and it is passionately loyal and heavily armed.

Then again, one can't be entirely certain in advance.

I think there is still a battle being waged for the hearts and minds of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij. [....]

The purpose of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij is the defense of the Islamic Revolution and the Supreme Leader. Rarely have the true believers in the militias been forced to consider the possibility that these two functions might come into conflict. Such a moment may have arrived. It is one thing to unleash brutal force on crowds that insult the Leader or Islam. That was how the members of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij could defend their assault on demonstrators at Tehran University in 1999. But now, in the name of Ahmadinejad’s controversial presidency, they are being asked to violently disperse fellow Iranians who are chanting religious slogans, carrying Korans, and calling for the lawful counting of their votes. Whether or not the rumors of splits at the top of the Revolutionary Guards’ hierarchy are true, the rank and file is not necessarily monolithic. [....]

If the opposition does indeed hope to appeal to the common humanity of its attackers, however, today’s events have not been particularly encouraging. Reports on Andrew Sullivan’s indispensable blog show unremitting violence, and a turn toward more frankly oppositional slogans on the part of the demonstrators.

As always, her analysis is worth reading in full.

Hoping for the best (but not optimistic),
Jeff Weintraub
=========================
New Yorker "News Desk" (On-Line)
Saturday, June 20, 2009
LAURA SECOR: FIGHTING OVER THE REVOLUTION

The footage from Tehran today looks like urban warfare. Gone are the massive crowds. Instead we see bands of civilians under attack from bands of thugs, gunshots, flames, thin crowds chased through side streets. If the authorities succeed in keeping demonstrators dispersed and on the run, they could swiftly seize the upper hand. The Web site Tehran Bureau is reporting forty dead and more than two hundred wounded. The victims are seeking aid in foreign embassies rather than hospitals, according to Twitter reports from Tehran.

Interestingly, the regime has disseminated reports of a bomb blast at the shrine to Khomeini on the outskirts of Tehran. Many observers and analysts suspect the bomb was planted or invented by the government, in an effort to tar the demonstrators as counter-revolutionaries. The protesters have done everything possible to complicate such stereotypes. There are reports that those demonstrators who came out today planned, via the Internet, to bring Korans onto the streets, and to sit and read from them when attacked by militiamen. Such tactics are in keeping with these demonstrators’ use of slogans and imagery taken from religion and from the Islamic Revolution of 1979—shouting “Allahu Akbar” from the rooftops, organizing demonstrations as public memorials for the dead, refusing (for the most part, at least until today) to attack Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei by name or to call for an end to theocratic rule. In effect, they are saying, We are not against the revolution or against the Islamic Republic. We are its defenders from desecration. Having the former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi for a leader helps in this regard, because of his close historic association with the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Nonetheless, the protesters’ posture has not been particularly effective with Khamenei, who yesterday threatened them and their leaders with bloodshed and mayhem. So who, exactly, are the demonstrators trying to convince? And who are the authorities trying to persuade with these reports of the shrine bombing?

I think there is still a battle being waged for the hearts and minds of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij. Successful nonviolent movements in other countries have depended on the cooptation of the rank and file in the armed forces; one remembers the moving scenes of Serbian riot police embracing demonstrators. Of course, the Serbian opposition spent months working up to that. In the summer of 2000, when Slobodan Milosevic’s government issued a statement to the army saying that the student activists were terrorists, an activist told me that he and his friends retaliated by sending care packages to soldiers in the hope that “in the key moment when he orders them to shoot on us, they won’t listen.” The success of Serbia’s democratic movement was not only that it deposed a rancid dictator but that it united, at least momentarily, a divided and scarred society.

Iran is not Serbia. The hostility between the people and the revolutionary shock troops is far older and deeper than anything that took root during Milosevic’s relatively brief tenure. By 2000, Milosevic’s fiefdom was rotten to the core; it survived on corruption, the fear of exposure on the part of many criminals and war profiteers, and hostility toward the world. The Islamic Republic, by contrast, was born in a people’s revolution and built on faith in a religion that is deeply held by most Iranians. The state’s ideology is not the hollow construct of political elites, as communism was by the time it collapsed in much of Eastern Europe. Rather, Iranian Islamism was forged over decades, in long struggle with the despotic regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, and from the potent raw materials of Iranian nationalism and Islam. Although the country’s constituency for democracy is vast and growing, the regime has a constituency, too, and it is passionately loyal and heavily armed.

The purpose of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij is the defense of the Islamic Revolution and the Supreme Leader. Rarely have the true believers in the militias been forced to consider the possibility that these two functions might come into conflict. Such a moment may have arrived. It is one thing to unleash brutal force on crowds that insult the Leader or Islam. That was how the members of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij could defend their assault on demonstrators at Tehran University in 1999. But now, in the name of Ahmadinejad’s controversial presidency, they are being asked to violently disperse fellow Iranians who are chanting religious slogans, carrying Korans, and calling for the lawful counting of their votes. Whether or not the rumors of splits at the top of the Revolutionary Guards’ hierarchy are true, the rank and file is not necessarily monolithic.

I am reminded of a conversation I had in December 2006 with a twenty-one-year-old Basiji named Mohammad Mahdi Kafshi-Ershad. He joined the Basij in high school, at the urging of his religious parents. Although he was a devout believer, he did not consider himself political. He said, “Among the Basijis, some are political and others just want to keep the government and country based on the religious fundamentals. If the government is one hundred per cent religious, there is no danger to belief. But today we have a mixture of politics and religion together. To its own benefit the government has mixed those things.” Some clerics, he told me with disgust, had become very rich and powerful, and they lived in lavish homes in North Tehran. The martyred Imam Ali would not approve of such lifestyles. As for voting, he was not himself inclined. “What if I vote for Ahmadinejad, and Ahmadinejad made a mistake?” he said. “It could be a sin. I don’t want to be a partner in a sin.” I wonder if there are other young men like Kafshi-Ershad, and how willing they will be to play partner to a political power grab by inflicting physical pain on protesters reading from the Koran.

If the opposition does indeed hope to appeal to the common humanity of its attackers, however, today’s events have not been particularly encouraging. Reports on Andrew Sullivan’s indispensable blog show unremitting violence, and a turn toward more frankly oppositional slogans on the part of the demonstrators.

Moussavi turns revolutionary (Gary Sick)

2009-06-21T17:38:00.007-04:00

Ever since the French revolution, it has been repeatedly observed that revolutions make revolutionaries as much as the other way around. Perhaps this has been happening to Mir Hossein Moussavi?

(Of course, what we have been seeing in Iran has so far involved only the first stages of a proto-revolutionary situation. It is not yet a full-fledged revolution, and will probably not become one. But then Moussavi is only part of the way to becoming a reluctant revolutionary.)

In two previous posts (here & here) I discussed an important statement issued by Moussavi on Saturday, described in at least one on-line source as "Moussavi's Statement #5 to the Iranian People".

(The first reports I had seen described it as Moussavi's speech to the rally he addressed on Saturday, so that's how I described it myself; but that may have been inaccurate, since I have now seen different accounts of his speech. On the other hand, maybe this statement was both a speech--or part of a speech--and a written formal document? Either way ...)

Here is another take on Moussavi's statement by Gary Sick. He sees it as marking an important milestone in the process whereby the pressure of events and the experience of leading a mobilized popular movement have pushed Moussavi, almost despite himself, into an increasingly direct and even revolutionary challenge to the basic structure of Iran's theocratic-authoritarian regime:

It is apparent from this statement that Mousavi's movement—and Mousavi himself—has evolved enormously in the past week. The candidate started as a mild-mannered reformer. After the searing events of the past several days, he has dared to preach a counter sermon to Khameni's lecture on Islamic government. Although he never mentions the leader by name, there is no overlooking the direct contradiction of his arguments. This open opposition to the leader by a political figure is unprecedented.

Mousavi has in fact issued a manifesto for a new vision of the Islamic republic. The repression and disdain of the government has brought the opposition to a place they probably never dreamed of going. And no one knows where any of the parties are likely to go next.

But for outside observers, it is like standing on the edge of a glacier and feeling the ice begin to crack under your feet.

Read the rest below.

--Jeff Weintraub
=========================
Daily Beast
June 21, 2009
Mousavi's New Revolutionary Manifesto
By Gary Sick

Today, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the presidential candidate who has come to represent the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, issued a formal statement.

Although he denounces the "lies and fraud" of the leadership, particularly in the recent election, he views the fraudulent election as only as the symptom of something far more serious. He describes a revolution gone wrong, a revolution that was originally based on attention to the voice of the people but has resulted in "forcing an unwanted government on the nation."

This moment is "a turning point," he says, and he defines the movement that is forming around him as having a "historical mission" to accomplish nothing less than "renewing the life of the nation" according to its own ideals.

He acknowledges, interestingly, that his own voice at the beginning was less “eloquent” than he would have wished and that the people were ahead of him in turning the movement green. But now he accepts the "burden of duty put on our shoulders by the destiny of generations and ages."

He denounces both extremes of the political spectrum: on one hand those who believe that "Islamic government is the same as Tyranny of the Rightful;" and on the other, those who "consider religion and Islam to be blockers for realization of republicanism," i.e. those who believe that democracy is incompatible with Islam.

Mousavi says his call for annulment of the election and a revote, supervised by an impartial national body, "is a given right." The objective is nothing less than "to achieve a new type of political life in the country."

That is truly a revolutionary statement. He says he will stand by the side of all those seeking "new solutions" in a nonviolent way. He accepts the principles and the institutions of the Islamic republic, including the Revolutionary Guard and the basij, but denounces "deviations and deceptions." He demands reform "that returns us to the pure principles of the Islamic Revolution."

He calls for freedom of expression in all its forms, and says that if the government permits people to express their views freely, "there won't be a need for the presence of military and regulatory forces in the streets."

It is apparent from this statement that Mousavi's movement—and Mousavi himself—has evolved enormously in the past week. The candidate started as a mild-mannered reformer. After the searing events of the past several days, he has dared to preach a counter sermon to Khameni's lecture on Islamic government. Although he never mentions the leader by name, there is no overlooking the direct contradiction of his arguments. This open opposition to the leader by a political figure is unprecedented.

Mousavi has in fact issued a manifesto for a new vision of the Islamic republic. The repression and disdain of the government has brought the opposition to a place they probably never dreamed of going. And no one knows where any of the parties are likely to go next.

But for outside observers, it is like standing on the edge of a glacier and feeling the ice begin to crack under your feet.

Gary Sick served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan. He was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis and is the author of two books on U.S.-Iranian relations. Mr. Sick has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, where he is senior research scholar, adjunct professor of international affairs and former director of the Middle East Institute (2000-2003).