In a Financial Times article, reporters Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Roula Khalaf tease out evidence that what some analysts have likened to a clerical-state bureaucracy elite are deftly manipulating the legitimate popular outrage against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime as a way of hoisting themselves (back) to power.
A political party affiliated with Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the former president and key member of the Iranian regime, on Sunday called on Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the opposition leader, to form a "political bloc" that would pursue a long-term campaign to undermine the "illegitimate" government.
Where the West sees the pictures and the blood and the green, the Iranian elite sees a contest for the spoils of power. There is no, as of yet, liberal political movement that can be extricated from the desires of a self-interested and powerful, conservative Islamic elite, one that might be, at most, slightly more congenial to American interests, and use less inflammatory rhetoric to prick the consciousness of Western minds. The uprising has appropriated the symbols, gestures and techniques of Western revolutions, but we still know so little about what type of Iranian state these people want. (As Mousavi himself has suggested, the goal isn't to disarm the state-sponsored paramilitaries. It's to co-opt them on the side of the real revolutionaries.)
There is immense disatisfaction among the Iranian people at the current state of affairs. The people are suffering and protesting about it. The United States political elite and the protesters in Iran share a common enemy: Ahmadinejad. They might not share a common future.
Of course, one faction of Iran’s elites is manipulating the protest movement. And the protest movement is supporting that faction as a way to ram-rod the Khamenei-A’jad forces and create pathways to economic reform and global engagement. Other mullahs look at Rafsanjani and want his type of wealth, too. But they can’t get it with A’jad’s failed economics and narrow appeal to the outside world. So, they’ve started to break in the direction of the protesters understanding their role in forcing change, not to mention their mandate for the future. That’s Iranian politics as it is today.
There is not, as of yet, a liberal political movement that can be extricated from the desires of a self-interested and powerful, conservative Islamic elite, one that might be, at most, slightly more congenial to American interests.
Right. And that’s one of the reasons Obama, as President and US government representative, is taking his wait and see position.
But if we as American citizens condition our own support of the Iranian democratic protesters on the emergence of a ‘liberal political movement ...extricated from the desires of a self-interested........,” then we are imposing our own values on this most significant of Iranian internal struggles. You can support the protesters based on what you, as an American, think the protests are about (or should be about). Or you can support them based on how Iranian democrats carry out their strategy within the framework of the Islamic Republic.
These Iranian protesters are not risking their lives to be “congenial to American interests.” They are fighting for the advancement and strengthening of the Iranian nation. Most Iranians, even the protesters, vigorously oppose any foreign interference or influence in their country’s internal affairs and most support Iran’s plans to become a nuclear power.
So, how do you know there’s not yet a ‘liberal political movement?‘ Do these terms apply to Iran? Was there a liberal political movement under Khatami?
Khatami was check-mated. This time around, the ‘Islamic elite’ is seriously divided. If democratic forces win out, the Rafsanjani/Khatami/Mousavi “elites” will ‘owe’ the protesters certain liberalizations and a viable economic plan. Presumably that will help democratize the nation’s agenda but not end the Islamic regime.
In time, as new struggle will emerge to ‘perfect’ the Iranian state within our outside the Islamic Republic. Westerners see Iranian politics as the most “oblique” in the world, yet the past 80 years show Iranian power struggles as some of the most dynamic and sophisticated - certainly within the Middle East and South Asia.