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Journalism of Courage
Iran’s recent parliamentary elections stuck closely to a script familiar from the past four years: Conservatives predictably won the majority of seats from a ballot cleansed of reformists by the Guardians Council; turnout in cosmopolitan Tehran was lower than the provinces; and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blasted the United States for interfering in Iran’s elections. The election’s only clear winner — as usual, in this script —is Khamenei, whose virtual veto power over all matters of state, combined with a conservative ascendancy, grants him a political shield that will be difficult to penetrate.
But this year’s script does offer some plot twists: A closer look at the election results reveals that the reformists did better than expected given their limited opportunities to run, and a significant bloc of independents with no clear political leaning has joined the parliament. Perhaps most importantly, substantive cleavages now divide Iran’s conservatives — with important implications for the rest of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s term and the possible roadblocks to his re-election in 2009…
For starters, the pragmatic conservatives are less confrontational in foreign policy matters than Ahmadinejad. Depending on the issue, the differences lie in either policy or tone, and sometimes in both. On the nuclear issue, the pragmatists generally agree with Ahmadinejad — they too believe that Iran has a right to enrich uranium — but would pursue this goal in a climate of measured negotiations with the European Union and others… On other issues of foreign policy, the divides among conservatives are not so clear. On regional policy, negotiations with America, and the country’s confrontational stance toward Israel, the pragmatists do not differ markedly from the hard-liners. Their push for more active diplomatic engagement on many of these issues makes their positions seem more reasonable — which is, admittedly, a low bar when compared to a president who denies the Holocaust and glad-hands dictators around the world…
It is a measure of the hopelessness and the restricted nature of Iranian politics that Khatami — whose tenure generated equal parts excitement and frustration — is seen as their best hope, after he had been severely hampered by many of those same conservatives who are in political ascendance today.
Excerpted from an article by Afshin Molavi in The New Republic
