If I Were Ahmadinejad

Here is some interesting advice for Barack Hussein Obama to win reelection as President of the United States from Leslie J. Sacks.

JRH 10/31/12

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If I Were Ahmadinejad

By Leslie J. Sacks

Sent: Oct 26, 2012 at 4:33 PM

Website: STRENGTH AND TOLERANCE

The possibilities are fascinating. He may or may not be as rational as many assume, considering his messianic beliefs in the coming of the Madji (the Shi'ite version of the coming of the Christ). However, he certainly is wily, manipulative, devious, and a superb strategist operating amorally with patient political acumen.

If I were Ahmadinejad, I would offer the White House a deal they could not refuse:

-Iran would agree to cease enriching uranium over 20% concentration.

-The White House would in turn agree to reduce sanctions against Iran.

-The Obama campaign desperately needs a game changer now that the debates and post-debate dialogue seems to be going Romney's way. A deal with the Iranians would be such a revelation and the only proof of success for the White House foreign policy of negotiation and accommodation.

-This political coup could well swing the election back the Democrats.

-After November 6, Obama will have another four years and Ahmadinejad will have reduced sanctions, and increased prestige and power.

After a while Iran will likely revert back to its nefarious activities and sanctions may possibly be reimposed. DespiteIran's deception, Obama would at least, for his part, remain in office and continue implementing his remaking of the world in his image. Ahmadinejad would not have to deal with an implacable Romney, who clearly has campaigned as a formidable obstacle to Iran and their nuclear ambitions. Romney sees nuclear Iran as the preeminent enemy of the USA and Ahmadinejad knows this well, if he knows anything. So in Ahmadinejad's playbook, a preferable Obama is a pushover compared to the Republican ticket.

The State Department has 1460 days and Obamas 4-year term to conclude a deal. It is conceivable that only in the last 14 days of this term the White House will manage to expediently cut a deal. Gaming the system, even for dispassionate observers, is clearly an inescapable conclusion. This deal will, if enacted, become Obama's Watergate just as the seeming cover-up of the Al Qaeda terrorist attack in Benghazi (within Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans murdered) is fast becoming one too. It is tragic that members of both parties so willingly politicize the debate, risking further the security of Israel and the USA in their unstoppable quest for one-upmanship.

So words and pieces of paper can help swing an election.

Checkmate.
 

Leslie J. Sacks

LESLIE'S BLOG: STRENGTH AND TOLERANCE

Further Reading:

The Three Benghazi Timelines We Need Answers About

Noonan: The Year the Debates Mattered

___________________________

Leslie J. Sacks
10550 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, California 90024
US

About Leslie J. Sacks

Regime Change in Iran?

Here is an interesting look inside Iranian politics and Shia Islamism.

JRH 5/4/12

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Regime Change in Iran?

By Brendan Daly
Middle East QuarterlySpring 2012, pp. 81-86

There is every reason to believe that the Islamic Republic's days are numbered. The current government, lorded over by the religious supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i, and his Guardian Council of aging mullahs, who can overrule any policy change by the pseudo-elected president, seem wildly out of touch with the general populace. Not only are the youth of Iran—some 70 percent of whom are under the age of thirty—chaffing under the "guardianship of the Islamic jurists" (velayet-e-faqih)—but so is the economy, due to sanctions imposed by the West in response to the regime's insistence on pursuing its nuclear program.[1] Inflation has long been out of control and trade and tourism a tiny fraction of what it could be, and yet the establishment has on the whole shown little interest in sacrificing militant, revolutionary principles for economic, and indeed, political expediency. Can this approach be sustained in view of the tightening economic noose around Tehran, and at what cost?

Background

The replacement of a relentlessly Islamist regime—emerging as it is in competition with Turkey as the primary regional superpower—with a liberal, secular, democratic government that will eschew domestic repression and international subversion is certainly attractive.[2] And it is not unprecedented, for Iran long struggled for constitutional and democratic rule. The constitutional revolution of 1905 was the first of its kind in the Middle East. Even the 1979 revolution, customarily referred to as the "Islamic Revolution," was in fact, initially, the result of a confluence of agitators: republican, nationalist, Marxist, and Islamist. But in the months and years following the flight of the shah and Khomeini's triumphant return, the ayatollah wrest control from the liberals and progressives, and through a brutal campaign of street violence, assassination, intimidation, and expert propaganda, crushed any opposition to his totalitarian ideology.[3]

Any visitor who spends significant time in the country will find ample justification for the Iranians' reputation for open-mindedness, artistry, intellectualism, and an almost fanatical reverence for culture. The most popular poet in Iran is Hafez, a national hero who is more readily quoted by most Iranians than the Qur'an. His poetry is full of wine-soaked revelry, unrequited and requited love, and a palpable hatred of religious hypocrisy and austerity.

Indeed, even after decades of repressive Islamist rule, Iran is still full of apparent contradictions. It is run by a highly moralistic, puritanical clergy, yet cannabis and heroin are more freely available than in most Western countries;[4] a country where producing music with a lone female voice is illegal, yet relatively early-term abortion is not;[5] where most people are constantly on guard against expressing true political opinions, yet one will find an old woman who will loudly shout "Long live the shah!"; where nepotism reigns at almost every level of society and wealth and power go hand in hand, yet many of its most powerful political figures were three decades ago "riding donkeys in the provinces" as one Tehran resident put it.[6]

Advocates of the Islamic Republic's imminent demise point to the small semi-nationalist, Zoroastrian revival burgeoning among the youth of Iran. The Faravahar, the symbol of the religion, is a common sight on key-rings and hanging from rearview mirrors. For some it simply represents Iran and its past glory. But for others, it is a real spiritual alternative to Islam. As Ali-Reza, a construction worker in his fifties from south Tehran told me: "My grandparents were Zoroastrian, but my parents were forced to convert. … We are still Zoroastrian in our hearts, but in Islam, if you change your religion, they kill you," he adds, followed by several expletives.

But one must be careful not to get carried away with this narrative. For every Zoroastrian revivalist, for every youth in north Tehran who spits at a passing bearded militiaman; for every exile who speaks in glowing terms of the shah; for every student in Shiraz who visits the bathroom with the words "I need to say hello to our President (Ahmadinejad)"— it is hard to escape the conclusion while travelling around the country that those who demand nothing less than the total abolition of the Islamic Republic are in a clear minority. Still, it is a minority that history and demographics would suggest is steadily growing.

Why No "Iranian Spring"?

With the ostensibly pro-democratic upheavals in the Arab world in 2011, many were asking why there were no equivalent mass protests in Iran. In fact, in the earliest days of the Arab uprisings, Tehran witnessed a series of sizeable demonstrations. Two protesters, Sane Jaleh and Mohammed Mokhtari, were killed on February 14-15, 2011. Amazingly, the state-run media tried to claim that they were in fact pro-government activists and that they were killed by either anti-regime terrorists or supporters of Green Movement leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi—a quite ludicrous notion that was conclusively refuted by interviews carried out with the men's friends and family.[7]

However, the bulk of the Iranian population did not back these February-April protests. Even among north Tehran's educated middle-class, the stronghold of the opposition movement, the prevailing feeling since the failed 2009 anti-government "Green Movement" demonstrations is one of cynicism and despair. Shokoufeh, 27, is an artist and veteran of antigovernment activity. When I asked her in March 2011 of her estimated time-frame for the collapse of the regime, she said,

Twenty, thirty years. If we all protest now, and don't give up, they will kill thousands of us. They don't care. They have all the power, all the guns, and they consider us traitors. They will kill as many of us as they want; they will win easily.

There is a hard-line element of the Iranian population, estimated at anywhere between 10 to 25 percent, that is willing to die and kill for the Islamic Republic. Furthermore, this militant minority has a monopoly on political and military power. The genius of the Islamic Republic is that for every state and civic institution—parliament, judiciary, military—there is a parallel, unaccountable religious body to either mirror it or police it. The on-the-ground authority of the paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and Basij militia exceeds that of the official Iranian military and police respectively.[8]

In short, the regime is strong and dynamic. Its byzantine political structure provides fundamental veto powers to any attempt at systemic, democratic change from within, and its sophisticated security and military apparatus dwarfs anything that could conceivably be mustered by the opposition. And there is no indication that the supreme leader and his circle of ayatollahs have any intention of "giving up one iota"[9] of control over the reins of power. Indeed, just the opposite is true.

Ahmadinejad Down, Ayatollahs Rising

In 2009, Ayatollah Khamene'i took the unprecedented step of publicly backing incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election victory against the reformist opposition and its claims of electoral fraud, declaring the victory a "divine assessment."[10] Several days later, as protests continued to escalate, the supreme leader appeared to backtrack somewhat, announcing that he had ordered the Guardian Council to investigate the claims of fraud—who, of course, denied the claims.[11]

Virtually all serious commentators have alleged some degree of fraud in the elections. The accusations came not only from every opposition candidate but from numerous nongovernment clerics and from foreign journalists.[12] Some results, such as Mousavi's loss in his own home province of East Azerbaijan, were too hard for many to swallow.[13] But to what extent Ahmadinejad's victory reflected, or failed to reflect, the majority's genuine preference has been hotly debated. Polls conducted by Western organizations both before and after the June 2009 elections, showed anywhere between a 12 percent to 39 percent[14] margin in favor of Ahmadinejad. However, such polls are themselves subject to a myriad of weaknesses, not least self-censorship.

Still, the Guardian Council's alliance with the president turned out to be ephemeral. Ahmadinejad and his circle have never been true orthodox conservatives. Instead, he is a part of a "religious nationalist" current within the broader conservative milieu. Ayatollah Khomeini was famous for his anti-nationalism: "Those who say that we want nationality, they are standing against Islam... We have no use for the nationalists. … Islam is against nationality."[15] In a Machiavellian twist, the president is now being derided as a "deviant" by the conservative establishment, accusing him and his inner circle of having messianic aspirations[16] and of trying to usurp the supreme leader and the velayet-e-faqih.

Ahmadinejad's closest friend and confidant Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whose daughter is married to the president's son, is particularly loathed by the orthodox conservatives and has even been jeered at by hardliners in the streets. It was the general opinion, both within and outside Iran, that Ahmadinejad was grooming Mashaei to be his successor (the presidency has a two-term limit).[17] This now seems impossible. When Ahmadinejad caused outrage by appointing Mashaei as first vice president (one of twelve VPs), Khamene'i quickly ordered Mashaei to resign from the cabinet, forcing Ahmadinejad to appoint him his chief of staff instead.[18] After being relentlessly slandered in the conservative state-run press, Mashaei has now been implicated in the largest corruption scandal in the republic's history—as have several of Ahmadinejad's other close associates.[19]

The antipathy does not end there. On November 21, 2011, Ahmadinejad's top media advisor and chief of the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Ali Akbar Javanfekr, was arrested and handcuffed by security services in his own office. Reportedly, only a personal telephone call from the president secured Javanfekr's release.[20]

In the ultimate affront to what semblance of democracy the country has, in mid-October, the supreme leader casually remarked that the position of a popularly-elected president may be abolished "someday in the distant future" and replaced with a prime minister appointed by the parliament.[21]

These events mark a high point in Khamene'i's involvement in politics from which he is traditionally supposed to be aloof. With Mousavi under indefinite house arrest,[22] and Ahmadinejad's faction despised if not decisively discredited in the eyes of the Guardian Council, it is hard to imagine what kind of reformist candidate might be allowed to run—let alone succeed—in the upcoming 2013 presidential elections.

Regime Change and the Pitfalls of Intervention

It has been a busy few months in Washington-Tehran diplomacy. First there was the FBI's revelation of a plot by Iranian nationals to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States (and possibly bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies),[23] followed by a damning International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report[24] and Washington's promise of increased sanctions,[25] then by the downing of a U.S. spy drone,[26] and now, according to some reports, by placing the Revolutionary Guards "on a war footing" in anticipation of further escalation.[27]

Keeping all these recent developments in mind, it is easy to understand why the rhetoric in favor of regime change and confrontation has escalated in the United States. At a recent Republican Party presidential debate, Newt Gingrich argued that not only was regime change in Iran possible but that it could be accomplished within a year.[28] Indeed, some of the Republican presidential candidates seem to have been trying to outdo each other in their willingness to use the "military option" to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

The problem with this kind of posturing, and any possible campaigns of solidarity with the opposition, is the strengthening of the regime's already dominant "siege-mentality"—thereby forfeiting more credibility, in a domestic political sense, to the hard-line conservatives. The success of the elites running the Islamic Republic depends heavily on their ability to assume the moral high-ground for their domestic audience—regardless of how twisted their moral compass might seem to outside observers. Events like the seizure of the U.S. drone or presidential candidates hinting at invasion are huge propaganda coups for the regime.

In the words of the pro-Western, antigovernment Parisa, a 28-year-old teacher from Shiraz: "I hate the government, but I hate more that [John] McCain would come over here and attack our country... Also, it would be a disaster. It would make Iraq look like nothing."

The Waiting Game

Some argue that sanctions have the same effect of rallying the Iranian people behind the regime, but conversations with Iranians have not borne this out. Whether an Iranian is likely to place the blame for the sanctions on Ahmadinejad's hostile statements or U.S. and European hawkishness tends to depend on their preexisting political views. It is true that sanctions cannot do much to hinder the activities of the likes of the Qods Force, the external Iranian intelligence agency, or the "millionaire mullahs,"[29] but their loosening or tightening can be an invaluable pressure card against the regime.

For all the ayatollahs' political maneuverings, there is no doubt about the regime's "protracted crisis of legitimacy"[30] since the 1990s. So much so that, in sharp contrast to the Islamist surge elsewhere, Iran may be the world's only sizeable Muslim-majority nation where Islamism is on the decline. Whether this makes the regime's collapse both inevitable and unpredictable, as suggested by Carnegie Endowment scholar Karim Sadjadpour, remains to be seen.[31] For now, all eyes are on the 2013 elections

Brendan Daly is a journalist with extensive experience in the Middle East and conflict and post-conflict zones.

[1] BBC News, Nov. 8, 2011.

[2] Melik Kaylan, "How a Regime Change in Iran Would Transform the World," Forbes, July 24, 2010.

[3] Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2008), chap. 6.

[4] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, July 18, 2005.

[5] BBC News, Apr. 12, 2005.

[6] Author interview, Mar. 2011.

[7] The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 17, 2011; Frontline, Public Broadcasting Service, Tehran Bureau, Feb. 16, 2011.

[8] Harold Rhode, "How Iran's Rulers Think about the Nuclear Program," Hudson New York, Dec. 15, 2011.

[9] Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Islamic Republic of Iran, Tehran, Oct. 9, 2011.

[10] Time Magazine, June 15, 2009.

[11] Press TV (Tehran), June 29, 2009.

[12] See, for example, Agence France-Presse, July 7, 2009; Reuters, June 13, 2009.

[13] Ynet News (Tel Aviv), June 13, 2009.

[14] "Iran: Public Opinion on Foreign, Nuclear and Domestic Issues," International Peace Institute, New York, Dec. 8, 2010; "Iranian Opinion on Current Issues," WorldPublicOpinion.org, Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2009.

[15] Mehregan Magazine (Washington, D.C.), Spring and Summer 2003, p. 16.

[16] Mohebat Ahdiyyih, "Ahmadinejad and the Mahdi," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2008, pp. 27-36.

[17] The Guardian (London), Apr. 21, 2011.

[18] Reza Molavi and K. Luisa Gandolfo, "Who Rules Iran?" Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2010, pp. 61-8.

[19] Newsweek, Nov. 21, 2011.

[20] The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2011.

[21] insideIRAN (New York), Nov. 1, 2011.

[22] Amnesty International, London, Sept. 29, 2011.

[23] ABC News, Oct. 11, 2011; al-Jazeera TV (Doha), Nov. 19, 2011.

[24] Voice of America News, Nov. 10, 2011.

[25] BBC News, Dec. 1, 2011.

[26] The Scotsman (Edinburgh), Dec. 14, 2011.

[27] The Daily Telegraph (London), Dec. 5, 2011.

[28] The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24, 2011.

[29] Paul Klebnikov, "Millionaire Mullahs," Forbes, July 21, 2003.

[30] Danny Postel, "The Specter Haunting Iran," Frontline, Public Broadcasting Service, Tehran, Feb. 21, 2010.

[31] Paul R. Pillar, "Inevitable and Unpredictable Regime Change in Iran," The National Interest, May 14, 2011.

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Johnson on Inner-Iran Feud of Shias

John R. Houk

© May 2011

Gary H. Johnson, Jr. is one of my heroes in exposing Islam as an unfriendly religion toward American Liberty as has been built upon from Christians seeking religious tolerance of their particular form of worship and from political experimental concepts derived from English political philosophers such as Locke and others.

I used to have a near direct connection to Mr. Johnson from website days in which there was a drive to make personal websites profitable for his insightful essays. Some of those websites are still up and are a good source for research into Islam:

·       United Against Islamic Supremacism

·       The AfPak Reader

·       The AfPak Gazette

Gary the expert was having a difficult time with name recognition to drive enough web readers to make a buck. Mr. Johnson’s pursuit to pay the bills with the awesome knowledge he has acquired led him to seek employment or partnership (I’m not sure how it worked out) somewhere else. Currently Gary H. Johnson’s (Jr.) pursuits seem to be with the Victory Institute where he is a Senior Editor.

Here at SlantRight.com on the Search Button, if you type Gary H. Johnson, Jr. you will find a significant amount of posts under his name.

Below is a Johnson article I located Family Security Matters thanks to Stop Radical Islam. Johnson peers into the theopolitical backroom struggles of a near open feud between Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

JRH 5/17/11

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Iran: The Purge of the Hojatieh Society

Showdown in the Shia Corridors of Power

By Gary H. Johnson, Jr.

May 7, 2011

Family Security Matters

“A nation from the East will rise and prepare the way for the coming of the Mahdi”

-Prophet Muhammad, Hadith tradition

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s defiance of Ayatollah Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Leader, is no laughing matter. An 11-day strike by President Ahmadinejad has ended with the arrest of 25 of his associates on the charge of sorcery – a charge which carries the penalty of death.

Ahmadinejad’s Chief of Staff, Esfandiar Rahim Masheia, lies at the heart of the controversy. Rumor has it that “Mashaei allegedly occasionally enters a trance-like state to communicate with the Twelfth Imam or will sometimes randomly say ‘hello’ to no one at all and then explain that the Twelfth Imam just passed by.”

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".

Following the 2009 elections, Ayatollah Khameini rejected Ahmadinejad’s decision to raise Mashaei to the position of First Vice President. Ahmadinejad eventually relented and made him Chief of Staff.

The rift between President Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khameini came to a head in late April. President Ahmadinejad asked the Minister of Intelligence, Heidar Moslehi, to resign due to concerns that Moslehi was stoking criticism of his Chief of Staff.

President Ahmadinejad accepted the resignation of Minister Moslehi on April 17th. However, Ayatollah Khameini refused to accept the resignation. The Iranian news website Azad Negar noted that the Intelligence Minister’s resignation followed Moslehi’s decision to replace the chief of the Intelligence Ministry’s Bureau of Planning and Budget. Notably, the chief of the bureau was a political ally of Ahmadinejad’s Chief of Staff, Mashaei.

The Ayatollah ordered Moslehi to remain in his position. President Ahmadinejad then staged a strike for 11 days that placed the future of his administration in question. Ahmadinejad refused to return to the Presidential Palace to reside over his cabinet meetings with Moslehi present. A sulking Ahmadinejad also canceled an official visit to Qom, a place often described as Iran’s holiest city. These two moves caused 12 Ministers of Iran’s Parliament to call for President Ahmadinejad’s impeachment.

President Ahmadinejad’s political gyrations in support of his Chief of Staff were read as a breach of the traditional power-sharing agreement in Iran. In response Ayatollah Khameini, as the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Establishment of Iran, has apparently chosen to purge the propaganda arm of a millennial cult known as the Hojatieh Society. The Hojatieh’s influence in Ahmadinejad’s inner circle is well documented.

Dore Gold captures the essence of the Hojatieh Society’s political drive for power in his recent release The Rise of Nuclear Iran:

Founded in 1954, its twofold mission was to fight the Bahai faith and pave the way for the reappearance of the Mahdi. It did not accept Khomeini’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih, the rule of the jurisprudent, since the arrival of the Mahdi make a cleric to represent him in the interim unnecessary.

Mubarak’s fall from power in Egypt on February 11th 2011 prompted the Iranian President Ahmadinejad to remark on the Arab Spring,

“This is a global revolution, managed by the imam of the ages.”

Ahmadinejad’s speech in Tehran’s Azadi Square sent alarm bells through the Qom Establishment. If the Mahdi, the Hidden Imam, had indeed returned from his occultation as Ahmadinejad was suggesting, than the institution of the vilayet-e faqih, the beating heart of the Khomeini Revolution, was no longer the source of authority in Iran. The release of an Ahmadinejad-sponsored documentary in mid-March advanced the notion that the Mahdi was orchestrating the Arab Spring.

Conservative clerics in Iran were critical of President Ahmadinejad’s disobedience of the Ayatollah in the wake of Moslehi’s reinstatement.

Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, a hardline cleric close to Khamenei, warned that disobeying the supreme leader – who has the ultimate power in Iran – is equivalent to "apostasy from Allah".

Reports indicate that the Ayatollah has told Ahmadinejad to either accept Minister Moslehi’s reinstatement or resign from the presidency. The stand-off has placed Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei at the center of the storm.

"Currently Mashaei is the real president," said Hojjat ol-Eslam Mojtaba Zolnur, the Supreme Leader's representative in the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).

Further Zolnur remarked, “Mr. Ahmadinejad has held on to a decaying rope by relying on Mashaei.”

The row over Minister Moslehi’s reinstatement is further complicated by the release of the March documentary about the Hidden Imam’s return. Conservative clerics have accused Ahmadinejad’s inner circle, including Mashaei, of releasing the video. The return of the twelfth Imam is a sacred event in Shia Islam that velayat loyalists believe cannot be predicted. The fact that the documentary claims to predict the coming of the Mahdi is seen by Khomeinist clerics as proof of a “deviant current” within the ranks of Ahmadinejad’s power brokers.

Ahmadinejad returned to the Presidential Palace on May 1st to contemplate the path forward. By May 5th, the Guardian revealed the Ayatollah Khameini’s moves to place pressure on Ahmadinejad to support the velayat-e faqih:

Since Ahmadinejad's return this week, at least 25 people, who are believed to be close to Mashaei, have been arrested. Among them is Abbas Amirifar, head of the government's cultural committee and some journalists of Mashaei's recently launched newspaper, Haft-e-Sobh.

President Ahmadinejad is not eligible for re-election in 2013. It is believed that President Ahmadinejad is grooming Esfandiar Rahim Masheia to take the keys to the Presidential Palace.

Tradition holds that the Mahdi will return to the earth in a time of great chaos. The Hojatieh Society believes this chaos can be engineered. In that strain, the forced resignation of Larijani on the nuclear negotiation front in October 2007 as well as the firing of Foreign Minister Mottaki in December 2010 foreshadowed the attempt to kick Minister Moslehi to the curb in April 2011.

According to Dore Gold, the belief that the Mahdi’s return was imminent rather than an end-times construct amounted to “an enormous irrational factor” in the Iranian Nuclear question.

The recent death of Osama bin Laden has introduced an unexpected wrinkle in the activities of Islamists in the Arab Spring; however, the ouster of Ahmadinejad would dramatically alter the geopolitical picture of the Greater Middle East.

The U.S. Special Representative of the Central Region, Dennis Ross, has led the way to a U.S.-Muslim Engagement which began in a June 2009 Cairo address which witnessed an open hand of American negotiations slapped aside by Ahmadinejad’s crack down on the Iranian Green Movement. The foundation of the Ross statecraft of engagement was defining Iran as a “rational” actor. After over a year of diplomatic overtures and sanctions activities, in an October 2010 address to AIPAC, Dennis Ross noted:

Iran’s own behavior over the past two years…has demonstrated that it prefers defiance and secrecy to transparency and peace.

In addition to unilateral sanctions from the United States, Ross highlighted the international community’s push to isolate the Iranian Regime:

UNSCR 1929 bans a wide range of Iranian activities including ballistic missile activity, Iranian investment in nuclear industries abroad, and the export of certain heavy weapons to Iran, which the Russians in particular have used as the basis for canceling the sale of an advanced air defense system to Iran.

The resolution provides mechanisms for inspecting Iranian cargo and seizing contraband, and requires member states to exercise vigilance when conducting business with any Iranian entity, including the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s shipping firm IRISL.

The combination of international pressure and a challenge to the supremacy of the Khomeinist doctrine of the velayat-e faqih has led to the Ayatollah Khameini’s recent push to purge the “irrational” Hojatieh elements from the Tehran regime.

Ironically, in order to establish a presence as a “rational” actor in a bid to claim the title of Superpower of the Middle East, Ayatollah Khameini has chosen to embark on a literal witch hunt.

Ahmadinejad may survive the purge. Indeed, the purge may be nothing more than a dramatic hoax to satisfy Western criticism of Iran’s colorful past in the industry of state-sponsored terrorism. Only a revisionist history of Iran can dismiss the Islamic Establishment of Iran’s support of organizations ranging from Hezbollah to Hamas to Al Qaeda.

At present, the only certainty is that any and all aspirations of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei to win the Iranian Presidency have been sacrificed to the geopolitics of regional hegemony.

The Western world is now witness to the spectacle of the Islamic Establishment of Iran achieving the status of “rational” actor by charging upstarts within its administration of sorcery.

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Johnson on Inner-Iran Feud of Shias

John R. Houk

© May 12, 2011

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Iran: The Purge of the Hojatieh Society

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Gary H. Johnson, Jr. is the Senior Advisor for International Security Affairs at the Victory Institute and is host of The Elemental Struggle on the Radio Jihad Network at 6pm every Wednesday.

The views expressed in the articles published in FamilySecurityMatters.org are those of the authors. These views should not be construed as the views of FamilySecurityMatters.org or of the Family Security Foundation, Inc., as an attempt to help or prevent the passage of any legislation, or as an intervention in any political campaign for public office.



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