Informed Comment

Iran’s Guardian Council startled that country when it announced that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president (1989-1997) who was among the founders of the Islamic Republic, would not be allowed to run for president in the June election. Less surprising, it struck down the candidacy of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, a confidant of outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Their exclusion is a further step toward authoritarianism and perhaps totalitarianism in Iran. For all its flaws and illiberal tendencies, the Islamic Republic did have, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a democratic side to it. Even though the presidential candidates and those running for parliament were vetted, and many excluded, a spectrum of candidates did run and elections did produce surprises. Now, the ideological litmus test for office is becoming more and more narrow, and the regime seems determined to prevent surprises even if it means ballot-stuffing.

A major challenge for the remaining 8 presidential candidates will to get anyone to care about an election conducted on a vary narrow basis, which might well be fixed anyway.

The two excluded candidates had something in common. They had caused headaches for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Rafsanjani had argued in summer of 2009 during the Green Movement that Ruhollah Khomeini’s vision of the Islamic Republic had had a strong popular and democratic dimension, and acknowledged a limited form of popular sovereignty. Rafsanjani is no democrat, and is a billionaire elitist, but he did not approve of the election being stolen that year, and he clearly did not approve of Khamenei’s authoritarian interpretation of the meaning of the Islamic Republic. I wrote at that time, in 2009, of a major sermon by Rafsanjani:

“Another piece of evidence for the popular character of the Islamic Republic, Rafsanjani says, is Khomeini’s own haste to establish lay, elected institutions and to implement a republican constitution. He maintains that Khomeini actually strengthened some of the popular institutions when he made suggestions for revision of the draft constitution. Even having a constitution is a bow to popular sovereignty, he implies, and he contrasts the haste with which revolutionary Iran established a rule of law and popular input into government with the slowness of these processes in countries such as Algeria.

Then Rafsanjani says:

“As you are aware, according to the constitution, everything in the country is determined by people’s vote. People elect the members of the Assembly of Expert[s] and then they elect leader, that is, the leader is (indirectly) elected by people’s vote. Presidents, MPs, members of the councils are elected by direct votes of the people. Other officials are also appointed (indirectly) through people’s vote. Everything depends on people. This is the religious system. The title of Islamic Republic is not used as a formality. It includes both the republican and Islamic nature.”

He points out that the parliament, president and members of municipal councils are drectly elected. But the Supreme Leader is indirectly elected, since he is chosen by the Assembly of Experts. But they in turn are directly elected by the people (i.e. the Experts are a sort of electoral college in American terms).

Opinion polling shows that Iranians mostly want the Supreme Leader to be directly elected. But Rafsanjani’s point is that even the Supreme Leader, whom some see as a theocratic dictator, derives his position from the operation of popular sovereignty.”

Rafsanjani was roundly condemned for the thrust of this sermon, which leant nuanced support to the Green Movement (who supported Mirhossein Mousavi, the candidate the regime said had lost).

Still, the exclusion of one of the founders of the Islamic Republic, and a former president, from running for this office, shocked many Iranians (see at end).

As for Rahim Mashaie, he was widely seen as a way that Ahmadinejad sought to extend his influence into the future. Ahmadinejad is a right wing populist, often having campaigned against the wealthy ayatollahs and businessmen of Khamenei’s Establishment. He also tried to maintain at least some autonomy from the Supreme Leader, insisting on making his own cabinet appointments, and was slapped down for it.

The exclusion of these two is a sign that Khamenei does not want an independent-minded president who might appeal to the people in any contest of will with the Supreme Leader.

Some observers believe that Khamenei intends to abolish the presidency and go to a parliamentary system, with a prime minister. The Supreme Leader would have more unchallenged power in such an arrangement, and would in a sense combine the powers of Theocrat and president. In this reading, Khamenei only wants a yes man as president, since this election is a way station toward ending the office.

Aljazeera English interviews Trita Parsi on the development:

The USG Open Source Center translates an article from Persian on the exclusion of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from running for president of Iran again, which I though had some humorous lines:

Iranian MP Says Vetting Body’s Move ‘Politically Driven’
Mehr News Agency
Wednesday, May 22, 2013 …
Document Type: OSC Summary …

Tehran Mehr News Agency in Persian at 0918 GMT on 22 May reported that Iranian conservative MP Ali Motahhari has said that the Guardian Council’s move to bar former President Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani from running in the June polls was “politically-driven.”

Motahhari said that it was “wrong” for the vetting body to disqualify Hashemi-Rafsanjani and approve the candidacy of nuclear negotiator Sa’id Jalili.

“This showed that the Guardian Council’s approach is political rather than legal or ideological,” the MP told Mehr.

“They have provided two reasons for the disqualification of Mr Hashemi, both of which are unsubstantiated. The first one is the lack of physical fitness, and the second one is that he played a role in the 88 sedition (unrest after the 2009 elections).”

“In order to measure the physical fitness of Mr Hashemi, I propose a 100-metre running competition between him and Mr Jalili, and a wrestling match between Mr Hashemi and Mr Haddad,” Mehr further quoted the MP as saying.

Sa’id Jalili, an approved presidential candidate who is currently the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, lost his right leg in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

“Regarding the 88 sedition too, there were slanders against Mr Hashemi and his family in the live televised presidential debates then. He asked the state broadcaster to give him air time to defend himself and they did not,” Motahhari added.

“Also, how did Mr Jalili’s candidacy get approved, given his lack of experience? Can a few meetings and negotiations with Catherine Ashton (EU’s foreign policy chief) qualify anyone to become the president?”

“I think the only solution is that the Supreme Leader approves Mr Hashemi’s eligibility to run in the election with an official decree. This is not far from imagination: After he registered his candidacy, Mr Hashemi told him (the Supreme Leader) that he would withdraw if the Leader was against it, and the Leader had said that he was not against it.”

(Description of Source: Tehran Mehr News Agency in Persian — Conservative news agency, run by the Islamic Propagation Office, and affiliated with the conservative Qom seminary; in October 2010, prominent long-time journalist Reza Moqaddasi, previously an executive director of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, was appointed to a four-year term as managing director; URL: www.mehrnews.com)

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The immense, mindless violence of a tornado hitting a small Oklahoma town, turning houses into splinters and crushing people under rubble, including children, has rightfully dominated the American airwaves for the past few days. Oklahoma is a great state, a state with profound history, a place of big plans where Native Americans play an outsized role in politics and the economy and hardworking descendants of cowboys and homesteaders build admirable lives in its cities and small towns.

Oklahoma voters need to get past the pathos, however, to reconsider the politicians they keep electing to office, who adopt policies that harm Oklahomans and directly contribute to such tragedies. Oklahoma has among the more corrupt and more despicable politics in the country, obsessed with hating gays and local Muslims (all three of them), with stingy and mean-spirited government, with controlling women, and with dirty oil and gas that is destroying our environment.

The sequestration, which your GOP politicians support, will cut funding for the National Weather Service, which performs little duties like… warning about tornadoes. Is that really what you want? If not, tell them so, and at the next polls, throw the bums out.

The hatred of government regulation (i.e. of good government) by Oklahoma’s political class impedes regulations like ensuring that there are shelters in all public schools. All they’d have to do is not give Big Oil $200 million in tax breaks a year, and they’d have the money to implement it.

Oklahoma’s senators, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, voted against relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York. You put them in office. They don’t care about people like you, living through the aftermath of a natural disaster. You should remember their position when they run for reelection.

Inhofe’s special pleading that Oklahoma’s disaster is ‘not like Sandy’ strikes the rest of the country as disgusting. This man is your public face, Oklahoma. Do you really want him there? You do understand that the rest of us have to support Federal relief aid for you in order for you to get it. We won’t hold you hostage to Inhofe’s small-mindedness, but we don’t appreciate your voting for him when you want our help.

And here’s the biggy. The tornado that so harmed you may not have been related to global warming. But it is indisputable that climate change will produce massive storms that will hit the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. By pumping out gas and oil you are dooming other small towns and big cities along the coasts to future destruction and loss of life, including childrens’ lives, of the sort you just suffered, except on a much bigger scale. You are not in any doubt that the climate can be dangerous. Please, please rethink your energy policies and turn in a big way to wind and solar (you have a lot of both) as quickly as possible. You’ve recently made a start with wind energy, but it is frankly a drop in the bucket compared with what you could do — indeed, you’re the state with perhaps the biggest wind power potential in the whole country. You need to build out your grid to supply the rest of us, and you need to put in turbines everywhere they make sense.

Your Senator Inhofe, in the back pocket of Big Oil, denies all this, and makes your state look buffoonish to the rest of the world.

Disasters require policy responses, to forestall them and to deal with the aftermath of the ones that can’t be prevented. Wise policy responses are crafted by caring, educated, wise politicians. You don’t seem to have many of those, and you need to pay more attention when you go to the ballot box. Otherwise, you are harming yourselves and the rest of us.

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PBS declined to show “Citizen Koch, a documentary about the Wisconsin public union issue, treating the influence of the dirty energy magnates who are destroying the world through climate change and funding climate change denial, among the various other nefarious things they do. This according to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. It points to the dangers of declining public funding for institutions such as PBS in favor of corporate sponsorships and the donations of the rich. No wonder investigative journalism is an endangered species!

Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films on the other hand is crowdsourced and can’t be so easily deterred:

Robert Greenwald’s “Koch Brothers Exposed”:

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The Increasingly desperate Baath regime in Syria appears to be seeking skirmishes with Israel as a way of shoring up its nationalist credentials. If the regime were under fire from Israel, that would put the rebels in the position of acting as allies of Tel Aviv and so discrediting them. Hence, Syria’s troops fired at an Israeli jeep in the Occupied Golan Heights (Syrian territory grabbed by Israel in the 1967 war). It was the fifth such Syrian provocation in the territory. Israel’s top general warned that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would “pay the price” if he undermined security in the area.

According to the USG Open Source Center, ‘Voice of Israel Network B in Hebrew adds at 1500 GMT that addressing a Haifa University conference, [Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Benny] Gantz said that Syrian President Al-Asad “encourages action against Israel in the Golan Heights.” He asserted that Al-Asad will pay the price if he undermines stability in the area and that Israel will not let him to turn the Golan Heights into what he termed Al-Asad’s comfort zone. Gantz denied Syrian claims that its men destroyed an IDF jeep that had entered its territory. According to him, fire was opened several times at an IDF patrol driving along the border fence from a Syrian position, but none of the soldiers was hurt.”‘

Euronews reports:

At Haaretz, Ahiqam Moshe David observed (via Israel News Today):

“Incidents on Saturday and Sunday nights saw bullets fired at the vicinity of Tel Hazeqa, one of the best-known IDF outposts on the Golan Heights. The IDF believes that that gunfire was accidental, the result of battles between the rebel forces and the Syrian army. Either way, no fewer than five incidents of gunfire at the Golan Heights have been recorded since the beginning of May, more than the number of attacks out of the Gaza Strip at southern Israel communities…

That said, in the aftermath of the attack in Damascus on missiles that were earmarked for Hizballah — an attack that, according to foreign reports, was carried out by Israel — the Israeli policy of retaliation was revised, as IDF officials admit. If in the past the instructions were to retaliate to all fire out of Syrian territory, regardless of whether it was intentional or unintentional, now the army is no longer in any rush to respond with firepower, as part of the effort to reduce tensions. “We’re more cautious and are less interested in clashes,” said one military official. “That’s manifested itself in taking a step back…”

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My column is out at Truthdig, looking at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s muscular new role in the Eastern Mediterranean and Syria:

Excerpt:

“Even as Damascus pushes back against the rebels militarily, Putin has swung into action on the international and regional stages. The Russian government persuaded U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to support an international conference aimed at a negotiated settlement. Putin upbraided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his country’s air attacks on Damascus. Moscow is sending sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries, anti-submarine missiles and other munitions to beleaguered Assad, and has just announced that 12 Russian warships will patrol the Mediterranean. The Russian actions have raised alarums in Tel Aviv and Washington, even as they have been praised in Damascus and Tehran. . .

When sources in the Pentagon leaked the information that explosions in Damascus on May 5 were an Israeli airstrike, Putin appears to have been livid. He tracked down Netanyahu on the prime minister’s visit to Shanghai and harangued him on the phone. The two met last week in Moscow, where Putin is alleged to have read Netanyahu the riot act. Subsequently, the Likud government leaked to The New York Times that its aim in the airstrike had been only to prevent Syrian munitions from being transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon, not to help in overthrowing the Baath government. The Israelis were clearly attempting to avoid further provoking Moscow’s ire, and wanted to send a signal to Damascus that they would remain neutral on Syria but not on further arming of Hezbollah.

Putin, not visibly mollified by Netanyahu’s clarification, responded by announcing forcefully that he had sent to Syria Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles and was planning to dispatch sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft batteries. Both U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey and Israeli military analysts protested the Russian shipments.”

Read the whole thing

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Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford write at Tomdispatch:

The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.

It’s 2023 — and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect.  They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013 — at the moment the sequester cuts began — no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested — and won — special relief.  Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.

Robust public investment had been a key to U.S. prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the Internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.

Austerity Fever

In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a set of manufactured arguments for “austerity,” which had been gaining traction for decades, captured the national imagination. In 2011-2012, a Congress that seemed capable of doing little else passed trillions of dollars of what was then called “deficit reduction.” Sequestration was a strange and special case of this particular disease.  These across-the-board cuts, instituted in August 2011 and set to kick in on January 2, 2013, were meant to be a storm cloud hanging over Congress. Sequestration was never intended to take effect, but only to force lawmakers to listen to reason — to craft a less terrible plan to reduce deficits by a wholly arbitrary $1.2 trillion over 10 years. As is now common knowledge, they didn’t come to their senses and sequestration did go into effect. Then, although Congress could have cancelled the cuts at any moment, the country never turned back.

It wasn’t that cutting federal spending at those levels would necessarily have been devastating in 2013, though in an already weakened economy any cutbacks would have hurt. Rather, sequestration proved particularly corrosive from the start because all types of public spending — from grants for renewable energy research and disadvantaged public schools to HIV testing — were to be gutted equally, as if all of it were just fat to be trimmed. Even monitoring systems for possible natural disasters like river flooding or an imminent volcanic eruption began to be shut down.  Over time the cuts would be vast: $85 billion in the first year and $110 billion in each year after that, for more than $1 trillion in cuts over a decade on top of other reductions already in place.

Keep reading How America Became a Third World Country (Kramer & Comerford)

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Bombings killed at least 95 people on Monday in Iraq, with 10 car bombs going off in the capital of Baghdad alone. Two car bombs were detonated in the southern Shiite port city of Basra, and the mostly Sunni city of Samarra north of the capital was also attacked. Most of the violence seems to have been aimed at Shiites.

Associated Press reports:

The Sunni-Shiite violence is a legacy of the way George W. Bush and the Neoconservatives governed Iraq in 2003-2008. They deliberately installed the Shiites in power, in an exclusivist sort of way. I remember Neoconservative strategist Marc Gerecht Reuel talking about the goal of putting the Shiites in power. His colleague James Woolsey, a former CIA head, upbraided me at a conference for pointing out that some Iraqi Shiite groups are closely tied to the ayatollahs in Iran. I read somewhere that the Neoconservatives were convinced that unlike the Sunni Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who sympathized with the Palestinians, the Shiite Iraqis as a functional minority would sympathize with Israel’s Jews. The Neocons were real cut-ups, with all kinds of fancy theories unconnected to reality.

The Americans played strong favorites for years. They avoided having a truth and reconciliation process. They castigated the Sunni Arabs, many of whom had had ties to the Baath Party (r. 1968-2003), as little short of Nazis, and encouraged the Shiites to fire thousands of them from government employment. At the same time the Americans closed down state factories and created massive unemployment. A ‘Debaathification Commission’ fired thousands of Sunni schoolteachers and brought in Shiite cronies instead.

Whereas in South Africa the truth and reconciliation commission sought truth over punishment, in Iraq the ascendant Shiites marginalized and victimized Sunnis with ties to the old Baath (or even just ties to Sunnis who had ties to . . .)

Those Sunnis who formed cells to engage in bombings and sniping to get the Americans back out, bequeathed a legacy of such cells, which remain active, now aimed at preventing the Shiite establishment that inherited Iraq from enjoying its ascendancy.

In all of Iraqi history from the Sumerians until 2003 there had never been a suicide bombing in that country. The technique was adopted to fight Bush’s occupation, having been pioneered by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

And now, having screwed up Iraq royally over years, Americans can’t be bothered to even report on events there in more than a sentence on their television news.

I am sympathetic to attempts to contextualize such violence, but in fact such coordinated bombings have been a feature of Iraqi life for many years. The only remarkable thing about these bombings is that they came so closely on the heels of others– in recent years the big bombing campaigns have been divided by long periods of quiescence.

It is not clear that the violence is especially connected to Syria. Similar bombings were carried out before Syria slipped into civil war. And while the Iraqi military repression of Sunni Arab protesters at Hawija about a month ago, in what some Sunnis called a massacre, has inflamed Sunni-Shiite tensions, the simple fact is that before Hawija there were coordinated bombings in several cities at once. The bombings don’t appear to have a specific political aim but rather an over-all strategic one, and to take place no matter what is happening politically.

Nor is the violence of the past week (or really the last month and a half) like that during the Iraqi Civil War of 2006-2007. Then, most of those killed were victims of neighborhood faction-fighting, and most victims were shot, not killed by bombs. The neighborhood fighting declined when they were ethnically cleansed. It is not likely that that sort of civil war will start back up again now, since there has been so much movement of populations.

What can be said is that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of the Shiite Islamic Mission Party (al-Da`wa) has not exactly been very good about reaching out to Sunni Iraqis and bringing them into his State of Law Coalition.

To be fair, large numbers of Sunni Arab Iraqis seem unreconciled to the rise to power of the majority Shiites, who are more or less allied with the minority Kurds. Small terrorist groups among them carry out these bombings in hopes of deterring foreign investment and of keeping the new order from congealing. They cannot really change the political situation with such bombings, but they can stop nice new buildings from being built or the kind of big increase in prosperity from being achieved that make al-Maliki truly popular.

They are having some success in this strategy. When I was in Baghdad a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that there were not many new buildings or construction sites and the city seemed in some ways frozen in 1991. Although Iraq is an oil state, it hasn’t been able to kickstart Abu Dhabi style building. (A developer has started work on a nice big new mall).

The bombers are, then, spoilers rather than revolutionaries, and they appear to have no coherent plan beyond disruption. It is a little surprising that they manage to keep at it despite having had no political impact at all for many years.

It is also surprising that al-Maliki has not been able to mount an effective counter-terrorism policy. How hard could it be to infiltrate the cells and bust them? Of course, even better would be to so mollify the general Sunni Arab population that they become willing to turn in the people making car bombs (you can’t make car bombs on an industrial scale without the neighbors noticing).

A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush gave his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech about how permanent warfare could now be deployed in a humanitarian fashion and without substantial loss of life to build up and maintain an global American empire. Wow.

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