May 20, 2024
Ann Arbor
(Informed Comment) – Iran’s Mehr News Service reported Monday morning Tehran
time that President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian
died Sunday in a helicopter crash in a remote area of Iran. They had been at
the border with the neighboring country of Azerbaijan to inaugurate a dam and
were going to Tabriz when the crash occurred because of bad weather. Iran has
two provinces also named Azerbaijan. The region was bifurcated in the early
nineteenth century when the Russian Empire conquered half of Iran’s Azerbaijan
and made it a Russian colony that became independent in 1991. The helicopter
crashed in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province.
Raisi was
elected president in the summer of 2021. The big features of his presidency in
my view have been:
1. He declined
to negotiate a return to the 2015 nuclear deal by the Biden administration. The
deal had constrained Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program, but Trump tore
it up in 2018 and put “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran even though it had abided
by the deal. Biden seemed inclined to reenter the treaty in 2021, but wasn’t
enthusiastic about it and Raisi’s election was the nail in the coffin.
2. He has
cultivated close relations with Russia and China to sidestep the effect of US
sanctions on selling Iranian petroleum.
3. He presided
over the crushing of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement of Iran’s young women
in 2022, which protested mandatory veiling and other patriarchal and police
repression. As the perpetrator of a massive prison massacre, he knew his way
around shooting and executing protesters.
4. He helped
negotiate a possible natural gas pipeline with Pakistan, over the objections of
the US, which wants to isolate Iran and crash its economy. Pakistan, however,
is energy poor and has not exploited its vast sun and wind power, and so is
tempted by Iranian gas.
5. He continued
his predecessor’s policies of cultivating pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, Syria,
Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza. Although he supported Hamas, Hamas did not tell him
that it was planning the October 7 attack.
6. His response
to the Gaza War (though Khamenei was the main policy maker here) was to allow
the pro-Iran militias to take symbolic actions like hitting bases with US
troops or firing rockets into Israel, but to restrain them from igniting a full
scale war.
7. He, Khamenei
and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps orchestrated the large-scale missile
and rocket reprisal toward Israel after the government of Benjamin Netanyahu
struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus and killed high ranking Iranian
officers. However, the Iranian response was announced in plenty of time for the
US to shoot down all but a couple of the incoming missiles, avoiding a huge
explosion in Israel that might have sparked a war. He was the only Iranian
president ever to have struck Israel directly from Iran.
Raisi, known as
a far right hawk and implicated in a 1988 prison massacre, was not all that
powerful. Presidents in Iran are more like American vice presidents,
subordinate to the clerical “August Leader” (rahbar-e mo`azzam), which I
maintain is a more accurate translation than “supreme leader,” which sounds
like something out of a comic book. In the Iranian system, there are four
branches of government — the legislature, the judiciary, the executive, and the
clerical Guardian-Jurisprudent. All the other branches of government are
subordinated to the theocratic Guardian.
In the thought
of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini, people in a society
who do not have high-powered seminary training are sort of like minor orphans
who need a guardian to be appointed over them. The clerical Guardian makes sure
that the people do not use their voting power for the parliament and the
president to take the country in an ungodly direction. Since Khomeini’s death
in 1989, the role of the top cleric has been filled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
85, an old-time revolutionary against the monarchist, pro-American government
of Iran’s last king or shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi.
Maybe an analogy
for Americans would be the role that Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito has
taken on, of overruling Americans — implicitly on grounds of Christian doctrine
and canon law — on ungodly activity such as abortion.
Raisi was being
groomed to succeed Khamenei as the theocratic Guardian.
Khamenei’s son
Mojtaba was the other leading contender to succeed him. However, the selection
of the August Leader is the prerogative of the clerical Assembly of Experts,
which has 88 members.
The Assembly of
Experts in turn is chosen by the Guardianship Council.
The Guardianship
Council is 12-man body that can strike down parliamentary legislation and vet
candidates for office. Half of the Guardianship Council members are appointed
by the August Leader and the other half are approved by the lay, elected
parliament. So Khamenei has a heavy indirect influence on the Assembly of
Experts, though it is not clear whether they would just roll over and appoint
his son to succeed him. Mojtaba does not have the stature as a cleric that is
usually thought necessary for such a role.
Afshon Ostovar
points out that Khamenei championed and built up the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards Corps (IRGC), which is a paramilitary alongside the conventional Iranian
military. The best analogy I can think of for the IRGC for Americans is the
National Guard, which isn’t identical to the US Army, but which was deployed in
Iraq, for instance. It isn’t a very good analogy.
Ostovar, who
wrote the book on the subject of the Revolutionary Guards points out that a new
clerical Guardian coming to power will be an inflection point for the IRGC. A
new clerical Leader could try to reduce the power of the paramilitary, or he
could attempt to ensconce it as a military junta of sorts — though still
subordinate to the clerical rulers.
There are
supposed to be elections within two months for a new president. There will be a
lot of jockeying for power during these two months, a night of long knives. As
long as Khamenei is alive, Raisi’s successor will be subordinate to the August
Leader. But the Iranian system is not fixed in stone, and the republic could
see major changes in the next five to ten years, so that the new president
could become a pivotal figure. The tendency of the regime in recent years has
been to attempt to exclude centrists from running or even serving on the
Assembly of Experts, in a coup of the hardliners. The presidential election
will tell us whether this slow motion coup is still in progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment