Khamenei Opts for Five More Years of Ahmadinejad
Fox News, August 29, 2008
Transcript
Over the weekend, in a knockout
punch to the fanciful myth of a rupture between Iran’s
supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his hand-picked president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the mullahs’ top leader not only
defended his embattled president, he endorsed him for a
second term. So much for the much-touted schism and
preposterous inferences shaping policy toward Tehran. Is
Denver listening?
In what Ahmadinejad’s allies have described as a
''conclusive statement'' on Saturday, 23 August, 2008,
Khamenei ordered the former Qods Force
commander-turned-president to plan on keeping his post for a
second four-year term. According to the state-run Fars News
Agency, he said, "Do not think that this year is your last
year as head of the government. No. Act as if you will stay
in charge for five years." He added ''Imagine that this
year, plus the four that follow, you will be in charge, and
plan and act accordingly.''
Many proponents of incentive-centric dialogue with Tehran
have reasoned that since Ahmadinejad has less than a year
left in office and the ''pragmatist radicals'' within the
ruling security-military faction are supposedly on the rise,
Washington and its allies should just wait and work with the
next cabinet.
Khamenei’s Saturday statement has scuttled this preposterous
policy which, if pursued, would effectively let Tehran
continue its nuclear drive and terrorist meddling in Iraq.
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Khamenei’s backing of Ahmadinejad at a crucial juncture was
nothing new, but the ferocity of his verbal attack on
Ahmadinejad’s domestic critics, top among them Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, was unprecedented. According to the New
York Times, his support for Ahmadinejad ''was exceptional
because of its detailed look at domestic issues and his
categorical statements that he and the president were in
ideological accord.''
Lashing out at Ahmadinejad’s rivals for their ''destructive
negativity,'' the mullahs’ supreme leader praised
Ahmadinejad’s defiance of three UN Security Council
resolutions. He said, ''Some bullying and demanding
countries wanted to impose their will on our country,'' a
reference to demands Iran stop its uranium enrichment. ''But
our people, and the president and his ministers, stood up to
such demands.''
Rafsanjani had recently revealed that Khamenei asked him and
other pillars of the theocratic regime to tolerate
Ahmadinejad. But in what some of Ahmadinejad’s allies have
labeled a declaration of war, Rafsanjani told an audience
that ''We tolerated the executive power for these three
years. Now we can say it is over.'' He later berated
Ahmadinejad as incompetent, saying, “A country with abundant
resources should not have gas cuts in winter and power cuts
in summer, or have people spending hours in line waiting at
gas stations.''
I have previously discussed in this column, how the
ayatollahs’ regime is besieged by insurmountable political
crisis, threatening its survival as never before. After
nearly three decades of rule, the clerical regime is marred
by financial and moral corruption; it depends on tyranny at
home and expansion of its Islamic fundamentalist rule abroad
to stay afloat.
To appreciate this crisis at the very top of Tehran’s
leadership, one must understand the set of domestic and
foreign imperatives that compelled Khamenei in 2005 to throw
his full weight behind the presidency of Ahmadinejad, then
an obscure mayor of Tehran. Please see The Iran Threat:
President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis
(Palgrave: February 2008) for more details.
In early 2003, with the invasion of Iraq looming and
Tehran’s nuclear program exposed by the main Iranian
dissident group, the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI/MEK),
Khamenei made a do-or-die decision: Advance the nuclear
program and agenda for Iraq by catapulting the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps into the political foreground.
Khamenei’s strategy, supported by the IRGC’s top brass, was
simple: There is window of opportunity before the curtain
falls on us; we have to advance full speed with an inward
and outward belligerence. There is no time to fool around
with charm campaigns.
Indeed, in an apparent jab at the mullahs’ ''reformist''
president Mohammad Khatami, Khamenei remarked on Saturday
that ''The government of Ahmadinejad has stopped the process
of Westernization and secularization that had begun to
infiltrate the decision-making processes of the country."
In 2006, Khamenei let it be known that any compromise in the
nuclear standoff or in Iraq would jeopardize the survival of
the theocratic regime. He said: ''Any backing down will open
the way for a series of endless pressures and never-ending
retreats.''
In October 2005, former IRGC general Ali Larijani told it
like it is. Then, he was Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator;
now he has been designated by advocates of the status quo as
a ''pragmatist'' radical. Larijani declared, ''This is war.
If we take a step back today, tomorrow they will bring up
the issue of human rights, and the day after they will bring
up the issue of Hezbollah, and then democracy, and other
matters.''
With that in mind, Khamenei has methodically built a
political, diplomatic and military stronghold since 2003,
placing the top IRGC brass in key political and security
positions. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s win in the 2005
presidential elections was the culmination of this
''multi-layered and complex'' morph of the IRGC into a
wide-ranging military-political entity.
Shortly after his win, Ahmadinejad, formerly a senior IRGC
commander, vowed to ''spread the Islamic Revolution
throughout the world.'' With Khamenei’s blessing, he staffed
the top tiers of his cabinet and diplomatic corps with
veteran IRGC commanders.
But the regime is nonetheless decaying, after three decades
of tyrannical, corrupt and belligerent rule. Khamenei finds
himself and his regime ever more dependent on the IRGC. And
he knows that any chink in the political-military armor -
even a change of guard with another die-hard IRGC radical
such as Larijani - would be perceived as a ''retreat'' and a
sign of strategic weakness.
With debate on a viable Iran policy undoubtedly surging in
coming days and weeks, during the presidential conventions
and afterward, the strategic implications of Khamenei’s
statement must be fully understood. With four more years of
the Khamenei/IRGC-backed Ahmadinejad, the Tehran regime is
incapable of fundamental change. The only viable, indigenous
agent for change is Iran’s rising opposition and democratic
resistance.
Alireza Jafarzadeh is a FOX News Channel Foreign Affairs
Analyst and the author of "The
Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear
Crisis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Jafarzadeh has revealed Iran's terrorist network in Iraq and
its terror training camps since 2003. He first disclosed the
existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the
Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.
