by Alex Evans | Jun 24, 2009 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
In today’s NY Times, Roger Cohen observes that “Iran’s 1979 revolution took full year to gestate”, and suggests that “the volatility ushered in by the June 12 ballot-box putsch of Iran’s New Right is certain to endure over the coming year”. He argues that the Islamic Republic has been weakened in five key ways as follows:
- The supreme leader’s post — the apex of the structure conceived by the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — has been undermined. The keystone of the arch is now loose. Khamenei, far from an arbiter with a Prophet-like authority, has looked more like a ruthless infighter. His word has been defied. At night, from rooftops, I’ve even heard people call for his death. The unthinkable has occurred.
- The hypocritical but effective contract that bound society has been broken. The regime never had active support from more than 20 percent of the population. But acquiescence was secured by using only highly targeted repression (leaving the majority free to go about its business), and by giving people a vote for the president every four years. That’s over. Repression will be broad and ferocious in the coming months. The acquiescent have already become the angry. You can’t turn Iran into Burma: The resistance of a society this varied and savvy will be fierce.
- A faction loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, fiercely nationalistic and mystically religious, has made a power grab so bold that fissures in the establishment have become canyons. Members of this faction include Hassan Taeb, the leader of the Basiji militia; Saeed Jalili, the head of the National Security Council and chief nuclear negotiator; and Mojtaba Khamenei, the reclusive but influential son of the supreme leader. They have their way for now, but the cost to Iran has been immense, and the rearguard action led by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a father of the revolution, and Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, will be intense.
- Iran’s international rhetoric, effective in Ahmadinejad’s first term, will be far less so now. Every time he talks of justice and ethics, his two favorite words, video will roll of Neda Agha Soltan’s murder and the regime’s truncheon-wielding goons at work. The president may prove too much of a liability to preserve.
- At the very peak of its post-revolution population boom, the regime has lost a whole new generation — and particularly the women of that generation — by failing to adapt. Thirty years from the revolution, the core question of this election was: Must Iran stand apart from the forces of economic and political globalization in order to preserve its Islamic theocracy? Or is it confident enough of its Islamic identity, and its now firmly established independence from America, to trash the nest-of-spies vitriol and an ultimately self-defeating isolation? The answer has been devastating.
by Charlie Edwards | Jun 23, 2009 | Global system, UK
Like you I am eagerly awaiting HMG’s national security strategy update set for this Thursday and next week’s IPPR report on national security.* Both publications have been making their way round Whitehall in the last few weeks – both are excellent pieces of work. But I’m a concerned. In a ‘gem’ of a comment piece today Philip Stephens suggests that:
‘Safeguarding national security may be the first duty of government, but it seems the least said the better before the general election…’ ‘When it comes to defence, we are greeted with a conspiracy of silence…’
This is true up to a point (a General Election hasn’t yet been formally called – so once the firing gun is sounded it’s every security soundbite for themselves) but there is something else – I don’t think the two reports are actually going to catalyse the debate on national security parties should be having. By the looks of it we’re only going to discuss one aspect: defence. For example:
The IPPR report enunciates the multiple challenges – from a fast-shifting geopolitical landscape and widespread state failure to nuclear proliferation and jihadi terrorism – that should be preoccupying political leaders. It looks beyond conventional external threats to the risks flowing from climate change, energy shortages and domestic radicalism. Britain will not have much use here for fast jets and nuclear submarines.
Well quite.
Is it really sensible to focus solely on defence? It’s an obvious line of attack for think tanks – and where Lords Ashdown and Robertson feel most comfortable – but I would suggest there are more important issues that need to be discussed in this fast-shifting geopolitical landscape. And lest we forget two of the three main political parties have already gone on record committing to a strategic defence review if they are in Government (I’d suggest the Labour manifesto will also include a promise of one too).
Finally I can’t believe that Britain’s European woes will be solved by simply strengthening the European arm of NATO – after all as Stephens says himself:
Strong relations with Washington will depend increasingly on what Europe, rather than simply Britain, brings to the security table.
This issue is where we need to pitch the debate on national security – it is utterly pointless to talk about platforms (carriers, tanks, planes) if there is no sense of strategic direction, no reasoning behind why we favour closer (or distant) European cooperation, or what the special relationship actually means in practice. Britain’s role needs to be better articulated – until then we will lurch from one policy issue to the next… and that’s not going to help anyone.
*Updated
Update Two: Here’s a good example from the Spectator of how the defence debate is going to go in the next few days – a set of complex issues, relationships and decisions boiled down to an overly simplistic, and crass argument:
This country faces a moment of decision: we either properly fund and equip our armed forces or we retreat from our role on the world stage. If the Conservative party believes that this country should be more than just a peace-keeping nation, then it will have to be prepared to increase defence spending.
Update 3: From The Times today: The Army can’t soldier on without more men Very observant, but somewhat out of step with news that Army chiefs have drawn up emergency plans to cope with an unprecedented recruitment surge following the collapse of Britain’s jobs market.
by Alex Evans | Jun 23, 2009 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
…with the basiji, it turns out:
Nokia Siemens Network has confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls. It told the BBC that it sold a product called the Monitoring Centre to Iran Telecom in the second half of 2008.
Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between the Finnish and German companies, supplied the system to Iran through its Intelligent Solutions business, which was sold in March 2009 to Perusa Partners Fund 1LP, a German investment firm. The product allows authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic.
by Alex Evans | Jun 23, 2009 | Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa
There’s some interesting backstory to the Tehran protests in, of all places, this month’s UK edition of GQ – which, as chance would have it, sent Ed Caesar off to do a piece on Tehran’s party scene not long before this month’s elections. His observations are fascinating in the light of subsequent events.
The article’s not on the web, but here are a few excerpts:
Two thirds of Iranians are under 30 years old, a product of the huge loss of life in the Iran-Iraq war of the Eighties and the subsequent baby boom. And, while many of this generation have left (every year 150,000 relocate to America, Britain, Australia and Canada), a significant number have stayed.
Now, a minority of the most daring young people – steeped in Western influences through travel, satellite TV and the internet – have created a home-grown scene that is wild, addictive and constricted to the inside of each other’s homes. In public, they play ball with the Islamic regime. In private, they just play.
[snip]
The Tehran party scene may be the by-product of a repressive state, but it’s anything but a revolutionary breeding ground. When politics is discussed at these gatherings, it is only to confirm who will be voting in the elections, or whether it’s all a waste of time. No plots are hatched. But the Iranian intelligence agencies, clearly, think differently.
[snip]
Jafar, a wisecracking 25-year-old pianist whose father was a member of Frozen Hot Tall, Iran’s first rock band in the Sixties, tries to explain what the parties are really about. “Tehran is out-of-control crazy,” he says. “But it’s not healthy. Everyone is doing everything to extremes. I was at a party the other day. There were 80 people there – from 15-year-old kids to old people of 75 – and everyone was so drunk it was unreal. Our use of drugs, our relationships, our parties, everything is so extreme. And, when the police come, we have to pay them a lot to bribe them to go away.” …
One story doing the rounds in north Tehran concerns a rich, gay art collecter who recently threw the mother of all parties at his house in the suburbs. When the police burst through the front door, they not only found people dressed inappropriately, but a smorgasbord of drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy. The icing on the cake was the owner’s collection of irreverent artworks, including his paintings of mullahs in compromising positions. The story goes that he had to pay $200,000 for the problem to go away – an unofficial record.
[snip]
Markan … tells me that he travelled to Germany with his band, Dash, to play some gigs but, despite the freedoms he enjoyed there, couldn’t wait to get home. “I was so homesick for my family, I cried when I spoke to my father,” he says, without shame.
Here seems to be the key to understanding the party people of Tehran. They are a generation trapped between the past and the present – a group who still believe in the importance of family, but who want the freedom to express themselves as individuals. When you understand this, you start to see the parties not as displays of Western hedonism, but as something much richer, and more Persian. They are places where everyone knows everyone. They are family.
“Thank God for these peple,” says Golsa, of her friends. “If we didn’t find each other, we’d go mad.”
