The neo-con movement is not at all as it is being characterized here. Essentially, it is a movement that believes demcoracy brings peace. As such, it supports the classical idealism of the US, a nation born of a democratic revolution, a nation that saved european democracy in WW 11, saved the world from anti-democratic Communism, and now seeks to save the world from anti-Democratic fascist islamism.
I recognize no posters here will agree with me, and I see no point getting into a futile debate about it. I'll leave my opinion on record, and leave it as that.
A new poll in the Arab world shows that bin laden has lost substantial support. He was right that people are drawn to "the strong horse," especially in the Islamic world. And now, thanks to the US, he is preceived as the weak horse, and paying the price. There is another factor, too. Islamist bombings in iraq and elsewhere have driven a wedge between Islamists and other Muslims, the majority, like the iraqi majority that supports the rise of democracy in their nation and who, therefore, despise the islamists who are trying to sabotage it.
In another thread last week, someone was discussing iranian democracy and its reformist katami. Here are two excellent articles by my favourite write on iran, Tehari, on the subjects.
THE BEST OF A BAD CHOICE
by Amir Taheri
Arab News
July 4, 2005
Imagine a Martian arriving in Tehran these days to observe the presidential election. The first thing he would remark is the low key in which the campaign is fought. With only a week to polling day, there is little sense of election fever. None of the candidates is holding mass rallies, ostensibly for security reasons, and few have bothered to visit the provinces to seek votes. The exercise looks more like a beauty parade with the candidates trying to catch the attention of the only person whose vote really counts: The "Supreme Guide", Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Our Martian might notice other facts.
There are eight candidates in the list approved by the "Supreme Guide". Almost 1000 other wannabes, including several former dignitaries of the regime, were told they didn't qualify. The candidates are all men, although women account for 52.1 percent of the population, according to the latest census. The average age of the candidates is 62 while two-thirds of the 45 million electors are under 30.
All the eight candidates are government employees with civil service or military careers.
Two are mullas who have branched into politics. Three others are sons of mullas, although the Shiite clergy consists of around 300,000 men in a population of 70 million.
Five candidates have a military background as former or active members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, a parallel army created by the late Ayatollah Khomeini.
Our Martian may be forgiven for forming the impression that the eight are siblings.
With the exception of the two mullas, they all wear the same kind of "khaksari" style clothes, that is to say suits that, although of costly fabric, are made to look scruffy, almost proletarian.
The candidates also use a vocabulary of around 80 to 100 words and phrases that sounds more like group-speak than political lexicon.
The substance of what they say is also similar.
They keep repeating that the system established in Iran by Khomeini is the best that mankind could imagine.
"Our system is the envy (of peoples) all over the world," says Mahdi Karrubi one of the two mullas in the race.
"Our Islamic Republic is a model for Islam, indeed for mankind," insists Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the other mulla standing for the presidency.
Other candidates express similar sentiments.
And, yet, they also say that the country has reached "an impasse", and that the regime is heading for "systemic crisis."
"We must put the revolution behind us," says Rafsanjani.
"We cannot build the future on old foundations," says Mostafa Moin, a former education minister and candidate of the remnants of the coalition that backed Muhammad Khatami eight years ago.
All the candidates pay tribute to Khomeini whom they describe as "the man who revived Islam" or "the leader who saved humanity from darkness."
They call on the voters to go to the polls to "give joy to the soul" of the late ayatollah, not to back a political program.
This is not surprising because none of the eight has presented a coherent platform. All that they offer is vague promises to curb corruption, to create jobs for the mass of unemployed youths, to house the homeless, and tame inflation.
It is not only the domestic policies of the candidates that remain a mystery. Although commentators are looking for "moderates" and "hard-liners", statements made by the eight show that none has a clear vision of the kind of foreign policy that the nation needs.
This is not surprising if only because the president has little power to set the agenda. That power belongs to the "Supreme Guide" who has the final word on all matters, with a small role allocated to the Islamic Consultative Assembly and the Council of the Custodians of the Constitution.
Because none of the crucial issues could be openly debated in a system that does not tolerate serious debate, the candidates are forced to speak obliquely, dropping a hint here and a hint there, and depending on their persona rather than discourse to win support. A Persian proverb says: Look at what is said, not who is saying it! In this campaign, however, the advice is: Look at who is saying, not at what is said!
On that basis the candidates could be divided into three groups.
In the first we find Ali Larijani, the former head of the state-owned Radio and Television and Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nezhad, the current mayor of Tehran. They believe that the source of the problems that the nation is facing is the weakening of the "revolutionary spirit." They wish to build cultural walls around Iran to save it from "invasion and ultimate conquest" by the global culture which they see as a concoction of the American "Great Satan."
In the second group we find Muhammad-Baqer Qalibaf, a former police chief, Mohsen Rezai, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Mehralizadeh, a former Revolutionary Guardsman, and Rafsanjani. These are ambitious politicians with business interests who wish to be under the limelight. If our Martian is kind he would call them pragmatics rather than opportunists. Don't be surprised if one of them, Rezai, drops out in favor of another member of the quartet, after making a deal.
The third group consists of Karrubi and Moin.
Our Martian might label them "lost souls." These are disillusioned Khomeinists who have not mastered the courage to admit that they were wrong to worship the radical ayatollah. They dream of Khomeinism without its essential ingredients of tyranny and terror something like chicken curry without chicken and curry. They know that the system cannot be reformed but still hope to reform it without undermining its foundations.
So, who is the best choice? Our Martian might ask.
The answer is that, as far as the long-term interests of Iran are concerned, the best choice is not on the ballot. What is left is a pragmatic choice.
Karrubi and Moin are out because they represent pale copies of Khatami whose failure is now acknowledged even by his younger brother Muhammad-Reza. Either Rafsanjani or Qalibaf could help the system weather its current crisis.
Rafsanjani could reassure the business community, mobilize the bureaucracy for cosmetic reforms, and avoid heightening tension in Iran's foreign relations.
Qalibaf, who is 44, might energize the estimated 3.5 million men who have so far served in the Revolutionary Guard, and speak to younger generations who feel alienated. The election either of Qalibaf or Larijani' would be a signal that Khamenei has decided to assume direct control.
With the Majlis and other organs of the regime now controlled by Khamenei the conquest of the presidency by his camp could end establishment's internecine feuds. It would send a signal to the people of Iran, and the outside world, that they are dealing with a radical regime pursuing messianic dreams.
And that, paradoxically, may be the best of a bad choice. It is almost always better to deal with a regime that is true to itself than one practicing taqiyah (dissimulation
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THE KHATAMI EXPERIENCE
by Amir Taheri
Arab News
July 4, 2005
As Iran held its ninth presidential election yesterday, few might have spared a thought for the incumbent Muhammad Khatami.
And yet who can forget the excitement that Khatami's first election in 1997 stirred around the world? Some Islamists saw his victory as a sign that politics and religion could mix without producing a deadly brew. At the other end of the spectrum some liberals tried to persuade themselves that even a despotic regime was not impervious to reform.
During the current presidential campaign, however, Khatami's tenure has been used by all the eight officially approved candidates as a warning rather than a model. Radical Khomeinist candidates Ali Larijani and Muhammad-Baqer Qalibaf spoke of the Khatami presidency as "eight wasted years" while Mostafa Moin and Mahdi Karrubi, who were in the field as candidates of the pro-reform groups, described the outgoing president as a failure.
Outside the establishment, many Iranians see Khatami as a cynical opportunist who was assigned a certain role by the so-called "tasmimgiran" (decision-makers) who pull the strings in Tehran.
"Khatami deceived us all," says dissident journalist Akbar Ganji.
"Khatami was a puppet activated by the ruling mullas," says one of his former ministers on condition of anonymity.
Both views are inaccurate and unfair.No one is deceived without wanting to be deceived, at least not twice. And yet more than 20 million Iranians voted for Khatami both in 1997 and in 2001. Nor is there any evidence that Khatami was manipulated by the "tasmimgiran".
The Khatami phenomenon is not unique to Iran. Other despotic systems have produced versions of it at different times.
The Khatami phenomenon emerges when a revolutionary regime which has been transformed into a despotic system feels the need to change course in order to negotiate a dangerous bend on its course. One sees a version of it in the pre-terror phase of the French Revolution when Danton and company practiced politics through oratory.
In the Bolshevik Revolution the Khatami phenomenon took the shape of the NEP concocted by Bukharin and marketed by Lenin. The version produced by the Chinese Revolution came with the slogan "Let One Hundred Flowers Blossom!" with Liu Shao-ji as front-man. In the 1960s Janos Kadar in Hungry and Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia represented versions of the Khatami phenomenon.
In almost every case such phenomena ended in personal tragedy for the men involved, and greater terror and repression for society as a whole.
To be sure this does not mean that Iran is heading for greater terror and repression or that Khatami may be in personal danger. It is likely that the Iranian system is not yet done with the Khatami phenomenon and that we may see it prolonged under a new president, whoever he turns out to be, for some time yet. In other words the possibility of a Khatami-bis presidency should not be discarded.
All revolutions produce types like Khatami.
These are individuals who believe that things happen simply by wanting them to happen. The technical term for their philosophy is voluntarism which regards societies as blank sheets on which idealistic elites can draw the image of their "perfect" society. Voluntarism cannot admit that the root cause of all problems a society faces may well be the very revolution that it idealizes.
"We wish to safeguard our revolution," Dubeck often insisted.
"The problem is not with socialism but its practice," Kadar liked to say.
Because idealism and optimism are twins, all versions of the Khatami phenomenon ultimately appear as real-life incarnations of Dr. Pangloss, one of Voltaire's greatest characters.
Pangloss is hired as schoolmaster for Candid, the son of a nobleman in Westphalia. Pangloss may criticize details of life in the Baron's castle. But, as a teacher of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology, he takes delight in proving that in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron's castle is the most magnificent of all castles, and the Baroness the prettiest of all possible ladies.
"It is demonstrable," Pangloss lectures, "that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles, therefore My Lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged; and they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best."
Khatami, who went on 63 foreign trips to 34 countries in eight years, never quoted Pangloss. Instead he tried to impress his audiences with quotations from Hobbes, Hegel, Locke, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Habermas, among others, and then proceeded to tell an incredulous world that the bizarre system crated by the late Ayatollah Khomeini was "the perfect model of government" for the whole of mankind.
Khatami first won election with a list of 10 promises the first of which was to "restore the rule of law."
That did not happen.
His presidency witnessed the notorious chain-killings that saw the brutal murder of two dozen dissidents and intellectuals, including Dariush Foruhar, a former minister in Khomeini's first government, and his wife Parvaneh who had their heads chopped off and displayed on the mantelpiece of the reception room in their house.
Khatami promised to bring the perpetrators to justice and failed. He also failed to find and punish those who murdered Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian photo-journalist, in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. Nor did Khatami lift a finger to prevent the closing of more than 100 newspaper and magazines, many of which had fought for his election, and to prevent the illegal arrests of dozens of journalists.
Finally, Khatami looked the other way while the student movement, which had initially formed to back his promised reforms, was crushed and thousands of activists jailed.
Khatami's second promise was to "revive the national economy".
That, too, has not happened. Iran is more dependent on oil revenues today than eight years ago. And, setting aside the recent rise in oil prices, the average income per head per annum is four percent lower than 1997 in real terms.
None of all that, however, could be blamed on Khatami because under the existing constitution the president is little more than a kind of prime minister with largely ceremonial functions in an absolute monarchy.
I know I might incur the wrath of many Iranians by saying this. But I believe that the Khatami experience was useful for Iran. It showed that Khomeinism is incompatible with democracy and that the Islamic Republic cannot become what it was not intended to be.
Since Khatami likes to quote Nietzsche rather than any Muslim philosopher, let us also enlist the support of the author of " Thus Spoke Zarathustra".
Nietzsche says : What does not kill me, makes me stronger!
This is true of Iran at the end of the Khatami experience.
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