Iran: Whispers from within the State Department and the Foreign Office

One advantage of passing 60 is that colleagues from your graduate studies in the US and England are often in senior positions in the US or UK government.

I attended two universities from which graduates found access to the ranks of the State Department and the UK Foreign Office. I hear from my friends on an occasional private mailing list, and right now, there is a circle of emails rapidly flowing from the bowels of each county’s foggy bottom about the crisis in Iran.

First, some background. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not have the same powers as does President Obama. That responsibility is held by the Supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

Khamenei controls the Judiciary, the Police, the National Security Council, and appoints the heads of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Khamenei countered Ahmadinejad’s statement that Israel should be “wiped off the map” by saying Iran “will never threaten any country.” Ahmadinejad does not even have the ability to tell the military to bomb Israel.

Khamenei alone has the power to overturn the results of the election or, alternately, to clampdown on the demonstrations in a Tiananmen Square horror.

So the buzz amongst the experts on this mailing list is as follows:

As is well known, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s primary candidate in the multi-candidate election is no rebel or outsider but a member of the establishment. His candidacy, however, was latched onto by democracy starved students and middle classed Iranians who demonstrated their support prior to and after the election in a manner totally unexpected by Khamenei. The Supreme leader, according to the experts, had grown weary of Ahmadinejad’s saber rattling on the international stage which had lead to a marginalization of Iran.

One does not get on the ballot in Iran without Khamenei’s approval, and Khamenei believed that as an establishment figure, Mousavi could placate the West and allow movement towards the development of widespread nuclear power (not weapons), Khamenei’s long held goal, stymied because of Ahmadinejad’s threat to develop nuclear weapons.

What Khamenei did not anticipate, because of the closed nature of Iran, was the development of the incredible support for Mousavi. The students and the middle class knew he came from the establishment, but their hope and belief was that, if elected, Mousavi would move the country towards democracy.

As female diplomat from State wrote in an essay on the list this week: “Mixing democracy and theocracy is even worse than mixing gas and water. Doing the later dilutes the gas making it harder to ignite the gas; mixing democracy and theocracy makes inevitable and the explosion greater .”

Those at State and the FO indicate that as the University and middle class agitation increased prior to the election, Mousavi “saw the light” and sent messages to France, the UK and the US indicating that he would take strong pro-democracy and pro-west stances that might not be evident in his history.

Obviously, the heads of these countries could say nothing of this, as is witnessed by President Obama’s statement today “the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised.”

Obama had little choice: to say otherwise, according to the list, would be to endorse Mousavi, and thus cause Khamenei more worry. In diplomacy, as in Obama’s basketball, you feign one way, and with the State department or Foreigh Office, through a backchannel, you go another.

And the list indicates that the backchannels are working overtime.

With pro-democracy, pro-Mousavi demonstrations of well over 100,000 every day in Tehran, the Republican Guard are pressing Khamenei to take action. The buzz from the State Office and the FO is that if it goes into another week, Iran’s theocracy could be greatly weakened.

Today’s mailing circle around the possibility that Thursday MAY be the big day. While TV and newspapers have declared the day to be Friday, the mailing list points out that would be illogical as Friday is Jumma, the day of assembly when men must pray for 2 hours beginning at mid-day. That alone would take the steam out of any demonstrations prior to 3 PM.

Already several Mullahs have broken from Khamenei, and are marching in the demonstrations; a number of women have been seen without head cover in Western coverage of the demonstrations; and one commentator on CNN estimated that half of the demonstrators’ signs were in English.

In the event Thursday is not the day, it is not because my colleagues in Washington or London were wrong, but it is instead that Khamenei and the the forces within Iran, being as Iran is largely an enigmatic State, are still twisting and turning.

Peter B. Hayward

Social Justice – We need to strive to change what we cannot accept for our all fellow human beings. We do not have the option of silence.

Copyright © 2009 Peter B. Hayward. All Rights Reserved

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