Category Archives: Lands

Latest Brazil protests bring 250,000 on to streets

The Associated Press reports: More than 250,000 anti-government protesters have again taken to the streets in several Brazilian cities and engaged police in isolated intense conflicts. Demonstrators vowed to stay in the streets until concrete steps are taken to reform the political system.

Across Brazil protesters gathered to denounce legislation known as PEC 37 that would limit the power of federal prosecutors to investigate crimes. Many fear the laws would hinder attempts to jail corrupt politicians.

Federal prosecutors were behind the investigation into the biggest corruption case in Brazil’s history, the so-called “mensalão” cash-for-votes scheme that came to light in 2005 and involved top aides of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva buying off members of congress to vote for their legislation.

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Egypt opposition reaches out to Mubarak supporters ahead of mass protests

The Associated Press reports: Egypt’s largest opposition bloc on Saturday reached out to former members of the deposed president’s party, ahead of mass protests on June 30 demanding the ouster of his successor.

The opposition’s move came a day after some 100,000 supporters of current President Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist and the country’s first elected leader, packed a main square in Cairo to support him and challenge the largely liberal opposition that demands he step down.

Morsi won a four-year term as president with some 52 percent of the vote in a run-off last June against Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister of now-ousted Hosni Mubarak. Shafiq is now contesting the election results.

“I can’t isolate millions of Egyptian people because they were part of the National Democratic Party,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, a top leader of the opposition National Salvation Front, referring to Mubarak’s now-dissolved party. He said the invitation to Mubarak supporters did not extend to those who had been convicted of crimes under the old regime.

“The masses of Egyptian people are calling for change,” he said, adding that the plan now was to discuss national reconciliation. He made his remarks during a two-day conference entitled “After Departure,” which aims to draw up a road map in case Morsi resigns as the opposition demands.

Hamdeen Sabahi, leader of the leftist Popular Current opposition group, said a six-month transitional period would start the day Morsi steps down, during which a new constitution would be drafted and a new president elected. Others proposed that the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court should become the country’s transitional leader until new elections.

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New wave of foreigners in Syrian fight

The Washington Post reports: He was young and bright, with an education from Egypt’s premier school of Islamic studies and lucrative job offers in the Gulf.

But Bilal Farag chose a different path, friends say, one that led him to die on a distant Syrian battlefield while fighting Shiite Muslims he regarded as infidels.

“Everybody has their own goal in life,” said a close friend, Hosam Ali. “Bilal’s was to be a martyr.”

Waves of Egyptians are now preparing to follow, fired by the virulently sectarian rhetoric of Sunni preachers and encouraged by the newly permissive policies of Egypt’s Islamist government. In recent days, this city’s ancient mosques have crackled with calls for jihad, as hard-line Sunni Muslim leaders command the faithful to respond to recent escalations in Syria by the Shiite forces of Iran and Hezbollah.

The Sunni backlash has echoed far beyond Egypt, penetrating every corner of the region, where divisions between the rival Muslim sects are hardening fast. At the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, the top cleric broke down in tears on pan-Arab television last week as he pleaded with his fellow Muslims to help the Syrian rebels “by all means.”

Foreign militants have long played a critical role in the Syrian uprising, but the prospect of a fresh flow of radicalized fighters bent on waging sectarian war threatens to complicate the Obama administration’s recently announced strategy to arm the rebellion’s moderate factions. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. has secretly provided arms training to Syria rebels since 2012

The Los Angeles Times reports: CIA operatives and U.S. special operations troops have been secretly training Syrian rebels with anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons since late last year, months before President Obama approved plans to begin directly arming them, according to U.S. officials and rebel commanders.

The covert U.S. training at bases in Jordan and Turkey, along with Obama’s decision this month to supply arms and ammunition to the rebels, has raised hope among the beleaguered Syrian opposition that Washington ultimately will provide heavier weapons as well. So far, the rebels say they lack the weapons they need to regain the offensive in the country’s bitter civil war.

The tightly constrained U.S. effort reflects Obama’s continuing doubts about being drawn into a conflict that has already killed more than 100,000 people and his administration’s fear that Islamic militants now leading the war against President Bashar Assad could gain control of advanced U.S. weaponry.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports: During his more than four decades in power, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya was North Africa’s outrageously self-styled arms benefactor, a donor of weapons to guerrillas and terrorists around the world fighting governments he did not like.

Even after his death, the colonel’s gunrunning vision lives on, although in ways he probably would have loathed.

Many of the same people who chased the colonel to his grave are busy shuttling his former arms stockpiles to rebels in Syria. The flow is an important source of weapons for the uprising and a case of bloody turnabout, as the inheritors of one strongman’s arsenal use them in the fight against another.

Evidence gathered in Syria, along with flight-control data and interviews with militia members, smugglers, rebels, analysts and officials in several countries, offers a profile of a complex and active multinational effort, financed largely by Qatar, to transport arms from Libya to Syria’s opposition fighters. Libya’s own former fighters, who sympathize with Syria’s rebels, have been eager collaborators.

“It is just the enthusiasm of the Libyan people helping the Syrians,” said Fawzi Bukatef, the former leader of an alliance of Libyan brigades who was recently named ambassador to Uganda, in an interview in Tripoli.

As the United States and its Western allies move toward providing lethal aid to Syrian rebels, these secretive transfers give insight into an unregistered arms pipeline that is difficult to monitor or control. And while the system appears to succeed in moving arms across multiple borders and to select rebel groups, once inside Syria the flow branches out. Extremist fighters, some of them aligned with Al Qaeda, have the money to buy the newly arrived stock, and many rebels are willing to sell. [Continue reading…]

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A million people across Brazil say ‘it’s not about 20 cents’

Conor Foley writes: Perhaps the most politically significant moment in the two weeks of popular protests that have shaken Brazil came at the opening ceremony for the Confederations Cup last Saturday. In Brasilia’s brand new football stadium, the crowd rose to their feet, turned their backs on the national team and loudly booed the president, Dilma Rousseff.

It was not exactly a Nicolae Ceausescu moment, and talk of a “Brazilian spring” is overblown – but the crowd’s reaction shows a dissatisfaction with Brazilian politics that was latent until now.

Hundreds of thousands have marched in demonstrations protesting against the rising cost of living, government corruption and the costs of staging major “prestige” events such as the World Cup and the Olympics.

Political protests are nothing new in Brazil, nor is the extreme violence with which they are often dealt by the police. What marks the current wave out is not just that they are bigger than usual, but a sense that they represent a much broader and still not entirely articulated sentiment. [Continue reading…]

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Why Brazilians don’t want the World Cup

The New York Times reports: It has long been a source of unparalleled pride, a common bond uniting a disparate nation, something Brazilians could always point to — even in times of economic ruin or authoritarian rule — that made them the best in the world.

But these days, Brazil, the most successful nation in World Cup history, home to legends like Pelé and Ronaldo, is finding little comfort in “the beautiful game.”

In the most unexpected of ways, Brazil’s obsession with soccer has become a potent symbol of what ails the country. Ever since huge protests began sweeping across Brazil this week, demonstrators have taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands to vent their rage at political leaders of every stripe, at the reign of corruption, at the sorry state of public services.

The protests have grown so large and disruptive that on Friday, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, put forth measures to address some of the grievances.

But pointing to the billions of dollars spent on stadiums at the expense of basic needs, a growing number of protesters are telling fans around the globe to do what would once have seemed unthinkable: to boycott the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. In a sign of how thoroughly the country has been turned upside down, even some of the nation’s revered soccer heroes have become targets of rage for distancing themselves from the popular uprising.

“Pelé and Ronaldo are making money off the Cup with their advertising contracts, but what about the rest of the nation?” asked one protester, Gabriela Costa, 24, a university student.

Protesters lambasted both men after Pelé, whose full name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento, called on Brazilians to “forget the protests” and a video circulated on social media showing Ronaldo, whose name is Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, now a television commentator and sports marketing strategist, contending that World Cups are accomplished “with stadiums, not hospitals.”

With hordes of protesters rallying outside soccer matches, clashing with the police and setting vehicles on fire, FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, took pains to reassure the world on Friday that it had “full trust” in Brazil’s ability to provide security and had not considered canceling either the 2014 World Cup or the Confederations Cup, a major international tournament currently taking place in Brazil.

But the fact that soccer officials even had to address the issue was a major embarrassment to Brazilian officials, who had fought so hard to land international events like the World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games in order to showcase what a stable, democratic power their nation had become.

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Unpromised land: Eritrean refugees in Israel

P.J. Tobia writes: In 2006, 1,348 Eritreans who fled their government crossed the border from Egypt’s Sinai into Israel. By 2011, that number had grown to 17,175, with nearly a thousand crossing the Sinai to Israel every month, according to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Israeli government. Today, there are roughly 35,895 Eritreans living in Israel, as well as 15,210 Sudanese. Since 2006, some 60,000 African refugees from these countries and others have come to Israel in this way.

Rhuba arrived in Israel as many migrants do, after having fled Eritrea because of its despotic leadership, universal conscription and endemic poverty. The journey is a perilous gamble. Eritrean migrants travel hundreds of miles over land, some on foot. The threat of kidnap and torture at the hands of Bedouins who control the Sinai — which most refugees cross to get to Israel from Africa — is ever present.

According to the U.N., many do not survive the journey. Those who do are not always looking to reside permanently in the Jewish state, according to Israeli NGOs and the refugees themselves. But upon arrival in Israel, instead of refuge, many face antagonism, bitterness and a government policy that makes life closer to prison than the promised land.

They are rarely granted work permits. They have little access to health care, and few can afford decent housing. There are few schools for their children. And now, due to an immigration law effective on June 3, 2012, every migrant who crosses the border is imprisoned for a minimum of three years. Some may be held indefinitely.

Many of the migrants say they mistrust the police, while the lack of work visas forces residents such as Rhuba into unfortunate arrangements with landlords who gouge, and employers who sometimes take advantage.

“We are free,” one Eritrean in Tel Aviv told me, “but only to breathe.”

Those who arrived here before last summer believe that it is only a matter of time before they, too, are imprisoned under the new law. For a time, the government offered those who voluntarily turn themselves into immigration authorities 1,000 Euros and a plane ticket out of Israel.

Those who don’t want to leave, are worried.

“We don’t know what will happen tomorrow for us,” says Zebib Sultan, 30. “We are at risk. We are suspended like oil on the water.”

At a protest rally last May, Miri Regev, a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, said that the immigrants were “a cancer” on Israeli society. Another parliament member called them “a plague.” Protesters waved signs reading “Tel Aviv — a Refugee camp,” while yelling “Blacks out!” [Continue reading…]

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Rouhani win could bring dividends in Syria

Barbara Slavin writes: Since the surprise election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s next president, most expert commentary has focused on the potential to improve US-Iran relations and resolve the long-running dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. However, the replacement of the abrasive Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by a veteran negotiator nicknamed the ‘diplomat sheikh’ could also provide an opportunity to ease growing sectarian tension in the region and to tamp down the civil war in Syria.

During the sixteen years (1989-2005) Rouhani served as secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s relations with Saudi Arabia improved from the low points of the 1979 revolution and the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. At his first news conference as president-elect on Monday, June 17, Rouhani noted that he had signed a security agreement with the Saudis in 1998 and suggested that repairing the breach with the House of Saud would be a major priority for his administration.

Iran intends to have “friendly and close relations” with neighboring states, especially Saudi Arabia, Rouhani said. In regard to Saudi Arabia–a principal backer of opposition forces battling the Iran-supported Assad regime–Rouhani added, “We are not only neighbors but brothers.”

In the past, both Saudi Arabia and the United States have rejected Iranian participation in Syria peace talks but that attitude may shift with Rouhani in the presidency. Saudi King Abdullah was quick to congratulate Rouhani on his victory.

France, which had vehemently opposed Iran’s presence at a proposed Geneva conference, also appears to have softened its view. “My position is that if he [Rouhani] can be useful, yes, he would be welcome” at the conference, French President Francois Hollande said Tuesday at the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland, Agence France Press reported.

Russia–Bashar al-Assad’s other principal backer–has insisted that Iran attend any new talks. President Barack Obama’s administration, after first opposing this, has waffled, noting that the invitations will come from the United Nations (UN), as though the United States had no say in the matter. [Continue reading…]

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In Syrian chemical weapons claim, criticism about lack of transparency

The Washington Post reports: Despite months of laboratory testing and scrutiny by top U.S. scientists, the Obama administration’s case for arming Syria’s rebels rests on unverifiable claims that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people, according to diplomats and experts.

The United States, Britain and France have supplied the United Nations with a trove of evidence, including multiple blood, tissue and soil samples, that U.S. officials say proves that Syrian troops used the nerve agent sarin on the battlefield. But the nature of the physical evidence — as well as the secrecy over how it was collected and analyzed — has opened the administration to criticism by independent experts, who say there is no reliable way to assess its authenticity.

The technical data presented by the three Western powers is of limited value to U.N. inspectors trying to determine whether
Syria’s combatants used chemical weapons during the country’s 25-month-old conflict. Under the United Nations’ terms of reference, only evidence personally collected by its inspectors can be used to fashion a final judgment.

But no inspectors have been allowed inside Syria, so Western governments have relied on physical evidence smuggled out of the country by rebels or intelligence operatives. Precisely who acquired the evidence and what methods were used to guard against tampering may be unknowable, according to experts experienced at investigating chemical weapons claims. [Continue reading…]

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Rouhani: A survivor in the snake pit of Tehran

David Patrikarakos writes: Iran’s new president-elect Hassan Rohani is being praised as a “moderate” who might bring change to Iran and transform Tehran’s international relationships. ”What does he want?” is the question most analysts now ask, and, critically, “What can he achieve?”

The answer may be: a great deal. If he is given the right support — domestically and internationally.

For Rohani possesses the single most important qualification for any president in Tehran: He knows how to negotiate the pit of vipers that is Iranian politics.

Rohani has survived for more than 30 years in Tehran. He is the Beria of the Islamic Republic – as able as Laventy Beria to skillfully negotiate the whims of his autocratic masters to safeguard his position at all times.

As a cleric of the Islamic Republic, who followed its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini into exile in Paris, Rohani is a true child of the Islamic Revolution. Yet he is also, comparatively speaking, a “moderate.”

His first post-election promises to improve Iran’s image are positive — contrasting starkly to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2005 arrival to the world stage with an offensively defiant speech at the United Nations.

Whether Rohani will deliver, however, is another matter.

But he has already vowed to release Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, the two reformist leaders held under house arrest since 2011. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is likely loathe to free the men he blames for the unrest that so badly shook the regime in 2009. So this will be Rohani’s first test — of his sincerity and, more importantly, his ability to get things done. [Continue reading…]

Trivial editorial point, but I hope that by the day he takes office, a winner will have emerged between Rohani, Ruhani, Rowhani, and Rouhani. Maybe the deciding factor will be URLs. That of the new president is rouhani.ir, whereas rohani.ir belongs to Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammad Sadeq Hussaini Rohani.

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Erdogan: The strong man now at his weakest

Steven Cook writes: “Re-cep Tay-yip Er-do-gan! Re-cep Tay-yip Er-do-gan!” chanted supporters of the Turkish prime minister, as a friend and I made our way through the absolutely mammoth crowd that descended on the Kazlicesme area of Istanbul last Sunday to hear their leader speak. As with Erdogan’s rally in the capital, Ankara, the day before, the people who turned out here, many of whom were decked out in scarves, T-shirts, and masks supporting the prime minister, vastly outnumbered the Gezi Park protesters who have captured global headlines. Young, old, well-to-do, decidedly modest, religious, and secular all declared their devotion to the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Erdogan. When the prime minister surveyed the 295,000 souls who had come to express their devotion and thundered, “Taksim Square is not Turkey!” it was a vindication of his vision, his economic policies, and the strength of his leadership. Yet the irony was that at Kazlicesme, Erdogan’s demonstration of strength revealed his profound weakness and political vulnerability.

Anyone with even a passing interest in Turkey knows something about the Erdogan mystique. He’s the tough guy from the Kasimpasa neighborhood — literally and figuratively down a steep slope from Taksim Square — who has remade Turkey over the last decade. For the media personalities parachuted into a maelstrom of tear gas, water cannons, and pepper spray, Turkey under Erdogan is best described as an economic and political success story, a “model” of a “Muslim democracy and prosperity” for the Arab world. But Erdogan’s reservoir of support is based on a much more tangible set of factors. The fact that he presides over the 17th-largest economy in the world — it was the 16th in the 1990s — is less important than the fact that more people are participating in it than ever before. There are still fabulously wealthy and terribly poor people in Turkey, but the overall gap between the two has narrowed. That is no small accomplishment. In other high-growth countries like Brazil, China, and Russia, for example, that gap has grown.

Consistent with the kind of grassroots work that the AKP’s precursor, the Welfare Party, perfected in the 1980s and 1990s, Erdogan — the guy who used to sell the Turkish version of the bagel, called simit, from a cart on the street — has focused much of his time in office on improving the lives of ordinary Turks. In places where transportation was thin, health care was basic, and government services were non-existent, the prime minister has paved roads, built airports, established “Erdogan-care,” and forced local governments to be responsive to their constituents. As a result, Kasimpasa is not so rough-and-tumble anymore and the people there love him for it. [Continue reading…]

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Pentagon shoots down Kerry’s Syria airstrike plan

Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Twenty years ago, in a debate over the war in Bosnia, Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, issued a challenge to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. Albright wanted the U.S. to confront an aggressive Serbia; Powell and the Pentagon were hesitant. Albright grew frustrated: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Albright asked. Powell later said that he thought Albright was going to give him an aneurysm.

Flash-forward to this past Wednesday. At a principals meeting in the White House situation room, Secretary of State John Kerry began arguing, vociferously, for immediate U.S. airstrikes against airfields under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — specifically, those fields it has used to launch chemical weapons raids against rebel forces.

It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation.

Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome. [Continue reading…]

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The adventures of a Libyan weapons dealer in Syria

Reuters reports: Abdul Basit Haroun says he is behind some of the biggest shipments of weapons from Libya to Syria, which he delivers on chartered flights to neighboring countries and then smuggles over the border.

After fleeing Libya in his 20s, Haroun established himself as a property developer in Manchester. After about two decades in the British city, he returned to Libya in 2011 to fight in the revolution, where he became a prominent rebel commander.

He says he sends aid and weapons to help Syrians achieve the freedom he fought for during the Libyan revolution.

The first consignment of weapons was smuggled into Syria aboard a Libyan ship delivering aid last year, Haroun says, but now containers of arms are flown “above board” into neighboring countries on chartered flights.

In the months since Haroun began his work, arming the rebels has moved up the international agenda, with Saudi Arabia equipping them with missiles, and Washington also planning to send weapons to the men fighting President Bashar al-Assad.

Haroun spoke to Reuters over coffee and homemade cake late at night at his villa on the outskirts of Benghazi, the eastern city that began the uprising that deposed Muammar Gaddafi.

His son, a young man who spoke English with a Manchester accent, offered help with weapon prices and other details.

Haroun was upset the West had not intervened in Syria, as it did in Libya and said the opportunity to avert a larger war had been missed.

“Even when the war in Syria ends, there will be another war in region; Sunni against Shia. At the beginning, there was just Assad to bring down … now Hezbollah, Iran are involved.”

A Reuters reporter was taken to an undisclosed location in Benghazi to see a container of weapons being prepared for delivery to Syria. It was stacked with boxes of ammunition, rocket launchers and various types of light and medium weapons. [Continue reading…]

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Erdoğan is fighting the last war

Joost Lagendijk writes: Erdoğan’s rise to power is inextricably connected with changes in Turkey’s society and economy in the 1980s and 1990s that challenged the old power structures and created new spaces for conservative businessmen, media and politicians. The self-made man from Kasımpaşa is the most successful among a new generation of pious Muslims who went into politics, especially after he realized that, in order to reach his goals, he had to moderate his policies and rhetoric. Still, since he became Istanbul mayor in the 1990s, his battle has been with the old elite and their representatives in politics and society, knowing that he could count on the support of the downtrodden and marginalized plus the growing middle classes and new business elites who shared his social conservatism and economic liberalism. His sympathies have always been with like-minded companies that rose with him and not with the old and established ones like the Koç family.

That struggle has made him the most successful politician since Atatürk and brought Turkey a lot of gains that are often overlooked these days. The country has become more prosperous since the AKP came to power, nobody even considers calling the army to intervene and we have never been closer to a solution for the Kurdish problem. But, apparently, at the back of Erdoğan’s mind there was always the fear that, one day, the old elites will try to strike back at him and his party because, deep down, they can’t stand being ruled by a so-called Black Turk that does not respect their views or lifestyles.

Listening to Erdoğan, I think it is obvious that he is convinced the people who went out on the streets to protest him are being manipulated by the same old forces he has been fighting his whole political life. In his perception of reality, they want to undermine and eventually destroy the new Turkey he has been building. As is every Turkish citizen, he is also prone to believe that his old foes in Turkey are being assisted by their traditional allies abroad and in the international media.

What we end up with is a mix of worn-out conspiracy theories and a political vision based on the fights of the past.

It is tragic to see the man who contributed considerably to Turkey’s journey towards a mature democracy is now stumbling somewhere halfway through because he is unable to understand that, as a result of his own policies, Turkey has changed. [Continue reading…]

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Israel should give Rouhani a chance

Shlomi Eldar writes: It’s time we admitted the truth. Despite all the enormous efforts by the international intelligence community directed toward Iran in recent years, we really don’t know much about what is going on in the Land of the Ayatollahs.

The United States, Israel and other Western nations have launched sophisticated cyber-attacks against the nuclear reactor systems in Bushehr. Intelligence agencies know the exact role of every nuclear scientist in Iran, and where they can be found at any given moment. But despite all that abundant intelligence, there is one basic thing that they didn’t understand about this enormous country: the public state of mind.

Some 18.6 million Iranians (50.7% of all eligible voters!) proved this by casting their ballots for the moderate reformist, newly elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The popular unrest over outgoing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s policies was even greater than estimated, and it was this that motivated millions of Iranians to say “No” to the country’s spiritual leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and to vote for what was good for them. By the way, this shows that there is something else we should admit, even if it ruins the image of Iran that we have long since etched in our minds: Despite everything else, the Land of the Ayatollahs has some modicum of democracy. True, Iran is not a liberal country. It receives no high marks for its record on human rights. Nevertheless, the elections there proved that the people exercised their right to replace their leaders. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli leaders respond with scowls to Rouhani’s election

Marsha B Cohen writes: For most Israeli politicians, the news of the election of moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran, is not good. That it is considered good news by anyone else makes it that much worse.

In Poland last Wednesday, two days before Iranians went to the polls, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declared that the results would bring about no meaningful change in Iran. Hours before reports of the election’s outcome began to be announced, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank, that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, would decide who the next Iranian president would be. The imminent Iranian election would change nothing.

As news of Rouhani’s garnering more than half the votes cast in Iran began to emerge, Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, echoed the widespread view that it is Khamenei who makes all the decisions concerning the Iranian nuclear program, not the Iranian president. “After the elections, Iran will continue to be judged by its actions, in the nuclear sphere as well as on the issue of terror,” Palmor said in a statement.” Iran must abide by the demands of the international community to stop its nuclear program and cease the dissemination of terror throughout the world.”

In a cabinet meeting on Sunday morning, Netanyahu derided not only the possible impact of a Rouhani-presidency on Iran’s policies, but also whether Rouhani even deserved to be considered a moderate since Khamenei had allowed him to run: [Continue reading…]

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Why Rouhani won — and why Ayatollah Khamenei let him

Suzanne Maloney writes: One explanation is that the Ayatollah simply miscalculated and found himself, once again, overtaken by events when Rouhani’s candidacy surged with little forewarning. Indeed, it is likely that Khamenei really did expect Iranians to vote for the conservatives. After all, the conservatives have held all the cards in Iran since 2005; they dominate its institutions and dictate the terms of the debate. With the leading reformists imprisoned or in exile, no one expected that the forces of change could be revived so powerfully. When his expectations proved off base last Friday, Khamenei could have simply opted not to risk a repeat of 2009.

There is another possibility, however, and one that better explains Khamenei’s strangely permissive attitude toward Rouhani’s edgy campaign and toward the extraordinary debate that took place between the eight remaining presidential candidates on state television only a week before the election. In that discussion, an exchange about general foreign policy issues morphed unexpectedly into a mutiny on the nuclear issue. One candidate, Ali Akbar Velayati, a scion of the regime’s conservative base, attacked Jalili for failing to strike a nuclear deal and for permitting U.S.-backed sanctions on Iran to increase.

The amazingly candid discussion that followed Velayati’s charge betrayed the Iranian establishment’s awareness of the regime’s increasing vulnerability. It could only be understood as an intervention — one initiated by the regime’s most stalwart supporters and intended to rescue the system by acknowledging its precarious straits and appealing for pragmatism (rather than Jalili’s dogmatism). The discussion was also an acknowledgement that the sanctions-induced miseries of the Iranian public can no longer be soothed with nuclear pageantry or even appeals to religious nationalism.

It is therefore possible to imagine that Khamenei’s unexpected munificence, including his last-minute appeal for every Iranian — even those who don’t support the Islamic Republic — to vote, was planned. In this case, those who see Rouhani’s election as a replay of the shocking political upset that Khatami pulled off in 1997 are off base. Instead, Rouhani’s election is an echo of Khamenei’s sudden shift in 1988 and 1989, when he charged Rafsanjani, a pragmatist, with ending the war with Iraq, and then helped Rafsanjani win the presidency so that he could spearhead the post-war reconstruction program. Now, as then, Khamenei is not bent on infinite sacrifice. Perhaps allowing Rouhani’s victory is his way of empowering a conciliator to repair Iran’s frayed relations with the world and find some resolution to the nuclear dispute that enables the country to revive oil exports and resume normal trade. [Continue reading…]

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