During yesterday'sl debate, John McCain once again denounced Barack Obama for saying he was willing to meet with "Iranian Dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions." This is an old tired charge that he's been making for months now. We know that it isn't true, but consider, what if it was? Who would he negotiate with?
We explore that below the fold...
Let's say President-elect Obama takes a brief trip to the Middle East around Christmas and decides to do some freelance diplomacy before taking office in January. Who would he be talking to? This seems like a dumb question, right? It's obviously Ahmadinejad, who, according to McCain, Palin and all those other Republican spokespeople, is the dictator. Fortunately for both us, and the people of Iran, this is not the case at all.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has not one, but two national governments: A real one and a phony one. The real one is run by what Joe Biden calls the theocracy, and the phony one is democratically elected. The real government vets popularly nominated candidates for the phony government and the people elect it. This was the case when Ahmadinejad was elected back in 2005.
It went something like this. The incumbent President, Ayatollah Mohammad Khatami, was completely frustrated by the job, as the unelected "Council of Guardians" kept on vetoing his reform program and there was nothing he could do about it. So he decided not to run for a third term. A number of Iranian progressives declared their candidacies and got enough signatures on the required petitions to get on the national ballot. But the Guardians didn't like anyone who might challenge their power so they threw them off. All that was left for the people to vote for were a number of mullahs, a reformist Ayatollah Mehdi Karroubi, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was known to be corrupt (Forbes Magizine reports him to be the richest man in Iran), and the Mayor of Teharan, Ahmadinejad.
When counting the ballots began, Karroubi was in the lead, but then there was a news blackout, and all of a sudden Rafsanjani was first and Ahmadinejad, who no one was taking seriously and was lagging in the polls, had come in second. Ahmadinejad blew Rafsanjani away in the runoff. According to the common wisdom, this was only because he was a civilian, not a cleric. Voting in the election was extremely light
As president of Iran, has no power over the military. None. This is the responsibility of the Velāyat-e faqih, (Der Fürer in German), Ali Khamenei, who is the real dictator of Iran.
When the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989, President Khamenei, who wasn't even an Ayatollah himself, managed go get himself elected by a council of three, which of which he was a member, to the top spot, a job he can have for as long as he and his cronies want it.
Khamenei is the object of adoration of the official Cult of Personality. His picture is everywhere, painted on walls, on billboards by the side of the street, and on the walls of every store in the country. Ahmadinejad? When I was in Iran last summer, I only saw two, small and almost hidden away. Recent polls show the president less popular there than Bush is here.
Criticizing Khamenei in public is a crime, while criticizing Ahmadinejad is a sport.
So If Obama were to actually drop in unannounced into Tehran one day, who would he talk to? The Minister of Foreign Affairs is the obvious choice. He is appointed by Ahmadinejad, but like the president himself, has very limited power. The military and nuclear programs are under the direct control of Khamenei, so he would have no power of negotiations. Defense Minister Major General Mostafa Mohammad Najjar might, but this leads us to another question. If a President-elect Obama were to fly into Tehran in December, would the Iranian government want to talk to him?
Remember, the Iran/Contra affair of the 1980s took place because the Iranian governments REFUSED to talk publically to any Americans. They wouldn't talk to us, not we didn't talk to them, however things have changed since then and it is quite possible that Khamenei might have a photo op with Obama should he stop by.
But that's a fantasy. What's real is plans to reopen the American embassy as a consular mission. When Condeleeza Rice announced they were thinking about doing so, the Iranian press went nuts. The Bush administration has announced that the plans are on hold until after the election, but is still hopeful that this might actually take place in the near future. We've got one in Havana, and we like the Castro brothers even less than we like the Ayatollahs. This might be a step in the right direction.