AHMADINEJAD: THE CLOCK STARTS TICKING

by Amir Taheri
Arab News

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to be sworn in as the new president of the Islamic Republic this morning, and the world will be watching for clues to policies that he might pursue in the next four years.

Even before his surprise victory in last June's election, Ahmadinejad had been the target of a massive character assassination campaign by his defeated rivals.

First he was accused of having been a member of the "student" gang that raided the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held its diplomats hostage for 444 days. But when that proved to be false, he was linked to the murder of three Kurdish leaders in Vienna in 1989, although he himself had also been injured in that incident.

The next line of attack on Ahmadinejad was to present him as an illiterate street lout with no administrative experience. But that, too, was proved to be false. In fact Ahmadinejad is the only one of the six presidents of the Islamic Republic so far to have had a proper education including a Ph.D. He is also the first to have a solid military background as well as administrative experience as provincial governor and Tehran city mayor.

The latest line of attack on Ahmadinejad, again coming from the defeated faction of the two ex-presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Muhammad Khatami, is that Ahmadinejad would be nothing but a front-man for the "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenehi. This is rich, coming from men who each served eight years as president without manifesting as much personality as a ventriloquist's dummy when it came to dealing with the same Khamenehi.

Rafsanjani and Khatami pretend to be Khomeinists as long as it suits their personal agendas. Neither was a mulla before the 1979 revolution and decided to grow beards and wear turbans when it became clear that the new regime would be dominated by clerics. Rafsanjani's main aim was to build a personal power base and help his family get rich. Khatami was happy going around the world to talk about Hegel and Nietzsche and behaving like a pseudo-intellectual in a Paris cafe.

Ahmadinejad is a different breed. He did grow a beard but did not transform himself into a mulla in order to rise in the hierarchy. He also managed to remain in touch with real people living real, and in the case of Iran today, extremely hard lives.

To label Rafsanjani and Khatami as "moderates" and Ahmadinejad as "conservative" is to miss the point. A better label for the two previous presidents is "opportunist" while Ahmadinejad could best be understood as a "radical."

Ahmadinejad's victory may well be the beginning of a long process of "de-mullaization" of the system. This may be reflected in the Cabinet he is scheduled to unveil next week. My guess is that the mullas will lose some of the key posts they have monopolized for the past quarter of a century.

Ahmadinejad has also promised to come up with a balance sheet of the past 16 years as the first step toward his anti-corruption campaign. Because the mullas have been and remain at the center of what Ahmadinejad describes as "the plunder of the nation's wealth", his anti-corruption campaign is certain to further distance the clergy from positions of political power.

Despite his strength within the Khomeinist establishment, however, Ahmadinejad is unlikely to be able to have much of an impact without appealing to the broader Iranian society that remains largely hostile to the present regime.

He could send a signal to that broader society by releasing at least some of the tens of thousands of political prisoners, often held without charge for years. Ending the captivity of Akbar Ganji, a leading dissident, would be a good gesture. In fact, the number of political prisoners more than doubled during the presidency of the "moderate" Khatami. The new president could also lift the ban on at least some of more than 150 newspapers and magazines that have been closed down during Khatami's two terms. Another good gesture would be to publish the results of investigations into the assassination of numerous intellectuals during Khatami's first term as president.

Some elements in Tehran are trying to put Ahmadinejad on a dangerous trajectory by encouraging him to provoke an unnecessary foreign policy crisis over the issue of uranium enrichment.

The Khatami administration made the foolish mistake of turning Iran's argument with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on this issue into a dispute with the European Union, and ended up by giving the EU a veto on aspects of the Iranian nuclear program. Khatami and his mentor Rafsanjani thought that they could draw a wedge between the EU and the United States and continue to fudge the issue until George W. Bush leaves the White House in four years time.

There is no reason why Ahmadinejad should provoke a crisis around an artificial issue. Iran does not have a single nuclear power station at the moment and thus does not need enriched uranium. The Bushehr nuclear power plant would not start operations for another year and, then, would have enough enriched uranium, bought from Russia, to function until 2009.

There is little doubt that the Islamic Republic has taken the strategic decision of developing a nuclear "surge capacity" to enable it to develop atomic weapons when and if it so chooses within a short time-span. A good part of the so-called "surge capacity" already exists in the shape of scientists, technicians, and machinery required for building nuclear weapons. Going beyond this at the moment could draw the Islamic Republic into confrontation not only with the EU and the US but also with some of Iran's neighbors.

Ahmadinejad's foes also want to get him involved in petty issues such as color of the women's headscarves (hijab) and the length of men's beards. In one of his last speeches as president, Khatami indirectly accused Ahmadinejad of trying to establish a Taleban-style regime in Iran. Ahmadinejad should not walk into that trap that could allow Rafsanjani and Khatami who presided over 16 years of ruthless repression appear as choirboys.

All new administrations enjoy a period of grace lasting up to 100 days, and Ahmadinejad's will be no exception. He has a tough job. A majority of Iranians are clearly unhappy about their lot and disillusioned with the revolution. The nation's economy is in a poorer shape than at any time in the past five decades. Ethnic tension is rising, especially in provinces where Kurds, Arabs, Baluch and Turkmen minorities live in large numbers. Several recent bomb attacks and assassination indicate that a new wave of terrorism may be rising in the country. Abroad Iran is more isolated than ever and left with hardly any ally apart from North Korea, Syria and Zimbabwe. Worse still, as far as Ahmadinejad is concerned, the administration is gangrened at virtually all levels with powerful networks of mullas and their hangers-on determined to ensure his failure.

Ahmadinejad should steer clear of adventurism. He should, as he has promised, expose and punish those who have plundered the nation's wealth, show the mullas the way back to the mosques, put food on the tables of the millions of poor families, and create jobs for some 10 million Iranians, aged between 16 and 60, who have been shut out of the labor market.

No one could be sure as to how sincere Ahmadinejad may have been in promising such radical reforms. But one thing is certain: His clock starts ticking today.

This item is available on the Benador Associates website, at http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/17654