Whatever the ifs and buts, and however it came about, Mr. Ahmadinejad has now emerged as president. A month from now, once his mandate is formally endorsed, he will take office as head of the government and the second-ranking official in the country (in name only, of course). What matters is to see what will happen and what this new landscape will look like.
1– The first point is that all power now lies in the hands of the Leader. The judiciary is directly under his supervision, and he appoints and dismisses its head. Over that head's shoulders he also has a few people in the judiciary, such as Mr. Mortazavi, who do whatever he wants for him: they arrest, convict, imprison, and so on. I agree with a fellow prisoner who said that even something as small as granting furlough to people like us is known to and controlled by the Leader personally. The Majlis (parliament) is also at the Leader's disposal. In the Seventh Majlis he cast aside all shame, disqualified 3,000 candidates, installed the deputies he wanted, and made the father of his daughter-in-law Speaker. Beyond that, through two appointed layers above the Majlis (the Guardian Council and the Expediency Discernment Council of the System), he effectively controls all of its legislation. Under the current Constitution of the Islamic Republic, even an opposition Majlis cannot pass a single bill against the Leader's wishes (as happened in the Sixth Majlis). In the Seventh Majlis they have gone further and filled the seats with deputies obedient and subservient to the Leader from the outset, so that the Guardian Council's blade is not even needed to cut down the Majlis's bills.
The monopoly state radio and television, the military and police forces, and the security forces (especially in the form of a parallel security organization) were already under the Leader's control. The free press, and even the websites that might have offered people some room to breathe and a channel for the free flow of information, have been shut down. Using that same infamous judiciary and laws that are only a caricature of law, all of them have been cut down. What remained was the executive branch and the government, and for years full control over it had become one of the Leader's dearest wishes. With this latest move in the country, a "devoted servant ready to lay down his life" for the Leader has been placed at the head of the executive apparatus. Now the Leader can fulfill his wish of many years. He can demand that meetings of the Economic Council be held in his presence and interfere in the smallest executive matters. He will do this, of course, in his own style: he likes to interfere in everything, but without the public knowing, while pinning the responsibility on this person or that. In any case, the first important and fundamental point is that what was built into the current Constitution has now been put into practice. Under this Constitution, more than 80 percent of the powers for running the country are in the Leader's hands. He is accountable to no one, and elections serve only to set up a stage set and dress a shop window. Apparently this is what they mean by "religious democracy." Now, congratulations and good fortune to all: the Leader has implemented the Constitution. We need only make sure that from now on he does not hide behind any person or any institution. He must stand naked and exposed, plainly and clearly, in the middle of the arena. From now on, unemployment and addiction, poverty and inflation, repression and insecurity, the gloom hanging over the country and the lack of recreation for young people, and every matter large and small in the country are directly his responsibility. From radio and television programs to the performance of the municipality, from corruption in the judiciary to abuses in the Ministry of Commerce, from the performance of the banks to the customs offices, from A to Z, and from the largest to the smallest affairs of the country, the Leader must be asked, and he must answer. He no longer has any excuse and cannot shift expectations onto this body or that. Everything and everyone is in his hands and appointed by him, so he himself must answer to the nation. He himself chose to create two clear ranks, black and white, and this dividing line will only grow sharper. Therefore he himself must answer to the white rank, the nation. Fifteen years ago, at the very beginning of Mr. Khamenei's tenure as Leader, I wrote to him in a private letter that the path he was taking would lead to a point where the nation would stand on one side and he on the other. (Perhaps one day I will publish these letters.) I believe that day has come. On one side stands the nation and on the other the Leader, and he must single-handedly answer to an entire nation. The next stage, which will arrive soon, is that once it becomes clear he cannot solve the country's problems, the nation will rise up against him.
2- Eight years ago, with the utmost lack of foresight, the Leader brought the military and weapons into politics. Ahmadinejad's presidency marks the official start of an era in which the regime's power base will plainly and clearly be the military and security forces. At present the Leader is courting people like Mr. Rafsanjani and Mr. Karroubi to stay around him, or trying to placate them (perhaps he himself has become frightened by the total dominance of the military and security people). But he does not understand that the gun does not easily accept an unarmed partner in power. Moreover, the logic of despotic power in general is to move toward concentration and monopoly. If the power base of this system was once the bazaar–clergy class, now that the gun has the first say, this class no longer plays a role either. The process that began with the Seventh Majlis and led to the sidelining of the main candidates of the "Motalefeh" (the Islamic Coalition Party) showed its more naked face in the "Ninth Election." It could not even tolerate Mr. Javadi Amoli, one of the most courtly of clerics. The path the Shah took has very quickly opened up before Mr. Khamenei. In the 1960s, once the Shah's militarism had fully ripened, he lost patience even with the old statesmen and the "Thousand Families," and he once said, "I threw the old statesmen into the toilet and flushed it." That ill-fated Shah set off on a course in which he thought he could run a country with the security organization and the army. When oil revenues rose as well, he imagined the world had bent to his will. He had crushed all his opponents, he had an easy rule, and he ran the country single-handedly. The logic of the gun did its work. The current Leader has set foot on the same path, with the difference that he wants to do these things in the name of religion and the clergy, and in place of absolute monarchy he has installed absolute guardianship (velayat-e motlaqeh). It is no longer only people like Mr. Vahid Khorasani or Mr. Montazeri whom he cannot tolerate. He no longer has the patience to haggle with people like Mr. Asgaroladi, Nategh-Nouri, Javadi Amoli and Hashemi Rafsanjani either, unless they are absolutely obedient to him. (Even if he himself wanted to tolerate them, that security–military power base would not let him.) On this basis, the other picture before us is the consolidation of the military–security power base and the making of everyone around the Leader more uniform and more "yes sir." The way things are going, I think that even in matters of emulation and religious authority (marja'iyat), the turn has come for people like Haj Agha Mojtaba Tehrani, the prayer leader of the Jameh Mosque of the Bazaar. He recently published a treatise of practical law (resaleh), has served for years as the source of emulation for the intelligence and security people, readily accepts absolute guardianship of the jurist as the form of Islamic government, and has no belief whatsoever in elections, parliament and the like. He gives religious legitimacy to every kind of torture, beating and intelligence game, and fashions a juristic and religious cover for them. This way of governing calls for this kind of source of emulation, too.
3– As was said before, Mr. Ahmadinejad, the team behind him, and ultimately the Leader himself are also pragmatists. Now that they believe they have seized all power, they want to stay. So wherever they see that "the other side's force is overwhelming," especially on the foreign front, they will prefer to back down. Their main problem, however, is with the military and security camp. Once you let the genie out of the lamp, there is no telling whether it will do whatever you want. So the struggle will begin with the selection of the cabinet. Mr. Ahmadinejad's post-election honeymoon will end once ministers are chosen and the wrangling with the Majlis begins. The Ministry of Intelligence is the first place the Leader wants under his absolute control. I don't think Ahmadinejad or the Majlis will put up a fight. The Leader will want this precious apparatus run in the style of Saeed Emami. The way Saeed Emami was treated and then made to disappear was an alarm bell for everyone involved in the Ministry of Intelligence. Even so, at the cost of purging some of them, this apparatus will be brought back under his grip. The Foreign Ministry will also be under his direct supervision, and he will install someone like Mr. Velayati or Mr. Kharrazi himself. If it goes to someone else, you can be sure the IRGC men's power has overtaken the Leader from the very start and they have denied him the Foreign Ministry. The same struggles will take place over Oil, Commerce, the Ministry of Finance and the Plan Organization. The easy rule the Shah also sought will in practice, especially with the gun present in politics, not be so easy for the head of the despotic apparatus. In any case, the composition of the cabinet and its final shape will show very clearly what is going on inside the ruling military–security camp. We will have to wait until it is finalized.
4- The final point in the picture before us is the government's executive policies, especially in the economy. It seems that all the classic mistakes made in other countries and revolutions will be repeated in Iran as well. In a word, Mr. Ahmadinejad will go back to the First Republic and the policies of Engineer Mousavi's government. This promise may have appealed to part of society, and it also drew in most of Mr. Karroubi's votes. But they have ignored a major reality. The First Republic, or the Republic of War and Revolution, lasted from the victory of the revolution until the death of Imam Khomeini and the end of the war (1979 to 1989). During that decade, nearly all the intellectual prescriptions of the 1960s, that is, all those revolutionary instructions, were carried out. If it failed and per capita income fell from 4,000 dollars to 1,500, this was not an accidental problem but an essential one. In other words, those economic and executive policies were by their very nature doomed to fail. The Second Republic, known as the Republic of Terror (1989 to 1997), the period of Mr. Rafsanjani's presidency, is the story of an era in which the need for economic reform became apparent, but neglect of political, cultural and social reform led this period to failure as well. In this period the government understood in practice that to increase investment it had to make peace with the world and strengthen the private sector. What it did not understand was that this requires democracy and human rights, and that it cannot at the same time assassinate its opponents to consolidate its rule and record more than 300 assassinations at home and abroad on its file. The Third Republic was the Republic of Reform, lasting from 2 Khordad 1376 (May 1997) to 27 Tir 1384 (July 2005). This republic was a failed attempt at political, social and cultural reform and at making up for the weaknesses of the Second Republic. It did not take into account the reality that, within the framework of the country's current Constitution, such reforms are fundamentally impossible. So the economy remained in disarray, and the problems of freedom, civil society and human rights in the country were not solved either. Nor did reconciliation with the world take place. The failure of the Third Republic showed itself in the Seventh Majlis elections, and the "Ninth Election" put the final period at the end of the sentence. A Fourth Republic is on the way, and it will no longer take the form of an Islamic Republic. This republic will begin with a change of the Constitution. This is the solution dictated by the country's intractable problems. But instead of responding naturally and properly to this need, the Leader has gone in exactly the opposite direction. He thinks that if he adopts the very policies of the First Republic, the problems will be solved. He does not
notice at all that the course of the Islamic Republic and of Iranian society has naturally been born out of the failure of each stage. I remember that in the 1970s, when some members inside the People's Mojahedin Organization were becoming Marxists, the organization's leadership recommended more study of the organization's books and theories to stop this process. In practice, the more someone read those books, the sooner they became Marxist, because the problem lay in the foundations of that organization's theories. In exactly the same way, instead of properly analyzing the failures and problems of the Islamic Republic and following the natural course of events and the evolution of Iranian society and the world, the country's Leader has prescribed a return to the theories of the early revolution. He fails to see that the more you go back to those theories, the more serious the defeats you will suffer. Instead of a proper critique of those theories and a fundamental rethinking, greater insistence on them places two precipices before the regime. One is greater reliance on oil revenues, which have been rising lately. The other is intensified repression and suffocation of opponents. The first will only make the country's economic vertigo worse. In its short life so far, the Seventh Majlis injected 7 billion dollars from the Foreign Exchange Reserve Fund, which comes from increased oil revenues, into the country's economic cycle. All this did was leave behind a 25% inflation rate, and it solved no problem. Greater use of oil revenues will bring more unemployment, more inflation, and more rent-seekers and corrupt people. Then there is the repression of opponents. A friend used to say that if a dictator represses his opponents systematically and continuously, he will last. Such repression, however, has to be carried out in the style of Saddam Hussein. It requires a regime of that type, which is beyond the capacity of the current Leader and does not fit Iranian society. More importantly, it cannot be carried out in today's world. The world and the Middle East region have entered a stage that does not tolerate such systems. Even if you become a Saddam Hussein, in the end you will be removed by the force of foreign armies and troops. Moreover, this regime's dilemma is social freedoms, a problem the likes of Saddam Hussein did not have. The rulers are unable to suppress social freedoms, especially where women are concerned. On the other hand, if they do not restrict them, problems arise within their own ranks and among the forces that support them. Therefore Mr. Ahmadinejad's government and the Leader's backward notions will be no more than a transitional period between the Third Republic and the Fourth Republic. They will help the new structure of Iran's government to be born through the mobilization and movement of the people. If the Leader were to act wisely, the best course would be to annul the Ninth Election and hold a free election centered on a constitutional referendum, under the supervision of international organizations.