Khamenei speaks, endorses nuke negotiations
Today, Iran's most powerful figure,Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Tehran "is ready for negotiations over the nuclear crisis" but warned it would not step over any "red lines" in the search for a deal.
Khamenei's remarks come a day before a key meeting at which Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, EU negotiator Javier Solana, and top US diplomat Bill Burns will all gather face-to-face to discuss (I hope) measures to defuse/de-escalate the tensions aroused by Iran's nuclear program.
That report from AFP notes that Khamenei's statement is his first direct intervention in the continuing standoff over the nuclear issue. This is, obviously, very significant, and could signal that the crisis is on its way to being ramped back down. (Related evidence: the recent agreement between Tehran and Washington that the US can re-open an "interests section", even if not yet a full embassy, in Tehran.)
Here's what, according to AFP, Khamenei actually said:
- "Iran has decided to take part in negotiations but it will not accept any threat," state television quoted Khamenei as saying.
He said Tehran would not step over any "red lines", repeating Iran's insistence that it will not suspend uranium enrichment activities, which world powers fear could be used to make a nuclear weapon.
But Khamenei also appeared to give his wholehearted backing to the idea of talks.
"Our red lines are clear and if the other parties respect the Iranian people, the dignity of the Islamic republic and these red lines, our officials will negotiate as long as no one makes any threats against Iran."
Karim Sadjadpour recently published this informative little study of Khamenei's thinking and leadership style.
He argued that,
- "Iran’s Islamic government is more powerful than it has ever been vis-à-vis the United States, Khamenei is more powerful than he’s ever been within Iran, and in order to devise a more effective U.S. policy toward Iran a better understanding of Khamenei is essential.” Though Khamenei is sometimes dismissed as weak and indecisive, Sadjadpour writes, “his rhetoric depicts a resolute leader with a remarkably consistent and coherent—though highly cynical and conspiratorial—world view.”
Given that the real political power of the Iranian Supreme Leader dwarfs that of the president, Sadjadpour argues, “It’s time for the world to focus less on Ahmadinejad and more on Khamenei. His speeches present arguably the most accurate reflection of Iranian domestic and foreign policy aims and actions over the last two decades.” ...
“Given Iran’s centrality to urgent U.S. and European foreign policy challenges—namely Iraq, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, energy security, Arab–Israeli peace, and Afghanistan,” Sadjadpour writes, “the United States does not have the luxury of shunning dialogue with Tehran until Khamenei’s death or the arrival of a more accessible Iranian leader. This could be a long time in coming.”
Sadjadpour argues that any successful approach toward Iran must take into account Khamenei’s pivotal role in Iran’s decision-making process and his deeply held suspicions of the United States. “Trying to engage an Iran with Khamenei at the helm will no doubt be trying, require a great deal of nuance and patience, and offer no guaranteed chance of success. But an approach toward Iran that aims to ignore, bypass, or undermine Khamenei is guaranteed to fail.”
But some of the other materials posted there, from earlier in June, are pretty interesting and revelatory. Like this, on Iraq, and this, on his view of the need to confront US power.
Anyway, good news from Tehran today. May the trend continue.
Helena - is there any evidence that Obama has foreign policy advisors who properly see the need to engage Iran positively and, as you suggest, understand the power structure really in place there? Thankyou
It’s time for the world to focus less on Ahmadinejad and more on Khamenei
Agreed. However, (1) it would be as foolish to focus exclusively on Khamenei as on Ahmedinejad, and (2) the latter's influence cannot be totally discounted.
Iran has a multipolar power structure, much of which is exercised through councils, and while Ahmedinejad's authority is primarily in the area of domestic policy, he has representatives on the tribunals in which foreign and military policy are made. He, and others like Rafsanjani and Larijani, have both institutional and non-institutional power bases of their own, and Khamenei does not have complete freedom to ignore their wishes. Add to this that Iran is a remarkably constitutionalist theocracy, Khamenei must face legal restrictions on his power vis-a-vis other figures. He certainly deserves more attention but he should not be thought of as an absolute dictator any more than the president.
Hmmmmmmmn. V-e-r-y interesting.
I wonder how Condi's going with that trip to Qom?
Helena,
It’s time for the world to focus less on Ahmadinejad and more on Khamenei
Only Khamenei has both the legal powers and the personal authority to impose his will on the other parts of the state. "Everyone behind the leader," shouted a young man with fierce eyes at Tehran's Friday prayers. "We will follow the leader to victory." But Khamenei does not command universal obedience. He sits instead at the fulcrum of Iranian politics, where elected politicians hash out policy with unelected apparatchiks, Revolutionary Guards and turbaned religious jurists.
Ali Khamenei grew up in the great shrine city of Mashhad, near the borders of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. The son of a cleric, his formative years were spent in the vaulted iwans and cloistered courtyards of great mosques, sitting cross-legged on exquisite Persian carpets, absorbing the religious teachings of his elders.
But his upbringing did not shelter him from Iran's tides of violence. At 14 he would have seen the rioters running in the streets as British and American agents brought down the populist Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadeq. As a young student in Qom, the great seminary city, he took part in risings against the Shah. Radicalised and revolutionary, he was imprisoned several times before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in 1979 to usher in Islamic rule.
In the wake of that upheaval, a bombing campaign shattered Iran's new leadership. Khamenei narrowly escaped: a bomb hidden in a tape recorder at a press conference crippled his right hand.
It is impossible to tell Khamenei's story without telling that of Khomeini, the father of Iran's revolution. There is a revolutionary mural - one of many in central Tehran - showing the leader's face looking up towards the future and contained entirely within the stern, patrician features of his predecessor. "The path of Khamenei is the path of Khomeini," reads the slogan.
Ooops, broken link above. This the link Khamenei
Ahmadinejad has in the past called for Israel's elimination. But his exact remarks have been disputed. Some translators say he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," but others say that would be better translated as "vanish from the pages of time" — implying Israel would disappear on its own rather than be destroyed.
Ahmadinejad also said that the next U.S. administration "would need at least 30 years in order to compensate, renovate and innovate the damages done by Mr. Bush." "Today, the government of the United States is on the threshold of bankruptcy — from political to economic," Ahmadinejad said.
Iran’s not a threat to the U.S., just as Iraq wasn’t a threat to the U.S. The threat is to Israel, which has always worried about any of its neighbors getting ahold of nuclear weapons. Israel, of course, has many nuclear weapons. So Israel is egging on the U.S. to do something about it, and is hinting that if the U.S. doesn’t stop the Iranian nuclear program, then Israel will—the same way it stopped Iraq’s nuclear program years ago, by blowing up their reactor. The U.S. professes that it supports democracy in the Middle East yet when there was a democratic government in Iran the U.S. destroyed it.
"Ahmadinejad has in the past called for Israel's elimination."
What Ahmadinajad said was 1) not a call for Israel's elimination, 2) not his words, but a repetition of a statement by Khomeini.
"The threat is to Israel"
There is no threat to Israel from Iran. The only "threat" would be IF Iran actually had a nuclear weapons program, which by all evidence it does not and will not in the foreseeable future if ever, and even then it would not be a threat of attack. The chances that Iran would ever attack Israel range somewhere between zero and none.
I really think we have to be very careful right now when using the word threat. Israelis whining about the possibility that they might lose their status as the only real military bully in the area if Iran gets too strong is quite a different thing than Israel being under a threat from Iran.
Ted, didn't you make that exact same comment in another thread? You got the same answer, too, as I recall, so what's the deal posting it again?
Not every discussion is about Israel, and this is one of those that isn't.
Jonathon, I noticed your reference to Iran being "a remarkably constitutionalist theocracy"....
Wow, that's an intriguing characterization, as usually those who characterize Iran as a "theocracy" then trot out the lines about Iran being "totalitarian" -- anything but "constitutional."
Have you posted on this before? Curious to know more of your term here.
As for Khamenehi's importance, I suggest too that Velayati's recent interviews are more important than has been recognized .... Back when Khamenehi was President during the Iran-Iraq war, it was no less than Khamenehi who pushed what became known as revolutionary Iran's "open door foreign policy" -- quite a pragmatic shift, circa 1984 and therefrom (which most of today's Iran observers have little idea of).... And Velayati was the long serving foreign minister who also developed the approach.... Today, he's a key adviser to Khamenehi -- and with Rafsanjani, Khatami, Rouhani, et. al., sits on Iran's supreme national security council -- a body recently strengthened....
But of course to those wishing to characterize Iran as Hitler as a "totalitarian theocracy" on the march, such nuances are "inconvenient."
"Not every discussion is about Israel"
Ah yes, but there is always someone who can MAKE any conversation into a conversation about Israel.
And you know, I THOUGHT I had replied to Ted's comment already, but I figured maybe I had written a reply and not posted it or something.
"Not every discussion is about Israel."
Every discussion involving the Middle East and US policy is, unfortunately.
Well, this latest manufactured crisis around Iran is, of course, very much about Israel.
Helena, thank you for bringing hope that something can be achieved by talks that wars could not achieve.
The art of negotiation is that two enemies must respect each other to start a dialog, in the absence of threat of war.
Respect builds trust, and the latter allows the negotiating process to continue.
Contemptuous pronouncements regarding the enemy provokes both the parties to a war stance slowly but eventually. Both realize their stupidity, only too late to be any good to anybody.
We have seen how negotiations broke down before the Iraq war using the pretext that the UN was not doing its job right and that "time was running out."
Has the time run out in eight years of war? Was the mission of war accomplished? (untruthful war!)
We owe it to ourselves not to start a new war.
Take the pulse of the public. As I watched the news today I saw great enthusiasm and widespread appreciation. I saw a new good mood of good anticipation.
Let's live again without fear of war. In the mean while eight years of our life has passed by ...
"We have seen how negotiations broke down before the Iraq war"
What negotiations? There WERE no negotiations for the precise reason that the United States government was determined to invade and occupy Iraq no matter what. They refused negotiations because they did not want anything to interfere with their plans.
Wow, that's an intriguing characterization, as usually those who characterize Iran as a "theocracy" then trot out the lines about Iran being "totalitarian" -- anything but "constitutional."
It should be non-controversial that Iran is a theocracy. A theocracy is a religious state, which has a ruling elite is drawn predominantly from the clergy and is governed at least nominally by religious law. Such a state need not be totalitarian, depending on the attitudes of the religious/political class and the way in which religious law is interpreted. The form of a state doesn't dictate its position along the democratic-totalitarian continuum.
What I meant by "constitutionalist" is that Iran has a set of fundamental laws that regulate acquisition and use of state power, and that, for the most part, the state actually operates in accordance with this system. For instance, although access to the ballot is limited, the people who take office are the ones who win the most votes. Likewise, the various policy-making councils mandated by the constitution actually have the powers and functions that they're supposed to have. They can (again with limits) act as checks against each other, and there are recognized channels for resolving disputes between them. No one political figure, even Khamenei, can do whatever he wants: if he wanted to, say, privatize garbage collecton in Tehran, he couldn't simply decree it but would have to convince the Majlis to pass a law.
Note that "constitutional" doesn't necessarily mean "liberal." Iran's constitution has quite a few illiberal provisions. The reason ballot access is so restricted, for example, is that the constitutional powers of the Council of Guardians include virtually unaccountable authority or reject candidates. The disqualifications are all very constitutional, done according to law.
Nor is Iran perfectly constitutionalist, or even nearly so. The most glaring deviation is the various paramilitary forces which exist outside legal regulation and which act as surrogates for political figures in conducting violent repression. More subtly, the judiciary is politically controlled, and court verdicts often place political expediency above the law. These and other imperfections are serious enough, at least IMO, to disqualify Iran as a democracy. But Iran is a long way from a totalitarian state and, more to the point for present purposes, Khamenei doesn't have unchallenged authority in any field of policy-making.
(And yes, I have written about this before, but my former blog seems to have vanished into the ether during the year that I've been preoccupied with other matters.)
Jonathan Edelstein:
"Note that "constitutional" doesn't necessarily mean "liberal." Iran's constitution has quite a few illiberal provisions. The reason ballot access is so restricted, for example, is that the constitutional powers of the Council of Guardians include virtually unaccountable authority or reject candidates. The disqualifications are all very constitutional, done according to law."
The Council of Guardians and the other tiers of the Iranian government have many similiarities to the fundamentalist government structure John Calvin set up in Geneva, as the vanguard of the Protestant Reformation. In time the Iranian revolution may be come to be seen as the start of the Islamic reformation.