02/16/16 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, man, how's it going, y'all?
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm doing a show.
LibertyRadioNetwork.com.
All right, next up is our friend Mohamed Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC.
Boo, go Bruins.
No offense, though, but we don't usually talk with him about chemical engineering so much, but about Iranian politics, and as I was saying earlier on the show, he did a great job for years and years and years helping us truth-tellers debunk the lies about Iran's nuclear program.
But now that that's sort of kind of out of the way, it's still relevant to this story, of course, Mohamed lately has been focusing a little bit more in-depth on, you know, the internal politics.
Well, I should say, he wrote a lot back in 2009 during the so-called Green Revolution and all that, too.
But very in-depth reporting on the internal politics in Iran, and it's really important right now, here in February 2016, because there are elections coming up at the end of this month and in the wake of the signing and the implementation of the Iran deal.
So there's a hell of a lot at stake when it comes to all of that.
But so anyway, first of all, welcome to the show, Mohamed.
Great to talk to you again, sir.
Thank you for having me on your program, Scott.
It's great to be back in your program.
Love talking to you, always.
So you say here right at the beginning, come on, these aren't democratic elections, okay?
There's some kind of elections, but they are what they are.
So what exactly are they?
Help us understand.
Well, they are not democratic in the sense that people who register with Ministry of Interior to run in the elections must pass several filters put in place by the ruling elite in order to make sure that those that the ruling elite doesn't like won't get to run in the elections.
So as I explained in that article that you mentioned, published by National Interest, there is a filter by Ministry of Interior, and there is a filter by the Guardian Council that constitutionally has the right to vet all the candidates.
Now, because Ministry of Interior now is run by the Rouhani administration, which is a moderate pro-reform administration, almost all the people who wanted to run in the elections basically passed the filter, they were accepted.
But then when it came to the Guardian Council, Guardian Council is allied with hardliners and with basically a secret and semi-secret network of hardliners in the security and intelligence and judiciary organs, they basically disqualified roughly half of all the candidates because these candidates are not to their liking.
Oh man, half of them?
Yes.
And what's that in numbers?
How many people are we talking about?
Well, originally over 12,000 people registered to run in the election.
And the Guardian Council roughly disqualified 6,000 of them.
Wow, okay.
The Iranian parliament has 290 members.
Five of these 290 is dedicated to religious minorities.
So a Jewish Iranian, for example, even though they number about 10,000, they have their own representative that they elect.
Iranian Christians that number about 500,000, they elect two people.
And then Zoroastrians elect another one.
And then Osirians elect another one.
So there are five of them that have been set aside for religious minorities so that they have their own representative to the Iranian parliament addressing their own concerns.
The other 285 is basically for the rest of the people.
Now, reformists knew that if they want to run in the election, the vast majority of their candidates would be disqualified because the Hardinists don't like them because they supported the Green Movement.
So what they did was about 3,000 reformist candidates registered with the Ministry of Interior to run in the election with the hope that even if 10% of them are accepted, that would be roughly 300, which means that they more or less will have one representative in each district.
But that's not what happened.
Only 1% of them was accepted.
And then after some maneuver, a few more of them were accepted.
So today, the reformists publish a list of their top 30 candidates for this district of Tehran because Tehran, the capital, elects 30 people, given its population of 14 million elects 30 people to the parliament.
So they publish a list of 30 people that they support.
Now, at the same time, we also have the elections for Assembly of Experts.
Assembly of Experts, according to Iranian constitution, is the organ that selects the supreme leader.
And because the supreme leader has a lot of power, the elections for Assembly of Experts are also important.
But this election in particular has become vastly more important simply because most people think that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will pass away during the next term of Assembly of Experts.
The members of Assembly of Experts serve for 10 years.
So most people think that over the next 10 years, he will pass away.
And in fact, he even himself in a speech last September said that I may not be around in the next 10 years, and therefore we should be careful about who we select as the next supreme leader and so on.
But because of that, that election has also taken extraordinary significance.
Again, there are two groups.
There are hardline clerics that support the security intelligence hardliners and Ayatollah Khamenei, and there are reformists and moderates that have another view.
I know when you were introducing me, you said that these elections have bearing on Iran's nuclear program and Iran's foreign policy.
And in fact, they do.
It is very important for Iranians to have a moderate government in place because the hardliners in Iran, just U.S. hardliners, oppose nuclear agreement.
And as we approach the day of implementation about a month ago, the hardliners in Iran did all sorts of maneuvering in order to provoke the United States to do something so that the implementation of the agreement would at least be suspended.
For example, they had these missiles, they started maneuvering in the Persian Gulf, having missiles that fired and passed by a U.S. carrier.
And when those sailors were arrested, although they were released less than 24 hours later because of the Rouhani administration efforts, after that they have been putting on a lot of propaganda, showing these sailors in some sad situation, which are inhuman and should be condemned.
So Iranian hardliners are also opposed to nuclear agreement.
They are also opposed to opening Iran to outside world, opening Iran economy to outside world.
And most importantly, in my view, Iranian hardliners and the Rouhani administration have two completely view of what's going on in the Middle East.
If you follow what Iranian hardliners, IRGC commanders and so on, say about Saudi Arabia or Syria or Iraq, they are ultra hard, they threaten Saudi Arabia.
Of course, Saudi Arabia started threatening, but they also respond in kind and so on.
On the other hand, if you read what Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says or President Rouhani says and so on, they always talk about reconciliation, willing to negotiate Saudi Arabia, willing to cooperate regarding resolving the civil war in Syria and so on.
Now, one might say that this is good cop, bad cop, but it actually is not.
This is two fundamental views of what's going on in the Middle East that are vastly different.
One side wants to make compromises just like in nuclear program.
The Rouhani administration made compromises.
It actually crossed several red lines that Ayatollah Khamenei had said.
They crossed those red lines in order to reach a compromise.
So these are two fundamentally different views of what's going on inside Iran and outside.
Right, absolutely.
All right, let's stop right there for a sec.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, y'all, with more with Mohammad Zahimi.
This one is in the national interest.
I forgot to say, Iran's elections reform is hardliners in the deep state.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
Welcome back, guys.
Wrapping up the show for the day.
Thanks for tuning in.
I'm on the line with Mohammad Sahimi, Iranian expat and peacemonger, truth-teller about Iran's civilian-safeguarded nuclear program.
I just want to make that real clear to everybody that Mohammad Sahimi, he's an Iranian expat living in the United States of America.
He does not support the Ayatollah's regime, nor does he support American intervention in Iran to change their regime or improve it or do anything to it in any way whatsoever.
He's just the facts on the nuclear program that is civilian-safeguarded, harmless nuclear program now safeguarded far beyond what it ever was before.
Because I know how people get, you know.
You hear somebody say, well, the Greens, this and that.
They go, ah, you're CIA.
Or you go, oh, well, you know, the nuclear program, this or that.
And they go, ah, you're for the Ayatollah.
And, of course, I know most of you guys don't think that way, but I just kind of want to make sure that we're clear here about who's who and what's what.
So, now, when it comes to the Greens, I wanted to ask you, Mohammad, whether – well, first of all, the current president, Rouhani, he's actually not up for re-election right now, but his so-called, at least, success in achieving the nuclear deal with the U.S. and the rest of the major powers here, that's expected to be reflected in the results of the parliamentary elections, I guess.
But I want to ask you, is he actually part of the Green movement?
Or, you know, you said there's basically two groups, but, you know, when an American says, well, you know, the reformers over there, who knows what they're – or who they're talking about.
So, I was wondering, you know, exactly what is Rouhani's relationship?
Is it the actual Green movement that you would expect to do any better?
Or, like you were saying, so many of them have been excluded.
Will we even be able to see a pro-Rouhani result in these elections as a response to his success in getting the nuclear deal?
And the sanctions lifted?
Yes.
First of all, President Rouhani and former Prime Minister Amir Hussein Moustavi, one of the three leaders of the Green movement, were very close.
In fact, when the Natanz enrichment facility started working several years ago, the very first two officials that visited the facility were Rouhani and Moustavi, because they both played a fundamental role in restarting Iran's nuclear program in the 1990s and late 1980s.
Rouhani never actually supported the Green movement, but since before his election, when he was running for president, he has talked about the fact that the leaders of the Green movement should be released from their house arrest.
Rouhani has said that if the hardliners think that these three people, the leaders of the Green movement, have done anything wrong, the easiest thing is to put them on a fair and open trial, so that they can explain their side and the hardliners can explain their side.
But of course, the hardliners are not willing to do it, because they know the leaders of the Green movement never really did anything wrong.
They just protested the fraud that we had in the 2009 presidential election.
His lieutenants have also talked about it.
But the fact of the matter is, this is not under Rouhani's control.
If it were under Rouhani's control, he would have released these people, these three people, a long time ago.
For the current elections, the hope is not that they will take over the parliament by a coalition of reformists and moderates, per se, but the hope is to expel the current hardline deputies or representatives to the parliament, so that the next parliament will be more moderate and more in cooperation with the government.
Because the present parliament, or majlis, tried to impede the progress of nuclear negotiations, because it's dominated by hardliners.
And they summoned Rouhani's ministers, like Foreign Minister Zarif and others, to the parliament repeatedly and questioning him.
And they even shouted slogans against nuclear negotiations, the United States and so on and so forth, in the parliament, which was very ugly and not something that one does in the national parliament of a country.
So the hope is that, given that the big, last majority of reformists have been disqualified from running, the remaining candidates can form a sort of moderate parliament that would be more supportive of the Rouhani administration.
So Rouhani never, to summarize, Rouhani never actually in wars or publicly supported the Green Movement, he has been very supportive of the release of the leaders of the Green Movement, and national reconciliation, and moving forward, and trying to open up the political space in Iraq.
I must say that compared to Ahmadinejad era, eight years of Ahmadinejad, the cultural and political space in Iranian universities is much more open, and a huge number of books that didn't get permission to be published in Iran, have not been published.
There are more lively discussions in Iranian universities.
And for this election, let me mention this important fact.
Investigative Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji, who spent seven years in jail in Iran, and now lives in exile in the United States, he called for people to go and vote in such a way that the worst of hardliners would not be re-elected, and not go back to the parliament and assembly of experts.
And I mentioned in the National Interest article, that call has actually taken steam, and now even in Iran they are talking about it.
In fact, that has become so strong that hardliners have started taking positions against it.
Former president Mohammad Khatami, who was a reformist, also issued a statement on Saturday, just two or three days ago, calling for the same thing.
He said, if it is not possible to vote for the candidates that we want to get elected, we cannot vote by not voting for the worst of those hardliners, preventing them from being sent to assembly of experts and parliament.
So that's the minimum expectations that we have.
And given that there is a lot of excitement about these elections, and given all these calls, and given the social network activity and so on, we are hoping, people like me are hoping, that this would be the beginning of something better for Iran, where we have a more open political space, we have less pressure on people, we have better foreign policy for Iran, and we have reconciliation, not only within Iran, but also outside Iran, and particularly in the Middle East.
Again, the article is Iran's elections, reformists, hardliners, and the deep state.
Yeah, they got one there too, their military, industrial, special forces, spies, money-making complex, just like in the U.S.
So I wanted to ask you about the economy, and how much it's improved since the lifting of the sanctions.
I know it's been a very short amount of time, but that's what people really vote on, right?
They did.
And it is too early to expect that the effect of lifting the sanctions would show up right away, but I must say that since Rouhani took office in August of 2013, inflation has been totally tamed.
Inflation, when he took office, was running around 50%, but now even World Bank and International Monetary Fund report that the inflation is around 10%, so it has drastically been reduced.
The unemployment rate has improved a bit, but the economy is still in sort of a recession because of two important factors.
The crippling sanctions that were imposed on Iran illegally, in my view, by the United States and its allies, that were just lifted, and the vast corruptions by the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration.
Basically, he and his allies plundered the national resources, wasted over a trillion dollars that Iran had from oil exports during his administration, and left Rouhani administration with huge intent of death to central bank and other financial organizations.
So it would take time for the economy to improve, but at least now people have hope for improvement because the sanctions have been lifted.
President Rouhani, in his trip to Europe, signed several important commercial agreements with Italy and France.
There is going to be new investment by European countries in Iran, and Iran's oil has started flowing to Europe again, and therefore there is hope for a better economy in the future.
Well, and hopefully a better and better relationship with the empire, but I guess we'll see about that.
We're still back in Badr in Iraq, but fighting them in Syria, so you never know how that's going to shake out.
Thanks again for coming back on the show, Mohamed.
You're great.
It's always great talking to you, Scott.
All right, so that's Mohamed Sahimi.
He is at thenationalinterest.org.
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