03/03/16 – Muhammad Sahimi – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, here on the Liberty Radio Network, live on the weekdays from noon to 2 Eastern.
First up today is our friend Mohamed Sahimi.
He is a professor of chemical engineering at USC in LA, but besides that, he is a great commentator on American-Iranian relations, most especially over the past few years.
He's been really great on their nuclear program, the truth about it, the negotiations over it, and all of the rest of that.
Here he is analyzing the results of the elections that took place last Friday or over the weekend.
It's at the Huffington Post.
It's called What the Defeat of Iran's Hardliners Means.
Welcome back to the show.
Mohamed, how are you?
I'm fine.
Thank you for having me on your program again, Scott.
Very happy to have you on, as always.
I guess the question is begging right there in the title.
I think that's the proper use of that phrase, actually, too.
The hardliners have been defeated, have they?
They have been defeated, and they have been defeated comprehensively, because due to the nature of the Iranian electoral process, there is a vetting stage in place where the Guardian Council, which is a constitutional body that vets the candidate, can reject any candidate that it deems unqualified for the election.
And this Guardian Council is controlled by the hardliners in Iran, and therefore, when the election process began about three months ago, after the vetting process, they disqualified at least half of the people who had declared their candidacy.
Initially, over 12,000 people registered with the Ministry of Interior to run in the election, but at the end of the vetting process, they had disqualified something like 6,000 or even more.
And most of the people who had been disqualified were moderates and reformists.
The Iranian parliament has 290 members, and reformists had hoped that by sending a large number of candidates to the election process, at least a few hundred of them would survive the vetting process, and therefore, they can run in the election.
But the Guardian Council disqualified all the well-known candidates of the reformists on the excuse that they had supported the Green Movement of 2009, when the presidential election was thought to be fraudulent by a large number of people, and there were demonstrations in Tehran.
So despite that, the reformists and moderates put together a list of candidates for Tehran and other places, and asked people to vote for the least, rather than for individuals.
In other words, they asked, for example, in Tehran, that sends 30 representatives to the Iranian parliament, they asked people to vote for the least and put all the 30 people in the list as their choice, because the list is supported by moderates and reformists.
And that's what happened.
It sounds almost like the strategy of the hardliners on the Guardian Council excluding all of the leaders of the so-called moderates and reformers, and we can get to defining that in a minute, but it sounds like their strategy of trying to weed out all of the best of them really just kind of backfired and motivated people to turn out for those parties, even if it was lesser-known candidates from those parties.
That is a completely correct assessment.
The hope of hardliners was that by weeding out all these well-known reformists and moderates, people would not know whom to vote for.
And therefore, that would increase the chances of hardliners to win the election.
But what happened was the well-known reformist candidates, and on top of them, former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, they published a list of candidates that they supported and asked people that if they want to support reformists, they should vote for the list.
So in a sense, although this was not sort of a political party or political organization, at least in the normal sense that we understand it here in the West, they basically put some sort of a list that would be appropriate for a political party and asked people to vote for the party that they support, in this case, the reformists.
And the result was that, for example, in Tehran, all the 30 candidates that the reformists and moderates had supported for Tehran representatives, they all got elected.
And none of the hardliners...
Wow.
Yes.
They swept Tehran election.
And sweeping Tehran election is very important, simply because Tehran is the capital and is the political heart of the country.
And as they say in Iran, whoever controls Tehran controls the nation.
And therefore, that was a very powerful message.
Throughout Iran, of the 290 members of the parliament, five are set aside for religious minority and basically the other 285 representatives are voted by Iran, by the people.
So throughout Iran, they captured moderates and reformists captured about 150 seats.
So they basically have the effective control of the parliament.
Now, the result of this would be that it would give a freer hand to the Rouhani administration to pursue both a more moderate foreign policy with the outside world and trying to open up political space in Iran and implement some economical reform program.
And most importantly, in the view of many people, try to release the leaders of green movement from house arrest that they have been handed for the last five years.
So we will see what happens.
But there is a clear path now, after presidential victory of Hassan Rouhani in 2013, successful completion of nuclear agreement and lifting of the economic sanctions, and now the reformist and moderate candidate victory in the election.
So Iran is in a much better condition than it was before.
Now, this is not to say that this political system in Iran is not flawed.
Of course, it's flawed.
The very fact that candidates are vetted by the Guardian Council, and the fact that there is still a lot of governmental organs that are controlled by the Hardiners, means that there are still many impediments to making Iran a true democracy.
But with this vote, Iranian people have shown that they want change, they want gradual change, and they want change that is implemented by themselves within Iran, without any outside interference, and without any outside intervention, and without anybody like Western government speaking on their behalf.
So we'll see what happens.
All right, now, how much credit would you give to the nuke deal getting done for Rouhani's allies' victory here, I guess?
I think that played a very important role, because people saw that the union negotiations, the Hardiners tried to stop it.
The Hardiners summoned Rouhani's ministers, and in particular Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, to the parliament, questioning him.
They saw that they tried to impeach some of Rouhani's ministers because of their position regarding a nuclear program and other reforms that he was trying to implement.
And most importantly, they saw that Rouhani actually delivered on his promise when he was running for president in 2013.
He promised that he would carry out negotiations with the West, and in particular with the United States, and he will conclude it successfully if the U.S. is also willing to make concessions and participate in negotiations in good faith.
And he delivered on that promise.
He made this famous statement that while the centrifuges are spinning, the economy must also roll.
So he has delivered.
All right, now hold it right there.
We've got to take this break.
It's the great Mohammad Sahimi.
This one is at the Huffington Post, huffingtonpost.com.
What the defeat of Iran's Hardliners means, and we're going to talk more about that part of it when we get back.
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Alright, man, welcome back, you guys.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line with Muhammad Sahimi.
This one is in the Huffington Post.
What the defeat of Iran's hardliners means.
In the first segment, he was explaining how the Guardian Council tried to, which is run by the hardliners, tried to exclude.
They have their own primary and caucus system, in a way, where the establishment tries to exclude the guys they don't like.
And it didn't work.
They got fired.
Sort of like American politics right now.
The establishment is trying to tamp down on the Trump movement.
And it ain't working.
Don't seem to have that same problem on the left.
But anyway, it didn't work.
And in fact, the so-called moderates and reformers kicked the right-wingers' butts all across the board in the recent Iranian elections.
And so now, two major questions here.
What's a moderate and a reformer?
Because, boy, are those pretty general terms.
What does that really mean?
And obviously, especially in terms of any possible, you know, lessening of tensions in the near term between the U.S. and Iran.
And then also, what difference is it really going to make, then, that the president has more support now in the parliament than before?
The reformers are those that believe that the constitution of the Islamic Republic needs some revision.
They believe that, for example, the vetting process by the Guardian Council must be set aside and people be allowed to, you know, run in the elections if they want to, and people be allowed to vote for anybody they want.
Of course, they can vote for anybody they want, but their choices are limited because of the vetting process.
They also believe that the constitution of the Islamic Republic, at least in theory, has guaranteed freedom of press.
But in practice, we don't have freedom of press in Iran.
We do have outspoken press in Iran.
We do have thousands of websites and so on that criticize constantly.
But whenever the hard-runners don't like what they see or what they read, they arrest people who wrote those critics and throw them in jail.
So they want to end that.
And then at the end, once all of these are implemented, then they want to open a national dialogue for revising the constitution, limiting the power of the supreme leader, and transferring almost all power to the elected president of the republic.
So these are the reformers in Iran.
They don't want to overthrow the system, but they want to refine it, limit the power of the supreme leader, and actually put in effect those provisions of the constitution that has spoken about freedom of press, freedom of thought, freedom of practice of religion, and so on and so forth.
Moderates is a relative word.
It is relative to hard-liners.
A lot of these moderates are actually conservative.
They are not leftists or reformists.
But they also believe that the system, as it has been implemented over the past three or so decades, is not working, and it needs some improvement.
They also believe that the hard-liners' policies, both internally and externally, have hurt Iran, and therefore one needs to moderate the policies.
For example, instead of having rhetorics espoused and broadcast about, for example, Saudi Arabia or Syria and so on, Iran should pursue diplomatic negotiations so that these crises in the Middle East can be resolved diplomatically, and Iran can live in peace with its neighbors.
So in that sense, they are allies of the reformists, although internally they may not go as far as what the reformists want to do.
But these are basically supporters of Rouhani, because Rouhani is not a reformist in the true sense of the word, but he's a moderate conservative person who wants to improve both the internal situation and the foreign policy.
So in effect, these two groups are allies against hard-liners.
And then, so now what about the state itself?
I mean, the assembly is one thing, but the actual departments and the executive branch is another, and that's pretty much all still in the hands of the hard right from the revolutionary days, right?
No, the executive branch of the government is controlled by the president.
So in that sense, he has a lot of power, because the day-to-day affairs of the country is run by the president and his cabinet.
It is not that Rouhani doesn't have power.
It is that he can be overruled by the supreme leader if he doesn't like what Rouhani does.
But I should mention that even here, if the president is really pursuing some reform or some more moderate policy, and if he has people's backing, as it happened in the Friday elections or the presidential election of two and a half years ago, he can really pursue those policies to a large extent.
For example, in the nuclear negotiations, the supreme leader had set some red lines for Iran's negotiators.
But Rouhani and his team actually crossed those red lines, which enabled them to successfully complete the negotiations and sign the agreement.
So if the president actually is willing to use the public support behind him and argue with the supreme leader, he can make quite advancement in the implementation of his policies and his program.
The revolutionary guards do have a lot of power, but they are what I call the deep estate, just like we have deep estate in this country.
They are the deep estate.
They are behind-the-scenes power that try to provoke this and that in order to put impediment in the path of reformists and moderates and prevent them from making advancement.
Just after the election over the past two, three days, a lot of these revolutionary guard officers have spoken against the results of the election.
And in particular, they have lamented the fact that in Tehran, not a single hardline candidate was elected to the parliament.
So there is always a power struggle behind the scenes between these hardliners and the deep estate that they have behind the scenes and the president, if the president belongs to the reformist moderate camp.
Ahmadinejad, the previous president, he was a hardliner.
He was brought to power by the hardliners, and therefore he basically followed whatever they wanted.
And the result was that because of the elections of 2009, when a lot of people thought that it was fraudulent, and he was basically imposed on Iran by the supreme leader and the revolutionary guard, even though people had seemingly voted for the opposition candidate, former Prime Minister Mohsen Mousavi, he had to increase the repression.
He has to be more secretive.
And the result was that there was vast corruption during his time in office.
A lot of national resources were plundered or wasted.
And in the foreign policy arena, he also was quite inflexible in negotiations.
Iran always wanted to negotiate its nuclear program.
Even Ahmadinejad wanted to do that.
But the problem was that Ahmadinejad was not willing to cross the red line set by the hardliners because he was a hardliner himself, and he was not flexible in negotiations.
He was not willing to make any concessions.
Rouhani, on the other hand, realized that successful negotiations required that both sides make concessions.
So he dared to cross the red line set by the hardliners and the supreme leader in order to have successful negotiations with P5-plus-1.
So these are the differences between the two camps.
And now you say in your article, too, that a difference appears to really have been made on the—I just had it in front of me—the assembly of experts that gets to choose the successor.
And reminding us that the current supreme leader is old and is reported to at least have had cancer in the past.
Yes, absolutely.
Because the assembly of experts will appoint the next supreme leader if Ayatollah Khamenei passes the seat.
And most people think that he will not survive the next term of assembly of experts.
And assembly of experts is elected for 10 years.
So this is quite a long time.
And even Khamenei, in his recent speeches, has hinted that he thinks that he won't be around much longer.
Therefore, if more moderate clerics get into assembly of experts when it comes to selecting the next supreme leader, they will have influence.
In particular, former President Rafsanjani, who is now allied with the reformists and moderate, was the highest vote-getter of any election in Iran on Friday.
He got the largest number of votes to go to the assembly of experts.
That puts him in a very powerful position to be the next chairman of the assembly.
And at the same time, some of his allies also got elected.
He published a list of 16 candidates for the Tehran province.
And this guy, Rafsanjani, is a guy who has a record of trying to work with the Americans, whether they would respond in kind or not.
Exactly.
Beside the point.
He started in the 1990s when he was president.
He wanted to start working with the United States also.
And at that time, in 1995, he awarded this large oil contract to Conoco, the American oil company, as a gesture of restarting working with the United States.
But the Clinton administration not only prevented Conoco from working in Iran, but also imposed total economic sanctions.
Ever since, Rafsanjani has always advocated compromise and accommodation with the West in order to bring investment into Iran and in order to improve Iran's economy.
And since Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, and hard on us or totally against Rafsanjani, Rafsanjani has increasingly moved towards reformists and moderates, and he's now a firm supporter of these groups.
The fact that his list for the province of Tehran, for Assembly of Experts, got totally elected again.
They swept the elections again just before the parliament.
And the fact that he received the largest number of votes in the election puts him and his allies in a very good position if the time comes for electing the next Supreme Leader.
And that was well for Iran if that happened.
They didn't get everything they wanted, but they succeeded, first of all, to get their list elected and also kick out several important and well-known hardliners from the Assembly, which will help them in the future.
Right on.
All right.
Well, I've kept you over time here, but thanks very much for staying on and doing the show with us today.
I really appreciate it, Mohammad.
It's always great talking to you, Scott.
All right, Shahab.
That is the great Mohammad Sahimi again, a professor of chemical engineering at USC.
And a great analyst of American-Iranian relations and obviously internal Iranian politics as well.
This one is at the Huffington Post, What the Defeat of Iran's Hardliners Means.
And it's actually running today or was it yesterday on antiwar.com.
You can find it there as well.
We'll be right back with Peter Van Buren after this.
Hey, Al.
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