[Mb-civic] In Iran, Even Some On Right Warning Against Extremes - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

In Iran, Even Some On Right Warning Against Extremes
Conservative Faction Fears Radicalism

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 27, 2006; A11

TEHRAN -- Nine months after the election of hard-liner Mahmoud 
Ahmadinejad as president, Iranian politics has shifted so sharply to the 
right that some traditional conservatives are warning of the dangers of 
radicalism.

With reformists sidelined and Ahmadinejad setting a strident new tone on 
the global stage, figures from the extreme right of Iran's political 
spectrum are defining the terms of political debate in the country. In 
remarks that set off a domestic firestorm, a senior cleric close to the 
new president suggested in January that Iranian voters were largely 
irrelevant because the government requires only the approval of God.

The remarks by Ayatollah Taqi Mesbah, and similar comments by an aide, 
were roundly criticized, even on the editorial page of Kayhan, a 
traditional showcase for hard-line thinking. Iranian political insiders 
said the flap offered a window on intense infighting at the highest 
reaches of Iran's theocracy just as world attention is focused on the 
government's determination to proceed with a nuclear program that 
skeptics call a cover for atomic weapons.

"Ayatollah Mesbah is an extremist," said one Iranian official close to 
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the soft-spoken cleric who has been Iran's 
supreme leader since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989.

"Ayatollah Khomeini warned the people lots of times not to allow these 
people, the Shia Talibans, to come to power in Iran and have space," 
said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, noting that 
Khamenei has judged it prudent to accommodate even extremists within the 
system and accord them respect. "Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei feel 
these people can do a lot of damage. They can damage Iran. They can 
damage Islam. They are like the Taliban. They are like al-Qaeda. They 
say they know what Allah expects from us -- that we should do what he 
wants from us without paying attention to the consequences.

"And it's a very dangerous belief."

The tension highlights significant divisions within Iran's conservative 
camp, often viewed from outside the country as a turbaned monolith. In 
reality, 27 years after the 1979 revolution that brought Shiite clerics 
to power, Iranian politics is a nuanced landscape defined largely by the 
lessons taken from the previous quarter-century.

Traditional conservatives describe themselves as firm but flexible. 
While remaining committed to the precept that clerics should hold 
ultimate authority, they were chastened in the 1990s when reformists -- 
determined to lessen the intrusion of the state into private lives and 
show greater tolerance for dissent -- won landslide electoral victories.

Other conservatives, who proudly call themselves fundamentalists, argue 
that reformists were hollowing out the Islamic Republic from within. 
Equating dissent with treason, they demanded a hard-line defense of the 
revolution's tenets, including strident opposition to the United States 
and Israel.

In recent years, the two camps united at election time, making common 
cause against reformists. But after the votes were counted, moderate 
conservatives were left unsatisfied.

"There was a problem in our structure, our conservative political 
structure," said Amir Mohebian, a leader in a conservative faction that 
absorbed some reformist inclinations, including cautious engagement with 
the West. "We start very well, but the result was not under our control."

Mohebian said the outcomes of 2003 elections for local councils, the 
2004 contest for parliament, "and now the presidency," were "not our 
result." Each succeeding contest tightened the right's grip.

One reason was the hard-line orientation of the Guardian Council, a 
screening panel that barred reformist candidates, producing a ballot 
skewed to the right.

That amplified another factor: turnout. The Basij civilian militia, and 
in last June's presidential contest the Islamic Revolutionary Guard 
Corps, showed up most reliably at the polls, doing their duty as the 
core constituency Khamenei set out to create after succeeding Khomeini.

"The Basij is mainly a creation of Mr. Khamenei," said one Iranian 
analyst, who declined to be quoted by name. "They spent a huge amount of 
money to reinforce these military groups. Basiji people and even the 
Revolutionary Guard people are really an artificial social class, like 
an artificial island."

Ahmadinejad spent most of his career in both groups, and he wrote huge 
increases for each into his first budget as president. He commanded a 
Revolutionary Guard engineering unit during the 1980s war with Iraq, the 
defining experience for many hard-liners holding fast to the slogans of 
a then-young revolution, and he was a leader in the Basij.

"He's a true believer in the revolutionary values, which we believe in, 
too," said Mohammad Ali Tai, 61, as he squatted on a curb at Tehran 
University, where Friday prayers are held in the capital. Usually, a few 
thousand people attend. Most are veterans like Tai, who returned home to 
lives that failed to improve materially while the governing elites grew 
wealthy.

"I am a barber myself. I talk to many people," Tai said. "They are only 
tolerating this hardship because they believe in Islam. Some people who 
were in charge did not believe in these values, and this inequality is 
because of them."

Each week, Tai attends a Basij meeting, and well as a gathering of his 
hayat , a community group that mounts celebrations for religious 
holidays. When Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran, he provided the groups 
with rice at discount prices.

"Everything we do is actually a matter of keeping alive the 
revolutionary spirit," said Tai, who said he voted in the previous two 
presidential contests for Mohammad Khatami, a reformist. "But this time 
the Basij told us: Only vote for Ahmadinejad, and don't vote for anybody 
else."

If such groups were key to Ahmadinejad's electoral success, the 
cocooning cycle of their meetings -- offering mutual reinforcement and 
fealty to a shared vision -- provides insight into the staying power of 
his rigid outlook. Friends say he held to it stubbornly when others 
adjusted their views to the post-revolution realities that spawned 
Iran's reform movement.

"He always thought that was a deviation from the true path of the 
revolution," said Nasser Hadian-Jazy, who has known Ahmadinejad since 
grade school. "Equality, justice, humility, being simple, supporting 
Muslims, opposing global arrogance -- he was never ashamed of these 
principles. Never."

Hadian-Jazy, himself a revolutionary who evolved into a reformist, said 
he marveled at seeing his old friend wearing a checkered headdress 
around his shoulders on a university campus in 1998, a deeply 
unfashionable gesture at the height of the reform movement. "His sense 
of overconfidence, to me, that's not a positive point. But that's the 
way he is," said Hadian-Jazy, now a political scientist at Tehran 
University. "He's naive. The black and white area of his mind is a lot 
bigger than the gray area."

Insiders say these are the qualities that keep Iran's hard-liners in the 
extremes.

"Because of their religious beliefs, these people are inflexible," said 
a former senior official in Khatami's government, who declined to be 
identified further. "Although their number might be few, the certainty 
of their belief lets them resist a larger population. The supporters of 
civil society and reformists are less hard, less ready to be damaged 
because of their belief."

"Whenever someone is fixed in his thinking, we call them hard-liners," 
said Mehdi Karrubi, a moderate cleric who lost narrowly to Ahmadinejad 
in the first round of last year's presidential balloting. "A group of 
people just come together. They talk to each other and say: This is what 
the society thinks!"

Mesbah, the cleric whose speech touched off the current conflict in the 
conservative camp, is praised even by critics for his intellect. He 
leads a well-funded seminary in the holy city of Qom and has forged a 
reputation for steeling the resolve of Iran's harshest conservatives, 
famously declaring: "If someone tells you he has a new interpretation of 
Islam, sock him in the mouth!"

A cartoonist dubbed him "Ayatollah Crocodile" for encouraging 
suppression of the press. One follower, now Ahmadinejad's intelligence 
minister, once bit a journalist on the shoulder. Another, now 
Ahmadinejad's interior minister, oversaw the execution of thousands of 
prisoners in the late 1980s.

Many of Mesbah's former students hold places in the Revolutionary 
Guard's ideological and political section. The cleric encourages 
students to study in Canada and the United States, which critics say 
does little to soften their views. Most eventually return to Qom.

Mesbah's followers have now set their sights, Hadian-Jazy said, on 
gaining control of the panel of clerics that is empowered to name Iran's 
supreme leader -- an open-ended appointment that has been assumed to run 
a lifetime. Called the Assembly of Experts, the 86-member body will be 
elected in nationwide balloting set for October.

Mesbah is expected to field a slate of graduates from his seminary, and 
in the preelection positioning now underway, some see preparations for a 
kind of coup. But the boldness hard-liners have shown since 
Ahmadinejad's surprise win -- on a populist platform that emphasized 
quality of life -- has unsettled many here.

"I believe the traditional right wing is worried," said Saeed Laylaz, an 
analyst who served in the first reformist administration of Khatami. 
"Until now they used each other as a horse to ride from one place to the 
other, and each thought the other was the rider."

Ahmadinejad's triumph, he said, clarified the driving force.

"When you create radicals, they don't stop when you want them to," 
Laylaz said. "The leader can order when they leave the barracks, but 
they decide when to go back. This is the dangerous position of the 
supreme leader and the right wing right now."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/26/AR2006032600755.html?nav=hcmodule
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