{"id":70844,"date":"2022-03-01T11:00:56","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T00:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=70844"},"modified":"2022-03-01T10:32:32","modified_gmt":"2022-02-28T23:32:32","slug":"iranians-are-clear-the-islamic-regime-has-lost-legitimacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/iranians-are-clear-the-islamic-regime-has-lost-legitimacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Iranians are clear: the Islamic regime has lost legitimacy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Forty-three years ago, Iranians took to the streets to celebrate the end of the shah\u2019s regime and welcome the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who, in exile, had become the shah\u2019s leading critic. Iranians opposed the shah for many reasons. Political dissidents despised his human rights abuses. Many Iranians felt left behind by the booming oil economy. The shah\u2019s liberal reforms chafed religious conservatives. Khomeini himself had gone into exile after opposing<\/a> the shah\u2019s embrace of religious equality, secular education and women\u2019s enfranchisement.<\/p>\n

What Khomeini promised was music to Iranians\u2019 ears. \u2018I don\u2019t want to have the power of government in my hand; I am not interested in personal power,\u2019 he said<\/a>. Once in power, he did an about-face. \u2018We will break all the poison pens of those who speak of nationalism, democracy and such things,\u2019 he told students six weeks after his return. \u2018You all have to obey the Islamic Republic. And if you don\u2019t, you all will vanish,\u2019 he added<\/a> in a September 1979 speech. Many did. Khomeini\u2019s regime decapitated the top ranks of the SAVAK, the shah\u2019s secret police, but then he reconstituted it, hiring the same agents to employ the same tortures on behalf of the new regime.<\/p>\n

Because of Khomeini\u2019s bait and switch on democracy and human rights, Iranians began to turn against the clerical regime. One day before the seizure of the US embassy, Steven Erlanger, then a young journalist but later the New York Times<\/em>\u2019s chief diplomatic correspondent, reported that while the revolution wasn\u2019t over, \u2018the religious phase is drawing to a close\u2019. Iraq\u2019s 1980 invasion of Iran saved Khomeini. He cloaked himself in the flag, and used the emergency to distract from rampant mismanagement and corruption and simultaneously consolidate power.<\/p>\n

The war\u2019s end and Khomeini\u2019s death soon after led to a wave of optimism both inside and outside Iran that there could be a fresh start. Diplomats believed Ali Khamenei, Khomeini\u2019s successor as supreme leader, and Iran\u2019s new president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, would end Iran\u2019s isolation, release hostages, and enable Iran to rejoin the community of nations. President George H.W. Bush secretly ordered<\/a> the US government to prepare for normalisation with Iran.<\/p>\n

Such optimism was misplaced. Khamenei was no moderate and Rafsanjani was insincere. When UN envoy Giandomenico Picco traveled to Tehran to facilitate rapprochement, Rafsanjani rebuffed<\/a> him. He meant rhetoric to facilitate business, not bring reconciliation. It was under his administration\u2014three decades before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office and years before US involvement in either Afghanistan or Iraq\u2014that the Islamic Republic restarted Iran\u2019s nuclear program.<\/p>\n

Business in and with Iran does not bring moderation. At the conclusion of the Iran\u2013Iraq War, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) began investing in the civilian economy in order to maintain their privileged position without subordination to Iran\u2019s parliament. Today, Khatam al-Anbiya<\/a>, the IRGC\u2019s economic wing, controls about 40% of the economy and dominates the construction, manufacturing, trade and oil sectors. The income of the IRGC exceeds its official budget by an order of magnitude.<\/p>\n

This has two results. First, the IRGC distorts the Iranian economy. Because courts have no jurisdiction over the IRGC, Iran effectively has no commercial law. Should an IRGC-owned company fail to pay salaries or violate a contract, neither workers nor investors have any recourse. This has nothing to do with external sanctions. It is among the reasons why Transparency International ranks<\/a> Iran lower than Papua New Guinea, Russia and Myanmar in its annual corruption index. It is also the reason why ordinary Iranians didn\u2019t benefit from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).<\/p>\n

According to the Central Bank of Iran, net capital stock<\/a>\u2014perhaps the best measures of the health of the trajectory of an economy\u2014fell into negative territory<\/a> even before President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA.<\/p>\n

The Iranian government has agency. It is ironic that Iran\u2019s external cheerleaders are more likely to absolve the regime for its situation than are ordinary Iranians. This is why ordinary Iranians have increasingly taken to the streets in recent years protesting Iranian mismanagement. This is why Iranian teachers on strike for back wages carried placards declaring<\/a>, \u2018Forget about Palestine and think about us.\u2019<\/p>\n

Second, it enables the IRGC to continue its terrorism and nuclear and missile programs regardless of any diplomatic agreement or the sincerity of the president in Tehran. When Mohammad Khatami was president, for example, he received plaudits in the West for his call for a \u2018dialogue of civilisations\u2019. During his tenure, trade with the European Union tripled and the price of oil quintupled<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The IRGC siphoned off the bulk of that money for its ballistic missile work and then-covert nuclear program. Those whom Western officials label reformist are well aware of the deception. Khatami spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh explained<\/a>, \u2018We had an overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the [nuclear] activities.\u2019<\/p>\n

The two points together have created a perfect storm for Iran. It\u2019s hard to take the Iranian regime\u2019s pleas of poverty seriously when it spends several billion dollars annually on terrorists, militias and proxy groups seeking to undermine regional states. Obstruction and terror support do not equate to influence.<\/p>\n

The reality is that the Islamic Republic of Iran at age 43 is a zombie state. Its legitimacy is gone. Executions skyrocketed<\/a>, notably before Trump walked away from the JCPOA. Nationwide protests have accelerated. In 1999, students took to the streets. Two years later, it was football fans. In 2009, the regime erupted after Khamenei oversaw mass election fraud. In 2016, anti-corruption protesters took to the streets. Economic protests reignited in 2018 and have continued sporadically ever since. This past summer, environmental protests broke out<\/a> after Isfahan\u2019s Ziyanderud River dried up, not because of climate change but because IRGC companies won corrupt contracts to build dams and undertake water-intensive agriculture.<\/p>\n

Amin Saikal writes<\/a> in these pages that the Islamic regime \u2018still commands sufficient state instrumentalities of power to deal with any nationwide uprisings\u2019. The same is true of any dictatorship that fears the free expression of its citizenry. Accelerating protests and the 82-year-old supreme leader\u2019s health<\/a>, however, suggest that the end might be near for the regime. How tragic it would be should Western countries snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by directing trade and investment not to the Iranian people, but to the Revolutionary Guards who oppress them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forty-three years ago, Iranians took to the streets to celebrate the end of the shah\u2019s regime and welcome the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who, in exile, had become the shah\u2019s leading critic. Iranians opposed …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1506,"featured_media":70850,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[321,247,1883,2122,1361],"class_list":["post-70844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-corruption","tag-iran","tag-jcpoa","tag-nuclear","tag-nuclear-deal"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIranians are clear: the Islamic regime has lost legitimacy | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/iranians-are-clear-the-islamic-regime-has-lost-legitimacy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Iranians are clear: the Islamic regime has lost legitimacy | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Forty-three years ago, Iranians took to the streets to celebrate the end of the shah\u2019s regime and welcome the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who, in exile, had become the shah\u2019s leading critic. 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