[R-G] Beijing Cautions US over Iran

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KF20Ak03.html>
Beijing cautions US over Iran
By M K Bhadrakumar

China has broken silence on the developing situation in Iran. This
comes against the backdrop of a discernible shift in Washington's
posturing toward political developments in Iran.

The government-owned China Daily featured its main editorial comment
on Thursday titled "For Peace in Iran". It comes amid reports in the
Western media that the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is
rallying the Qom clergy to put pressure on the Guardians Council -
and, in turn, on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei - to annul last Friday's
presidential election that gave Mahmud Ahmadinejad another four-year
term.

Beijing fears a confrontation looming and counsels Obama to keep the
pledge in his Cairo speech not to repeat such errors in the US's
Middle East policy as the overthrow of the elected government of
Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953. Beijing also warns about letting
the genie of popular unrest get out of the bottle in a highly volatile
region that is waiting to explode. Tehran on Friday saw its sixth day
of massive protests by supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, whom they
say was cheated out of victory.

A parallel with Thailand

Meanwhile, China's special envoy on Middle East, Wu Sike, is setting
out on an extensive fortnight-long regional tour on Saturday (which,
significantly, will be rounded off with consultations in Moscow) to
fathom the political temperature in capitals as varied as Cairo and
Tel Aviv, Amman and Damascus, and Beirut and Ramallah.

Beijing also made a political statement when a substantive bilateral
was scheduled between President Hu Jintao and Ahmadinejad on Tuesday
on the sidelines of the summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Conceivably, Hu would have discussed the Iran situation with his
Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev during his official visit to
Moscow that followed the SCO summit. Earlier, Moscow welcomed
Ahmadinejad's re-election. Both China and Russia abhor "color"
revolutions, especially something as intriguing as Twitter, which
Moscow came across a few months ago in Moldova and raises hackles
about the US's interventionist global strategy.

China anticipated the backlash against Ahmadinejad's victory. On
Monday, The Global Times newspaper quoted the former Chinese
ambassador to Iran, Hua Liming, that the Iranian situation would get
back to normalcy only if a negotiated agreement was reached among the
"major centers of political power ... But, if not, the recent turmoil
in Thailand will possibly be repeated". It is quite revealing that the
veteran Chinese diplomat drew a parallel with Thailand.

However, Hua underscored that Ahmadinejad does enjoy popularity and
has "lots of support in this nationalist country because he has the
courage to state his own opinion and dares to carry out his policies".
The consensus opinion of Chinese academic community is also that
Ahmadinejad's re-election will "test" Obama.

Thus, Thursday's China Daily editorial is broadly in the nature of an
appeal to the Obama administration not to spoil its new Middle East
policy, which is shaping well, through impetuous actions.
Significantly, the editorial upheld the authenticity of Ahmadinejad's
election victory: "Win and loss are two sides of an election coin.
Some candidates are less inclined to accept defeat."

The daily pointed out that a pre-election public opinion poll
conducted by the Washington Post newspaper showed Ahmadinejad having a
2-1 lead over his nearest rival and some opinion polls in Iran also
indicated more or less the same, whereas, actually, "he won the
election on a lower margin. Thus, the opposition's allegations against
Ahmadinejad come as a trifle surprising".

The editorial warns: "Attempts to push the so-called color revolution
toward chaos will prove very dangerous. A destabilized Iran is in
nobody's interest if we want to maintain peace and stability in the
Middle East, and the world beyond." It pointedly recalled that the
US's "Cold War intervention in Iran" made US-Iran relationship a
troubled one, "with US presidents trying to stick their nose into
Iran's internal business".

Theocracy versus republicanism
Beijing understands Iran's revolutionary politics very well. China was
one of the few countries that warmly hosted Ruhollah Khomeini as
president (in 1981 and 1989). In contrast, India, which professes
"civilizational" ties with Iran, was much too confused about Iran's
revolutionary legacy to be able to correctly estimate Khamenei's
political instincts favoring republicanism. Most of the Indian elites
aren't even aware that Khamenei studied as a youth in Moscow's Patrice
Lumumba University.

Be that as it may, the Hu-Ahmadinejad meeting in Yekaterinburg on
Tuesday once again shows Beijing has a very clear idea about the ebb
and flow of Iran's politics. Hu demonstrably accorded to Ahmadinejad
the full honor as Beijing's valued interlocutor.

Chinese media have closely followed the trajectory of the US reaction
to the situation in Iran, especially the "Twitter revolution", which
puts Beijing on guard about US intentions. Indications are that the US
establishment has begun meddling in Iranian politics. Rafsanjani's
camp always keeps lines open to the West. All-in-all, a degree of
synchronization is visible involving the US's "Twitter revolution"
route, Rafsanjani's parleys with the conservative clergy in Qom and
Mousavi's uncharacteristically defiant stance.

Obama faces multiple challenges. On the one hand, as Helene Cooper of
The New York Times reported on Thursday, the continuing street
protests in Tehran are emboldening a corpus of (pro-Israel)
conservatives in Washington to demand that Obama should take a "more
visible stance in support of the protesters". But then, a regime
change would inevitably delay the expected US-Iran direct engagement
and upset Obama's tight calendar to ensure the negotiations gained
traction by year's end, while Iran's centrifuges in its nuclear
establishments keep spinning.

Also, a fragmented power structure in Tehran will prove ineffectual in
helping the US stabilize Afghanistan. However, top administration
officials like Vice President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton would like the US to "strike a stronger tone" on
Iran's turmoil. Cooper reported they are piling pressure on Obama that
he might run the risk of "coming across the wrong side of history at a
potentially transformative moment in Iran".

A Thermidorian reaction

No doubt, the turmoil has an intellectual side to it. Obama being a
rare politician gifted with intellectuality and a keen sense of
history would know that what is at stake is a well-orchestrated
attempt by the hardcore conservative clerical establishment to roll
back the four-year-old painful, zig-zag process toward republicanism
in Iran.

Mousavi is the affable front man for the mullahs, who fear that
another four years of Ahmadinejad would hurt their vested interests.
Ahmadinejad has already begun marginalizing the clergy from the
sinecures of power and the honey pots of the Iranian economy,
especially the oil industry.

The struggle between the worldly mullahs (in alliance with the bazaar)
and the republicans is as old as the 1979 Iranian revolution, where
the fedayeen of the proscribed Tudeh party (communist cadres) were the
original foot soldiers of the revolution, but the clerics usurped the
leadership. The highly contrived political passions let loose by the
444-day hostage crisis with the US helped the wily Shi'ite clerics to
stage the Thermidorian reaction and isolate the progressive
revolutionary leadership. Ironically, the US once again figures as a
key protagonist in Iran's dialectics - not as a hostage, though.

Imam Khomeini was wary of the Iranian mullahs and he created the
Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as an independent force to ensure
the mullahs didn't hijack the revolution. Equally, his preference was
that the government should be headed by non-clerics. In the early
years of the revolution, the conspiracies hatched by the triumvirate
of Beheshti-Rafsanjani-Rajai who engineered the ouster of the
secularist leftist president Bani Sadr (who was Khomeini's protege),
had the agenda to establish a one-party theocratic state. These are
vignettes of Iran's revolutionary history that might have eluded the
intellectual grasp of George W Bush, but Obama must be au fait with
the deviousness of Rafsanjani's politics.

If Rafsanjani's putsch succeeds, Iran would at best bear resemblance
to a decadent outpost of the "pro-West" Persian Gulf. Would a dubious
regime be durable? More important, is it what Obama wishes to see as
the destiny of the Iranian people? The Arab street is also watching.
Iran is an exception in the Muslim world where people have been
empowered. Iran's multitudes of poor, who form Ahmadinejad's support
base, detest the corrupt, venal clerical establishment. They don't
even hide their visceral hatred of the Rafsanjani family.

Alas, the political class in Washington is clueless about the
Byzantine world of Iranian clergy. Egged on by the Israeli lobby, it
is obsessed with "regime change". The temptation will be to engineer a
"color revolution". But the consequence will be far worse than what
obtains in Ukraine. Iran is a regional power and the debris will fall
all over. The US today has neither the clout nor the stamina to stem
the lava flow of a volcanic eruption triggered by a color revolution
that may spill over Iran's borders.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri
Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.