In the summer of 1988, Iran’s supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered the secret executions of thousands of political
prisoners.
Iran then denied reports of the slaughter, calling them “nothing but
propaganda” based on “forgeries.” It also ruthlessly suppressed efforts by the
families of the disappeared to find out what had happened to their relatives,
including the location of their burial sites.
اضافة اعلان
More than 30 years later, the world still doesn’t know how
many prisoners were murdered, although a landmark 2017 report from Amnesty
International put the minimum number at “around 5,000.” Other reports suggest a
figure as high as 30,000.
But one point is not seriously in doubt: Among the handful
of Iranian leaders most involved in the “death commissions” was Ebrahim Raisi.
At the time of the massacres, Raisi, the son of a cleric and the product of a
clerical education, was deputy prosecutor general of Tehran, later rising to
become Iran’s chief justice. In 2018, he called the massacres “one of the proud
achievements of the system.”
Last week, he was elected president of Iran in a rigged
process in which centrist candidates were disqualified before the vote took
place.
What does this mean for the world outside Iran?
One awkward question is how Western leaders should deal with
a foreign leader who is currently under
US Treasury Department sanctions for
his human-rights abuses.
A second question is what his election means for a restored
Iran nuclear deal, which the Biden administration is keen to restart after the
Trump administration withdrew from it in 2018. Negotiators in Vienna have
reportedly already completed the revised accord.
According to one analysis, Iran will most likely move
quickly to finalize an agreement while the departing, ostensibly moderate
government of Hassan Rouhani remains in office, the better for it to receive
the blame for the deal’s shortcomings (as Iranian hard-liners see them) while
Raisi’s government reaps the benefits of sanctions’ relief.
That may well be, to the extent that the Kabuki theater of
Iranian politics matters much on questions dictated by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Kabuki extends to the deal itself, which Iran will pretend to honor and the
West will pretend to verify and enforce.
The one thing it will achieve is a fleeting diplomatic
victory for the Biden administration, since the Raisi government will never
concede to additional demands for additional curbs on Iran’s nuclear and
military programs. In the meantime, billions of dollars of new money will flow
to Iran’s malevolent proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Gaza, and
Yemen.
But the important question raised by Raisi’s elevation is
not about the nuclear deal. It’s about the kind of regime we are dealing with.
Several years ago, Henry Kissinger asked whether Iran was “a
nation or a cause.” If Iran’s ambitions are defined by normal considerations of
national security, prosperity, and self-respect, then the US can negotiate with
it on the basis of objective self-interest — its and ours. Alternatively, if
Iran’s ambitions are fundamentally ideological — to spread the cause of its
Islamic Revolution to every part of the Middle East and beyond — then
negotiations are largely pointless. Iran will be bent on dominance and
subversion, not stability.
This is why Raisi’s rise matters. Although he’s often
described as “ultraconservative,” it’s more accurate to say that he’s
“ultrarevolutionary,” in the sense that he remains the loyal and unrepentant
Khomeinist he became as a young man. That makes it possible, even likely, that
he will succeed Khamenei when the supreme leader, who is 82 and rumored to be
suffering from prostate cancer, dies.
Those who thought that Iranian politics would ultimately
move in a more moderate direction were wrong. The regime is doubling down on
religion, repression and revolution.
The Biden team will make the argument that, whatever its
flaws, the deal on the table in Vienna is still the best option for dealing
with Iran’s nuclear program, on the view that military action is unthinkable
and the Trump administration’s policy of maximum sanctions didn’t stop Iran’s
uranium enrichment drive. The argument makes a certain amount of sense — at
least if the true goal of US policy is to find a face-saving exit from the
Middle East, akin to what the 1973 Paris Peace Accords did for the US and
Indochina.
But a less-restricted Iran means more regional mayhem. It
means Arab states more likely to acquire nuclear capabilities of their own.
Whatever else happens in Vienna, Raisi’s presidency means that the 42-year
crisis with Iran is about to get worse.
Read more
Opinion & Analysis
.jpg)
.jpg)
