Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad aren’t the only people who have staked their reputations on Iran’s disputed presidential election results. In a TV interview, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah described the Iranian elections as a mass endorsement by the Iranian people of their country’s system of Velayat-e Faqih — or “guardianship by Islamic jurist” — in which the state is guided by a clerical “supreme leader.”
On the surface, it may seem that the leader of Hezbollah was simply using the opportunity to pay homage to Khamenei, who has been a dedicated supporter of the Lebanese Shiite militant group. But as much as Hezbollah relies on Khamenei’s patronage, its investment in Iran’s Velayat-e Faqih system goes much deeper. And the upheaval in Iran, irrespective of its outcome, spells trouble for Nasrallah and Hezbollah.
For years, Hezbollah’s leaders and rank-and-file members alike have looked to Iran’s supreme leaders as their Marjae Taghlid — their sources of emulation. Both Khamenei and his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, have been seen by Hezbollah as the Shiite equivalent of the pope. Hezbollah could point to Iran’s relative domestic stability to back its claims that the Iranian system provides a genuine model of Islamic governance for Shiites, one that should be emulated by its own followers in Lebanon.
The recent mass demonstrations in Iran, however, have highlighted the less appealing side of this system. Suddenly, the Iranian system doesn’t seem as if it’s so popular among the people of Iran, let alone something that should be adopted by Shiites abroad. Hezbollah’s Lebanese foes and competitors will undoubtedly use the unrest in Iran as a tool to attack the Shiite group’s model of religious governance. Coming on the heels of Hezbollah’s recent loss in the Lebanese elections, the turmoil in Iran is a particularly heavy blow.
And things could get even worse for Hezbollah, as well as for the Palestinian Hamas movement, should Iran’s reformists end up gaining the upper hand. In immediately and enthusiastically embracing the falsified results showing Ahmadinejad to have handily won reelection, Hezbollah and Hamas likely have tarnished their image among backers of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the broader Iranian public.
Yet a rift between Hezbollah and Hamas on the one hand and Iran’s reformists on the other was not preordained. Indeed, some Iranian reformers have been influential backers of these groups. For instance, Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Mohtashami-Pur, a key reformist figure, is credited with establishing Hezbollah in the early 1980s, while serving as Iran’s ambassador to Syria. He has been a staunch supporter of both Hezbollah and Hamas. Given what has transpired since the election, however, he would likely have a much more difficult time lobbying his fellow reformists on Hezbollah’s behalf, assuming he were still inclined to do so.
But while the protests in Iran over the election are bad news for Israel’s enemies, some Israelis don’t seem to have noticed. Instead, key Israeli officials — much like the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah — persist in seeing Ahmadinejad as an asset, albeit for different reasons.
The logic behind their thinking is that Ahmadinejad, with his reckless rhetoric, has single-handedly raised the level of international alarm over the Iranian nuclear program. Therefore, they figure, it is better to have him than a smiling Mousavi, who would undo years of Israeli efforts to paint Iran’s nuclear program and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas as dangers to the region. This sort of thinking may explain why Mossad chief Meir Dagan, in a recent briefing at the Knesset, said that Mousavi would be no different than Ahmadinejad, stressing that, despite Mousavi’s reformist outlook, he has been a staunch supporter of Hezbollah and of Iran’s nuclear program.
Such a view of Mousavi would have been understandable prior to the elections. In the current atmosphere, though, it is a major mistake to say that he is no different than Ahmadinejad. Hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities prove that he is not. Yes, Mousavi did support Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program. But Mikhail Gorbachev supported the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and endorsed human rights abuses during the Soviet era, through his participation in the Soviet Union’s communist leadership. Yet it was Gorbachev who instituted reforms that proved to be both popular with the people of the Soviet Union and beneficial to relations with the West.
We should also not forget that Iran’s atomic program is related to nationalistic ambitions. The Shah wanted a bomb, so did Khamenei and, most probably, so will any regime that comes along next, even if it is a Western-style democracy.
Leaders come and go. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad and Mousavi won’t be on the scene forever. But the Iranian people are here to stay. If Israelis want to enjoy good relations with Iran, we should respect the desire of the Iranian people for change and hope for an outcome to the current crisis that meets their aspirations. Rooting for Ahmadinejad because of short-term and shortsighted political calculations is a sure recipe for future tensions.
Meir Javedanfar is a co-author, with Yossi Melman, of “The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran” (Basic Books, 2007).
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good article. I believe your analisis is very good. if i were to add anything to this it would be the reasons behind irans aspiration to build a bomb!? the shah wanted it for the security of the nation given the extent of forign medeling into iran ie british or russian attacks. were as the mullahs want it to secure their existance and place within iran ! i don't believe they would hesitate to use it if their seat in power was threatened! as you can see already with the recent events that they are already blaming US and UK of medeling (which is not true) can you imagine what would have happened if they had the bomb alraedy????
Millions of sympathizers around the world looked forward to seeing Iran's protest movement using the Internet for the first online coup in history. Instead, the Iranian Islamic regime turned the tables: Its Internet police, arguably the largest in the world, pushed "control," "halt," "delete" and "send" buttons to activate a deadly weapon for suppressing the movement, as soon as it took to the streets to protest the June 12 election which was believed to have given Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a false victory.
By Sunday, June 28, when the Guardian Council was to hand down its final verdict on their complaints, the street rallies had petered out.
Part of the reason, DEBKAfile's intelligence sources report, was their organizers' heavy reliance on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social sites to orchestrate their protest movement. They did not at first appreciate that Iranian intelligence Internet experts, operating from secret headquarters established months ago, were using their communications to shoot them down.
According to our sources, that headquarters is located at the telecom center on Sepah (Khomenei) Square in Tehran. It was built for the Shah in the 1970s by the Israel construction contractors Solel Boneh and designed by Israeli intelligence and telecommunications experts.
The high-end apparatus, installed in late 2008 by the German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia Corp. cell phone giant, gave Iranian intelligence the most advanced tools anywhere for controlling, inspecting, censoring and altering Internet and cell phone messaging. Those tools were being used weeks before the poll to identify penetrations by alien spy services, their local agents and dissident activists.
This system is capable of conducting "deep packet inspection" of every type of text and video communication in all parts of Iran on three tracks:
1. Like other advanced electronic spy systems in the world, this one uses such keywords as attack, weapons, cash, data, explosives, meeting, demonstration, resistance, protest, etc. to alert Iran within milliseconds to feeds of interest by computer or phone - mail, signals or visuals.
In a flash, intelligence analysts get a fix on the sender and the electronic addressee which are then placed on a surveillance list for further monitoring. Once identified, the sender or receiver and their connections are closely shadowed by field agents.
2. By "deep packet inspection," the secret controllers can cause delays in online data transfers, which surfers may attribute to glitches connected with their providers. The more targets under surveillance, the more online transfers are slowed down.
DEBKAfile's Iranian sources report that the day after the presidential poll and resulting street outbreaks, Iran's Internet control and tracking supervisors took over the 10 leading service providers in the country. Their first action was to slow down incoming and outgoing cyber traffic from 1,500 to 54 kilobytes to make sure that not a single byte by Internet or cell phone to or from protest leaders escaped their notice.
Tehran has vented its ire on Britain because it is accused of providing the organizers of the dissident movement with London telephone numbers to circumvent the deliberate slowdown of online traffic from inside the country. These numbers gave anti-government activists instant, direct links through Western Internet providers for getting their messages out to the world. Iran suspects they were laid on by British intelligence.
Eventually, the British lines became jammed by overload.
3. Iranian intelligence made cynical use of the large amount of electronic and personal data accumulated on anti-regime elements. Instead of detaining their prey at once, Iranian intelligence invaded their computers and cell phones to plant false leads for smoking unsuspecting activists out in the open and keeping them under inspection.
Within a few days of their protest, Mir Hossein Mousavi and the bulk of his supporters, realizing their electronic campaign had been taken over by the regime to hunt them down, disappeared from the streets of Tehran.
Wednesday, June 24, when the extent of the damage the Iranian Internet invasion had inflicted on American interests was brought home to him, US secretary of defense Robert Gates ordered a special cyber defense system set up to protect the US armed forces' 15,000 Web sites, which encompass seven million computers. Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, was put in charge of getting the new system up and running by the end of 2010.
Tuesday, June 23, a group of US senators led by the Republic presidential candidate John McCain and independent Joe Lieberman initiated legislation to fund a cyber defense system capable of combating Internet assaults like the one mounted by the Iranian government
You seem to have failed to see their have been no suacide bombers in the "Iranian Political Civil War" why because what good for the arabs killing themselves to further Iranian policy is not good enough for the leaders own country and if anything the rank and file hezbollah members just might see that a man with much less education as well never being a marja before becoming Rafsanjani's puppet he never learned to connect with people learn what concerns the ordinary shia faithful. I don't know what the outcome will be but we should offer a list of incentives for the opposition as many nuclear plant as they want in return for oil, all the money of iran that the west has and offer to reotfit the regular army in return for help with Afghanistan let we not forget the two almost went to war when the taliban killed their diplomats ironic twist after taking ours hostage as well it would help the shia minority