The smirking hard-liners of Tehran

The Telegraph has reported that Iran appears to be making more emollient noises about its nuclear programme,

indicating its willingness to find a diplomatic solution to the confrontation with the international community.

The fact is that the threat they pose to us all may be even more terrifying than we thought. Last Sunday, the Washington Post reported that, according to the former UN weapons inspector David Albright, Iran might have obtained the blueprints for a nuclear warhead small enough to fit onto its ballistic missiles from designs passed to rogue states by an international smuggling ring once headed by the father of the Pakistan nuclear bomb and rogue scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The A.Q. Khan smuggling ring was previously known to have provided Libya with design information for a nuclear bomb. But the blueprints found in 2006 are far more troubling, Albright said in his report... ‘To many of these countries, it's all about size and weight,’ Albright said in an interview. ‘They need to be able to fit the device on the missiles they have.’ The Swiss government acknowledged this month that it destroyed nuclear-related documents, including weapons-design details, under the direction of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency to keep them from falling into terrorists' hands. However, it has not been previously reported that the documents included hundreds of pages of specifications for a second, more advanced nuclear bomb. ‘These would have been ideal for two of Khan's other major customers, Iran and North Korea,’ wrote Albright, now president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. ‘They both faced struggles in building a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop their ballistic missiles, and these designs were for a warhead that would fit.’

Meanwhile, the western media has almost completely ignored the fact that the extreme hard-liners in Tehran have routed the relatively reformist tendencies within the clerical establishment. In the run up to next year’s presidential elections in Iran, increased tensions between the hard line revolutionaries, led by Supreme Leader Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards on the one hand and the (relatively) reformist clerical establishment led by Rafsanjani on the other have broken out into the open. The reformists have been routed by the hard-liners who, in the last three months, have openly attacked, mocked and humiliated them.

This has shown itself in a number of ways. First there were the rigged Parliamentary elections this year in which the hardliners banned any reformists of note from running and now dominate the Majlis (Parliament). They now control every significant body of political power in Iran – the Revolutionary Guards, parliament, presidency and the Office of Supreme Leader with the only remaining areas of contention being the conservative Clerical Council of Guardians and the Assembly of Experts.

Second, the hard-liners have been exposing the debauchery and corruption at the highest ranks of the clerical establishment. As was reported on Pajamas Media:

General Reza Zarei, Tehran’s chief of police and a member of the Revolutionary Guard, has resigned under a cloud of scandal after he was caught and arrested naked, with no fewer than six nude women, during a government raid on a brothel. General Zarei had spearheaded recent police operations targeting the enforcement of Islamic dress for women to promote public morality, which have resulted in thousands of arrests. In courthouses across the country, but especially in Tehran — among lawyers, judges, court clerks, and police — there is talk of little else. The story, which the Iranian regime has done its utmost to keep out of the press, first leaked out on the leftist Farsi website Peiknet more than a week ago...

According to these multiple reports, the raid and arrest were the result of a direct order from the head of judicial authorities, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, and was executed under strictest secrecy, without informing or notifying the judiciary’s chief prosecutor Said Mortazavi . Shahroudi was aware of the very close relationship between Zarei, who had served as Tehran police chief for four years, and Mortazavi, and suspected that if he was informed, Judge Mortazavi would tip off his friend in advance. It has been reported that Shahroudi was so worried this could happen that he fired an administrator in one courthouse who was close to Mortazavi in order to block any possible leak of information about this arrest to Mortazavi and his people. Mortazavi is said to be furious about the whole operation.

More recently, Abbas Palizdar, a member of Iran’s Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission has been exposing multi-billion dollar embezzlements by the clerical establishment. In a speech to students at Hamedan university, he claimed that Iran's wealth was being plundered on a daily basis by such individuals. Palizdar himself was subsequently arrested. According to Iranian blogger Hamid Tehrani:

He offered details of many illegal business deals and accused several of Iran's leading political figures, including former president and chairman of the Assembly of Experts, Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Interim Friday Prayer Leader of Tehran, Emami Kashani, and the head of the Imam Reza Shrine Foundation, Ayatollah Vaez Tabbasi, of illegally accumulating hundreds of millions of dollars. Several other Iranian bloggers published parts of his speech and commented on this exceptional event. After the speech, the university’s Islamic Society of Students was allegedly shut down.

The point about these revelations is that such washing of dirty linen in public would have been unthinkable in the past and underscores the new confidence and ascendancy of the hard-liners. Those exposing this corruption and debauchery are hardly doing so out of a sense of democratic outrage but in order to win power for the most repressive faction within the regime against the relatively less extreme elements. As is also recorded by Hamid Tehrani,

Islamic historian Abdollah Shabazi says that the ‘owners of the revolution’, according to the definition of the Islamic Republic leadership, face a dilemma between either

… the status quo, continuing the present situation and making Iran a second Pakistan, or renewing the Islamic Republic. There is no third option. The choice is either to accept institutionalised corruption, or fight against it to realise the goals of late Ayathollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution.

The ascendancy of the hard-liners has also produced a rise in overt antisemitism, as we have seen from the wild Holocaust-denial of Ahmadinejad and whose manifestations on Iranian blogs are analysed here by Tehrani.

Clearly, the ascendancy of the Iranian hard-liners has serious implications for the rest of the world, since this is the faction that is closely tied to Hezbollah and believes in ‘exporting the revolution’ – which in plain speech means war. The ‘emollient’ noises the regime has recently been making should therefore be seen as nothing other than an even wider smile on the face of the tiger.