Was the Iranian election a referendum on Iran's nuclear diplomacy?

Omid Memarian (along with other analysts) suggests that it was, at least in part.

Hasan Rowhani’s victory is indicative of the Iranian leadership’s rejection by the Iranian people and its failure to sell its hardliner policies, including the nuclear program that has led Iran to a series of crippling sanctions.

This interpretation is contestable, and some may find it overstated, but it's certainly not implausible. A great deal will depend on the extent to which Iran's ruling elite, especially Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, share this interpretation of the election results—and how they decide to respond. I have seen a lot of commentary, and even gotten some e-mail messages, about how Obama should respond.  Yes, that's an interesting question that may prove to be of practical significance. But the more crucial question, which really needs to come first, is how Khamenei will respond.

It so happens that Rohani was in charge of international negotiations about Iran's nuclear program a decade ago, during failed reformist presidency of Mohammed Khatami (though Rohani was not in the reformist camp himself).  The most hard-line of the hard candidates, Saeed Jalili, was in charge of nuclear negotiations with the so-called P5+1 (the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) since 2007.  In addition to being the point man for a rigidly uncompromising negotiating strategy, Jalili became one of the figures who epitomized a more general orientation of intransigence and hostile confrontation in Iran's dealings with the west, especially the US.

During that time, an increasingly solid international consensus has coalesced against Iran on the nuclear issue, leading to effective economic sanctions with severely damaging effects on the Iranian economy.  In combination with the Iranian government's own economic mismanagement and the effects of the global recession, the consequences have made life more difficult for the Iranian population.  One big question was whether Iranians would put all the blame for sanctions and their effects on outsiders, above all the US—as they've been urged to do by the Iranian regime and its western apologists—or whether they would recognize that their rulers shared a lot of the blame.  Well, it seems that most Iranian voters did the latter.

As Max Fisher wrote in the Washington Post just before the election:

Whomever Iranians pick in today’s presidential election, and regardless of whether or not their votes are accurately counted, the winner will not be in charge of the country’s controversial nuclear program or its foreign policy. Those are controlled by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. But the nuclear issue and its ramifications are being debated more openly in this election than you might think and are, presumably, on voters’ minds as they head to the polls. Who they choose might give some insights into how Iranians feel about the nuclear development carried out in their name.

The candidate who has most emphasized confrontation over compromise on the nuclear issue is Saeed Jalili, the country’s lead nuclear negotiator and a staunch hard-liner who is thought to be Khamenei’s preferred candidate. As a nuclear negotiator, Jalili has refused to compromise and stonewalled Western efforts to reach an agreement. As a candidate, he’s said not only that Iran should refuse to compromise with the West but that it is in fact winning against the foreign powers, its strategy of stubborn resistance successful. And some people in Iran seem to share that view.

“Open your eyes,” one 20-something Iranian man told a friend who was considering another candidate, according to Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian’s report from Tehran. “Everything we have now is because of Jalili and his courage.”

That Jalili supporter might be more right than he knows. It would be overly simplistic to reduce all of Iran’s problems to a single issue, but the country’s refusal to budge on its nuclear program and the crippling international sanctions that has invited play a big role. Those policies are ultimately decided by Khamenei but Jalili had been a key player in implementing them. Partly as a result, run-away inflation is devastating the middle class, prices on basic necessities are rising and the Iranian health-care system could soon be in crisis.

Jalili, meanwhile, is calling for status quo on the nuclear policy, a refusal to compromise with Western powers and a “resistance economy” that espouses self-sufficiency but has demonstrated little actual success.

When the Jalili supporter said they owed “everything we have” to him, he hit, probably unintentionally, on the degree to which Iranians owe much of their economic and social pains, if not to Jalili directly, then to the confrontational policies he has helped to champion.  [....]

And, in fact, Jalili was explicitly criticized on these grounds by several of the other candidates—not only by Rohani, but also by one of the hard-liners, Ali Akbar Velayati.  What made this public criticism especially remarkable was that everyone knows Jalili was just doing what Khamenei told him to do, so that criticizing Jalili's approach to the nuclear negotiations meant, implicitly, criticizing the Supreme Leader himself.

With what result?  The massive surge of support for Rohani during the last week before the election was based on a combination of many factors, but it seems safe to conclude that popular exasperation with the regime's nuclear policy was one important factor.  A lot of Iranians are clearly fed up with the policy of intransigence and confrontation and the results it has brought in the form of economic sanctions and increasing international isolation.  They used the election to send that message to ruling elite.

The ultimate repercussions of this protest vote remain unclear—which has not stopped many pundits, analysts, and other observers from jumping to premature conclusions which may well turn out to be based on wishful thinking more than anything else. But the implications may turn out to be significant. Among the various commentators I've read, I think Mehdi Khalaji did an especially perceptive and plausible job of spelling out some of the possible implications:

The main theme of Rouhani’s campaign was his critique of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear policy during the last eight years, which led to a series of U.N, E.U. and U.S. sanctions against Iran. Not only were the business community and private sector deeply damaged by sanctions, but the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s companies and government businesses also came under unprecedented pressure. The current policy left little hope for peaceful resolution of the nuclear crisis and, because of sanctions, made the impasse the first concern of many Iranian citizens, both urban and rural.

In the televised debates and his campaign, Rouhani has defended the pre-Ahmadinejad nuclear policy, which he ran from 2003 to 2005. He argued that he succeeded in keeping the nuclear program off the U.N. Security Council’s agenda while also preventing a significant interruption to the program. He said that Iran should change its negotiation pattern, assure the West that it is not after a nuclear bomb and save the economy from sanctions, while letting Iran’s peaceful nuclear program proceed. He described the 2003-04 decision to suspend uranium enrichment for a few months as a way for Iran to prove that the nuclear program is for peaceful purposes while at the same time make progress on the enrichment program during the suspension.

Rouhani’s victory can be interpreted as the success of the West’s policy toward Iran’s nuclear program. Since the start of sanctions, many have doubted whether sanctions are useful, and whether they would change Iran’s nuclear policy, but the 2013 election proved that sanctions deeply affected people’s opinions of the government’s policy of resistance rather than compromise. During the campaign, many of the candidates criticized the resistance approach, which was defended only by current nuclear negotiator Jalili. Even Velayati — who has been regarded as an influential advisor to the supreme leader—criticized Jalili in the televised debate,saying Jalili’s policy harmed Iran and produced zero benefit. [....]

It's worth stopping to re-read that last paragraph.  Thus, Khalaji suggests,

the West now should have more confidence in the negotiations because the Iranian people showed that they are not indifferent to the leverages used against nuclear policy — and indeed the hard-line elite showed it is deeply split over how to proceed on the nuclear front.

But before we get too giddily optimistic, Khalaji points out that we also need to keep some important caveats in mind. Among other things, the criticisms of Jalili by the other presidential candidates focused on the tactical incompetence of his approach to negotiations with the west. So far, there has been no serious open debate about the nuclear program itself.

[O]ne should not forget that Rouhani’s justification for negotiations during the campaign was to relieve the pressure without giving up the program. This means that while the West should approach negotiations with cautious optimism, the West has to remain insistent on Iran having only a peaceful nuclear program that is verifiably far from a nuclear weapons capability.

It's necessary to add that although Rohani looks "moderate" and reasonable by comparison with Ahmadinejad and the candidates he just defeated, and although he wound up as the default candidate for reformist voters, he has no record as a serious reformist. In fact, he has always been very much a man of the system. OK, everyone can evolve. But even if Rohani is able to bring about significant changes in Iran's domestic and international policies—a big if—it remains to be seen how much these will prove to be changes in substance and how much they will be restricted to changes in tone, style, and public-relations strategy. (Though even changes in tone would be a welcome change from the last 8 years.)

Above all, it's important not to forget a crucial point made by Fisher as well as Khalaji:  The person ultimately in charge of both the nuclear program and Iran's foreign policy is not the President, but Supreme Leader Khamenei. And, more generally, all the ultimate levers of power in the system remain in the hands of the un-elected authoritarian/theocratic power structure headed by the Supreme Leader.

So the key questions, really, are whether and how this popular repudiation of hard-line policies will influence Khamenei and the rest of the hard-line power structure.

And of course, Iran’s president does not dominate Iran’s foreign and security policy, which is overwhelmingly set by Khamenei, though the fact that Khamenei allowed Rouhani to win suggests that Khamenei himself may be open to a shift in approach.

Maybe. If Khamenei does respond by allowing Rohani some flexibility, and Rohani and his supporters take effective advantage of that room for maneuver, then that could open up some constructive possibilities. In that case, the US government and other western governments should be prepared to respond appropriately. If, on the other hand, Khamenei and the other hard-liners opt for continued inflexibility, then all this will end with even more frustration and disappointment.

This will be a long game, with big stakes. So stay tuned ...

—Jeff Weintraub

Ayatollah Khamenei explains the difference between US and Iranian presidential elections

I've just learned from Gene at Harry's Place that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, has a Facebook page. (No, that's not a joke.  It really exists, and appears to be genuine.)  On June 13 Khamenei posted a useful explanation, in graphic form, of the differences between presidential election processes in the US and Iran.

(As Evan Siegel noted in a comment, it's odd that the Iranian side of this comparison doesn't mention the mediating role of the Guardian Council, which needs to approve all aspiring candidates and routinely disqualifies almost all of them.  We might add that women and members of religious minorities are ineligible, and that voters who complain too loudly about stolen elections can get imprisoned, beaten, and sometimes tortured.)

In case you've been wondering who ultimately controls elections in the US, now you know.

—Jeff Weintraub

Farideh Farhi - Iranians vote for hope and change

What did Friday's presidential election in Iran mean? As I suggested earlier today, I think two of the key conclusions we can draw are that most Iranians want change and that, despite everything, they have not given up on the idea that they can use elections to help bring that change about.

I see that the analysis of the election by Farideh Farhi (below) also makes that case, and she offers an optimistic assessment of the implications. Whether or not that optimism proves to be correct, Farhi's analysis is informative and worth reading. Many of her points strike me as clearly on-target. And even where I find them less convincing, or at least more speculative, they are perceptive and usefully thought-provoking.

Here are a few of Farhi's points I would highlight.

Not only was Rohani's decisive victory in the presidential election a great surprise; the fact that he emerged as the favored candidate of the reformists was also a bit of a surprise.

But the move a few days before the election by reformists and centrists – guided by two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – to join forces and align behind the centrist Rowhani proved successful.  [....]

Khatami in particular had to rally reformers behind a centrist candidate who, until this election, had said little about many reformist concerns, including the incarceration of their key leaders, Mir Hossein Mussavi, his spouse Zahra Rahnavard and Mehdi Karrubi.

Khatami’s task was made easier when Rowhani also began criticising the securitised environment of the past few years [JW: a slightly euphemistic formulation] and the arrests of journalists, civil society activists and even former government officials.  [....]

The massive election turnout shows that Iranians still want to believe that their elections are meaningful, and that voting in elections can help bring about positive change. Perhaps just as significant, the conduct of this election suggests that for Iran's ruling elite, maintaining at least the appearance of meaningful elections remains an important priority.

As I noted in my own discussion, the unusual hybrid structure of the Iranian regime greatly adds to the complexities involved in analyzing Iranian politics. The dominant component of the regime, headed by the Supreme Leader, is un-elected and straightforwardly authoritarian and theocratic, based on Khomeini's distinctive doctrine of the "rule of the jurist". But the regime also includes an elected and representative component, including a Parliament and a President. And despite the rather severe restrictions within which these elections operate and the heavy manipulation to which they are subject, the outcomes are not entirely predictable (unlike, say, the kinds of elections that Communist regimes used to run.)  The tensions built into this hybrid structure have turned out to be considerable. But Supreme Leader Khamenei and the rest of the ruling elite remain committed to maintaining it.  Or, at least, they worry that completely discrediting the elective elements of the regime will undermine its overall legitimacy, so they are apparently willing to take some (limited) risks to avoid the dangers of total public cynicism about elections.

Much of the electorate, disappointed by Iran’s contested 2009 election and the crackdown that followed, was skeptical of the electoral process and whether their votes would really be counted, and they also questioned whether any elected official could change the country’s direction.

Although low voter turnout was the expectation, with the centrist-reformist alliance, the mood of the country changed, with serious debate beginning about whether or not to vote. As more people became convinced, Rowhani’s chances increased. Hope overcame skepticism and cynicism.

The case for voting centred on the argument that the most important democratic institution of the Islamic Republic – the electoral process – should not be abandoned out of fear that it would be manipulated by non-elective institutions and that abandoning the field was tantamount to premature surrender. [....]

The hope that the Iranian electoral system could still be used to register a desire for change was a significant motivation for voters.

In the long run, this continuing hope that elections can be used effectively to achieve reform-within-the-system may or may not turn out to be illusory (as it has so far). But Farhi would prefer to see those prospects in an optimistic light, and that perception might conceivably prove correct.

Farhi also puts an optimistic spin on this election in two other key respects. Given the structures of power within the Iranian regime, will Rohani's election as President actually lead to significant concrete changes in Iran's domestic and international policies? Farhi hopes so (though she adds some cautionary reservations). And, more generally, Farhi suggests that the results of this election add up to "nothing less than a political earthquake" in Iran.

We shall see. Meanwhile, read the whole thing.

—Jeff Weintraub

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Inter Press Service (IPS) News Agency
June 15, 2013
Iranians Vote for Hope and a Change of Course
Farideh Farhi

HONOLULU, Hawaii, Jun 15 2013 (IPS) - Iran’s Jun. 14 presidential election results, announced the day after voting was held, were nothing less than a political earthquake.

The Centrist Hassan Rowhani’s win was ruled out when Iran’s vetting body, the Guardian Council, qualified him as one of the eight candidates on May 21.

Furthermore, a first-round win by anyone in a crowded competition was not foreseen by any pre-election polling.

Up to a couple of weeks ago, conventional wisdom held that only a conservative candidate anointed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could win. Few expected the election of a self-identified independent and moderate who was not well-known outside of Tehran, and few expected participation rates of close to 73 percent.

The expected range was around 60 to 65 percent, in favour of conservative candidates, who benefit from a stable base that always votes.

But the move a few days before the election by reformists and centrists – guided by two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – to join forces and align behind the centrist Rowhani proved successful. It promises significant changes in the management and top layers of Iran’s various ministries and provincial offices.

Rowhani has also promised a shift towards a more conciliatory foreign policy and less securitised domestic political environment.

The centrist-reformist alliance formed when, in a calculated action earlier this week, the reformist candidate Mohammadreza Aref withdrew his candidacy in favour of Rowhani. But the strong support for Rowhani underwriting his first-round win came from an unexpected surge in voter turnout.

Much of the electorate, disappointed by Iran’s contested 2009 election and the crackdown that followed, was skeptical of the electoral process and whether their votes would really be counted, and they also questioned whether any elected official could change the country’s direction.

Although low voter turnout was the expectation, with the centrist-reformist alliance, the mood of the country changed, with serious debate beginning about whether or not to vote. As more people became convinced, Rowhani’s chances increased. Hope overcame skepticism and cynicism.

The case for voting centred on the argument that the most important democratic institution of the Islamic Republic – the electoral process – should not be abandoned out of fear that it would be manipulated by non-elective institutions and that abandoning the field was tantamount to premature surrender.

Reformist newspaper editorials also articulated the fear that a continuation of Iran’s current policies may lead the country into war and instability.

Syria, in particular, played an important role as the Iranian public watched peaceful protests for change there turn into a violent civil war.

The hope that the Iranian electoral system could still be used to register a desire for change was a significant motivation for voters.

Beyond the choice of Iran’s president, the conduct of this election should be considered an affirmation of a key institution of the Islamic Republic that was tainted when the 2009 results were questioned by a large part of the voting public.

The election was conducted peacefully and without any serious complaints regarding its process.

Unlike the previous election, when results were announced hurriedly on the night of the election, the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of conducting the election, with over 60,000 voting stations throughout the country, chose to take its time to reveal the complete results.

Other key individual winners of this election, beyond Rowhani, are undoubtedly former presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Khatami who proved they can lead and convince their supporters to vote for their preferred candidate.

Khatami in particular had to rally reformers behind a centrist candidate who, until this election, had said little about many reformist concerns, including the incarceration of their key leaders, Mir Hossein Mussavi, his spouse Zahra Rahnavard and Mehdi Karrubi.

Khatami’s task was made easier when Rowhani also began criticising the securitised environment of the past few years and the arrests of journalists, civil society activists and even former government officials.

Meanwhile, Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose own candidacy was rejected by the Guardian Council, saw his call for moderation and political reconciliation confirmed by Rowhani’s win.

He rightly sensed that despite the country’s huge economic problems, caused by bad management and the ferocious U.S.-led sanctions regime imposed on Iran, voters understood the importance of political change in bringing about economic recovery.

Conservatives, on the other hand, proved rather inept at understanding the mood of the country, failing in their attempt to unify behind one candidate and stealing votes from each other instead.

The biggest losers were the hardline conservatives, whose candidate Saeed Jalili ran on a platform that mostly emphasised resistance against Western powers and a reinvigoration of conservative Islamic values.

Although he was initially believed to be favoured, due to the presumed support he had from Khamenei, he ended up placing third, with only 11.4 percent of the vote, behind the more moderate conservative mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.

The hardliners loss did not, however, result from a purge. Other candidates besides Rowhani received approximately 49 percent of the vote overall, and so while this election did not signal the hardliners’ disappearance, it did showcase the diversity and differentiation of the Iranian public.

Rowhani, as a centrist candidate in alliance with the reformists, will still be a president who will need to negotiate with the conservative-controlled parliament, Guardian Council and other key institutions such as the Judiciary, various security organisations and the office of Ali Khamenei, which also continues to be controlled by conservatives.

Rowhani’s mandate gives him a strong position but not one that is outside the political frames of the Islamic Republic. He will have to negotiate between the demands of many of his supporters who will be pushing for faster change and those who want to maintain the status quo.

For a country wracked by eight years of polarised and erratic politics, Rowhani’s slogan of moderation and prudence sets the right tone, even as his promises constitute a tall order.

Whether he will be able to decrease political tensions, help release political prisoners, reverse the economic downturn and ease the sanctions regime through negotiations with the United States remains to be seen.

But Iran’s voters just showed they still believe the presidential office matters and they expect the president to play a vital role in guiding the country in a different direction.

Iranians want change

To repeat:  It's clear that Iranians want change.  And the kinds of change that most of them want include movement toward a more open society, more freedom, less theocracy, and less confrontation with the west in general and the US in particular.  So far, those are the only indisputable conclusions one can draw from the surprise victory of Hassan Rohani (or Rowhani or Rouhani) in Friday's presidential election.  And they accord with larger tendencies that have been clear since at least the mid-1990s.  Whenever Iranians have been given even half a chance to vote against the status quo, even under difficult and restricted conditions, most of them have done so.

To try to understand the meaning and implications of these elections, one always has to bear in mind the peculiar hybrid character of the Iranian regime established by the Khomeinists after the 1979 revolution.  It's a fundamentally authoritarian regime, ultimately controlled by hard-line theocratic ideologues, and that's the essential starting-point.  But it has a complex dual structure.  It has an un-elected and straightforwardly theocratic component, headed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and buttressed by institutions like the Revolutionary Guards (who are not only a major military force, on a par with the regular armed forces, but also control much of the economy) and the paramilitary basij militia.  But it also has an elective component featuring all the standard elements of quasi-democratic representative government, including an elected President and Parliament, elected local governments, universal suffrage (including women and religious minorities, though they are excluded from some important offices), and so on.  The trick is that the un-elected theocratic component controls all the ultimate levers of power—including the judiciary, the military, the security services, the police, foreign affairs, and so on.  The theocratic component of the regime also intervenes extensively in the representative part of the system.  For example, the Guardian Council can veto any legislation, or exclude any election candidates, that it deems insufficiently "Islamic"—and it has done so very extensively over the years, though often in variable and unpredictable ways.

The tensions built into this hybrid regime structure, in a situation where the ruling elite has lost its legitimacy among much of the population and there are also splits within the ruling elite, help explain the odd reality that Iranian presidential elections are unfair, restricted, heavily manipulated—but nevertheless often unpredictable.

From 1997 through 2005 reformists led by (the reformist cleric) President Mohammed Khatami won repeated election victories, giving rise to hopes (or illusions) that there could be serious positive changes within the framework of the system.  But the reformists were were blocked, harassed, and eventually shut down by the hard-liners.  In 2005 the hard-line establishment stopped pussyfooting around, suppressed the reformists, disqualified reformist candidates across the board, and engineered the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President.  But it is often forgotten that when Ahmadinejad was first elected, he also presented himself as a candidate of change.  The main candidate he defeated, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, was generally perceived as the establishment candidate, the very epitome of the corrupt clerico-kleptocratic elite.  By contrast, Ahmadinejad looked to many like a protest candidate.  But unlike the reformists, the alternative to the status quo offered by Ahmadinejad and his backers was a revitalization of the Islamic Republic by a return to its roots in revolutionary radicalism.  (One indication of the increasing narrowing of the ruling elite over time is that in the 2013 election Rafsanjani, who tried to run as a presidential candidate, was himself disqualified by the Guardian Council.  Nowadays, the hard-liners consider Rafsanjani an Iranian equivalent of an American RINO.)  Given that the reformists were suppressed and demoralized, Ahmadinejad represented the only kind of change available on the ballot in 2005, and Ahmadinejad undoubtedly got a lot of votes on that basis (though there was probably also some vote-rigging involved in his victory—Rafsanjani clearly thought so).

By 2009, though Ahmadinejad still had some genuine support, it was clear to most Iranians that this was not the kind of change they could believe in.  And the hard-liners discovered that, to their shock, as the election results started to come in.  So they had to resort to blatantly stealing the 2009 election, by massively cooking the voting figures, in order to prevent the victory of Mir Hossein Moussavi.  That provoked an explosion of protest by defrauded Iranian voters that greatly embarrassed the ruling elite.  (And since then the two reformist candidates from 2009, Moussavi and Karroubi, have been under house arrest.)

This time around, we can actually see the same basic pattern in the voting, except that this time they counted the votes. Rohani, it should be emphasized, was not really a candidate of the reformist camp.  But most of the other candidates were hard-core hard-liners, differing only in their degrees of extremism, and by contrast Rohani emerged as by far the most "moderate" candidate.  During the campaign he also reached out to the reformists by calling for policies like reduced censorship and the release of political prisoners, as well as criticizing the counter-productive intransigence displayed by the Iranian government in international negotiations over Iran's nuclear program.  (These criticisms seem to have been mostly about tactical incompetence, without directly addressing the goals of the nuclear program itself; but the public airing of such criticism by Rohani, himself a former nuclear negotiator during the Khatami era, was startling in itself.)  After the only other non-hard-line candidate withdrew from the race, Rohani emerged as the default candidate for all voters critical of existing policies and of the existing system more generally.  That role was reinforced when Rohani was publicly endorsed by Khatami and Rafsanjani.

And Rohani won, taking an outright majority of the votes in the first round and greatly out-polling any of the individual hard-line candidates.  All the available information seems to suggest that everyone was surprised by this outcome, including Khamenei and the hard-line establishment.  So why did they let Rohani win, and not steal the election the way they did in 2009?

That's a tricky question, about which one can only speculate.  It may be that Khamenei & Co. regard Rohani as less threatening than Moussavi.  It may also be that Khamenei was eager to avoid a replay of the 2009 debacle, which would only reinforce and harden popular cynicism about the Iranian regime.  It does seem clear that, despite everything, the ruling elite continues to regard the elective component of the system, and sense of participation that Iranians get from the rituals of voting, as important elements in maintaining the system's legitimacy.  Or it may be that splits within the ruling elite (it's worth noting that one of Ahmadinejad's close advisers was also disqualified by the Guardian Council) would have made a major vote-rigging exercise like the one in 2009 harder to pull off efficiently.  Or perhaps some combination of all those factors?  As I said, so far we can only speculate.

The practical implications of Rohani's election also remain to be seen.  They might be significant, within limits, in terms of both tone and substance.  But they might not be terribly significant.  Again, one always has to bear in mind that whoever wins elections in Iran, the hard-line theocratic establishment continues to control the crucial levers of power, and they have shown themselves willing to use those levers.  Also, Rohani himself is fundamentally a man of the system—but then so was Moussavi, and he wound up surprising everyone, probably including himself.

=> In the meantime, though, it's important to emphasize the crucial message of this election.  Most Iranians want change.  And the kinds of change that a majority of Iranians want point in the direction of more freedom, more democracy, less theocracy, less extremism, and less international isolation.  From a long-term perspective, that strikes me as extremely important.

In fact, I feel emboldened to revisit some observations I offered in 2004, when the previous effort at political "reform" within the system, headed by then-President Mohammed Khatami, was collapsing in the face of massive obstruction and increasing repression by the hard-liners (The Iranian Dubcek bows out):

In retrospect, the Khatami experiment, beginning in 1997, will almost certainly be seen as the last shot at reforming and democratizing the system from within (like the Prague Spring of 1968). It was tried, and it failed.

What happens next is less clear. Like the eastern European regimes during the 1980s, the Iranian regime seems to have decisively lost its legitimacy and support among the great majority of Iranians. But historical analogies are rarely exact. By the 1980s, the eastern European elites (with some very rare exceptions) didn't really believe in the system either, had become cynical and demoralized, and collapsed fairly rapidly when they were challenged. Unlike those regimes, the Iranian regime still commands the loyalty of a sizable hard core who are committed to it from genuine ideological belief and/or from materialistic motives, and who seem willing to use as much violence as it takes to crush opposition. I suspect this means that Iran can look forward to an indefinite period of very unstable political equilibrium, probably marked by increasing repression as well as potentially dangerous efforts by the ruling elite to build up support through nuclear brinksmanship and other types of foreign-policy adventurism.

Or maybe not. After all, when Solidarity was suppressed in Poland in 1981, almost no sane person imagined that the whole edifice of eastern European post-Stalinist state socialism would come crashing down a decade later. History is unpredictable. And Iran remains one of the very few countries in the Middle East where, if the current regime collapsed tomorrow, it's plausible that it would NOT be replaced with an even worse regime. In fact, I think we could still see an Iranian 1989 ... sometime down the road.

In one sense, my impressions back in 2004 seem to have been incorrect, or at least premature.  Various developments in Iran over the past decade, including the presidential elections of 2009 and 2013, suggest that widespread hopes for reform within the system are still alive, despite repeated disappointments and ongoing repression.  But my basic long-term prognosis still strikes me as plausible—and that represents one of the few reasons for feeling hopeful about broader prospects for the Middle East.

I continue to believe that there is a real possibility that at some point in the future Iranians can succeed in achieving their own, distinctively Iranian, version of 1989.  (I'm referring to the revolutions of 1989 in East/Central Europe, of course, not Tienanmen.)  However, that will be the outcome of a long-term process, which offers no solutions for immediate problems and crises. Until then, for those of us outside Iran, the key tasks will be to contain the damage that the Iranian regime can cause (and to make every effort to keep it from getting nuclear weapons, while also trying to avoid a disastrous war).  But it is important to bear in mind that the Iranian people, as distinct from the lunatics currently ruling them, are basically on the right side.  They mostly want a better social and political order than the one they now have—not an even more awful one, like publics in some other countries—and they deserve the greatest possible sympathy, support, and encouragement from the rest of us.

=>  With respect to Friday's election and Rohani's election, the piece piece below by Scott Peterson, long-time Middle East reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, provides an informative overview along with a useful round-up of some immediate reactions and analyses.  I find some of those reactions perceptive and illuminating, others less convincing ... but that only underlines the key point, which is that we're all in the business of informed speculation at this point.  Stay tuned.

—Jeff Weintraub

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Christian Science Monitor
June 15, 2013
Hassan Rohani is Iran's next president. What will change?
Political moderate Hassan Rohani defeated a host of conservative challengers to win Iran's presidency. His style is a sharp contrast with that of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
By Scott Peterson

Politically moderate cleric Hassan Rohani won a first-round victory in Iran’s presidential election, a stunning result that heralds change – both in tone, and almost certainly in substance – for the Islamic Republic.

Mr. Rohani, a former nuclear negotiator, polled three times as many votes as his nearest rival to garner 50.71 percent of all ballots cast, enough to avoid an expected runoff. He faced down a host of conservatives in Friday’s vote, stating at the ballot box that he had “come to destroy extremism.”

Rohani built his campaign around promises to ease Iran’s tensions with the West, end international sanctions, allow greater freedom of the press and reduce government interference in private lives. Ahead of the vote many said that Rohani’s candidacy was little more than window dressing, permitted by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to boost turnout among disillusioned Iranians and erase memories of the violent, fraud-tainted 2009 election.

But with the cleric now officially Iran's president-elect, after capitalizing on discontent within the electorate and divisions in the conservative camp, Khamenei may be as surprised as anyone about the result. The surge for Rohani began just 72 hours before the vote – fueled by endorsements from former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani – and has now shocked Khamenei and the rest of the conservative establishment.

There is shock, too, for all those Iranians who planned to boycott the election because they considered their votes “useless” in a rigged system, yet voted anyway – pushing official turnout to roughly 72 percent – and found their choice accurately reflected in the result.

“The Climax of a Political Epic – World was Stunned Again,” proclaimed the hardline Kayhan newspaper. One Iranian Tweet distilled the surprise: “Four years ago today we were on the street in disbelief, chanting ‘Where is my vote?’ This is a different kind of disbelief.”

Khamenei had called for a large turnout to defeat Iran’s “enemies,” and to restore legitimacy to an Islamic system tarnished by Iran's fraud-tainted 2009 election, which brought millions of Iranians to the streets in weeks of protest that were violently crushed amid chants of “Death to the Dictator!”

Iranian pendulum

“What we are seeing is a swing of the pendulum, with a clear understanding of what happened before,” says Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert at the University of Hawaii. Critical was the ability of Mr. Khatami and Mr. Rafsanjani to work together, “prodded by…the rank and file in the provinces” to do something “no matter how flawed [the election] is."

“Once they became convinced that conservative forces have a stake in running an adequately fair election – a proper election, in terms of its mechanism – then the game became extremely political and strategic. It worked, and one has to give kudos to two former presidents who now are leaders of the country, because they have proven they can mobilize voters,” she says.

In the months prior to the vote, the regime insisted that the “sedition” of 2009 would not be repeated. Journalists were arrested or harassed months ago. Revolutionary Guard commanders issued warnings against interference at home and abroad.

The 686 people who registered to run were whittled down to just eight candidates by the Guardian Council, which disqualified Rafsanjani as well as the chosen successor of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose second term ends in August.

Khamenei and other elements of the ruling system made clear their preference that one of the six hardline contenders should win. Among them are the popular Tehran mayor Mahammed Baqr Qalibaf and current nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili. Against such well-known opponents close to the Supreme Leader, Rohani was given little hope.

But events combined to provide the “hope” and “prudence” that were the catchwords of his campaign. Conservatives were divided, their votes split among themselves. And after a third televised debate – in which Rohani claimed he had “never lied” to the Iranian people – fellow reformist candidate Mohammad Reza Aref withdrew from the race. High-profile endorsements began to pile-up and Rohani began to ride the crest of a popular surge.

“We are seeing again that the Islamic Republic is a wizard at turning the elections into an event, and always provides us with a surprise,” says a mother in Tehran, who had vowed not to cast a "worthless" vote before the election.

Today she marvels that the vote count was “so measured and meticulous” compared to 2009, and quipped that her “jaw is hurting from repeated falling motion, chest getting bruised... this election is merely an indication that maybe the Leader is feeling less bloody-minded after learning a hard lesson through his selection of Ahmadinejad [in 2005 and 2009] and is now ready to be more pragmatic to save the Islamic system."

Hardliners and blame

Hardliners did not blame Khamenei for the result, but in some cases themselves. An editorial today in Tabnak, which is run by candidate and former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei, explained the loss under the headline: “Why is defeat necessary?"

“People of Iran said no to fundamentalists because they were unhappy about the way the country was being managed and were hurt because of it,” Tabnak said. Iranians wanted a president who “does not only chant slogans inside and outside Iran and bring fundamentally negative changes to their lives.”

Votes were counted far more slowly than in 2009, when complete results were published by a semi-official news agency while the polls were still open, then taken down only to be re-posted with precisely the same numbers later.

The reformist candidates in that election, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, leaders of the so-called Green Movement who challenged the 2009 result and Khamenei, remain under house arrest in Tehran. The Supreme Leader said today’s result would help overcome the ghosts of 2009. Khamenei did not speak as ballots were being counted, but his office tweeted: “In 2009 was same excitement but w/ insults; this election has no disrespect. It’s valuable that we’ve progressed so much in 4 years.”

In another tweet, Khamenei said: “2009 unrests were all about to hurt [popular] base of Revolution while West propagandized 'people lost confidence.' No! People & System got mutual confidence.”

Rafsanjani appears to agree with him. Iranian media quoted the former president today saying it was the “most democratic election in the world and there are not flaws in the election.”

Gracious in victory and defeat

Overnight all six candidates issued a joint statement calling on their supporters not to demonstrate or make celebrations until the results were out. By late afternoon, Rohani had called on his supporters not to “gather against the law,” and that any gathering would only be after official announcements and with legal permission.

“If this result stands, the Western narrative stating that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the [Revolutionary Guard] are all-powerful needs to be revisited,” wrote Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, in an analysis from Washington. “Though hardliners remain in control of key aspects of Iran’s political system, the centrists and reformists have proven that even when the cards are stacked against them, they can still prevail due to their support among the population."

Mr. Parsi wrote that “Rohani will likely try to move to the middle now and be a unifying president.”

As voting was extended by five hours on Friday, there were noticeable differences compared to 2009. State TV channel IRIB broadcast that candidate representatives were allowed to stay in polling stations until the counting was done. The head of the election headquarters Seyed Solat Mortazavi last night said he would look into reports of Jalili campaign material being distributed at polling stations and “we will confront such behavior.” Journalists were not kicked out of the Interior Ministry as results were coming in, as they were in 2009.

“Now because people are so shocked, they think that Mr. Khamenei has planned all these things to reinvent the Islamic system,” says Farhi in Hawaii. Instead, the results illustrate that there is “real politics going on [across] contested political terrain” in Iran, which shows the limits of Khamenei’s ability to shape events. “The Islamic Republic has developed so many competing institutions, and competing political forces” that the consolidation of conservatives since 2005 was not likely to last, says Farhi.

“The policies of the last eight years so clearly failed, in terms of improving the lot of the Iranian population, that now there is an adjustment. If it didn’t happen, then there was something wrong.”

Yet Khamenei would have been as surprised as any at the Rohani victory. “[Khamenei] is the leader who made the decision in 2009 to come out and say publicly that his views are closer to Ahmadinejad. He identified himself not as the father of the nation, but as player in these things,” adds Farhi. “So he is paying for that political mistake,” she says. “Does this mean that he’s going to disappear, and the office of the Leader is not going to be powerful anymore? Absolutely not.”

Where do conspiracy theories come from, and why do they matter?

Mass delusions, including paranoid conspiracy theories and other widely shared myths, may be factually and logically absurd, but it's important to remember that they're also social facts worth noticing and trying to understand—and if enough people believe them, they can sometimes be quite important and consequential social facts.

Apropos of which ... a recent post by Andrew Sullivan, Where Conspiracy Theories Come From, is worth looking at just to watch this priceless video clip from a BBC interview with David Aaronovich (author of Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History) and American talk-radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones:



Sullivan also quotes a perceptive passage from an interesting-sounding book:

Jesse Walker discusses his forthcoming book on conspiracy theories, The United States Of Paranoia:

A point I try to stress in the book is that even a conspiracy theory that says absolutely nothing true about the external world does say something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe it. One example that I mention in the book is the claim that white doctors were deliberately injecting black babies with AIDS. There’s no evidence for that. But while investigating that theory, you can’t stop there. You have to go on to ask, “Why did people believe this was true?”

And in fact, there is this long history of the secretive medical mistreatment of black people, which includes the Tuskegee experiment and all sorts of other things. There were these rumors about night doctors [who would supposedly secretly experiment on African Americans] and it’s really unclear to what extent those were true. Historians who look at this are very cautious, because it’s entirely possible that hospitals were seriously abusing the rights of people from the underclass. We’re trying to piece it together from such incomplete evidence that there’s always going to be question marks. There’s a spectrum that on one end has stuff that’s accepted as historical fact and on the other contains weird fantasies. But these aren’t completely separate categories because there’s this whole realm of possibilities in between.

Sometimes, it is important to add, the underlying anxieties don't have any grains of empirical truth in them, even symbolically transformed grains of truth, but instead are based on social-psychological mechanisms of projection, displacement, the transformation of guilt into resentment and self-justification, etc. ... but those are also linked to forms of social experience, which also need to be analyzed and understood.

Yours for reality-based discourse (though without illusory expectations),
Jeff Weintraub

Trudy Rubin on the "strong whiff of Putinism" in Erdogan's Turkey

Has Turkey been getting more democratic during the past decade?  In some ways the answer to that question seems to be positive, but in other ways it's a lot more ambiguous, and any account of Turkish politics that tries to deny or evade those ambiguities is unrealistic and misleading.

Turkey has been going through a complex political and cultural transition, and the ultimate outcome remains uncertain.  The steps taken by the AKP government to reduce the political power of the military and to dismantle the quasi-authoritarian remnants of the Kemalist "deep state" apparatus are potentially valuable contributions toward strengthening and deepening Turkish democracy.  In the process, however, the AKP has been dismantling the whole structure of institutional and socio-political restraints on its own power and freedom of action, both formal and informal.  So far, they have proceeded in a (generally) cautious, restrained, and disciplined manner.  But will that continue to be true once the remaining constraints have been removed?

The AKP has been moving to consolidate its grip on the various branches of the state apparatus, including the police and the judiciary, and has engaged in sustained efforts to silence or intimidate critics and opponents.  Turkey has never been a paradise for freedom of the press or freedom of expression more generally, but lately the numbers of indicted and imprisoned journalists, along with other measures against independent news media, have drawn condemnations from groups like Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International. Some of the ongoing judicial inquisitions, ostensibly directed against plots for military coups, see to be metastasizing into a McCarthyite witch-hunt.  All this is further complicated by the personal style and political ambitions of Erdogan himself, who has become a central figure in Turkish politics to an extent probably unmatched since Ataturk—and who obviously wants things to stay that way.

This whole process of consolidating the AKP's one-party control has been facilitated by the disunity and ineffectiveness of the opposition parties--a fact that makes the current eruption of extra-parliamentary protest especially significant.  This protest wave might turn out to be a useful corrective moment on a long-term path toward genuine democratization ... or it might lead to a backlash in which Erdogan and the AKP move even more harshly to suppress criticism and opposition.  That remains to be seen, and one should avoid excessive pessimism as well as undue complacency about the prospects of Turkish democracy.  But it's clear that people who worry about the possibility that Turkey might be in the process of moving from one quasi-authoritarian system to another have plausible grounds for concern that can't simply be dismissed.

In the meantime, if anyone thinks that talk of a "McCarthyite witch-hunt" is exaggerated or hysterical, just read the illuminating piece by Trudy Rubin below.

—Jeff Weintraub

===================================
Philadelphia Inquirer
June 9, 2013
Clues on Turkey in jailing of educator
By Trudy Rubin

Kemal Guruz, jailed for nearly a year.

If you want to understand why tens of thousands of young urban Turks have been demonstrating against their government, you need look no further than the tragic plight of Kemal Guruz.

Guruz, one of Turkey's most distinguished academic reformers and the onetime head of Turkey's Higher Education Council (known as YOK), has been held without charges in a maximum-security prison for nearly a year.

An indictment against him was finally issued a couple of weeks ago, but the details have not been made public nor revealed to him or his family. The case is supposedly related to a long-running investigation launched by the "moderate" Islamic government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan into events that led to the resignation of a more hard-line Islamist government in 1997.

Guruz, an outspoken advocate of Turkey's secular traditions, says he had no links whatsoever to the 1997 events - which Erdogan's followers regard as a "soft" coup - and no credible evidence to the contrary has been presented. Rather, Turkish human-rights activists believe Guruz's arrest is part of a systematic effort by Erdogan's AKP party to intimidate academics, journalists, and others who oppose its efforts to Islamacize society.

The dragnet arrests that ensnared Guruz reflect the same arrogance of power that was on display last week when the government responded brutally to peaceful environmental protests against the destruction of Istanbul's Gezi Park. That arrogance transformed a small demonstration into nationwide protests by middle-class, (mostly) secular youth against government intimidation of those with different views.

Erdogan has racked up solid domestic achievements - notably, economic growth that has expanded the middle class. But the crackdown in Gezi Park triggered an explosion of pent-up outrage over the AKP's crony capitalism and coercive measures, such as banning alcohol in public places after 10 p.m. and intimidating the press.

Turkish media have been so cowed that the leading TV channels failed to cover the massive demonstrations. When social media tried to pick up the slack, Erdogan denounced Twitter as "the worst menace to society," and 34 cyberactivists were arrested. Reporters Without Borders has ranked Turkey 154th out of 179 countries on its press freedom index, just below Russia.

Indeed, there is a strong whiff of Putinism in Erdogan's disdain for civil society, and his hopes to change Turkey's constitution to enable himself to become president and solidify power. The prime minister appears to think that, after winning 50 percent of the votes in 2011, he needn't listen to anyone who didn't choose him. But his backers included many liberals who will not vote for him again.

So anyone (see: President Obama) who views Erdogan's Turkey as the model that Arab states should follow should reconsider. Indeed, long before the Gezi Park protests, the AKP's democracy deficit was laid bare by the arrests of Guruz and many others like him.

I visited Guruz in Ankara in October 2010 and found this erudite, patriotic man bewildered at the allegations leveled against him. At that time he had just been called in for questioning on claims that he was part of a bizarre conspiracy called Ergenekon (the name of a mythical Turkish valley), in which a shadowy network of military officers allegedly plotted to overthrow Erdogan's government just after he came to power.

These accusations provided an excuse for a religiously oriented government to arrest a wide swath of intellectuals, university presidents, women's-rights advocates, journalists, and writers, who were critics of AKP policies. Many of them were advocates for maintaining a secular, or at least tolerant, Turkey, and have languished in prison for years without trial.

"They charged me with being a member of a secret terrorist organization, which I never heard of before, including some guys I've been opposed to," Guruz told me. "This is like a nightmare." The nightmare was destined to get much worse.

In June 2012, while on a cruise, Guruz received word that he was wanted for questioning about his alleged involvement with the Turkish military in the 1997 "coup." He immediately returned to Ankara to deny the allegations, but was arrested and put in a maximum-security prison. He has been held without trial as a flight risk - even though he had voluntarily returned from abroad.

Guruz believes the government's real grievances against him revolve around steps he took as head of YOK that were legal but anathema to Islamist officials: enforcing constitutional policy on banning girls in head scarves from university campuses, and helping design a new university admissions policy (without any military input) that was disliked by officials from Muslim schools.

This stellar educator, highly respected in the West, faces a possible life sentence in solitary confinement. His trial may be held soon; a judge could dismiss the paper-thin case, but the government may not want to lose face.

As thousands of young people continue to demonstrate against the government, the outcome of Guruz's case will symbolize the direction this Turkish government intends to take.

There are two options: On the one hand, Erdogan takes a hard line, dismissing the demonstrators as terrorists. He still says Gezi Park will be razed and a mosque built nearby. On the other hand, President Abdullah Gul, also an AKP leader, insists all Turkish views (secular or religious) should be freely expressed and considered by the government.

If Gul's outlook prevails, the demonstrations will likely cool and the politicized charges against Guruz should be dropped soon. If Guruz is convicted, it will signal to Turkey's citizens and allies that its democracy faces very rough times.

E-mail Trudy Rubin at trubin@phillynews.com. Read her blog at www.inquirer.com/worldview.

Better & worse forms of economic "stimulus"

(From Business Insider, April 2012. This graph updated an October 2011 US/UK comparison, here, which already showed the US economic recovery pulling ahead significantly, despite unremitting Republican sabotage and obstructionism. The contrasts are even stronger now ... as shown by the graph at the end of this post.)
------------------------------

First, let's review the basics. As I've noted before (please pardon the repetition):

In some ways, admittedly, the idea that governments should respond to economic downturns with policies of fiscal "austerity"—that is, with spending cuts and other measures to reduce their growing deficits—may seem like common sense. To quote one popular but misleading slogan, when individuals and families have to tighten their belts, government should tighten its belt too. And before the 1930s, this piece of economic folklore would also have been regarded as sound and responsible mainstream economics.

Unfortunately, life is sometimes more complicated than that. Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the work of John Maynard Keynes it has been recognized—or, at least, it should be generally recognized—that this is precisely the wrong way to respond to an economic crash. In that kind of situation, a fixation on government deficit-cutting is not just misplaced and harmful but systematically counterproductive and self-defeating. As the amount of demand in the overall economy slumps, withdrawing further demand from the economy through those "austerity" policies just accelerates a self-reinforcing contractionary spiral. Insufficient demand reduces sales and discourages investment, businesses cut back or go bust, unemployment increases and incomes shrink, consumers have less money to spend, and so on ... with the result that the economy declines even further or, at best, remains stuck at a depressed level where it is operating well below capacity. A shrinking economy also yields smaller government revenues from taxes, increasing government deficits, and for governments to try to improve that situation with spending cuts and/or tax increases will reinforce contractionary tendencies in the economy. In the meantime, there is a lot of unnecessary suffering and social disruption.

Some key implications are pretty clear. To put it bluntly, when the economy is threatened by or recovering from a major recession, the government should be running a deficit (except in exceptional situations that make this difficult or dangerous) to pump more demand into the system, offset contractionary dynamics, and help promote economic recovery. In the US case, for various reasons, the major responsibility for doing this rests with the federal government, not state and local governments. (And, by the way, if you've been hoodwinked by right-wing propaganda into believing that the Obama administration's 2009 economic "stimulus" didn't work, thus disproving Keynes on this point, think again.)  More generally, fiscal policy should be counter-cyclical. Everything else being equal, governments should bring down their deficits in good times, not bad times. The time for governments to balance the budget, run surpluses, or pay down the debt is when the economy is booming. During downswings in the business cycle, let alone major economic crises, trying to do those things is a bad idea.

All of that is a fairly straightforward recapitulation of what should be conventional economic wisdom, and before the 2008 crash I would have guessed that these basic (I mean really basic) Keynesian insights were generally accepted, at least by informed analysts and policymakers.  But the experience of the past four years has made it clear that many people find the points I've just outlined controversial, deeply counter-intuitive, or even surprising.  Whether those views stem from economic illiteracy, partisan demagoguery, or a quasi-theological commitment to pre-Keynesian economic dogmas, they have unfortunately been pervasive and influential—and very damaging, since they happen to be quite misguided. [....]

It is now almost five years since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, which triggered the big economic crash of 2008-2009 from which we are still struggling to recover. Different economic policies have been followed in different countries—more Keynesian in the US, despite unrelenting Republican sabotage and obstructionism, though not Keynesian enough ... and more anti-Keynesian in Europe, most notably in Britain.

Well, the results are in – Keynes was right, contractionary economics was wrong, but the damage is done. If you want a quick comparison of life with and without economic "stimulus", just check the graph at the beginning of this post.  As you examine that graph, bear in mind that the kinds of policies favored by the Republicans and the right-wing propaganda apparatus (including, for example, the Wall Street Journal editorial page) generate the red and blue lines, as opposed to the yellow line.

With respect to the continued sluggishness of the economic recovery in the US, part of the blame lies with the excessive timidity and caution of the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats in 2009, when there was still a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate (though the 2009 economic "stimulus" did, at least, help keep the economy from going over the edge into another Great Depression). But fundamentally, in this context as in so many others, the Republicans are the problem—not the only problem, admittedly, but a crucial and dangerous problem—and any discussions of economic policy, unemployment, and the slow pace of recovery from the Great Recession that try to evade or obscure this central reality are not worth taking seriously.

In practice, of course, ever since around 1980 the Republicans have shown that they accept the idea of using fiscal "stimulus" to respond to economic downturns—as long as that stimulus takes the form of cutting taxes, especially for the wealthiest taxpayers. More precisely, whenever Republican presidents are in office, Congressional Republicans tend to vote according to the principle, enunciated so crisply by Dick Cheney, that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter". Then, when Democratic presidents are in office, they temporarily start hyper-ventilating about the federal deficit again—while also refusing to raise taxes on the rich as part of reducing the deficit. But be that as it may ...

=> Once one faces the fact that counter-cyclical fiscal policies are a necessary part of responding to severe economic slumps, in order to pump needed "stimulus" into the economy, one then has to consider what kinds of economic stimulus are most effective in promoting economic recovery and reducing unemployment.

As Jonathan Chait recently reminded us, back in 2010 Dylan Matthews took the trouble to lay out some relevant comparisons, based on various estimates by solidly mainstream economic analysts.

The pattern is striking: Direct government spending -- through unemployment benefits, food stamps, work sharing or infrastructure spending -- top the list, giving you more than a dollar's worth of stimulus for a dollar's worth of spending, while cuts to taxes affecting businesses and upper-income individuals -- such as the corporate, dividend, capital gains and alternative minimum taxes -- give you less.

The reason there is clear: A tax cut that ends up with upper-income folks gets saved rather than spent, and a dollar saved doesn't stimulate the economy. That's why some tax breaks, such as the job tax credit and payroll tax holiday, are fairly effective, though still less so than direct spending. The problem, of course, is that the politics of tax breaks are easier than the politics of spending, even though the tax breaks are actually more expensive. But if the government wants the maximum stimulus at the minimum deficit cost, direct spending is the way to go.

As one might expect, the forms of economic "stimulus" most favored by Republicans, then and since, are among the least effective in terms of promoting economic recovery and reducing unemployment—though, to be fair, they are among the most effective in terms of increasing after-tax income for the wealthy and helping increase overall economic inequality. On the other hand, the forms of stimulus most effective in terms of promoting economic recovery and reducing unemployment (look down toward the bottom of the chart below) have been fought tooth-and-nail by the Republicans.

What conclusions should one draw? We report, you decide.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S.  By the way, "increased infrastructure spending" to start rebuilding, repairing, updating, and otherwise strengthening our national infrastructure would not only employ a lot of people and help stimulate economic recovery, but would also make excellent sense in terms of long-term public investment.  Even Peggy Noonan can see that—though she doesn't seem to have noticed that her party has relentlessly blocked this, too.

===================================
Washington Post Online (Wonkblog)
June 17, 2010
Research desk: What's a dollar of stimulus worth?
By Dylan Matthews

BHeffernan1 asks:

How many jobs does a federal gov dollar buy? Provide optimistic (most efficient -- extending unemployment? building a smart power grid?), median and pessimistic (tax cuts for wealthy?).

For reasons Ezra has laid out in the past, it's best to focus not on job creation narrowly, but on the general economic impact of a policy. Policies that create jobs have other benefits (and costs) as well. If you're evaluating a proposal to pay workers to build a railroad, you want to know what the value of that railroad is, not just how many workers were hired. If you're giving laid-off workers unemployment insurance, the point isn't just job creation, but also helping them pay rent. So if you want raw job estimates for different policies, see Moody's analysis of the cost per job of job tax credit proposals, or CAP's look (PDF) at the job creation potential of various clean-energy investments. But keep in mind they leave out important effects of various proposals.

We can get a better picture of the overall effectiveness of a stimulus method by looking at its contribution to GDP. The most recent numbers come from April's Senate testimony (PDF) from Mark Zandi of Moody's. Zandi calculated the change in GDP caused by a dollar spent on various stimulus policies. Here are the results, grouped from least effective to most effective. You might want to click [here] to see the larger, and more readable, version.



The pattern is striking: Direct government spending -- through unemployment benefits, food stamps, work sharing or infrastructure spending -- top the list, giving you more than a dollar's worth of stimulus for a dollar's worth of spending, while cuts to taxes affecting businesses and upper-income individuals -- such as the corporate, dividend, capital gains and alternative minimum taxes -- give you less.

The reason there is clear: A tax cut that ends up with upper-income folks gets saved rather than spent, and a dollar saved doesn't stimulate the economy. That's why some tax breaks, such as the job tax credit and payroll tax holiday, are fairly effective, though still less so than direct spending. The problem, of course, is that the politics of tax breaks are easier than the politics of spending, even though the tax breaks are actually more expensive. But if the government wants the maximum stimulus at the minimum deficit cost, direct spending is the way to go.

Recycling standard anti-semitic propaganda is OK if you say "Zionists" instead of "Jews", right?

A tip from David Hirsh refers us to a good piece by Mark Gardner  CST blog. I'm really not sure why borderline (and sometimes not so borderline) anti-semitic discourse is so prevalent and acceptable in so many sectors of British society that consider themselves "progressive", sometimes thinly disguised as anti-Zionism and sometimes just treated as respectable or "understandable" because of anti-Zionist hysteria. But it is.

(By "anti-Zionism" I mean, like Gardner, not disagreement with actual Zionism or criticism of Israel and Israeli policies, but systematic bias against Israel, Israelis, and supporters of Israel's right to exist, shading off into obsessive hatred, demonization, and paranoid conspiracy theorizing about real or imagined "Zionists".  That's analytically distinct from anti-semitism, but in practice the two are often connected—and, at all events, anti-Zionist bigotry is morally reprehensible and politically pernicious in itself, whether or not it is caused by, or a coded euphemism for, anti-semitism.)

These phenomena are so routine and pervasive, in fact, that it may seem tiresome and redundant to keep pointing them out. But occasional reminders are useful, if only to spell out how different varieties of this game work.

—Jeff Weintraub

=============================
CST blog
June 12, 2013
Anti-Zionism: the frontline.
by Mark Gardner

Tonight, Ibrahim Hewitt (pro-Palestinian Islamist), David Hearst (senior Guardian writer) and Tim Llewellyn (ex-BBC Middle East correspondent), will be “critiquing the media’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict”. The venue is London journalist haunt, the Frontline Club. It will be chaired by Mark McDonald, a founder of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East.

Hewitt is central to this meeting. He is senior editor of Islamist news outfit, Middle East Monitor (MEMO) and runs Interpal, a pro-Palestinian charity. In 2010, CST stated that MEMO’s beliefs about “Zionist” control of media and politicians, made it “unsuitable for Labour MPs and senior Guardian personnel to work with”.

CST could equally have said that no senior Labour or Guardian figures ought to work with Tim Llewellyn, who perhaps even surpasses MEMO in his anti-Zionist conspiracy theorising. At the Frontline Club, we can expect Hewitt and Llewellyn to fervently claim that the media runs to a Zionist agenda. Whether Hearst and McDonald endorse this, do a bystander act, or intervene with the occasional “hold on, you’ve taken that a bit far” remains to be seen.

‘Jews run the media’ is intrinsic to any ‘Jews and Jewish money run the world’ way of thinking. Neither Hewitt or Llewellyn would be so crass, or so racist, as to actually expound a full-on antisemitic conspiracy, run by Jews, for Jews. Nevertheless, with anti-Zionists such as these, who really needs stupid antisemites?

By contrast, there is Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party (BNP). Griffin is not attending the Frontline Club meeting, because his “anti-Zionism” is the wrong type for such company; and he is currently in Damascus. (Perhaps seeking other “anti-Zionist” allies?).

One of Griffin’s explicitly antisemitic BNP ventures was his publication, in 1997, of the infamous "MIND-BENDERS". Its full title:

Who are the MIND-BENDERS? The people who rule Britain through control of the mass media

Surprise, surprise:

…very few people in Britain are aware of the huge influence over the mass media exercised by a certain ethnic minority, namely the Jews.

Griffin goes on to stress, “We in the British National Party do nowhere advocate ill-treatment of Jews”. He explains how to distinguish good Jews from bad Jews:

Those Jews who are loyal to Britain, observe the laws of Britain and play no part in poisoning the minds of the people of Britain have absolutely nothing to fear from us…those who are disloyal, break the law and/or play a part in poisoning the public mind – whether by means of the press, TV or any other medium – Gentiles are equally guilty as Jews and should be treated equally.  

One presumes that there is simply no way that the Guardian’s David Hearst, or Mark McDonald would dream of sharing a stage with Nick Griffin. So, they should compare the above, with this below, including the “Jewish” mentions, by Tim Llewellyn (from 2006):

No alien polity has so successfully penetrated the British government and British institutions during the past ninety years as the Zionist movement and its manifestation as the state of Israel…the Zionists have manipulated British systems as expertly as maestros, here a massive major chord, there a minor refrain, the audience, for the most part, spellbound.

…this cuckoo in the nest of British politics…

… Israel had worked its spells well, with a lot of help from its friends: these lined the benches of parliament, wrote the news stories and editorials, framed the way we saw and heard almost everything about the Middle East on TV, radio and in the press. History, the Bible, Nazi Germany’s slaughter of the Jews, Russian pogroms, the Jewish narrative relayed and parlayed through a thousand books, films, TV plays and series, radio programmes, the skills of Jewish writers, diarists, memoirists, artists and musicians, people like us and among us, all had played their part.

…the fervent Zionist Labour MPs, some of them little better than bully-boys, Richard Crossman (not a Jew), Ian Mikardo, Maurice Edelman, Emmanuel “Manny” Shinwell, Sidney Silverman, Konni Zilliacus et al, are, mercifully, not only no longer with us but have not been replaced, not in such virulent form.

… the Union of Jewish Students, which elbows and induces Zionistically inclined undergraduates towards influential positions in British public life, especially the media, the banking sector and information technology.

In all seriousness, with such “anti-Zionism” from an ex-BBC man, is there really any need for BNP antisemitism?

Next, consider Ibrahim Hewitt. His MEMO outfit has featured many times previously on CST blog. For example, here, asking if David Cameron had appointed a British Jewish ambassador to Israel for the benefit of Britain, or of Israel. Or, here, running an article that included “the long, poisonous tentacles of Zionism”.  Or, here, Hewitt’s take on George Osborne MP addressing the 250th anniversary dinner of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. And, here, on their use of this graphic:



MEMO also loomed large in the Sheikh Ra’ed Salah controversy (2011-2012). CST had supported the Home Secretary’s banning of Salah and provided information towards this end. Salah was supported to the hilt by the Guardian and UK Islamist groups, primarily MEMO, who had invited him to Britain. (Again, CST Blog covered this on numerous occasions, including MEMO’s various shifting stories, for example, here and here.)

The case was complex. Salah lost an appeal, then won another appeal and left the UK. Throughout, the Guardian acted as little more than an outrider for Salah and his MEMO hosts. The paper carried extensive coverage, but failed to adequately explain Jewish communal fears; never admitted that Salah had been due to meet with senior Guardian staff (as revealed by MEMO); and did not even tell its readers that the last judicial ruling in Salah’s favour had, nevertheless, dismissed the Sheikh’s denial of having made a blood libel speech. (Yes, that blood libel, the one about Jews needing non-Jewish blood for matzos.)

As a lengthy case study in why the Guardian attracts such singular criticism from those who care about antisemitism, the entire episode was hard to beat.

David Hearst concluded the paper’s disgraceful and extensive coverage of the affair with an article that praised CST’s “expertise” on antisemitic hate crime, but then attacked CST’s role. Crucially, he failed to state that the judge had not found against CST’s central concern, Salah’s use of the blood libel. He then wrongly claimed:

As the CST makes clear in its reports, there is a world of difference between antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and criticism of the actions of the Israeli state. All three discourses have their own dynamic. There are grave dangers in conflating the three.

Actually, CST’s reports usually say the opposite, because most antisemitic controversies in the mainstream are in some kind of Israel-related context. CST is constantly trying to explain the porous nature of antisemitic arguments, impacts and actions in these ostensibly anti-Zionist or anti-Israel settings. Yes, there is grave and dangerous conflation of “the three” issues, but it is done by those who run with wild anti-Zionist conspiracy theories: not by CST.

Hearst ended with:

The home secretary and the police should continue to consult organisations like the CST on all matters which pertain to antisemitism. But the CST should also examine its conscience. Was it wise to allow itself to stray from its natural terrain, the legitimate and necessary pursuit of antisemites, and be drawn into the snake pit of the Arab-Israeli conflict?

The Arab-Israel conflict is, indeed, a “snake pit”, but Hearst is very wrong to imply a disconnect with local antisemitism. In Britain, and even more obviously in France and elsewhere, the overseas conflict contributes greatly to local antisemitic attitudes and hate crimes, causing Jews to fear for their future well-being. (This will be better understood after a forthcoming EU report on Jewish perceptions is published later this year.)

One way of limiting the Arab-Israel conflict’s impact upon British Jews is to limit the importation of sheer hatred into this country. That is why CST opposed Sheikh Salah’s entry. It is also why we condemn the kind of anti-Zionist hysteria that we fear will characterise this meeting in the trendy heart of Britain’s media establishment.

———
Further reading:

Pages 18-22 of CST’s 2011 Antisemitic Discourse Report (full pdf here) explain the Salah controversy and the roles of MEMO and the Guardian.

Tim Llewellyn, on how Israelis cunningly speak differently accented forms of English; and on how Dennis Ross, American Middle East ambassador “is not just a Jew, he is a Zionist”. See MEMO website here (May 2013) for Llewellyn alleging that “The BBC is now culturally and socially stuck in the Zionist frame”.

Tim Llewellyn, at another MEMO meeting, saying “Zionists are scattered at strategic points throughout British business”. This meeting was also attended by David Hearst’s colleague Seumas Milne (Guardian associate editor) and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (Independent columnist).

Elite transition and culture wars in Turkey (Dexter Filkins)

People ran away from clouds of tear gas police fired among the crowd on Taksim Square in Istanbul on Tuesday.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected in 2003, despite having been banned from holding office, and since then he has taken an increasingly harsh line against his opponents. In the past five years, more than seven hundred people have been arrested. Photograph by Abbas.


I just noticed a New Yorker piece about Turkey by Dexter Filkins that was written more than a year ago, well before the current protest wave in Turkey. But it's one of the better overviews I've seen of the political developments in Turkey over the past decade that helped set the stage for this confrontation. Filkins focused on the prolonged and complex struggle between the newly ascendant Islamist AK Party elite, headed by Erdogan, and the old secular Kemalist elite—including, in particular, the deeply embedded framework of quasi-authoritarian institutions and arrangements, partly open and partly concealed, that Turks have long called the "deep state". The AKP's campaign to dismantle the "deep state" has some potentially valuable implications for advancing Turkish democracy, but in other respects it seems to have broadened into a more generalized campaign to suppress and intimidate all criticism and opposition, and some of the ongoing judicial inquisitions have come to resemble a McCarthyite witch-hunt.

This piece by Filkins is exceptionally informative for anyone who wants to understand the background to the current situation, so it's worth reading in full:

"The Deep State: The Prime Minister is revered as a moderate, but how far will he go to stay in power?"

=>  For me, it also provoked a passing thought that I'm tempted to pass on, and I won't resist the temptation. As I mentioned about a week ago, over the past decade I have often been struck by the curious and interesting parallels:

(a) between Turkey's AK Party and the Texas Republican Party—both of which combine a heavily pro-business unleash-the-market orientation (which helps explain why magazines like the Economist look so favorably on the AKP) plus a fair amount of crony capitalism with often-intolerant cultural conservatism, moderately theocratic tendencies, opposition to abortion, uneasiness about the theory of evolution, and a culture-war mentality infused with deep resentment against the "elitism" of secular, cosmopolitan, old-time-establishment types who they think look down on them ...

    ... and, specifically ...

(b) between Governor Rick Perry and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan—both of whom combine a bullying tough-guy macho style with a tendency to shoot their mouths off and blurt out embarrassing and offensive statements ... that draw unfavorable comments from outsiders and sometimes complicate life for their political colleagues, but don't seem to bother their core supporters?

I find that pair of analogies apt and illuminating, despite their obvious limits.  But as I read Filkins's account of Erdogan's career as a successful populist politician (and demagogue), it occurred to me that Erdogan also has more than a touch of James Michael Curley, and perhaps even Huey Long (though Erdogan is decidedly more pious and, as far as we know, more sexually monogamous than the latter, and of course he doesn't drink alcohol).  He expresses and personifies both the status resentments of his consituency and their desires for macho self-assertion.

Despite the scale of Erdoğan’s victory, he never forgot the humiliations he had suffered. Nuray Mert, a former columnist for the newspaper Milliyet who used to be an ally of Erdoğan’s, told me, “He was traumatized, I think—by the military, by the people who tried to hold him back.” Last June, when, again, Erdoğan led his party to a resounding victory in parliamentary elections, leaving the opposition scattered and leaderless, he nevertheless played the underdog. “We are the voice of the voiceless!” he said to a throng of supporters in Istanbul. “They sent me to prison from this city!” Most of the time, friends say, Erdoğan keeps his resentments under control, but occasionally they surface. “Whenever Tayyip got really mad at me,” Zapsu [a successful businessman and one of Erdogan's close advisers] said, “he would call me a White Turk.”

[....]

The Palace, a café in the working-class Istanbul neighborhood of Kasımpaşa, is on the same noisy street where Tayyip Erdoğan spent his youth. A concrete-block building occupies the spot where Erdoğan’s father, a seaman for a state shipping company, brought the family after migrating, when Erdoğan was a child, from the Black Sea town of Rize.  [....]  When I went into the café not long ago, a group of men were sitting at a table playing cards. There were no women there, and none of the men could recall the last time one had ventured in.  [....]

On seeing me, some of the cardplayers came over to talk. Affecting the same sort of tough-guy swagger as the Prime Minister, they were happy to discuss Erdoğan. He was one of them, a champion and a native son. Erdoğan, they said, was the most serious, the most pious, the most respectful young man that Kasımpaşa had ever produced. “He was a flower in the marsh,” one said. As a boy, Erdoğan would climb onto an elevated platform at Sinan Paşa, a sixteenth-century neighborhood mosque that was restored by the government two years ago, and read Koranic verses aloud to the assembled. “If a bunch of guys started staring at a girl and teasing her, Tayyip would always shut them up,” one of the men said.

Erdoğan bypassed the local state-run secondary school to attend what is called an Imam Hatip school; technically, this is where young men prepare to become imams, but in practice, in a country where the display of religious devotion was officially discouraged and sometimes forcibly suppressed, it was one of the few places where parents could send their sons to receive a religious education. The men admired Erdoğan’s toughness, as well as his piety. He played as a striker for Erokspor, a local soccer club. Yaşar Kırıcı, the owner of the Palace, said, “I’ll tell you one thing—he never backed down from a fight.”  [....]

Such are often the ways of politics in a democratic age (which are not always, in the end, fully democratic politics).

—Jeff Weintraub