Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Iran Elects Hardliner Raisi President
The people of Iran were allowed to vote for a new president last week, and the winner is a hardliner named Sayyid Ebrahim Raisol-Saditi, more popularly known as Ebrahim Raisi. He is currently the Chief Justice of Iran, and he will take over the presidency in August. As the second highest official in the government after the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he will guide Iran for the next few years subject only to vetoes from the Supreme Leader himself. This bodes poorly for the people of Iran, but there is some hope on the international scene because he is positioned to do things without fear of being outflanked. It took a hardliner like President Nixon to go to China. It may take a hardliner like President Raisi to turn down the tensions in the Middle East.
Iran's elections are rather a farce. Some 600 candidates put their names forward. The unelected Guardian Council allowed 7 of them to appear on the ballot, having vetted them for Islamic orthodoxy. Those rejected included Ali Larjani the former head of parliament and Mohammed Sharif Malekzadeh, a former vice-president of the republic. They were not rabid liberals demanding true pluralism, yet they failed to pass muster with the Guardian Council. The 7 on the ballot were those more royalist than the king, or in this case, more Islamic than the imams. The favorite of the Supreme Leader won, on miserably low turn-out of 48.8%, a record low. Some 29.8 million votes were counted, while 3.7 million were voided. The voided ballots might have been blank or cast for ineligible candidates. That is hardly a ringing endorsement.
The president-elect is not the sort of chap one would comfortably put up for membership at the Atheneum or White's. The Guardian reports, "The youngest member of the 1988 Tehran death committee, Raisi has been accused of systematically sending as many as 3,000 people to slaughter. When he was head of the judiciary floggings and executions flourished, yet many see this election as a staging post to his becoming supreme leader when Ayatollah Khamenei dies. Raisi was 28 at the time of the massacres -- a Tehran deputy prosecutor who stood in on the death committee for Morteza Eshraghi, Tehran's chief prosecutor." He claimed that as the junior-most member he had little influence, but he seemed quite content with what his superiors were doing.
One expects Iran to see a tightening of the Sharia noose round the necks of the people. Iranians should anticipate more rules and regulations about social interactions. In addition, the economy will continue to splutter as President-Elect Raisi has shown little ability or interest in the care and feeding of the Iranian people.
However, no one can complain that he is unIslamic in the Iranian revolutionary sense of the word. His anti-Western, anti-Zionist, anti-Sunni credentials are second to none. That can be the basis of an opening. There is a consensus in Iranian ruling circles that reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the Iranian nuke treaty is known, is in Iran's national interests. Being able to drop an A-bomb on an enemy is nice, but being able to rejoin the global economy is better. Under President Raisi, Iran could make a deal with the other powers that would stick even with the hardest of hardliners.
Moreover, there is a chance this has already begun. A great many experts believed that the talks to jump start the JCPOA would halt while all sides absorbed the idea of a Raisi presidency. Instead, a sixth round of negotiations began yesterday, and some believe matters will be resolved before Mr. Raisi takes over the presidency. If not, few believe he would upend what has been agreed so far.
It is one of the great ironies of international politics that bad news for the Iranian people regarding their leadership is potentially good news for everyone else.
© Copyright 2021 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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