Iran is Split

And so is every other polity on earth. Hidden or obvious, politics (the struggle for power) inevitably leads to divisions. It’s important that observers find and define those divisions, and remember that discovering divisions doesn’t foretell any particular outcome.

I thought it was crazy for a foreign policy generalist like Les Gelb (closely involved with the Vietnam disaster, by the way) to build a column in advance of Iran’s June election around opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi's anticipated win. Mousavi lost, of course. President Ahmadinejad won a crooked election as one might have expected, and just as he had four years earlier.

Iranian journalist Massoumeh Torfeh, writing in the UK Guardian, presents the kind of useful picture of Iran’s politics Gelb might have profitably read before predicting free elections there:

➢ Former president (1989-97) and leading cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani [photo] is now indispensable to Iran’s opposition. He is a bitter rival of the supreme leader and the president alike. In 2005, as the candidate tipped to win that year’s presidential election, he accused Ahmadinejad of rigging the result; four years later, he sees the scenario repeated for Mousavi.

➢ But Iran's opposition must acknowledge that direct confrontation has never been Rafsanjani's style, nor has it been the style chosen by any other powerful backer, including Mousavi. All are aware their future is tightly linked to the Islamic Republic’s survival.

➢ Student protesters know their own weaknesses. They have no clear strategy for what should happen in the event they could remove the "dictator".

➢ The opposition also knows that to confront the regime they need the backing of military and security services; that their set of leaders have little influence inside the Revolutionary Guards or the Basij militia since these are the Islamic instruments of power and devoted to the supreme leader; that Ahmadinejad, who rose to power from the security and intelligence forces, has rewarded his former colleagues, and has influence in their ranks, can rely on them to repress street protests.

These are political realities. Nevertheless, Torfeh believes the protesters know “time is on their side.” The cracks that showed in the U.S.S.R. in 1989 quickly led to the regime’s collapse. But in China that same year, many predicted democracy would follow suppression of the student-led Tiananmen riots. Instead, China's leaders delivered dictatorship-protecting economic development.

Iran’s leaders would do well to get their economy going.