Iranian rulers seek to tighten grip, advance Mideast clout
https://themilitant.com/2021/06/05/iranian-rulers-seek-to-tighten-grip-advance-mideast-clout/
BY TERRY EVANS
Vol. 85/No. 23
June 14, 2021
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, in car, surrounded by protesting coal
miners in Azadshahr, Iran, May 2017. His reformist forces have been
barred from running in June 18 presidential election. For years workers
have fought to end rulers’ wars abroad, economic crisis at home.
OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF IRAN
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, in car, surrounded by protesting coal
miners in Azadshahr, Iran, May 2017. His reformist forces have been
barred from running in June 18 presidential election. For years workers
have fought to end rulers’ wars abroad, economic crisis at home.
Volatile conflicts within Iran’s cleric-led capitalist regime flared up
this month after the Guardian Council barred candidates from President
Hassan Rouhani’s reformist forces from running in the June 18
presidential elections. Since the last election in 2017, authorities
have faced waves of protests by working people propelled by mounting
opposition to the deadly consequences of their expansionist foreign
policy and resulting economic crisis.
Only seven of more than 590 presidential candidates that registered are
being permitted to run. The Guardian Council is led by Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Among those excluded are prominent figures within the regime, including
Eshaq Jahangiri, Rouhani’s first vice president; Ali Larjani, a former
parliament speaker; as well as former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a
frequent critic of the government. Rouhani has been in office since 2013
and by law cannot seek a third term.
“What the Guardian Council did … has made elections meaningless,” Azar
Mansouri, a spokesperson for the Iran Reformists Front, told the
Financial Times. Khamenei condemned calls made by capitalist opposition
groups for a boycott of the vote.
The decision ensures that a conservative candidate closely aligned with
Khamenei and his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps allies will win the
election. Ebrahim Raisi is the front-runner. Backed by both Khamenei and
the Revolutionary Guard, he ran in the 2017 election, but was soundly
defeated by Rouhani.
Decision-making on key questions, including foreign policy, remains in
the hands of Supreme Leader Khamenei, not the president.
In addition to being a military and repressive force, the Revolutionary
Guard runs many of the largest, most profitable industries in the country.
All wings of the regime, including disqualified presidential candidates,
back the Iranian rulers’ assaults on working people at home and their
interventionist foreign policy abroad. Tehran seeks to export its
counterrevolutionary policies throughout the region. That course has
brought it into sharper conflict with working people in Iraq, Lebanon
and Syria, as well as in Israel. Moreover, the human and financial toll
of these conflicts is borne at home by workers and farmers and has
eroded any moral legitimacy claimed by Iran’s rulers and their state.
The Iranian rulers have intervened in bloody conflicts across the Middle
East, entrenching militias and weapons bases to extend their power. This
included supplying weapons-making material to Hamas in the Gaza Strip
that it used in the thousands of recent rocket attacks launched on Israel.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution
Iran’s workers and farmers carried out a popular revolution that
overthrew the dictatorial rule of the U.S.-backed shah. Workers councils
were set up in factories and oil refineries across the country, gains
were made in the fight for the national rights of the Kurds and other
oppressed peoples, and in the fight for the emancipation of women.
The Iranian rulers’ expansionist course was part of their moves to drive
through a far-reaching counterrevolution against these advances.
Capitalist politicians of all stripes in the U.S. present the Tehran
regime’s counterrevolution as if it is the revolution itself.
In 2019 up to 1,500 people were shot and killed by Iranian security
forces and paramilitary squads during country-wide protests against the
regime. Widespread demonstrations had begun in 2017 as working people
took advantage of widening divisions within the regime. For factional
reasons, Rouhani had released some of the facts about the authorities’
vast spending on the Revolutionary Guard and other military forces,
hoping to deflect anger away from his administration’s cuts to subsidies
on basic necessities that millions depend upon.
This year’s election takes place after years of U.S. sanctions have
sharply exacerbated the impact of the economic crisis bearing down on
working people in Iran, widening class inequalities. On May 23 the
semiofficial government news agency ISNA reported the prices of six
basic food items had increased 70% since the end of March.
President Joseph Biden’s administration and Iran’s rulers have begun
talks aimed at reviving the 2015 nuclear deal Washington struck with
Tehran, in exchange for cutbacks in sanctions.
As part of its negotiating tactics, Tehran announced last month it was
enriching uranium to levels far above those agreed to in the 2015 deal.
Since that pact was reached Tehran has also expanded its deployment of
precision missiles, rockets and drones to allies across the region.
The clerical regime aims to use the elections to push back the ongoing
popular opposition, to continue to extend its reach abroad, and to
strengthen its hand in its conflict with Washington.
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--
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept