All Politics Is Local (Tehran Edition)
By Dylan Matthews - Oct 14th, 2008 at 10:51 amIt looks like the 2009 Iranian presidential race could get very, very interesting:
TEHRAN — Former President Mohammad Khatami, a moderate under pressure by political allies to challenge President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in elections next year, held a high-profile event here on Monday that many saw as a possible first step in his return to the political arena.
The event drew several former Western leaders, the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that so many had attended a conference here that was not sponsored by the government.
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[T]he high-level participants — including the former secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan; the former Italian prime minister, Romano Prodi; the former Irish president, Mary Robinson; and the former president of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio — demonstrated Mr. Khatami’s popularity in the West.
It’s easy to view a prospective Khatami vs. Ahmadinejad presidential contest as one that pits pro-Western reformism against anti-American/Israeli militancy, but if Ahmadinejad loses it won’t be because of his foreign policy. Indeed, much of his hardline rhetoric has been designed in no small part to shore up support and silence dissent domestically. No, if Ahmadinejad loses, it’ll be because he’s done a damn good job of running the Iranian economy into the ground.
Iran’s yearly inflation rate was up to almost 30 percent as of last month, and Ahmadinejad recently fired the head of the country’s central bank, with whom he had been at loggerheads about how to curb rising prices. One of his proposed solutions, a sales tax, has resulted in nationwide rioting. In a country with a history of clamping down on protests, demonstrations of this scale really say something.
This isn’t to say that a Khatami victory wouldn’t have major implications for Iranian-American relations. It would, by making it easier politically for the U.S. to participate in high-level talks than if Ahmadinejad were still the public face of Iran. But just as a hypothetical Barack Obama victory could probably be attributed less to his support for negotiations with leaders of hostile nations and more to the economic crisis, so too should a hypothetical Khatami victory be seen as repudiation of Ahmadinejad’s economic, and not necessarily his foreign, policy.
All of which is to say we shouldn’t expect Khatami to waltz into his third term with a sweeping mandate to open an embassy in DC and thaw relations overnight. He won’t have one, and acting otherwise could lead the U.S. to overplay its hand and endanger the very real possibility of a grand bargain between the two countries.
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