You remember the dramatic scene in “The Wizard of Oz,” when little dog Toto overturns the screen to reveal that the “great wizard” is in fact a very ordinary man who has been using tricks to manipulate events. Iran is experiencing its own Wizard of Oz moment.
President Ahmadinejad, never known for his caution or perspicacity, has used the unprecedented TV public debates with his challengers to create the image of a prosperous, growing Iran that is unrecognizable to most actual Iranians. They are suffering high inflation and unemployment, together with low job growth that keeps the talented and well educated younger generation out of the job market.
More important, he also broke crockery left and right by associating his opponents with what he claimed was a history of corruption and catastrophic errors dating back to the earliest days of the Islamic Republic. That, of course, is the system that he represents and that he extolls in every public appearance.
The 40 million Iranian voters who watched this astonishing spectacle, and who had never heard a serious word of criticism about the Islamic government on national TV, scarcely knew what to think. His accusations, if true, cast doubt on the very legitimacy of the revolutionary state.
Although Ahmadinejad’s barbs were aimed primarily at former president Rafsanjani, whom he suspects of orchestrating the opposition, these charges also apply even more directly to the Leader, Ayatollah Khamene`i, who has had supreme authority over the Islamic Republic since at least 1989. If Iran is this wasteland of corruption, inefficiency and strategic mistakes, what does that say about the wizard who has been guiding this process almost since its inception?
Rafsanjani (who heads the Assembly of Experts, which has statutory responsibility for assuring the competence of the Leader) has now written a letter to Khamene`i comparing Ahmadinejad to the anti-revolutionary forces that he and Khamene`i faced during the 1979 revolution and, even more damning, to the disgraced former president Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, who was removed from office on the orders of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Rafsanjani then asked the Leader to insure that the coming vote on Friday will be conducted fairly. (Officials in the Ministry of the Interior have charged that the leadership was taking apparent steps to manipulate the voting.) Everyone knows that Khamene`i has openly praised Ahmadinejad over the past year, and many suspect that he was prepared to at least look the other way in the case of election irregularities favoring Ahmadinejad.
Thus far, Khamene`i has remained utterly silent in the face of Rafsanjani’s direct challenge to him to act or else risk the future of the Islamic system. Whatever Khamene`i decides to do – facilitate a possibly unfair election of Ahmadinejad, encourage the more liberal opposition, or simply do nothing – he is at risk of being unveiled as quite an ordinary man whose powers are anything but magical and who has no answers to the tumultuous uncertainties generated by an election that is assuming historic importance.
No one in Iran appears to be fully in control of events that have a potential to mark a turning point in the history of the Islamic revolution.
2 years ago • 62 notes
