Iran, changing again

Roger Cohen has a column in The New York Times about the Iranian election:

They’re calling it the “green tsunami,” a transformative wave unfurling down the broad avenues of the Iranian capital. Call it what you will, but the city is agog at the campaign of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the reformist candidate seeking to unseat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the tenth post-revolution election. Iran, its internal fissures exposed as never before, is teetering again on the brink of change. For months now, I’ve been urging another look at Iran, beyond dangerous demonization of it as a totalitarian state. Seldom has the country looked less like one than in these giddy June days.
I wandered in a sea of green ribbons, hats, banners, and bandannas to a rally at which Ahmadinejad was mocked as “a midget” and Moussavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, sporting a floral hijab that taunted grey-black officialdom, warned the president that: “If there is vote rigging, Iran will rise up.”
A Moussavi kite hovered; a shout went up that “It’s even written in the sky.” I don’t know about that, but something is stirring again in the Islamic Republic, a nation attached to both words in its self-description.That stirring has deep roots. The last century taught that Iran’s democratic impulse is denied only at peril. Ever since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, the quest for representative government has flared. Moussavi is dour but seen as a man of integrity, the anti-Ahmadinejad who can usher back the 1979 revolution’s promise rather than incarnate its repressive turn.
Rahnavard, a professor of political science, is not dour. She has emerged as a core figure in Friday’s vote through her vigorous call for women’s rights and the way she goaded Ahmadinejad into a rash attack on her academic credentials during his no-holds-barred televised debate last week with Moussavi. “Make up your files,” Rahnavard declared at the rally, in a derisive allusion to Ahmadinejad’s Stasi-like brandishing of a document about her before some forty million TV viewers. “But the file-makers will be defeated!”
Iran’s democracy is incomplete (a Guardian Council representing the Islamic hierarchy vets candidates) but vigorous to the point of unpredictability. Nobody knows who will triumph in an election that chooses the second most powerful figure in Iran under the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but some things are already clear.
The first is that the frank ferocity of politics here in recent weeks would be unthinkable among U.S. allies from Cairo to Riyadh, a fact no less true for being discomfiting. The problem with Iran caricatures, like Benjamin Netanyahu’s absurd recent description of the regime as a “messianic, apocalyptic cult,” is that reality— not least this campaign’s— defies them.
The second is that while Ahmadinejad still marshals potentially victorious forces, including the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia, he now faces a daunting array of opposition ranging across the political spectrum. If his attack on Rahnavard was rash, his broadside in the same debate against Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the regime’s éminence grise, looks like recklessness. It has ushered this election into the inner sanctum of authority. That’s a transgression Ahmadinejad may not survive.
Rafsanjani, a former president, was so incensed by Ahmadinejad’s accusations of Mafia-like corruption that he responded with a blistering letter to Khamenei, who’s supposed to sit above the fray. The president’s suggestion that corruption was endemic to the revolution also angered the Qom clerical establishment, which responded with its own dissenting letter: How dare Ahmadinejad defile the very system? “Ahmadinejad has exposed rifts and spread distrust vis-à-vis the whole regime,” said Kavous Seyed-Emami, a university professor. “That’s groundbreaking.”
The Rafsanjani letter, alluding to “volcanoes” of anger among Iranians, including at the alleged disappearance of $1 billion from state coffers, will belong in any history of Iran’s revolution. It says tens of millions watched as Ahmadinejad “lied and violated laws against religion, morality and fairness, and as he targeted the achievements of our Islamic system.” It insists that Khamenei now ensure free and fair elections.
Khamenei has leaned toward Ahmadinejad, but much less so of late. He cannot be impervious to the rage of Rafsanjani, who is chairman of the powerful Expediency Council, which mediates disputes, and the Assembly of Experts, which oversees the supreme leader’s office. Ahmadinejad now confronts surging forces from without (the street) and within (the clerical hierarchy).
Why the sudden turbulence? Here we come to the third critical characteristic of this campaign. Radicalism in the Bush White House bred radicalism in Iran, making life easy for Ahmadinejad. President Obama’s outreach, by contrast, has unsettled the regime.
With Lebanon denying an electoral victory to Hezbollah, the oil-driven Iranian economy in a slump, and America seeking reconciliation with Muslims, the world now looks a little different. Moussavi’s attacks on the “exhibitionism, extremism and superficiality” of Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy resonate. Rafsanjani believes in a China option for Iran: a historic rapprochement with the United States that will at the same time preserve a modified regime. I also think that’s possible— and desirable— and that Khamenei’s margin for resisting it has just narrowed. So, too, has the margin for the foolishness of anti-Iran hawks.

Rico says it'll just be nice to have an Iranian president that the newscasters can pronounce...