The Sentinel: Bush Administration Helped Iranian Hardliner Get Elected

The Sentinel: "Bush Administration Helped Iranian Hardliner Get Elected

By Margie Burns
Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, the only major Iranian figure who advocated reaching out to America, made indirect overtures to the Bush administration in the period leading up to the Iranian election but was rebuffed, according to local businessman Barry O'Connell, who frequently travels to Iran.

State Department personnel referred pejoratively to Rafsanjani, the political figure best known outside Iran and most often favored by the business community in Iran and elsewhere, as "that old fox" and "that old wheeler dealer," O'Connell said. Among feelers preceding the election last June, Iran had conveyed messages through members of its legislative assembly via business contacts, which reached the South East Asia section of the State Department. According to Department personnel, O'Connell said, messages that Rafsanjani was interested in dealing with the U.S. were relayed "upstairs" to the seventh floor offices of the Secretary of State.

The feelers were ignored. Asked whether the Bush administration opposed Rafsanjani and influenced the Iranian election, O'Connell answers, "Very much so."

Interestingly, there were other impediments to cooperation with moderate or secular or business-oriented Iranians in the weeks leading up to the election, including restraints to travel in and out of Iranian air space, imposed with the cooperation of elements in the business community and government contractors. In any case, the administration rebuffs decreased the ability of Rafsanjani to draw support. "He was almost the only one reaching out to America, and they treated him this way?" O'Connell comments. "They [said] it to me personally, so it is reasonable to assume that they said it to others. This administration would not deal with him at all."

Responding to questions about the other Iranian candidates, O'Connell says that the administration "didn't seem concerned about Ahmadinejad at all." There was no apparent concern, at the policy-making level, that some hardliner or radical fundamentalist might win the election as a result of its actions. The possibility, treated as inevitability in rightwing publications and think tanks associated with White House Middle East policy, seems not to have been regarded as an outcome to be avoided.

Since the election, Rafsanjani has increased in his powers, according to O'Connell. "He is not out of power at all." The new President, Ahmadinejad, gets "all the spotlight" but does not have much power.

This is not to say that power in Iran has become all secular. The bulk of power is held by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamenei, in office since 1989, and also by the head of the expediency committee. Thus power is largely divided among four places -- the Supreme Leader, the committee head, Rafsanjani and the new head who has gotten all the global spotlight.

These internal divisions in Iran tend not to be reflected in administration rhetoric about Iran. The White House, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and neoconservatives in media have focused publicly only on President Ahmadinejad, whose world-burning rhetoric makes their project easy. The rightwing National Review, co-founded by William A. Rusher, who also founded the infamous Concerned Alumni of Princeton and is Chairman of the media corporation that launched the most recent attack on Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.), is running articles about Iran that eerily parallel rhetoric about Iraq leading up to the Iraq war.

O'Connell points out that, while neoconservatives advocate several months of bombing Iran — two or three months, at least, of bombing purported "nuclear" sites in Iran, those sites are all in residential neighborhoods.

Supposing the administration were to bomb millions of Iranians, for two or three months, as neoconservatives are proposing, O'Connell wonders. "If we start another war," in Iran this time, "how do we get out of it?" "There is no exit strategy — like in Iraq." Right now, the U.S. maintains a tenuous hold in Iraq because of the majority Shia population who, led largely by Ayatollah Sistani, have chosen to try to participate in reestablishing Iraq as a nation. But Iraqi Shia might well react against an administration bombing millions of Shia in Iran, where they are 89 percent of the population.

Shia Islam has two main schools of thought: the theocratic, which predominates in Iran; and one that more separates church and state, which predominates in Iraq. Administration policy seems to aim at driving the two populations together in opposition to the U.S. This would approach the goal of a pan-Islam war, global war between the West and Muslims, advocated by some well-placed neoconservatives and also by Osama bin Laden.

Iran has no embassy in the U.S. but has an Iran Interests Section in the embassy of its ally Pakistan. The administration just conducted a bloody air strike against Pakistan, killing civilians."