irredenta

In a recent column posted on Foreign Affairs’s website, former State Department policy adviser, Suzanne Maloney, offers the following assessment of the Obama administration’s sanctions on Iran’s financial and oil industries:

What needs to be addressed is the disturbing reality that the Obama administration’s approach offers no viable endgame for dealing with Iran’s current leadership. The impression that the sanctions are permanent — indeed, the new law does not specify any conditions that Tehran might satisfy in order to lift the siege on its central bank — conforms to Iranian hard-liners’ darkest delusions about Washington’s intentions. By embracing maximalist measures, the White House has come full circle, abandoning, along the way, its earlier optimistic efforts at engagement. In doing so, it has implicitly relinquished the prospect of negotiating with the Islamic regime: given the ayatollahs’ innate mistrust of the West, they cannot be nudged into a constructive negotiating process by measures that exacerbate their vulnerability.

American policy is now effectively predicated on achieving political change in Tehran. Such an outcome will likely prove even more ellusive than productive talks with the revolutionary regime — something the United States has sought for 33-years.

Leaving aside the logical incoherence of the first paragraph (so even though the ayatollahs “cannot be nudged into a constructive negotiation process” given their “innate mistrust of the West,” the Obama administration is still wrong to have abandoned negotiations after trying it for a fair amount of time? - Wait, what?), one really ought to marvel at the shocking ignorance displayed here of internal political dynamics inside Iran. Not only is Iran mired in an acute political crisis not seen since the founding of the Islamic Republic, it is also rapidly turning into a military dictatorship. The plain fact of the matter is that the regime is threatened by a crisis of legitimacy vis-a-vis not only the majority of the population, but also its hardline base of support. The latter is brought on by the intense level of factionalism among ultra-conservative groups more interested in exacting revenge on their once-upon-a-time feudal lords (metaphorically speaking, of course) and re-imagining the virtues of the republic. The upcoming parliamentary elections in the spring are sure to blow the lid off these now mostly polite disputes in a way that would make the regime even more susceptible to mass domestic revolt. 

Considering this climate, only an unqualified guarantee in the shape of a nuclear bomb can calm the nerves of the minority fat-cats at the very top. Khamenei and his acolytes are not under any illusions when it comes to what will ultimately deliver their survival, and so far as I can tell, nor is the Obama administration. I think Obama is rightly testing the shock absorbers of the regime, looking for cracks as they appear. Far from forcing himself into a corner as regards regime change, he seems quite aware of the fact that it is Khamenei & Co. who are the desperate ones looking for a way out of the dead-end alley they entered in 2009. Better to apprehend them now, while their compatriots wish the same, than dither and watch them take a whole nation hostage. 

The belligerent impulse of Iranian officials to keep up appearances (Naval maneuvers, blustery talk, etc.) notwithstanding, the sanctions have thus far been far more effective in reversing the advance of truly egregious, criminal enterprises of the Islamic Republic operating in every corner of the world than anything tried before. The main question going forward is for how much longer the regime is able to keep its base happy through propaganda and forced submission. With multiple nationwide elections on the horizon, we’re about to get a good sense.

I’ve identified with the demands of the Occupy Wall St. Movement (yes, loons out there, there are clearly-articulated, broadly-agreed-upon sets of demands), as have millions of people across the globe. But the time has come to shift strategies and elevate the protests to a higher register. 

The merchants of politics on both the right and the left - with their respective mouthpieces in the mainstream press - have found it convenient to portray the OWS’s demands as either incoherent or infeasible, thereby equating the grievances of millions of cosmopolitan egalitarians with those of a rag-tag group of nativist Tea Partiers disillusioned by the election of the first mixed-race head of state and fresh prey to self-obsessed libertarian billionaires. Like it or not, that’s where the ‘public’ portrayal of the OWS has landed: ‘the Left’s Tea Party’! That the comparison defies basic sanity is beside the point. Instead, it is important to note the ways in which this convenient storyline is undercutting the purpose behind and the demands enumerated by OWS. 

For instance, instead of debating the merits of current tax and fiscal policies, news coverage of OWS are limited only to the coverage of confrontations between the protesters and the police; instead of learning about the environmental- and health-related policy changes demanded by the protesters, we are anticipating the status of this or that eviction order in the courts; instead of compelling the politicians to justify their nonchalance in the face of widespread protests across the globe, we are left to sit in judgment of university presidents’ handling of confrontations on their campuses.

Now, to some supporters of OWS these are worthy headlines, the point of the protests, inevitable outcomes. Not to me. It takes a lot more to alarm the merchants of politics responsible for this mess. Having already characterized the movement as a latter day incarnation of Comintern, the hypnocrats in charge would much prefer you and I focused on police brutality in Berkeley (how typical is that?) than go back to whatever it was we were saying about Goldman Sachs.

So why not call them on their bluff and engage on a different plane instead? Why not instead of modest gatherings across cities in the US, massive 1-3 million-strong occupations of Central Park and the National Mall? Why not rolling campaigns of national strikes by various labor unions? Why not organize boycott campaigns of companies in the Grover Norquist coalition of asshole libertarians? Why not establishing a target-list of politicians to evict and an honor roll of their possible replacements?

When the Tea Partiers first squeaked, the merchant politicians, hack pundits, and their libertarian bosses rushed to announce that they “knew exactly” what the putative agitators wanted: low or no taxation, deficit reduction, and more privatization. A movement born out of ignorance and avowed racism, therefore, was welcomed with certitude and no small amount of empathy (if not outright sympathy). In contrast, the OWS protests have thus far been greeted by a mixture of bafflement and sensationalism as exemplified by the following excerpt in the Times:

Lacking a list of demands or recognized leaders, the Occupy movement has at times perplexed the nation’s media outlets. Press coverage, minimal in the first days of the occupation in New York, picked up after amateur video surfaced online showing a police officer using pepper spray on protesters. On several occasions, video of confrontations with the police, often filmed by the protesters, has propelled television coverage.

In the age of impression and of the image, the trajectory of the portrayal of the OWS in the mainstream press, should the movement continue with its current strategies, should be clear. It’s time to raise the temperature and change the script, perhaps taking a page from the imperial force itself by declaring our intention to intensify the occupation of Wall Street through ‘targeted sanctions’.