M in Seattle
December 6, 2006 9:45 PM

Supreme Leader

Ayatollah’s health fails as Iran power struggle grows
by Michael Ledeen
Three days ago, Iran’s dictator, Supreme Leader Ayatollah ali Khamenei, was rushed to the vast medical facility traditionally known as “Vanak” hospital (it now has an Arabic name that means “the 12th Imam Hospital”), a 1,200-room facility that saves half of its beds for the leadership.
Khamenei is known to be suffering from cancer, and taking considerable quantities of an opium-based pain killer. He has lost more than 17 pounds in the past ten months, and was told last spring that he was unlikely to see another New Year (In the Iranian calendar, the New Year begins at the end of March).
Khamenei first complained of chills, and then broke out in a cold sweat. He lay down to rest, and began to lose feeling in his feet, at which point his aides got him to the hospital.
Amidst maximum security, and under orders that the event be kept secret at all costs, the theocrat was placed in one of the luxurious suites reserved for the country’s most important figures. Khamenei’s blood pressure and pulse were alarmingly low, and his physicians at
first feared some sort of hemorrhage. But they could find no trace of internal bleeding, and concluded that he had had some sort of cardiac crisis.
Khamenei is still undergoing tests and receiving maximum attention. It is clearly a serious problem because he wanted to leave the hospital, only to be talked out of it by the doctors. The precise gravity of his condition is not known, but the argument over the wisdom of moving him to his own home suggests it may be quite serious.
My sources for this information are a very knowledgeable Iranian cleric plus another Iranian who has previously provided strikingly accurate stories from the highest levels of the regime in Tehran, suggesting that a major crisis may be underway in Iran.
The Power Struggle
The Supreme Leader has good reason to keep his condition secret, and to seek to demonstrate he retains his ability to rule the country. Khamenei knows that his regime is riven by intense conflict, some of which has been dramatically exposed in recent weeks in the run-up to the election of a new Assembly of Experts (the clerical body whose main responsibility is the selection of the Supreme Leader).
News of Khamenei’s heart problems, especially if they turn out to be life-threatening, would undoubtedly catalyze the battle at the highest levels of the regime to control the choice of his successor. Recent events document both the intensity and the violence of the power struggle.
On November 27th, a military aircraft–an Antonov 74—headed for a military site near Tabriz crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran. Nearly forty deaths were reported, including several top leaders of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the country’s elite military organization. The dead included some of Khamenei’s closest allies and advisers, and their loss was a serious blow for him.
Most Iranians–who are in any case reluctant to believe in accidents when the mighty are killed–are convinced the plane was sabotaged, especially as this is the latest in a sequence of spectacular airplane disasters, producing high-level military casualties.
About a week earlier, a military helicopter came down, killing all six people on board. Last January, Ahmad Kazemi, the Revolutionary Guards’ ground commander, and seven other senior officers, were killed in the crash of a French-made Falcon, a small executive jet, near the Turkish border. Barely a month before, yet another military aircraft, a C-130, came down near Tehran airport, hit a ten-story building, and killed 115 people (mostly journalists).
A week ago, the Majlis (the national assembly) passed a law effectively reducing the presidential term of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nezhad by a full year. This was universally seen as an attack in favor of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ahmadi-Nezhad’s most visible political rival, and a candidate to succeed Khamenei.
Meanwhile, as reported in Iran Press News, the ongoing public challenge to the regime itself continues unabated.
On Wednesday, thousands of students demonstrated on the campus of Tehran University, chanting “death to despotism,” and “death to the dictator.” And in Mazandaran Province, up by the Caspian Sea, thousands of angry workers protested in front of Ahmadi-Nezhad himself, announcing they were starving and demanding the government honor its promise to improve the lot of the poor.
As yet, news of the Supreme Leader’s medical problems has remained a secret, known only to a handful of trusted aides and colleagues. But it is only a matter of time before Khamenei’s condition becomes public knowledge. With unknown ramifications to the stability of Iran and the region at large.

IRAN WANTS TURKEY TO CONTROL FEMALE IRANIAN VISITORS. The Iranian
government has called on Turkey to enforce rules for Islamic clothing
for women -- the hijab -- at hotels in Anatolia that are frequented
by Iranians, Turkish newspapers reported on December 7, according to
Radio Farda. Should Turkey fail to comply with this demand, the
newspapers continued, then Iran will no longer permit direct flights
to Anatolia. The Iranian request came during Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan's meeting with First Vice President Parviz Davudi in
Tehran during the first weekend of December, Radio Farda reported.
Davudi told his guest that one million Iranians visit Turkey every
year, and he went on to express concern that images of scantily clad
Iranian beachgoers have appeared in the Turkish media. BS

20 Terrorists Killed, Weapons Caches Destroyed
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Dec. 8, 2006 – Coalition forces killed 20 terrorists this morning while targeting al Qaeda terrorists in the Thar Thar area, military officials reported.

Coalition forces targeted the location based on intelligence reports that indicated associates with links to multiple al Qaeda in Iraq networks were operating in the area.

Ground forces were searching buildings at the targeted location when they began receiving heavy machine-gun fire from one of the buildings. The ground forces returned fire, killing two armed terrorists.

Despite efforts to subdue the remaining armed terrorists, officials said, coalition forces continued to be threatened by enemy fire, causing forces to call in close-air support. A coalition aircraft performed the air strike, resulting in 18 more armed terrorists killed.

During a search of the objective, coalition forces found multiple weapons caches consisting of AK-47s, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-personnel mines, explosives, blasting caps and suicide vests. All these items were destroyed on site.

Coalition forces also found that two of the terrorists killed were women. Al Qaeda in Iraq has both men and women supporting and facilitating their operations, officials said.

(From a Multinational Force Iraq news release.)

Related Sites:

December 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Set a Date and Buy Some Leverage

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The brutally honest Baker-Hamilton assessment of the Iraq morass implies that we need to leave Iraq if the factions there don’t get their act together, but it also urges a last-ditch effort to enlist the help of Syria and Iran to salvage something decent. Both are good suggestions, but they will only have a chance of being effective if we go one notch further and set a fixed date — now — for America to leave Iraq.

The only hope of moving the factions inside Iraq, not to mention Syria and Iran, toward reconciliation is if we have leverage over them, which we now lack. The currency of Middle East politics is pain. And right now, all the pain is being inflicted on us and on Iraqi civilians. Only if we tell all the players that we are leaving might we create a different balance of pain and therefore some hope for a diplomatic deal. Trying to do diplomacy without the threat of pain is like trying to play baseball without a bat.

Yes, yes, I know, the conventional wisdom is that if the U.S. sets a date to leave Iraq the whole Middle East will explode in a Shiite-Sunni war. Maybe, but maybe not.

Let’s play this out. What happens if we set a date to leave? The war in Iraq will get worse, but for how long? Right now our troops are providing a floor under the civil war that allows some parties to behave outrageously or make impossible demands — because they know that we won’t let things spin totally out of control. Would they behave more cautiously if they knew they had to pay retail for their madness? I’d like to find out.

Moreover, while our presence in Iraq helps control the situation, it also aggravates it. For many Sunnis, and a growing number of Shiites, we’ve become “occupiers” to be resisted. Our leaving will both unleash violence and eliminate violence.

As for the neighbors, well, right now Iran, Syria and some other Arab states look at Iraq and clearly believe that the controlled chaos there is their friend. For Arab autocrats, chaos is their friend because a burning Iraq on Al Jazeera sends a message to their own people: “This is what happens to those who try democracy.” And for Iran and Syria, anything that frustrates the U.S. in Iraq and keeps America bleeding weakens its ability to confront Tehran.

The minute we leave, chaos in Iraq is not their friend anymore. First of all, if there is a full-fledged civil war, Syria, a largely Sunni country, will have to support the Iraqi Sunnis. Shiite Iran will have to support the Iraqi Shiites. That would mean Iran and Syria, now allies, will be on opposite sides of the Iraqi civil war. That will leave them with the choice of either indirectly fighting each other or working to settle the war.

Moreover, right now we are “Mr. Big” in Iraq, soaking up all the popular anger. But the minute we’re gone, Iran becomes “Mr. Big” and the age-old tensions between Iraqi Arab Shiites and Iranian Persian Shiites will surface. Iran and Moktada al-Sadr will be at each other’s throats.

Also, as long as our troops are in Iraq, we are pinned down and an easy target for Iran to hit, should we ever want to strike its nuclear facilities. Once we are out, we will have much more room to maneuver. I’m not saying we should attack Iran, but I am saying Iran will be much more worried that we will.

As for the Arab states, they’ve done little to promote peace in Iraq. They’ve basically said to America: “You can’t leave and we won’t help.” O.K., we’re leaving. You still don’t want to help? The only thing the Arab regimes fear more than democracy is fragmentation.

As I’ve written before, our real choices in Iraq are 10 months or 10 years. Either we commit the resources to entirely rebuild the place over a decade, for which there is little support, or we tell everyone that we will be out within 10 months, or sooner, and we’ll deal with the consequences from afar. We need to start the timer — today, now.

As long as we’re in Iraq, Iraq implodes, and we absorb a lot of the pain. The minute we leave, Iraq explodes — or at least no one can be sure it won’t — and that is a real threat to the Iraqi factions and neighbors. Even facing that reality might not knock enough sense into them to compromise, but at least then they’ll have their medieval religious war without us.

Only that threat will give us leverage. Yes, it would be a sad end to our involvement there. But everything Iraq’s leaders have done so far suggests that a united, democratic and pluralistic Iraq is their second choice. Tribal politics is still their first choice. We can’t go on having our first-choice kids dying for their second choice.

'Pie in the sky' report won't fix Iraq
Peter W. Galbraith
The Boston Globe
Thursday, December 7, 2006

WASHINGTON
"Dead on arrival" seems the likely verdict on the much-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group. James Baker 3rd, the former secretary of state who chaired the panel with the former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, demonstrated his skills as the great deal maker by getting the group's five Democrats and five Republicans to endorse every word of the report.

Consensus came at the expense of candor. Iraq has broken up and is in the midst of a civil war, but this is never acknowledged in the report. The panel seems to assume that nation building is still possible in Iraq. The result is a report that, on the most essential points, is pie in the sky.

The Iraq Study Group recommends a tough love approach to Iraq's internal problems. It proposes to condition U.S. support to the Iraqi government on it meeting certain benchmarks. These benchmarks include constitutional revision to subordinate Iraq's virtually independent regions to control from Baghdad, revising de-Baathification laws to permit Saddam Hussein's supporters (who were mostly Sunni) a greater role in public life, regulating militias and amnesty for Sunni insurgents.

Parts of this program are questionable. Iraq's 80 years as a unified state produced nonstop misery, including mass killings and genocide, for its Shiite majority and Kurdish minority. The new Iraqi constitution allows the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunnis to form powerful regions with their own militaries and substantial control over natural resources. It is an antidote to Iraq's deadly centralism and was adopted by nearly 80 percent of Iraq's voters. It is hard to understand why it should be gutted.

More important, however, the Baker- Hamilton program is unachievable. Kurdistan's voters would have to agree to the constitutional amendments, and having voted 98.7 percent for independence, are not likely to do so. Iraq's constitution currently prohibits militias and a law regulating them is not likely to have a greater impact. Both Shiites and Sunnis consider militias, and other irregular forces, essential for prosecuting the civil war. Amnesty is for losers, and the Sunni insurgents believe they are winning. They have wrested control of large parts of Sunni Iraq - including west Baghdad - from the U.S.-led coalition and the Iraqi government, and bombing Shiite civilians has triggered a civil war. If the insurgents were prepared to trade their gains for amnesty, they would never have taken up arms in the first place.

The panel's most publicized recommendation is for U.S. combat troops to be mostly withdrawn by 2008 with the remaining forces training and supporting the Iraqi Army and police. This seems to assume that Iraq's police and army are, or can be, neutral guarantors of public safety. In fact, they are Shiite or Sunni, and combatants in a civil war.

The Shiite police include the death squads that have abducted, tortured and killed thousands of Sunnis. The Sunni police are insurgents or insurgent sympathizers. American training can make the Iraqi security forces more effective killers but it cannot make them loyal to the idea of an inclusive Iraq.

As to the recommendation that U.S. combat forces be withdrawn, this is a step in the right direction since U.S. troops are doing little today to contain Iraq's civil war or put the country back together. President George W. Bush, however, has signaled he will not accept this proposal, and the newly Democratic Congress lacks the will and the votes to force a withdrawal.

The panel rightly recommended U.S. engagement with Iran and Syria, but neither country can improve significantly the situation in Iraq nor will they want to as long as the Bush administration pursues - however ineffectively - regime change.

On June 21, 1991, Baker flew into Belgrade to warn Yugoslavia's leaders not to break up the country. Four days later, Slovenia and Croatia declared themselves independent. Baker had misdiagnosed the problem. By focusing on the hopeless task of saving Yugoslavia, he missed an opportunity to prevent the war that followed.

By not facing up to the reality of a disintegrated Iraq, Baker's panel has missed an opportunity to forge a consensus around concrete steps that could contain Iraq's civil war and extricate the United States from the quagmire.