Re: Street-fighting Days
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
I’ve presented such facts as available to me in the English language about the social and economic policy of the Ahmadinejad administration: http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20051205/026706.html http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060508/037925.html.
And on reading some of the sources you cite in the second, I learn:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1013/p25s01-wome.html
Such uncertainty is manifest across the Islamic Republic, as Iranians begin taking measure of their choice: a man who is filling top positions with Revolutionary Guard cadres, and insists that he will build a pure Islamic government.
[…]
http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_15511.shtml
The government has banned independent reporting on the nuclear issue and closed all but a couple of independent newspapers. The Revolutionary Guard recently began jamming foreign satellite and radio stations in Tehran and other cities; a campaign against dissident users of the Internet is planned. Intellectuals who attempt to address the West with a message other than defiance are quickly jailed like the philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who tried to attend a transatlantic conference in Brussels, Belgium, 10 days ago and instead found himself in Tehran’s Evin prison. By the end of last week he had been hospitalized, friends said.
The rabble-rousing serves Ahmadinejad less than it does Iran’s real ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has disarmed the democratic movement that just three years ago still posed a serious threat to his power. This president is his faithful servant; what passes for political debate in Iran now occurs in the elite confines of Khamenei-controlled bodies such as the Guardian Council.
[…]
Wage increases and other pump priming are fueling double-digit inflation. A spike in the price of gold in the Tehran bazaar recently forced the government to intervene. A committee of the conservative-controlled parliament compiled a list of the promises Ahmadinejad has made on his provincial tours and concluded that most cannot be fulfilled. According to an official study, success in lowering Iran’s official unemployment rate of 12 percent will require an annual growth rate of 8 percent - something Iran could never reach if Western sanctions were imposed.
Elsewhere http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1766111,00.html Tariq Ali writes:
Ahmadinejad reaped the vote against Khatami’s miserable record between 1997 and 2005. Economic conditions had worsened and Khatami was prepared to defend the rights of foreign investors, but not those of independent newspapers or protesting students. Manoeuvring ineffectually between contradictory pressures, he exhausted his moral credit. Contrary to some reports, Ahmadinejad has not so far imposed any new puritanical clampdown on social mores. Instead, the most likely constituency to be disappointed is Ahmadinejad’s own: the millions of young, working-class jobless, crammed into overcrowded living conditions, in desperate need of a national development policy that neither neoliberalism nor Islamist voluntarism will provide.
Nor is fundamentalist backwardness exhibited in the denial of the Nazi genocide against the Jews and the threat to obliterate Israel, a basis for any foreign policy. To face up to the enemies ranged against Iran requires an intelligent and far-sighted strategy - not the current rag-bag of opportunism and manoeuvre, determined by the immediate interests of the clerics.
I think I’ll stick with Chavez.
Doug