Rafsanjani's Gambit Backfires (Who is Mir Hossein Mousavi?)

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Rafsanjani's Gambit Backfires

By M K Bhadrakumar

June 16, 2009 "Asia Times" -- Iranian politics is never easy to decode. The maelstrom around Friday's presidential election intrigued most avid cryptographers scanning Iranian codes. So many false trails appeared that it became difficult to decipher who the real contenders were and what the political stakes were.

In the event, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei won a resounding victory. The grey cardinal of Iranian politics Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been dealt a crushing defeat. Is the curtain finally ringing down on the tumultuous career of the "Shark", a nickname Rafsanjani acquired in the vicious well of the Iranian Majlis (parliament) where he used to swim dangerously as a political predator in the early years of the Iranian Revolution as the speaker? sperm whale of immense, premeditated ferocity and stamina in Herman Melville's epic novel Moby Dick, Rafsanjani is going down, deeply wounded by the harpoon, into the cold oblivion of the sea of Iranian politics. But you can never quite tell.

The administration of President Barack Obama in the United States could see through the allegorical mode of the Iranian election and probably anticipate the flood of destruction that would follow once vengeance is unleashed. It did just the right thing by staying aloof, studiously detached. Now comes the difficult part - engaging the house that Khamenei presides over as the monarch of all he surveys.

First, the ABC of the election. Who is Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmedinejad's main opponent in the election? He is an enigma wrapped in mystery. He impressed the Iranian youth and the urban middle class as a reformer and a modernist. Yet, as Iran's prime minister during 1981-89, Mousavi was an unvarnished hardliner. Evidently, what we have seen during his high-tech campaign is a vastly different Mousavi, as if he meticulously deconstructed and then reassembled himself.

This was what Mousavi had to say in a 1981 interview about the 444-day hostage crisis when young Iranian revolutionaries kept American diplomats in custody: "It was the beginning of the second stage of our revolution. It was after this that we discovered our true Islamic identity. After this we felt the sense that we could look Western policy in the eye and analyze it the way they had been evaluating us for many years."

Most likely, he had a hand in the creation of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Ali Akbar Mohtashami, Hezbollah's patron saint, served as his interior minister. He was involved in the Iran-Contra deal in 1985, which was a trade-off with the Ronald Reagan administration whereby the US would supply arms to Iran and as quid pro quo Tehran would facilitate the release of the Hezbollah-held American hostages in Beirut. The irony is, Mousavi was the very anti-thesis of Rafsanjani and one of the first things the latter did in 1989 after taking over as president was to show Mousavi the door. Rafsanjani had no time for Mousavi's anti-"Westernism" or his visceral dislike of the market.

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