Why would an Iranian expatriate with a comfortable life in New Jersey want to be the president of Iran?
D. Parvaz Last Modified: 26 May 2013 17:23
Hooshang Amirahmadi, 64, is an Iranian expatriate in US running for Iran's presidency [Al Jazeera]
Even lifelong insiders can tell you that surviving political life in Iran is brutal. If someone with the clout of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - wealthy and the right-hand man of the leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - is struggling, what makes a guy like Hooshang Amirahmadi think he has a shot at the office of the presidency?
For one thing, the Rutgers University public policy professor left Iran in 1975. He's not affiliated with any of the parties or power players, but by his Iranian constitutional rights, Amirahmadi, 64, can run for office. Even as an expatriate.
Al Jazeera had a few questions for the presidential hopeful, who has a 80-page platform .. http://amirahmadi.com/english/ , published in both English and Farsi:
Al Jazeera: The term "quixotic" is often used to describe your quest for the presidency. How do you feel about that?
Hooshang Amirahmadi: I think my campaign has been very serious. We've had the only real campaign with platform ... This is a novel campaign in the sense that for the first time ever, an expatriate has organised a campaign outside the country trying to become president in the homeland. It is also novel that we are the only campaign to the people, to social media and to the international media. We're breaking a lot of the conventional processes about campaigning in Iran. I feel very good about this. Whether I become president or not, is really beside the point, because my purpose was to create a campaign process and a whole new political culture to create a better Iran.
AJ: Do you think the process of being vetted by the Council of Guardians is fair?
HA: No. And that is really why I ran this campaign. The Iranian people will have less than 20 days to choose a president, some of whom [the candidates] had not declared their intentions to run until last week, when they registered. And now, they will have 20 days to tell the Iranian people who they are ... They will not have the time to introduce themselves to the Iranian people properly, so that the Iranian people will have an informed election process.
AJ: Do you think you have a shot of making the list?
HA: I will continue this campaign regardless of what the Council of Guardians decides - not as a protest campaign, but as a campaign for a better Iran. The Iranian people have a right to decide who they want. I don't think the Guardian Council should be deciding, but that's unfortunately how things are ... But I'm not planning on giving up. So you can assume that Hooshang Amirahmadi will stay in the campaign. Whatever happens, I will be there for the next four years.
AJ: Speaking of being there - playing devil's advocate - if you want to affect change, why not move back to Iran and run for a lower office?
HA: First off, I have a plan to return. I'm restructuring my life to move there on a more permanent basis ... Second, the people who have been in Iran for 40 years and are running for presidency, you know, they have been part of all the problems that have been created in the country for the past 30-some years. Thank God, because I wasn't there, I wasn't part of this problem.
AJ: Part of your platform is to solve the nuclear issue by "reassuring the US" that its programme is of a civilian nature. How, after more than 30 years of acrimony and paranoia, do you plan on doing that?
HA: The question is: Why does this problem exist? The bottom line I believe is lack of trust between the two countries. I, Hooshang Amirahmadi, have been heavily and actively involved in US-Iran relations for over 27 years ... I know every player, I know every issue, I know every concern. To solve the issue, the first and most important issue is to build trust between the two countries. And also between Iran and Israel and Arab neighbours ... Iran, as per the NPT [nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] has the right to civilian nuclear technology, but it has that right within obligations that it has made to the safeguard agreement to that treaty. The most important part is transparency, and if I'm president, I can easily establish that trust. Everything would be transparent, from A to Z.
AJ: So. The list of candidates has been released...
HA: The big names aren't on it. That's the bottom line. There were only three big names in this election and all three of us [including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei] are not on it ... I will not appeal .. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/05/2013521173932624643.html . Nobody has any recourse here - it's finished, it's final. It's finished. The system is taken an extremely cautious approach to this election. As the leader of the Islamic Republic has said over and over again, he considers this to be a dangerous turn he needs to pass. The idea is that this election should have absolutely no surprises, it should not bring lots of people to the streets, it should not create any degree of uncertainty ... I wasn't very sure that I'd be accepted. I mean, honestly, this issue of the Iranian election has become a very cheap process, because everybody looks for the results, nobody looks at the process ... it's very unfortunate that that political culture is so bankrupt. I didn't care if I became president. I wanted to modernise the process.
.. seriously .. out of the country since 1975 .. 'first one to run a campaign from outside the country' .. has any aspirant for the USA presidency ever run a campaign from outside the country? .. any one for any country? .. he obviously has to have a long term plan .. ?? .. yes, this effort seems to be rather "quixotic" ..
Top-10 reasons to welcome departure of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Only the Neocons will miss Him
Posted on 08/04/2013 by Juan Cole
Since he won the Iranian presidential election in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been an object of fear, vilification and ridicule in Washington DC. I said from the beginning that there was no evidence Iran had a nuclear weapons program under his presidency, and 8 years later he went out of office without one. I was upbraided 7 years ago and told that Iran was five years away from the bomb. There’s still no evidence that the country even has a weapons program.
Both American rightwing and Jewish-nationalist hawks who want the US to go to war with the Islamic Republic of Iran nearly wet their pants in delight at having the quirky yet somehow menacing figure of Ahmadinejad with which to frighten the public into the war they yearn for. When I pointed out to them that Ahmadinejad did not control the Iranian army or intelligence and that therefore nothing he said mattered very much, they ignored that point. Now that Iran has a new and more presentable president, Hasan Rouhani, the hawks are saying with no trace of shame that the president doesn’t matter for security issues, and these matters are in the hands of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. I.e., in case Rouhani turns out to be personable and pragmatic, the hawks want to be able to dismiss him as powerless, even though they spent the last 8 years stridently shouting at us that Ahmadinejad was in charge.
So here are the reasons to be glad to see Ahmadinejad gone:
1. Without Mahmoud putting his foot in his mouth at every opportunity, it will be harder to demonize Iran, thus impeding if not forestalling war.
2. We won’t have to have the annual wingnut hysteria when Ahmadinejad came to New York .. http://www.salon.com/2007/09/24/ahmadinejad/ .. for the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September. That hysteria was so frenetic that it pushed an otherwise honorable intellectual like Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, to utter a string of demonstrable falsehoods and act like a jerk when ‘interviewing’ the then Iranian president. The annual hysteria was because the hawks wanted to configure Iran as a country with which we have been at war since the 1980s (wasn’t that when their leader Ronald Reagan stole TOW missiles from the Pentagon warehouse and sold them to Khomeini?)
3. Every time Ahmadinejad said things like that Iran was going to try to produce isotopes for treating cancer at its medical reactor, Western politicians alleged that it was another Nagasaki .. http://www.juancole.com/2010/02/more-nuclear-scaremongering-about-iran.html .. (without mentioning that Nagasaki was ordered by. . . Western politicians.)
4. We won’t have to point out ad infinitum that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei .. http://www.juancole.com/2012/03/khamenei-takes-control-forbids-nuclear-bomb.html .. is in charge of nuclear policy and that he forbids nukes as illicit in Islamic law, and that Ahmadinejad is not Hitler, since he cannot, like, give an effective order to a single regular army troop.
5. Ahmadinejad continually said Iran has a policy of no first strike .. http://www.juancole.com/2006/08/ahmadinejad-we-are-not-threat-to-any.html , and that he believed an aggressive attack on Israel would be wrong and that he did not want to kill a single Israeli, and that nuclear “Weapons research is in no way part of Iran’s program. Even with regard to the Zionist regime, our path to a solution is elections.” But apparently that odd light in his eyes when he said it made Western journalists hear him threaten genocide.
6. Ahmadinejad’s odd version of the one-state solution .. http://www.juancole.com/2010/02/ahmadinejad-once-again-fails-to-call.html , in which he called for Palestinians to have the vote in Israel but for Israelis who immigrated after a certain date to be excluded as foreigners, leant itself to anti-Iran war propaganda.
7. I won’t have to analyze Ahmadinejad’s creepy anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial .. http://www.juancole.com/2009/09/ahmadinejad-spews-raving-lunatic-anti.html .. any more. Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, former president Mohammad Khatami, upbraided him for denying the Holocaust, and it is not a universally held view among Iran’s political class. Since Ahmadinejad was not commander in chief of the armed forces and since Iran has a no first strike policy, his objectionable views in any case were no guide to national defense policy.
8. Ahmadinejad went back on his populist promises to allow a more open culture. He did an about-face and backed puritan norms. At one point Ahmadinejad’s morals police went into department stores and cut the breasts off storefront mannequins because they filled out the clothes too suggestively. His successor seems to seek a cultural opening.
9. I will never again have to hear some uninformed pundit or politician drone on about how Ahmadinejad threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the map, which he did not .. http://www.juancole.com/2009/09/ahmadinejad-spews-raving-lunatic-anti.html . This stupid debate was only possible because the journalists in Washington and New York apparently do not trust me (I’m looking at you, Ethan Bronner) to know the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb or accurately to translate Persian into English. The late Christopher Hitchens even managed to convince himself that he knew Persian better than I. It is a profound mark of contemporary America’s anti-intellectualism that a professor of Middle Eastern history with numerous refereed works to his name on Iran and Shiite Islam at prominent academic presses should be assumed not to know the grammar every Iranian schoolchild does. This whole ‘wiped off the face of the map’ mania among Western journalists was just war propaganda, in which they seem unashamed to join, and which causes them to vilify anyone who stands in their way.
10. And the top reason we should be happy to see the back of Ahmadinejad [lit. scion of the Ahmadi clan] is that his name is unpronounceable for American politicians and pundits, who embarrass themselves tripping over it, creating a shame-rage cycle that turns into war fever. Just changing the president to a Rouhani (literally, “spiritual”) may forestall a ruinous war all by itself.
Moderate candidate secures surprise victory in race to succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with just over 50% of the vote
[...]
During Rouhani's term as a nuclear negotiator, Iran appeared more co-operative to the international community and, leading up to Friday's poll, he repeatedly pointed out that on his watch Iran's nuclear dossier was not referred to the UN security council.
[...]
The endorsement of Rouhani earlier in the week by reformist leaders Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani injected last-minute excitement into the race, boosting his chances. The 65-year-old was the only cleric among the six presidential candidates.
[...] .. the last bit ..
"Hardliners remain in control of key aspects of Iran's political system, but centrists and reformists have proven that even when the cards are stacked against them they can still prevail due to their support among the population," Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council said.
The turnout for Friday's vote was so high that polling stations stayed open for five hours longer than planned.
Speaking after casting his vote in Tehran, Khamenei had urged a mass turnout to rebut suggestions by American officials that the election enjoyed little legitimacy.
"I recently heard that someone at the US national security council said, 'We do not accept this election in Iran'," he said. "We don't give a damn."
Among those voting was Ebrahim Yazdi, secretary general of the Freedom Movement of Iran, a banned group that is critical of the system.
"Today's election is about choosing between bad and worse," he told the semi-official Mehr news agency. "Voting is a national duty and a right given to you by God."
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