Iran, India and Lebanon

A New York Times Op-ed looks at the issues surrounding the elections in Iran. It notes that there has been an Iranian-American journalist jailed and makes the point that this is likely related to the elections. Also, this column notes that the conservative party in Iran is fractured and that Ahmadinejad has been unable to the deal with domestic policy in that country and that he faces both external opposition (from countries like the United States) and internal opposition (in his election and from some elites). The reformist actually look like they have a decent chance of unseating the conservatives in Iran and Iran has been isolated because of it’s rhetoric. The elites among the conservatives are feuding with one another with pragmatic conservatives and hard-liner conservatives fighting, particularly pragmatic conservatives trying to undermine Ahmadinejad. While Iran’s presidential elections are not until June 12, as has been mentioned before, they are having effects on the things going on now. The reformist have two different candidates they are vying for president: Mir Hossein Mousavi, a popular 1980s prime minister and Mahdi Karroubi the former speaker of Iran’s Parliament. Conservatives are split between the pragmatist who want to pick a moderate candidate and who support détente with Obama and the hard-liners who want to continue supporting Ahmadinejad and who distrust Obama and do not want to negotiate with him in any way. Those who support Ahmadinejad include the intelligence apparatus, some of the Revolutionary Guard, and hard-line clerics (like Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi) and their followers. The Op-ed columnist argues that Iran’s hard-liners are afraid of talking to the US because they are that relations with strength reformist and democratic groups in Iran and that could led to a velvet revolution. Also, he argues they fear that improved relations mean a removal of sanctions which would break up some of the economic power they have and also expose the corruption they have been a part of.

Forbes is also looking at the elections coming up in India. They note that it is possible that the small caste-based and regional parties will be successful at winning seats over the two larger parties the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leading to no party having a clear majority and post-election negotiations will have to be done to determine who is in control of India. The opinion polls seem to suggest that the two major parties will win about 200 seats each with third parties winning about 150 seats so that nobody has the required 272 out of 573 seats. In 1996, the leader of the BJP Atal Behari Vajpayee became prime minister but was ultimately unable to build a winning coalition and so resigned. Then the third parties joined into a Third Front and before failing had two prime ministers. Either of which seems like it is possible in this situations. The party with the most seats gets the first chance to form a government but it will have trouble forming a government since it is possible their allies on the Left Front (a group of four Marxist parties) will not join them because of their nuclear deal with the US last session. Without them, they might need to depend on Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) who leads the dalits (a group who consist of the bottom of India's caste ladder). If the BJP gains power it is likely that they will need the Mayawati in order to maintain power as well. However, Mayawati has stated that the price of her support is gaining the position of Prime Minister. This may led to a rotating Prime Ministership. Still, the coalition government, while though to possible cause bad economic policy has not done so in the past and in fact have produce important economic reforms. Since this is the case, India will likely continue on its same path of careful liberalization. Also, until the recession is over, economic liberalism of finance and retail will not go far but after the recession there should be a movement in that direction. Still, there are two problems that author notes. The first is that all the parties are promising large amounts of spending and this could be bad for the country economically. Second, Mayawait wants a job quota for dalits and tribals in the private sector (they already exist in the public sector) and she may get it in order for other parties to get her support. They could hurt India’s competitiveness. Finally, there could be increases in wealth and capital gains taxes if the Left Front dominates a third party government. This article argues the best case is a stable BJP government as they are liberalizers and support outright privatization and the worst case a government led by third party groups with the Left Front at the top and Mayawati’s job quotas. This article looks at India from a liberal perspective with its focus on leaders (though that’s all elections coverage really) and it’s concern with the economic prospects of the election, implicitly showing it to be an area of significant concern.

The Washington Times reports that another country with elections coming up is Lebanon. What is more, Hezbollah is working to build support and has a good chance of winning the elections there. They are working on putting a more moderate face. This could be problematic of the US since Lebanon is a pro-US country and if Hezbollah won, a very anti-US group (and Iranian and Syrian proxy) would have control of Lebanon. Hezbollah is considered a terrorist group by both the United States and Israel. Hezbollah has tried to make the case that they would not be a radical change if they won. Their leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has stated they will work with opponents and build a national unity government to make sure the country continues to be stable. They have talked about things like dealing with government corruption, making government more efficient and and government by consensus. Also, Britain has said it is willing to talk to the political wing of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is being careful because it does not want the same fate as it’s militant ally Hamas that won election but was then crippled by Western boycotts and Israeli actions. Still a Hezbollah win means at the least less pressure on Hezbollah and it’s ability to use rocket attacks on Israel, attempts to solidify Shiite power and the possibility of adding Lebanon to the Iran and Syria block. Lebanon is has a highly sectarian system a 128-member legislature that has to be half-Christian and half-Muslim. Then Christians are divided among Orthodox and Catholic parties and Muslims among Shi'ite, Sunni, Druse and Alawite sects. Also, in any of the governments, the prime minister must be a Sunni, so Hezbollah would needs there help. All Hezbollah’s candidates will likely win and it’s coalition that consist of pro-Syrian, Shiite and Christian parties currently has 58 seats. A win by this coalition would likely see a end to the sectarian distribution of parliamentary seats and a mandate for opposition to the US’s Middle East policy and strong opposition to Israel.

Back to Elections!

In the, Globe and Mail, one of the candidates for parliament discusses the elections currently going on it India. On the theme of elections, the world’s largest democracy, India, is having its elections. They are electing a new national parliament and have gone through this process fourteen times since getting their independence. The electorate includes a whopping 714 million voters with votes cast in 828,804 polling stations. There are more that 5,000 candidates from seven national political parties and the process involves four million electoral officials and 6.1 million police and civilian personnel. In other words, it’s massive process. So massive that it will happen over 5 stages and starting in mid-April, will not end until May 16th. Also, since a large amount of the population is illiterate, there are party symbols so that voters can vote according to that. Their elections are free of violence, honest, and they use electronic voting so there is not an option of stuffing the ballot box. This is a part of what makes India unique in that there are few developing countries with strong democracies. It is even more rare considering that there is still large amounts of poverty and illiteracy.

This article likely has some bias considering that it is a candidate running for the elections in India. For my next blog I intend to focus more on this election. It will be going on for a while so there should be a lot to talk about and to focus on. Still, it is interesting just to think about the fact that India is the world’s largest democracy. This is something that people just do not think about. It makes me wonder if it is possible to learn something from how their system works because our huge population has made elections somewhat difficult recently. One particular thing of interest is that they are using electronic voting. That has become a problem in the US and I do not know if the Indians have come up with a better solution there or if they have just not run into problems yet because it’s new there. That is something that I will continue to look out for. I also hope to find out more about the political environment as I follow these elections.

The American Prospect reports that Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to power and created a coalition. However, it questions whether he is actually in charge of the coalition that he has created or not. They argue that Netanyahu has a coalition of people that are not up to the job of dealing with Israel’s crisis and that Netanyahu in particular is not a strong deal maker. He built his coalition with five other parties besides his own Likud party and shut out the centrist Kadima party that won more votes in the Knesset than his party did. He got the other groups in with various favors and gifts. For instance, he gave the ultra-Orthodox Shas party a system of state subsidies that had ironically enough been removed by him, gives funding to Orthodox schools, and lets the Shas party be in charge of the Housing Ministry. Avigdor Lieberman received the job of foreign minister and control over judicial and law enforcement post. To get Labor, he gave half the members of Labor in the Knesset cabinet positions and let Ehud Barak stay on as defense minister. This left him with very few cabinet positions for his own party so he had to split cabinet position to reward his own Likud party and has quite a few ministers with no portfolio. Also, Lieberman made the point that Israel was not required to continue the talks they had started with the Palestines but Netanyahu release a press statement soon after saying he supported Obama’s quest for peace in regards to the Israelis and Palestinians. The American Prospect ultimately makes the argument that on this and many other issues, Netanyahu will zig and zag on various different issues in an attempt to try and consolidate power as opposed to an attempt to act on his principles. They note that he is a hardliner and that is part of the reason for his hard-right conservative parliament but that he is easily deterred from his views.

The Israeli elections have continued to be rather interesting to follow. However, since the cabinet is picked, it seems that I will probably move away from talking about Israel. One thing of comment is that this article seems to have a left-wing bias. If I’m not mistaken the American Prospect is left-leaning. They are very critical of Netanyahu but what seems interesting to me is that they seem to criticize his willingness to compromise and usually that is considered a good trait. Regardless, this is a much more right-wing government so it will be interesting to see how it works with the US and other countries and how the Middle East peace process is affected by what is going on.

A Stratfor Intelligence report discusses Iranian influence in Iraq as well as the effects of elections in Iran around the issue. The Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani has met with the most powerful Shiite religious leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Iranian Assembly of Experts Chairman Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani led a delegation to meet with Al-Sistani and other political Iraqi officials including the president earlier this month. Both men are powerful figures in Iranian politics, members of the pragmatic conservative wing and both have issues with the current president Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Also, interestingly, al-Sistani was willing to host both men but refused to host Ahmadinehjad. While the election in Iran is between hardliners like Ahmadinejad and reformers like Mir Hossein Mousavi, it is important to note that the person who is actually in charge is Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In some ways, the election in Iraq is more important because of this simple fact. Iran’s plan was to unifiy Shiite power in Iraq and use it to expand their influence. They wanted to do this either by creating a federal Shiite zone in Iraq’s oil-rich south to give Iran influence in Shiite political factions in Iraq and give them a link to the oil revenue. Their main method was to use the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), an allied Iraqi faction led by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim who has pushed this idea. However, they did poorly in the January elections with Shiite parties less connected to Iran doing fact better. In retrospect, the ISCI’s “close affiliation with Iran, use of religious symbols in campaigning, false claims of al-Sistani's backing and the push for the creation of a Shiite federal zone in southern Iraq “ hurt it badly in the election. This is a problem for Iran in that it shows they are having less influence on Iraqi politics than they want. Now Iran is trying to gain support in various Shiite groups and work to have their political allies in Shiite groups, as well as Sunni and Kurdish groups, to unseat Prime Minister Al-Maliki but that will take a large amount of effort as well. The 2003 Iraq War has created an opening for Iran to try and spread it’s influence but the Turks, Americans and other Arab powers are filling in the gap so far. Things may change with the reduced US presence but it seems that for now this will be a difficult task for Iran.

Model UN Recap

Doing the Model UN simulation was an interesting and powerful experience in many ways. For me it was different from many of the people in the class because I was the chair of the committee and got to see how the process worked from behind the scenes as well as see the prep work that was a part of our class and see how the process worked in the room itself. One of the first things that really stuck out to me was how hard it was to take off our Western, perhaps softer approaches to dealing with political issues. While I complimented the group on thinking very much like the Kuwaiti government in regards to balancing the competing demands to be more Western and the public’s strong opposition (and I hold to that) we were still very nice. A example that stands out to me was the very first crisis we had. The crisis had us deal with the fact that the parliament had threaten to remove the Prime Minister unless we gave in to their demands. We made a deal with them in order to get them to stop and change course. Now, it just so happens that this story pretty much happened in the real world. There were not explicit terms given but other than that it was the same. The response of the Emir was to dissolve the parliament and blame them for the crisis. I’m not going to get into whether he was right or wrong. It’s just interested that we handled the situation so differently. The idea of the simulation was to give people the freedom to act and decide but not let them do anything crazy or extremely unrealistic. I felt our response was in the mainstream so I allowed it but I could not help but notice our actions were affected by what we thought was fair and from a Western point of view.

There were also quite a few “real world” things that happened that would not have been expected and were not planned but in some ways made the simulation better to me. For example, the news messed up a story having Israel threaten us with military violence one time and made it sound like we wanted Syria to have Jerusalem in another case. In each situation, we had to do quick diplomatic work to make sure the matter did not get out of hand. Doing this is something that countries really have to deal with. Sometimes miscommunications occur and countries have to meet and deal with them. Sometimes the news blatantly mischaracterizes your position. That’s something that has to be dealt with in the real world. So in some ways, I think the simulation did good to have us deal with those kinds of things despite the fact that it was quite frustrating. It was surprising in some ways how difficult it was to make decisions. We debated for quite a while on a way to deal with the labor strike that we received. Eventually we had to vote on a few issues to come up with a firm decision on what to do. Again, that is what happens in real life (either that or those with the biggest guns win) and so it was a valuable part of the simulations.

Talking about the simulation just for itself there were some good things about it and some really bad things. I think it did give a somewhat accurate portrayal of the pace of issues that must be dealt with when crisis really picked up. Sometimes there were lull moments and those were used to deal with domestic issues but as soon as an international crisis occurred we put it down. The crisis that we received were very good and led to in-depth conversation that later led us to coming up with one of the domestic issues we discussed and tried to deal with. Besides that, the way that we dealt with other countries felt very real. We were reacting to news as it happened and looked through headlines of stories to see what if we should act in the situation or just let it go. Also, the diplomatic meetings seemed to go well. In many ways they were the most exciting part with people anxious to hear the reports of the diplomats who had gone down to talk with another country. I liked that we had China in this simulation though I feel there is more that could have been done to really flesh out their role in the region. It was difficult to figure out what they wanted which could be for a number of reasons including they were played by people from ECU who were not trained by people as close to the Model UN group.

My major complaint would be that we did not have enough crisis (we didn’t have any) for the second day. This made the day really seem unbearable. There was very little to do at the beginning until other countries were doing things and so people got bored and stopped paying attention. That made it really hard to keep people’s attention when things did start to happen. That said, even when they did pick up, it was more Kuwait inserting itself into situations that them dealing with Kuwait. This is in some parts, because Kuwait is a small country and so there are few issues that really affect Kuwait or many major players that care about it. Still, it made the simulation less rewarding for those of us who were Kuwait. I really had run out of domestic concerns to give the group that they could deal with by the second day so that left me with very little to do to deal with their boredom. I know in many ways that it because of news but it was a problem and it did make it a less rewarding experience overall.

Still, it is without a doubt something that I would do again. It was a rewarding and fun experience that gave a lot of power to those who participated. I tried to not force my will on the group, (though I probably failed there on the second day close to the end) so I did not get to experience that and did not spend large amounts of time trying to get my particular will. That is one thing that I do regret from having a Chair role. It forced me to hold back and not get to play as active of a role in the actual doing. I would like to have had a chance to actually be one of the people trying to push an agenda. If I were in the Model UN class-club for another semester I would have that chance. As is, I’ll get to do it a bit but as a Security Council member. Because of that I can’t speak on that element. Still it was worth it to be able to talk to others and help them to have an enjoyable experience with their first exploration of a Model UN simulation. I hope that we continue to do things like this because this has been one of the more interesting and meaningful parts of the class and gave us a chance to try and put some of what we had learned into actual practice.