Captain Ed hits the nail on Mohammad Khatami:

Khatami has often been called a “reformer”, but he has been as much of a member of the ruling clique as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  The ruling mullahs put Khatami in power to address their foreign- and domestic-policy goals at the time, and they booted him when those goals changed.  He serves as an approved symbol of reform — someone who can act as a rallying point for the disaffected but who will not challenge the standing of the ruling mullahcracy.

Either Khatami may have tired of that role or he doesn’t understand the power of these words.  His definition of freedom sounds very much like that of America’s founding fathers, who built that very concept into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  The “sovereign right of the people” form the legitimacy of any government, as Khatami notes, but that flies in the face of shari’a and the Iranian mullahcracy. In fact, it constitutes a form of heresy in Islam, where Allah is sovereign and mullahs rule in his name.  The “people” have no sovereign rights in Islamic theocracies.

Did Khatami mean to undermine the very concept that has legitimized the Iranian theocracy, or did his rhetoric simply get the better of him?   It’s hard to say, but it would be a mistake to assume a break from the mullahs without more evidence than this.  However, it may not take an actual break for these words to have an effect on the Iranian population.  Just having them spoken by a legitimate national leader could bolster an already passionate democratization movement, and Khatami may find himself an unwilling catalyst for massive change.

It would be great if this were genuine, but I have my doubts.  As we’ve seen in the past, Khamenei (and Rafsanjani) uses the pieces he has in order to control the public.  It’s really a brilliant tactic, in a totalitarian society, to control a populous under dramatic demographic and geographical change–the Iranians of the future will be younger and increasingly more urban, making modernism and cosmopolitanism harder to stifle.  Khatami has been a useful cog in the past, frequently carted out as the face of “reform” within the system. In fact, the entire 2nd of Khordad Front could be accused of similar capitulation and public forgery.  Khomeini pioneered this behavior, allowing Rafsanjani to liberalize the nation in the late 80’s through foreign investment and personal freedoms (he would later recant on this, but the pattern prevails today).  Give the people a cookie, and then take it away.  Hand it over, take it away.  Keep the entire population on a psychological roller coaster, so that no genuine reform movement can properly ferment.  By offering the people that glimmer of internal hope, you can stifle an exterior revolt.   

And the Iranian people can sense this.  They aren’t stupid.  That’s why they don’t care about Friday’s Majlis elections, and that’s why 86% of them would rather hold direct elections for the position of Supreme Leader (I think this would pose other problems, but you have to appreciate the mindset).  However, until a true constitutional movement can gain steam, I don’t foresee much of anything changing.  The pieces on the board aren’t the problem, the game is.  Changing the Guardian Council might foster a more autonomous Majlis, but it can’t affect the Supreme Leader’s position of final jurist.  It may be a good first step, but the final step has to be some kind of departure from the Revolution and Khomeini’s vision of Velayat-e faqih.

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