Iran’s president names `unknown’ for oil post
In many appointments, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad has favoured friends. He has brought in both his brother and close allies from Tehran city council, where he was mayor before being elected president, as official advisers.
At the same time, he has removed many senior officials, including those who conducted two-year negotiations with the European Union over Iran’s nuclear programme. Mr Ahmadi-Nejad replaced them with less experienced fundamentalists.
(…)
Ansar Hezbollah, the militant fundamentalist group, has argued appointments should be based on religious commitment rather than friendship.
Hmmm…
- nominating incompetent cronies to senior posts?
- counting on friendliness or closeness rather than ideological purity (or competence)?
- being criticised by his own fundamentalists?
Who does that remind you of?
It seems that the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, and George Bush deserve each other. The problem, of course, is that it’s really worrying news. In the US, you have avowed torture-proponents running the army, obnoxious incompetents running diplomacy (well, almost, Bolton is only at the UN), and the shining examples or Miers and Brownie. In Iran, it’s only the oil industry and their nuclear diplomacy which is threatened…
Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, president of Iran, nominated a largely unknown figure, Sadeq Mahsouli, as minister of oil on Wednesday, adding further mystery to the direction of his new administration.
Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s original nominee, the conservative academic Aliasghar Zarei, was one of four ministerial nominations rejected by Iran’s parliament, in which a majority of deputies are, like the president, fundamentalist conservatives.
An oil official said he had “never heard of” Mr Mahsouli, who was “definitely not from the ministry”. Mr Mahsouli may face a rough ride in the parliament, where Kamal Daneshyar, head of its energy commission, expressed regret at the nomination. “When there is no knowledge about them [nominations] . . . it’s not clear what the result of any vote will be,” he said.
Elyas Naderan, a prominent fundamentalist deputy, said parliament preferred a ministry run by an acting minister rather than a minister who lacked qualifications. Iran is the second largest oil producer in the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Iranian news agencies reported Mr Mahsouli was a former commander in the Revolutionary Guards and a former deputy governor of Western Ajerbaijan province – apparently when Mr Ahmadi-Nejad was governor of neighbouring Ardebil province.
So at least Iran can rely on some reality-based decision making from its fundamentalists… And the fact that fundamentalists are more effective at blocking nominations than the minority opposition looks a lot like what happened over Miers.
Mr Ahmadi-Nejad (…)has removed many senior officials, including those who conducted two-year negotiations with the European Union over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Mr Ahmadi-Nejad replaced them with less experienced fundamentalists, at a time when the International Atomic Energy Agency is contemplating referring Iran to the UN Security Council and where the president’s own rhetoric over “wiping Israel from the map” has left Iran isolated internationally.
Iran has also decided to replace its three ambassadors to France, Germany and Britain – the three countries who have led the EU in talks with Iran. Also being replaced is the ambassador to Geneva, Mohammad-Reza Alborzi, who also played a key role in nuclear negotiations.
Nice. Now the European countries do not have anyone to talk to anymore. What a nice situation to be when the stakes are, oh only whether the country will have a nuclear bomb or not?!
Private business is meanwhile alarmed by Mr Ahmad-Nejad’s economic management, as his appointment of relative liberals to leading posts has clashed with the president’s statist rhetoric. The Tehran Stock Exchange index this week fell below the psychologically important 10,000 mark, down from around 12,500 at June’s election. “I see a lack of strategy across the board, even chaos,” said an Iranian analyst. “The budget deficit and inflation will grow markedly by the end of the year.
Budget deficit? Inflation? Lack of (economic) strategy across the board? Check. Well, actually, Bush has the tax cuts going for him in terms of coherence, so score one for him there…
Among the senior clerics he reveres in the holy city of Qom is Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, dubbed the “spiritual father” of the fundamentalists, who advocates cultural isolation from the west. Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s sense that Iran is under attack is shared by many of the new cabinet, half of whom have a military background.
Isolation from the world? A sense that the country is under attack? Again, troubling similarities…
So, am I reading too much into this? Is this a skewed European viewpoint, whereby we naturally see the USA as the “biggest danger” around and are giddily keen to find similarities between US democracy and dictatorial regimes elsewhere?
But hey, Iran is not completely a dictatorship, as glimpsed in the above article, and as can be read in this article from the Independent (already behind a subscription wall, but a copy can be found here: Ten very surprising things about Iran).
What we can say, I think, is that Bush and the Iranian fundamentalists are objective allies in finding an enemy in each other which allows them to rouse (or scare) their respective populations and make them forget about real domestic issues. As the experience of both countries shows, this can only last for a time, before people start caring again about real issues that affect them, and get tired of fundamentalism, but any new crisis or external enemy can re-start the cycle again easily.
Thus I do fear that with the two countries having bellicose leaders, any crisis will be amplified and not resolved, and being in the middle, I am not really overjoyed with it.
