Re: [lbo-talk] Iran’s New Power Balance

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 12/11/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 11, 2006, at 4:43 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > Far more interesting is the faction fight in Iran's power elite, which
> > generally goes unnoticed among Western leftists except Iranian
> > leftists and Iran Studies scholars in the West.  The way you look at
> > Iran is the same as the way most Western liberals look at Russia.
>
> I'm not going to say any more on this topic after this post, but I'm
> aware of that faction fight, and your boy is on the right-wing of it.
> As the Le Monde Diplomatique piece you cited makes clear, Ahmadinejad
> has increased the level of repression while failing to deliver on his
> economic agenda, and it was the economic agenda that was he was
> elected on and which was supposed to set him apart from the
> moralizing mullahs. Russians enjoy a higher level of civil liberties
> than Iranians do.

Right and left are relative terms, and Ahamdinejad is to the right of
the Khatami faction and to the left of Ali Khamenei and other ruling
clerics on culture and to the left of the Khatami and Rafsanjani
factions and the ruling clerics on economics and foreign policy.

Change in the level of repression in Iran or any other country can
only be objectively evaluated by changes in the incarceration rate,
number of political prisoners, number of censored publications, and so
on over time.

As for economics, in the view of Alexandre Leroi-Ponant as well as
those who think like him, Ahmadinejad has failed to deliver, but the
question is what Iran's working people think.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>