The social and economic backgrounds of Iran's ruling class have yet to be closely studied. I'd love to read a study of that modeled upon Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes and New Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (1978).
Pending such a study, I'd simply call your attention to the fact that the Western ruling classes do not think that Iran's political economy is closer to the West's than China's is: <http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/country.cfm?id=iran> <http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/country.cfm?id=china>.
Moreover, the blow that the Chinese Communist Party struck against China's farmers this year (see Antoaneta Bezlova, "Property Law Denies Farmers the Good Earth," 16 March 2007, <http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36946>), given the place of the land question in the Chinese Revolution, is not unlike the shock of a blow that would be struck against Iran's working people if Iran's power elite (or a US client that Washington might succeed in installing) radically privatized Iran's oil industry, which _none_ of Iran's power elite has yet to even contemplate (and they won't do so any time soon, for that will mean the end of bureaucratic-collectivist clerical rule).
> > [YF] On the question of imperialism, too, some religious parties are to
> > the
> > Left of some secular left parties in the South, and in the North, all
> > major secular left parties are part of the US-led multinational
> > empire.
>
> [MG] But is this inherent in being a "religious" or a "secular left" party?
> These distinctions are important in social policy, but not in foreign
> policy. You have had both secular left and religious parties leading
> anti-imperialist movements or collaborating with imperialism at different
> stages in their history.
Quite right. But the type of mass Islamist parties and movements in which I am interested have social class bases more conducive to practical anti-imperialism than most secular leftist parties on one hand and all transnational jihadist cells on the other hand.
> In such case, Iranian-US relations would be brought more into line with the
> kind of relationship which exists today between Iran and Europe, or for that
> matter, between the US and Brazil, the secular left government I think you
> have most in mind when you draw the contrast between the respective posture
> towards US imperialism of religious parties in the Mideast and "some secular
> left regimes in the South".
If Washington had wanted that, it would have done it in the Khatami era.
> [MG] Two questions arising out of your comment:
>
> (1) Is it the case that the Islamic Republic, Hezbollah, and Hamas are less
> tolerant of bourgeois democratic norms and institutions than, for example,
> the "secular leftist" Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela? That's not my
> impression. The degree of commitment to these forms is less a function of
> ideology, than of the internal and external relationship of forces facing
> these governments.
Take RCTV, for instance. The rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran would have put it out of business before its owners forthrightly put it to service of a coup. The Bolivarian Revolution, so far, has been a "very legalistic" revolution in the words of Vladimir Acosta: "esta es una revolución muy legalista" (Marcelo Colussi, "La no-renovación de RCTV es un hecho revolucionario porque toca el corazón del poder mundial," Argenpress, 3 June 2007, <http://www.argenpress.info/notaprint.asp?num=043380&parte=0>).
That said, Latin American leftists, except Cubans and more recently PRD in Mexico City, have not particularly been more committed to reproductive rights and freedoms than Iran's Islamists, and some (FMLN, FSLN) are in fact worse than them in some respects, though few notice it since sexual display is permitted and encouraged in Latin America unlike anywhere in the Middle East.
> (2) Are you in favour of preserving "individual rights and
> freedoms...conceived in political liberalism", and does that, by definition,
> lead you to identify yourself, with Andie, as a "social liberal"?
Within a nation, yes, albeit _strongly_ qualified by the criticism of discourse of rights by Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, and so on. (Note that, even within the North, the more liberal and rights-oriented a country is, the less freedom and security its people have. Compare the Anglo countries' political economy with continental Europe.)
But it doesn't make sense to apply rights discourse in ahistorical, transnational fashion. For instance, just about all media are owned by the state in Cuba, which makes the degree of "freedom of speech," "freedom of press," etc. in Cuba lower than those in capitalist countries under the most undemocratic governments, according to media watchdog groups, most of which are the USG's "democracy assistance" apparatuses. That doesn't make sense, does it?
On 7/12/07, Seth Ackerman <sethackerman1 at verizon.net> wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >The sad reality is that, if
> >Iran's power elite succeed in imposing the Chinese Communist Party's
> >economic model upon Iran's working people, as many of them yearn to
> >do, that will mean Iran moving to the Right, not to the Left.
>
> So the Left = gas rationing and stagnation while the Right = 10% growth
> rates for 20 years in a row? Yoshie, you may be the listmember whose
> views most closely resemble Grover Norquist's!
>
> He sees the religious right as a useful tool, too. And he's very
> pro-Islam. You should send in your resume.
Till your posting, I had only known Grover Norquist as an anti-tax man, but now I have made a discovery that rightists can be as sectarian as self-identified liberals and leftists. Moreover, rightists are joined by liberals in Islamist-baiting Norquist and Bush. We may indeed be in a post-ideological age, the age when terms such as left, right, and center, liberal and conservative, no longer make sense and morons alone set the terms of debate.
<http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/451> Daniel Pipes' Weblog Is Grover Norquist an Islamist? April 14, 2005
Paul Sperry, author of the new book, Infiltration, in an interview calls Grover Norquist "an agent of influence for Islamists in Washington." When asked by FrontPageMag.com why a Republican anti-tax lobbyist should so passionately promote Islamist causes, Sperry implied that Norquist has converted to Islam: "He's marrying a Muslim, and when I asked Norquist if he himself has converted to Islam, he brushed the question off as too 'personal.'" As Lawrence Auster comments on this exchange, "Clearly, if Norquist hadn't converted to Islam, or weren't in the process of doing so, he would simply have answered no."
Indeed, Norquist married Samah Alrayyes, a Palestinian Muslim, on April 2, 2005, and Islamic law limits a Muslim woman to marrying a man who is Muslim. This is not an abstract dictum but a very serious imperative, with many "honor" killings having resulted from a woman ignoring her family's wishes.
Alrayyes (now known as Samah Norquist) has radical Islamic credentials of her own; she served as communications director at the Islamic Free Market Institute, the Islamist organization Norquist helped found. Now, she is employed as a public affairs officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development – and so it appears that yet another Islamist finds employment in a branch of the U.S. government.
Grover Norquist has for some years now been promoting Islamist organizations, including even the Council on American-Islamic Relations; for example, he spoke at CAIR's conference, "A Better America in a Better World" on October 5, 2004. Frank Gaffney has researched Norquist's ties to Islamists in his exhaustive, careful, and convincing study, "Agent of Influence" and concludes that he is enabling "a political influence operation to advance the causes of radical Islamists, and targeted most particularly at the Bush Administration."
But if Grover Norquist is indeed a convert to Islam, it could be that he is not just enabling the Islamist causes but is himself an Islamist. (April 14, 2005)
<http://michellemalkin.com/2004/07/30/what-say-you-now-grover-norquist/> What say you now, Grover Norquist? By Michelle Malkin • July 30, 2004 08:46 AM
<http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/000376.php> December 9, 2003 Grover Norquist and radical Islam
<http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11209> A Troubling Influence By Frank J Gaffney Jr. FrontPageMagazine.com | December 9, 2003
<http://www.islamicsupremecouncil.org/media_center/leaders/TNR_110101.htm> Grover Norquist's Strange Alliance with Radical Islam; Fevered Pitch The New Republic By Franklin Foer, November 1, 2001
<http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2004/03/15/unger_3/index.html> The Arabian candidate How George W. Bush's close ties to Islamic lobbying groups -- and to an accused supporter of Palestinian terrorism -- may have brought him his razor-thin margin of victory in Florida. By Craig Unger
<http://archive.democrats.com/display.cfm?id=299> Bush Scandal Red Alert! Bush Tied to Terror Suspect Sami al-Arian -- Yoshie