Opinion: Iran replays the Soviet Union’s bitter end-game

Remember in Godfather II, how a strangely dressed Sicilian visitor emerges unannounced in the Senate hearing, and by just being there makes his brother, Frankie “Five Angels” Pentangeli, reverse his signed testimony that would have incriminated Michael Corleone?

Well that’s pretty much what happened last weekend in Vienna when Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal emerged outside Coburn Palace and by just being there reminded U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that a bad deal with Iran would make King Abdullah very angry.

Yet a bad deal is all Iran would offer. By Monday, Kerry’s previous statements that “substantial progress” had been made in the six powers’ talks with Iran proved unfounded. When it came to freezing its nuclear effort, as opposed to just slowing it, Iran wouldn’t move one inch, so much so that Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Mohammed Jazad Zarif, both ordinarily soft-spoken people, at one point reportedly exchanged shouts.

The negotiators, having moved the goal post by adding seven months to the self-imposed deadline they missed Monday, want us to believe they will deliver tomorrow what they failed to produce yesterday. Well they won’t; not as long as Zarif et al report to their current superiors.

Like the former Soviet Union in its last years, Iran is at a political, ideological, and social crossroads.

Reports from the Islamic Republic indicate that mosque attendance is declining, people are losing respect for clergy, youngsters secretly party to Western music, a thriving black market exists for alcohol, women evade dress restrictions, and prostitution is booming.

The economy’s relative improvement since last year’s easing of sanctions has been superficial. Inflation has apparently declined from triple-digit levels to some 20%, following subsidy cuts which sharply reduced money supply. However, the economy remains strangled by banking and trade sanctions that have shrunk Iranian GDP by 25% since 2011, and spiked unemployment to about one-third of the workforce.

The negotiators’ agreement, that Iran will continue to get a monthly $700 million from its frozen assets, is like substituting triple-bypass surgery with aspirin.

Yet aspirin is all Iranian President Hassan Rouhani carries in his medical kit.

In a clumsy attempt to scrape cash, Rouhani tried, and failed, to convince the public to forego the monthly $15-per-household handout that the previous administration introduced when it began slashing subsidies. On the political level he has proven just as ineffective, as he let down millions in the middle-class and intelligentsia by failing to release political prisoners. And on foreign affairs, Rouhani has shown no signs of questioning, let alone undoing, the Ayatollahs’ strategic overextension — a multi-billion-dollar effort that includes arming Lebanon’s Shiites and bailing out Syria, besides meddling in Arab affairs from Iraq to Yemen.

Back when the Soviet Union’s downfall approached, Princeton University historian Paul Kennedy noted that all empires are doomed to eventually overextend. In the U.S.S.R, overextension came coupled with ideological heresy and economic bankruptcy. This is also where Iran is headed.

In the U.S.S.R, the writing had been on the wall for years, but the Soviet leader who would finally read it out loud, Mikhail Gorbachev, could show up only half-a-decade and two successors after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, who personified the previous order’s paralysis

The talks in Vienna were an attempt at fielding Iran’s Gorbachev while he still reports to its Brezhnev, namely Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the septuagenarian whose career was crowned by shouting “Death to America” into microphones that blared into millions of Iranian ears. As long as he is around, Iran will remain at loggerheads with Western civilization.

Quiet in the mosque at the expense of despair in the bazaar.

The same goes for the Revolutionary Guards, the economic equivalent of the U.S.S.R’s communist party membership, which had a vested interest in preserving the existing order, disastrous though it was for the 90% of the population that did not belong to its ranks.

Like the communist elite in its time, the Guards also control agencies and projects through which they earn cash, collect bribes, and distribute patronage. They fear that a lifting of sanctions would lead to a Chinese-style economic revolution coupled with a Gorbachev-style political thaw, which in turn would expose them to economic meritocracy and political vengeance.

Faced with this constraint, Rouhani and Zarif had no choice but to overplay their hand. In extending the talks they bought quiet in the mosque at the expense of despair in the bazaar. Such an arrangement can’t last long.

In Washington, once the new Senate is in place, a deal that might have been reachable in the fall will be unreachable by the summer. In Tehran, meanwhile, economic pressures and political wrath will eventually produce a showdown between the middle class and the regime.

There are differences in the West concerning the tactics of the struggle with Iran, but there is wall-to-wall agreement that the ayatollahs must not get a nuclear bomb. An Iranian agreement to retreat may yet be obtained, but not before the social processes already underway in Iran mature, and redo Tehran’s political structure, whether peacefully or violently.

In its current format — a suave foreign minister, under a well-intentioned and well-educated but powerless president, under an unreconstructed cleric — Iran’s regime will not deliver. The empty pockets Kerry has just frisked in Vienna are all his interlocutors have.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/iran-replays-the-soviet-unions-bitter-end-game-2014-11-26