(CNN) Trump says Vance and Rubio are participating in talks with Iran to end war. In preface, my sympathies lie with General Jack Keane of ISW. Nothing in this critical appraisal should be accepted uncritically.
Quoting CNN,
The speaker of the Iranian parliament has been talked of as a potential interlocutor with the Trump administration.
CNN’s Fred Pleitgen has more on Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf…
Choice of a hard line Iranian interlocutor over a moderate or reformer may be capitulation to reality on the ground in Iran, to domestic politics, or a combination of the two. While support for this action increased in the first weeks, the American public has no appetite for drawn-out conflict. Ghalibaf knows this, and will exploit it. Trump should expect a second Putin experience.
In fairness, the timing may have been forced by more than the gathering of Khameini’s inner circle above ground. Netanyahu claims that new subterranean fortifications, invulnerable to conventional munitions, were soon to come online. I had a similar anticipation, of a switch to harder, igneous rock.
There may have been no time to develop an insurgency. A planning deficit would be more serious. Has the intelligence community lost expertise in the anticipation and foment of revolution? Quoting Why Trump is Optimistic about Iran Conflict; Role of Technology; Flexible Goals,
Set the stage for revolution, which involves getting guns to the street. As this is written, there is news that the CIA is working with the Kurds. (CNN) CIA working to arm Kurdish forces to spark uprising in Iran, sources say. Another possibility: Sistan and Baluchestan.
This suggestion, arming the street with guns, was mildly shocking to several commentators. My response: It is incongruous to offer Iranians nothing more than a quick martyrdom. Guns are a curse here in the U.S, but an unavoidable tool in the overthrow of the worst tyrannies. Mao, famous tyrant, knew this: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun “
The contrast between excellence of military planning and poor political planning is eerily reminiscent of the “neoconservatives” of the 2003 Iraq War, when, straying far beyond Iraq, one abortive goal of that establishment was the invasion of Iran. Then, as now with their equivalents, the neoconservatives exercised their form of political orthodoxy to believe things about these countries which had no basis in reality.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf:offers three illusions. The first is Ghalibaf himself; brutal and steeped in the Iranian practice of deception, which is actually codified in Shi’ism via its roots as a heretical splinter of Islam.
The second is that Ghalibaf is a unitary entity. He is not; he is embedded in a society and system. He is not an independent entity; his free will is contained by that system. In Should Fox Apologize to Putin?, I wrote
After I had studied Vladimir Putin for a while, I realized that it is impossible to separate the man from the world in which he is embedded. It is an ethnocentric world of corrupt institutions and extrajudicial punishments, coexisting with a western yearning that willed the city of St. Petersburg into existence. In this milieu, there is a significant minority of completely modern people who have hybridized themselves with the west. They are just like us, a confusing veneer.
The parallels are obvious. Putin cannot turn his ship to leave Ukraine; Ghalibaf cannot expunge Iran’s constitutional goal to eradicate Israel, or the other external goals of the IRG.
The third is that Ghalibaf can deliver. The power structure, consisting of dual elements of command and consensus forming elements, is broken. That it has come together is a leap from sparse messaging from some elements. The absence of the command element is exemplified by a dead or comatose Supreme Leader. If there were a competent consensus-forming mechanism, this would not be allowed to persist. Both command and consensus are inoperative.
Even if Ghalibaf tries to find a new consensus, he has a motive to talk indefinitely: It keeps him off the kill list.