Throughout the fall of 2019, protests shake the Middle East: Iraq, Lebanon, Iran.
In Iraq and Lebanon, countries of strategic importance to Iran and Israel, governments yielded to the protesters and resigned. On the night of December 12, the Israeli Knesset will be dissolved - the deadline for the formation of a coalition government between Netanyahu and the blue-and-white Ganza will expire - until the new elections in March.
That is, three countries: Iraq, Lebanon and Israel - in the near future are in a vacuum of power and transitional timelessness. At the same time, violent protests in Iraq and Lebanon continue to this day. As long as everyone around is in a political fever, everything is calm in Iran (with the exception of the impending economic collapse, which Iran is trying to avoid in every possible way, playing to raise rates from the United States).
Why only the Iranian protest was successfully suppressed? There are several reasons for this. First, let us recall that the Iranian protest “interrupted” and diverted world attention from the bloody protests in Iraq, which by that time had lasted a second month and ultimately demanded the resignation of the pro-Iranian prime minister Abdul-Mahdi (against the backdrop of arson of pro-Iranian facilities and the consulate in the holy Karbell) . Iranian two-week protests refocused the attention of the United States and world media on itself, giving Iran the opportunity to regroup in Iraq, a key strategic country for him. And the fact that the change of the protest agenda in Iraq occurred after the Iranian protests is already obvious.
Even before the Iranian protests began, their future tone was voiced by Hossein Tayeb, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps intelligence service, whom some in Iran consider to be involved in the arrest of President Rouhani’s brother. In general, the anti-corruption campaign, which has been widely advertised in the Iranian media for the last couple of years, has an interesting impact on the president and his closest associates, the very “liberal government”.
On November 14, 2019, Tayeba was quoted by the conservative agency Fars: “We are returning to the country of economic corrupt officials who need to know that corruption has no chance.” This indicated that the accumulated protest energy, caused by economic collapse, the collapse of the nuclear deal and other social reasons, would be released through the safest channel and the authorities would control the process.
On November 15, a protest began that looked like this: masked young men set fire to banks as a symbol of the snickering bureaucracy and the rich, blocked traffic on highways, burned tires and staged riots on the streets with anti-presidential slogans (Rukhani in eternal confrontation with the IRGC). In Iran, tracing of Iraqi events took place - a claim against the government, which raises prices and is allegedly guilty of corruption.
On November 20 and 21, Fars published the names of the arrested protesters, among whom were a former Iranian diplomat who worked at the Iranian Embassy in Denmark (he allegedly blocked Imam Ali’s highway), as well as Iranians with dual citizenship - Germany, Turkey and Afghanistan.
Protests in no country can do without foreign intervention - this is already a classic.
On the eve of the protests, the entire elite, starting from actors and athletes, as if on a command, began to repost the same caricature in their millions of Instagram accounts: how an unfortunate Iranian is strangled with a gas station hose.
For anyone who is more or less familiar with the realities of Iranian domestic politics and the situation in the country, the assumptions about the spontaneity of mass manifestations of discontent - from the elite to the population - seem ridiculous. The country's special services, including the paramilitary Basidzh, are so effective that they can be suspected of excessive zeal and paranoia, but not weakness. Moreover, even after doubling the price of fuel, it still remained almost the lowest in the world (lower only in Venezuela): as of November 18, at the height of the protests, according to Globalpetrolpices, a liter of gasoline in Iran cost about $ 0, 12. There were times, as they say, and much worse.
Iranian protests ended with tougher anti-corruption rhetoric, the opening of new schemes of banking fraud, kilograms of gold shown on TV, the arrests of officials, the campaign “purge ranks” and the announcement of the registration of candidates for the February parliamentary elections, which, of course, will be “popular”, and not bourgeois, as under Rouhani. At least 7,000 people were registered with 290 seats, the media cover the election show as "reviving the hopes of the common people" to get rid of corruption and participate in the country's fate.
Iran successfully managed to channel the protest into the global “fashionable” channel of the fight against corruption and wrap it in its favor not only domestically, but also in Iraq.
Sadroddin Mousavi, the manager of the state-run Iran Daily newspaper, said in an interview with the Turkish Anadolu agency: “At the official level, Iran will advise Iraqi officials to launch a serious anti-corruption campaign and pay attention to people's complaints.”
Hamid Reza, head of the non-governmental Iranian organization Peace Spirit, said of the Iraqi protests: "People needed a goal, and the enemies gave them that." It is difficult to suppress the anger of protesters in another country by Iranian methods, so Iran’s tactics are to give people a different purpose to take out the anger instead of Iranian consulates and security forces.
And this goal is already outlined. Created in the midst of protests, the Iraq Integrity Commission issued over 250 arrest warrants for former and current officials on suspicion of corruption as part of government reform after a wave of protests in the country.
An angry people needs sacrifices - they will receive them. On December 9, the commission issued a communique with the first reports: two current ministers and seven former ones were arrested. Add to this two current legislators and ten former as well as 11 Iraqi governors. Nice catch.
The Iraqi government spokesman, Saad al-Haditi, announced the creation of a special central court to conduct anti-corruption trials. If there is no bread in the country, spectacles must be given. And dozens of ministers, governors, deputies, who will be judged publicly and deprived of illegal property, are perhaps one of the best shows in a country torn by unrest, poverty, religious wars and one step away from the complete collapse of statehood.
Having sacrificed the figure of Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi on the chessboard of Iraqi politics, Iran is building a new combination using the technology of legitimization of popular protests, beloved by the West. Mahdi resigned after the recommendation to “listen to the people” of the Iraqi Shiite leader Al Sistani, who, apparently, will play a key role in stabilizing the situation in Iraq. Is this not democracy you love about the West? “At the religious level, Iran, through a network of influential Iraqi priests, will try to help Iraqis unite and maintain their territorial integrity,” Mousavi confirms.
While protesters in Baghdad are trying to gather in Tahrir Square using white t-shirts and the hashtag White_Shirt_Revolution (the Iraqi police are trying to block their access to the square because Iraq cannot afford to knock out the Internet all over the country like Iran), Iraq’s highest clergyman Ayatollah Al Sistani calls for the use of peaceful forms of protest and not succumb to the provocations of "external forces."
He legitimized the right of the people to an anti-corruption agenda: “Violence and chaos impede the reforms that the ongoing anti-corruption and economic protests in Iraq demand.”
The fight against corruption has become an ideal scheme for dumping regimes around the world, from Latin America to the Middle East and Eastern Europe. This is an ideal formula: corruption is ineradicable and invincible, nowhere and never, only somewhere it is available to everyone (certificates in the traffic police, kickbacks for budget orders, money for gifts to a teacher at school), and somewhere it’s an expensive pleasure for politicians (hearing in Congress, Trump’s attempts to put together a “corrupt” case for Biden).
Or closer examples: for example, the fight against corruption in Georgia, where Saakashvili allegedly completely broke the ridge of the soviet mentality and “defeated corruption”. But did he win?
Or made it an expensive pleasure, affordable for politicians and big business? Or the Russian FBK * Navalny - a political project designed to change the regime, or a government project to channel protest energy in a safe way for the regime? The question is open.
Iran, the theocratic militarized state, faced in 2009 with the largest protest in the history of the Islamic Republic, showed incredible sensitivity in studying the forms and types of protest movements, and it seems that in 2019 the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were able to intercept the regional agenda of the struggle corruption in their favor (Lebanon was no exception).
Changing the discourse of the Iraqi protest from anti-Iranian to anti-corruption allows legally flawlessly clean and form a new government in Iraq. Here, as in surfing - a person riding a wave of protest controls it.
* The Anti-Corruption Fund is included in the register of NGOs performing the functions of a foreign agent, by decision of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation of 09.10.2019.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.