Did Ayatollah Khomeini intend a government based on popular sovereignty in 1979?

According to Iran's Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in his Friday prayers sermon Khomeini the government to be that of a Supreme Leader who makes important decisions himself. Rafsanjani, according to Juan Cole, intended that Iran be governed as a Republic whose base of power was the sovereignty of the people. That implies that the Khomeini Revolution was taken over by authoritarian Shiite hardliners who are misruling Iran today. The evidence of that misrule is the extreme public suspicion of the declared outcome of the recent Iranian elections. So Rafsanjini stated yesterday what had to be done to restore the true nature of the 1979 Khomeini Revolution:

Rafsanjani then speaks of a plague of doubt about the election results that has afflicted a not inconsiderable number of Iranians, including many intellectuals and thinking persons.

His solution to this crisis of confidence consists in the following steps:

1. All parties to the dispute should act only in accordance with the law.

2. The authorities must exert themselves to regain the confidence of the people.

3. The door must be left open to free and unrestrained public debate among the contending parties, including on the state-run radio and other media.

4. Demonstrators and other prisoners of conscience must be released by the regime.

5. The press must be left free to publish a wide range of opinion on these issues.

Rafsanjani seems to have been acknowledging that the results of this election are unlikely to be overturned. But he is urging fresh legislation and wide open debate as means of resolving the crisis.

I don't know or understand Iran or the Iranian culture and politics, so I won't pass public judgment on the accuracy of what Rafsanjini said in his sermon except to suggest that while I hope his view is correct it remains up to the people of Iran to decided. Juan Cole has been kind enough to pass it on for our information. Obviously there are strong political factions for both a more democratic Iran responsive to the will of the people and for the hard line authoritarian theocracy of Iran. The U.S. and the other nations surrounding Iran would certainly be better off if Rafsanjini's view were that of those in power there.

Short history of US COIN ops in Iraq

"COIN" is the US military acronym for CounterInsurgency Operations. It is also the subject of the Field Manual that Gen Petreaus spent the last year or so writing, and now is in charge of implementing in Iraq. The new COIN doctrine is the basis of the current Surge being implemented in Iraq, but the Surge is not a strategy. The Surge is an implementation of the new strategy.

Confused yet? You don't need to be. Professor Colin Kahl of the Political Science Department at the University of Minnesota wrote a short, concise description of COIN operations in Iraq in an e-mail to Juan Cole. Dr. Cole then got permission and published the email in his excellent blog "Informed Comment."

For the clearest guide I have seen yet to what is going on militarily in Iraq and what led to it, go read the post at "Informed Comment".

Where there's a will....

Juan Cole, writing this morning, pointed me to the statement by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former British diplomat. Sir Jeremy has a number of comments he wanted to make about how the invasion and occupation of Iraq was mishandled. But the Blair government will not let him publish his book.

Fortunately, he has found a way to make an end run. He provided a new forward to the reissue of "Tigris Gunboats: The Forgotten War in Iraq 1914-1917", a memoir by Wilfred Nunnskip. Here are the main comments:

The Telegraph It is a history of the 1914-17 expedition to capture Baghdad by a British expeditionary force for which Nunn led the naval contingent.

Sir Jeremy writes that it was an appallingly bloody campaign, fought against the Ottoman Turkish army in which Britain suffered 40,000 men killed, wounded or captured in a few months.

Eventually Baghdad was taken, but the capture proved nothing but a heartache for the invaders.

"The victory of March 1917 left the British owning the territory of Iraq after the war," writes Sir Jeremy. But it brought them "many years of trial and distress in trying, first through colonial occupation and then through intrusive diplomacy, to stabilise a nation that has rarely in its history remained both united and peaceful.

"Is it too churlish to ask whether the leaders of a more modern administration might have profited from studying this experience?

"It now transpires that many individual American officers did try to learn from Iraq's earlier history.

"But other considerations closer to home were weighing on the top-level decision-makers; there was little delegation of real authority to those in the theatre who could see what the local conditions required; the different parts of the military and civilian systems were out of tune with each other; and the limitations of the use of force were poorly understood.

"That meant that a sense of common purpose was missing after the ousting of Saddam Hussein, which was not the case nine decades earlier."

Sir Jeremy adds: "Neither the British Government in 1917 nor the Coalition in 2003 really understood what they were taking on when they assumed control of Baghdad."

So we are suffering from politicians who don't read or understand history.

The only people who would be surprised by that are going to be those politicians themselves, and that's assuming that somehow they can be made aware of their failure. Not very likely.