1 Report for

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Daily Report for Wednesday, November 22, 2017

1 Report for

Wednesday,

November 22, 2017 Azar 1, 1396

* Highlights. Page 2

* News Briefs. Page 3

* Future of Middle East. Page 3

* Unprecedented number of bodyguards. Page 4

* Time to get concession, not giving concession. Page 4

* Iranian leadership or hegemony? A response to Macron. Page 5

* Is Iran seeking clandestine talks with Saudi Arabia? Page 9

* Korean news corner. Page 10

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2 Highlights

 French President Emmanuel Macron is nowadays busy thrusting himself in the turbulent Middle East politics and, unfortunately, increasingly echoing the Iranophobic American and Saudi sentiments by warning of Iran’s “hegemonic”

desires and “tendencies.” (See Page 5)

 A Kuwaiti newspaper Al Jarida on Wednesday claimed that Mohammad Irani, director-general for the Middle East and North Africa at the Iranian foreign ministry, was dispatched to Tunisia as a personal emissary of Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif to request his Tunisian counterpart Khemaies Jhinaoui to

“intervene in the crisis between Tehran and Riyadh and discuss with the Saudis the possibility of behind-the-scenes talks between the two countries to resolve differences” (See Page 9)

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3 Briefs

* Farsi-language reformist newspaper Ghanoon speculates about the political future of First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri, whether he will continue to be in the government or not, especially after his criticism of Ahmadinejad and Mehr Housing Scheme. Ayatollah Khamenei’s deputy for special Affairs for the Office of the Supreme Leader, Vahid Haghanian criticized Jahangiri for publicly criticizing Ahmadinejad and Mehr Housing Scheme.

* Farsi-language Iranian Students’

News Agency (ISNA) reports that the spokesperson of SNSC’s Office for Supervising MP’s Conduct Mohammad Javad Jamali has said that SNSC is pursuing a complaint against conservative MP Ali Motahhari.

Jamali said that during a television interview, Motahhari commented about the house arrest of Musavi and Karroubi. Jamali said that the issue is a national security issue and Motahhari should not have commented on it. Motahhari is on record for advocating lifting the house arrest.

* Farsi-language newspaper Shargh reports that Intelligence Ministry has arrested a man who falsely represented himself as staff member of Supreme Leader’s Office and Intelligence Ministry and extorting money from the people.

* Farsi-language newspaper Shargh reports that Sistan and Baluchiestan police have arrested a five-member gang of drug smugglers and confiscated 2.635 tons of drugs during an encounter.

* Farsi-language newspaper Shargh reports that police in Hormuzgan Province have arrested a man who swindled 20 billion rials from people on false pretext of importing and then selling of foreign cars.

Future of Middle East

Farsi-language reformist newspaper Shargh writes that President Rouhani and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are expected to visit Russia’s Sochi today. It is unclear, at the time of Shargh going to print, that Syrian President Bashar Assad would also participate in the Sochi meeting or not.

Assad visited Sochi on Tuesday, a day before a summit meeting there for the leaders of Iran, Turkey and Russia.

He met with Putin, thanking him for the military intervention he credited for “saving Syria”. Saying that

“the military operation is really coming to an end,” Mr.

Putin told Mr. Assad that it was time to work toward a lasting political settlement.

Shargh writes that the meeting shows growing solidarity between Iran, Russia and Turkey. Iran, Turkey and Russia are drawing a new map for the Middle East. It is like Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov once said,

“What is happening in Syria will shape the future of the world”, a new system with Iran, Turkey and Russia playing key role.

Russian Defense Ministry has said that Iran, Russi and Turkey have plans to completely destroying the remaining forces of IS in Syria. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Sheikholeslam tells Shargh newspaper:

The situation in Syria is moving towards a political solution. After Syria’s military victories over IS in Syria and the terrorists were defeated in Syria, their last organized base collapsed in the region. Other opponents of Bashar al-Assad are in Adlib. Now Syria has stepped up its efforts towards political dialogue. This victory in the [battle] field is moving towards a political solution.

He stressed that the political solution should reflect the military victories on the ground. As part of this political solution, Iran, Turkey and Russia act as the guarantor

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countries. Conditional on the participation of all effective parties, especially the Syrian nation and government, we are all waiting for peace.

Unprecedented number of bodyguards

Farsi-language Iranian news websites based outside Iran are highlighting the comments by Iranian users on social networking websites about the

“unprecedented” number of bodyguards for Ayatollah Khamenei when he travelled to Kermanshah to visit earthquake victims.

There are reports that during Ayatollah Khamenei’s visit on Sunday, “all security personnel” including IRGC’s Intelligence Unit had transferred their personnel to Kermanshah to support Supreme Leader’s protection details. Three full IRGC Ilyushin planes and also Pooya Company transported 800 security personnel to Kermanshah. This was in addition to 300- person security teams of the Supreme Leader himself. It is also reported that unspecified number of IRGC helicopters equipped with launcher and rocket were dispatched to the area.

It is also reported that President Rouhani and Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani were also escorted by high number of bodyguards.

Time to get concession, not giving concession

Farsi-language hardline conservative Kayhan writes that we should not forget that immediately after there were indications of ISIL’s downfall, suddenly there was “disintegration of Iraq’s Kurdistan” through ethnic divisions. Of course, this quickly disappeared.

Yesterday, when the federal court of Iraq

“revoked” the “Iraqi Kurdistan Referendum”, the speaker of Kurdish parliament said that Barzani’s stupid mistake cost the Kurds 20 years of hard work. The plot to break up “Kurdistan”

was supposed to lay down the ground for the breakdown of other countries in the region.

Now, there is yet another plot in the region with the same purpose. This plot consists of adventurous measures by several reactionary Arab states against Iran and its allies. Two days ago, Cairo hosted one of the most anti-Iranian summit meetings of the Arab League. Foreign ministers from countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE and even Djibouti attended the meeting.

They stepped up their anti-Iran tirades and attacks. They condemned Iran and its ally Lebanese Shi’ite Hizballah group, calling the latter a terrorist group.

Reacting to the meeting, President Rouhani has criticized the Arab League for supporting Saudi Arabia and its role in the war in Yemen. He called the Arab League

“old, worn-out, exhausted and ineffective.”

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5 Iranian leadership or hegemony?

A response to Macron

The new French President Emmanuel Macron is nowadays busy thrusting himself in the turbulent Middle East politics and, unfortunately, increasingly echoing the

Iranophobic American and Saudi sentiments by warning of Iran’s “hegemonic” desires and “tendencies.” One of the key problems with Macron’s and Le Drian’s frequent attachment of hegemonic ambitions to Iran is conceptual ambiguity, that is, their willingness to repeatedly invoke the concept of hegemony without ever defining it, other than giving the impression of a negative attribute suggesting coercive

domination.

If hegemony relates to specific distribution of power and influence, then it is glaringly obvious that Iran’s position in the region is recently enhanced both directly, as a result of Iran’s prudent foreign policy actions, such as rushing forces to Erbil to assist the Iraqi Kurds against the ISIS onslaught four years ago, when the American President was turning a blind eye and branding the ISIS phenomenon as an “internal problem,”

much to the pleasure of Saudi and other sponsors of ISIS and other terrorists in Iraq and Syria, who are now the net losers of a power competition gone badly for them, principally due to their misguided policies and priorities.

Macron would be well-advised to inspect the Persian Gulf map more closely, e.g., at Iran’s long shorelines and strategic islands, etc., in order to reach the apt conclusion that Iran is destined to play a significant leadership role commensurate with its history, location, and nexus of power relations.

Macron’s discourse on Iran leaves a lot to be desired and is bereft of the basic understanding of the historical necessity of Iran’s prudent leadership role, which is markedly different from naked aggression or coercive hegemony attributed to the country by the current French officials, who are now risking the health of France’s (lucrative) ties with Iran by their liberal misuse of the term hegemony.

IRDiplomacy news website: The new French President Emmanuel Macron is nowadays busy thrusting himself in the turbulent Middle East politics and, unfortunately, increasingly echoing the Iranophobic American and Saudi sentiments by warning of Iran’s “hegemonic” desires and “tendencies.” As expected, Tehran has reacted strongly against Macron’s, and his foreign minister jean-Yves Le Drian’s,

‘Trumpeseque’ calls for amending the Iran nuclear accord and addressing Iran’s

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ballistic missiles, warning that such hostile attitudes can negatively impact the growing Iran-French business relations.

One of the key problems with Macron’s and Le Drian’s frequent attachment of hegemonic ambitions to Iran is conceptual ambiguity, that is, their willingness to repeatedly invoke the concept of hegemony without ever defining it, other than giving the impression of a negative attribute suggesting coercive domination. But, this is a disservice to a commonly-used political jargon or concept that, in fact, is often used to distinguish from mere domination and control and, instead, conveys a more complex meaning that entails moral, political, and intellectual leadership, and the ability to take into account the interests of other groups and social forces and finding ways of combining them with one’s own interests.

Indeed, a cursory examination of the concept of hegemony in European (and more general Western) political philosophy and the various conservative, liberal and leftist interpretations of this much used and abused concept leaves no doubt that (a) there are contrasting interpretations, and yet (b) there is a common tendency to distinguish dictatorship from hegemony, which is often linked with “consent.” Thus, the American political scientist Joseph Nye, in his recent article on “American hegemony or American primacy” carefully distinguishes the two and relies on a host of objective deterministic factors favoring the latter.

As is rather well-known, the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci is credited with the contemporary use of the term hegemony, relating it to a complex strategy of domination that relies on the mix of ‘soft’, i.e., persuasive, and ‘hard’, i.e., coercive, power, emerging out of social and political contexts. According to Raymond Williams, hegemony is dynamic and has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. Inevitably, it is organically linked to “leadership” and the ability to muster the necessary ingredients of political and, in the case of states, diplomatic leadership.

Notwithstanding the above-said, the nub of the problem with President Macron’s explicit connection of hegemony with Iran is two-fold. First, it overlooks the positive connotations of the term and simply assumes a purely negative connotation of the term and, second, it fails to distinguish it from (regional) leadership.

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Concerning the latter, it is the requirement of a dialectical, both historically, geographically and geopolitically conscious, mind-set to recognize the Persian Gulf and Middle East realities and to recognize the significance of leadership role Iran is presently playing beyond her borders. In the emerging post-ISIS context, with the region slowly recuperating from the calamitous past few years of rampant terrorism that will require years of rebuilding from the ashes of violent struggles, it is vitally important to disallow the region’s relapse to yet another round of terrorism-infested context wreaking havoc on both regional and global peace and security.

If hegemony relates to specific distribution of power and influence, then it is glaringly obvious that Iran’s position in the region is recently enhanced both directly, as a result of Iran’s prudent foreign policy actions, such as rushing forces to Erbil to assist the Iraqi Kurds against the ISIS onslaught four years ago, when the American President was turning a blind eye and branding the ISIS phenomenon as an “internal problem,”

much to the pleasure of Saudi and other sponsors of ISIS and other terrorists in Iraq and Syria, who are now the net losers of a power competition gone badly for them, principally due to their misguided policies and priorities. In turn, this points at yet another basic flaw in Mr. Macron’s Middle East approach, that is, his muted criticism of the Saudis’ destructive policies against their neighbors such as Yemen and Qatar, which have been tolerated by the West simply because of the Saudi oil power.

Furthermore, doubtless it would be a tissue of historical naivete to ignore France’s own “hegemonic tendencies” so plainly obvious in France’s modern history in general and Middle East and African politics in specific. After all, France’s self-insertion in Persian Gulf security calculus through its naval base in the UAE since 2009 by the former President Nicolas Sarkozy has been openly deemed as a quest for “influence”

parallel to the American and British influence in the region, dubbed as “peace camp”

although one might be inclined to use a more appropriate term such as

“interventionist.”

But, of course, consistent with their second-nature Orientalism, neither France nor any other Western power is ever willing to embrace such negative pejoratives that, god forbid, insinuates any neo-colonial desires or ambitions, for these powers are officially above any blame and or ill-intentions, their powers are always couched in the benign language of “peace and stability,” not one of ‘divide and conquer’. There is, of course, a certain chasm between the rhetoric and reality that is a matter for historians and political analysts to sort through.

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In conclusion, Mr. Macron would be well-advised to inspect the Persian Gulf map more closely, e.g., at Iran’s long shorelines and strategic islands, etc., in order to reach the apt conclusion that Iran is destined to play a significant leadership role commensurate with its history, location, and nexus of power relations. In both Iraq and Syria, Iran owes no apology for fighting terrorism, which could creep closer and closer to her own borders if left unchecked, and, certainly, Iran’s ability to forge close strategic partnerships with the governments of Iraq, Turkey, and Russia, to counter the terrorist menace is a big plus even for the sake of Europe’s own security.

Unfortunately, Mr. Macron’s discourse on Iran leaves a lot to be desired and is bereft of the basic understanding of the historical necessity of Iran’s prudent leadership role, which is markedly different from naked aggression or coercive hegemony attributed to the country by the current French officials, who are now risking the health of France’s (lucrative) ties with Iran by their liberal misuse of the term hegemony.

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9 Is Iran seeking clandestine talks

with Saudi Arabia?

Gulf News website claims that Tehran has reportedly requested Tunisia to mediate in the enduring tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

A report in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Jarida on Wednesday claimed that Mohammad Irani, director-general for the Middle East and North Africa at the Iranian foreign ministry, was dispatched to Tunisia as a personal emissary of Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif to request his Tunisian counterpart Khemaies Jhinaoui to “intervene in the crisis between Tehran and Riyadh and discuss with the Saudis the possibility of behind-the-scenes talks between the two countries to resolve differences”.

“Jhinaoui conveyed the message to Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, Adel Al Jubeir, on the sidelines of the Arab foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo last Sunday,” the daily said, quoting a well-informed source at the Iranian foreign affairs ministry.

The source added that the Tunisian authorities informed the Iranians that the message had been conveyed to Riyadh and that the Saudis would respond to it next week after studying it.

“Tehran chose Tunis to play this role in light of its good relations with both parties and in order to keep the move out of the limelight. If Iran chose Kuwait or Oman for instance, the move would be exposed and could cause further complications that would undermine the negotiations before they could start,” the source said.

“The Iranians chose to move in such a way so that if Saudi Arabia agreed to negotiate, it could then be made public.”

The source refused to divulge details about the message, but said that it “is based on the principle that the interests of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the region require the resolution of differences through negotiations and that escalation will not be in the interest of either side”.

Saudi Arabia severed its diplomatic relations with Iran in January 2016 after Iranians stormed its embassy in Tehran and consulate in the northern city of Mashhad.

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1 0 Korean news corner

 Farsi-language Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) reports that South Korean intelligence says one of North Korean leader’s most trusted advisers Hwang Pyong So has disappeared. He was one of the officials sitting beside Kim Jong Un when he decided to conduct the North’s sixth nuclear weapons test. Reuters news agency reports that this was reported by South Korean intelligence officials. It is difficult to obtain information about the developments inside North Korea. This has not been confirmed by North Korea.

 Farsi-language Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) reports that the United Nations command has said that North Korea has violated armistice with South by crossing border to shoot defector. The fleeing North Korean soldier is said to have recovered consciousness and is breathing on his own following surgery to remove bullets near Seoul