minister, sparking commentary in Iran and around the world about the military taking over the country.
Rostam Qasemi also becomes the fourth high-ranking Ahmadi-nejad appointee to be named despite facing foreign sanctions. Qasemi is under US and EU sanctions for heading an engineering organization that has worked on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.
Qasemi easily won Majlis approval last Wednesday on a vote of 216-to-22 with seven abstentions.
That was a remarkable margin of victory. The 29 no votes and abstentions were only half what the Majlis doled out to the luckiest of President Ahmadi-nejad’s 21 cabinet nominees when he began his second term in August 2009. Two nominees then received 59 noes and abstentions and the others received lots more. (In the Iranian Majlis, an abstention effectively works out as a no vote because of a majority of noes and abstentions defeats a nominee or bill.)
Three other cabinet nominees went before the Majlis the same day and all also won easy victories. Two of those three also received few noes and abstentions—27 and 41 respectively.
The votes suggested that the major effort by Majlis deputies to bury Ahmadi-nejad has now come to an end, and that some semblance of peace has been restored to politics in Iran.
The anti-Ahmadi-nejad frenzy erupted in late April when the president tried to defy Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi after Khamenehi stopped the president from firing his intelligence minister. It then became open season on Ahmadi-nejad with deputies refusing to approve anything he proposed. The president was forced into one retreat after another.
Last month, Ahmadi-nejad came to the Majlis to defend his nominee for minister of sports and youth. The deputies not only voted down the nominee overwhelmingly, they also chanted against Ahmadi-nejad while he was speaking from the podium.
That outburst offended Khamenehi, who summoned all the deputies the next day for a very pointed dressing down. (See accompanying story.) The deputies demure conduct last Wednesday when Ahmadi-nejad came to defend the four new cabinet nominees and the overwhelming vote for them suggested the Majlis has been chastened by Khamenehi.
But there was little comment in the Iranian media about the political shift since Kha-menehi told off the deputies for crass conduct. Instead the focus was on the role of the military in politics.
Around the world, commentators were most commonly interpreting Qasemi’s rise to the cabinet as an expansion of Pasdar power over the economy. Qasemi has been a brigadier general in the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) and the commander of the Khatam ol-Anbiya, the Pasdaran’s construction arm, much like the US Army’s Corps of Engineers, from which it was apparently copied.
The Khatam ol-Anbiya was created at the end of the 1980-88 war to help with the postwar reconstruction of the country. It started handling mostly construction of buildings, roads and bridges. But in recent years, with major international oil companies bowing out of Iran, Khatam ol-Anbiya has taken over several major oil development projects.
There has been much boasting of its success in replacing foreigners, but Iran’s daily oil output has been slowly but perceptively declining almost every month for the past two years, which suggests Khatam ol-Anbiya has not been able to replace the foreign oil developers.
Furthermore, Khatam ol-Anbiya has left others disappointed with its work. More than a decade ago, the Khatami Administration gave Khatam ol-Anbiya the contract to build the short railroad spur linking Iran’s rail system with Turkmenistan. But the firm later just disappeared from the project. There was no announcement of its departure or explanation. Its name just vanished from the project.
The same thing happened with the project to punch a highway from Tehran through the mountains to the Caspian. This involves a series of very large tunnels. Khatam ol-Anbiya got the contract a decade ago, but its name has long since disappeared without explanation.
The gas and oilfield projects—especially those under the Persian Gulf—are much more complicated than railroad or tunnel projects.
But the core issue with Qasemi’s appointment as oil minister hasn’t been the competence of Khatam ol-Anbiya but rather the organization’s outreach into the economy. Even before Khatam ol-Anbiya started garnering oil contracts, commentators were musing over a Pasdar takeover of the economy—and more.
The Associated Press last week said Qasemi’s rise to oil minister means the Pasdaran are “further expanding the enormous influence that the country’s top military branch wields in politics, business and other areas of civilian life.”
When President Ahmadi-nejad took office in 2005, he named many former Pasdar officers to his administration, prompting talk of a Pasdar takeover of the entire government. What was missed in those commentaries was that Ahmadi-nejad was mainly naming Pasdar civil engineers to government—men who served with Ahmadi-nejad, a civil engineer himself, during the war. It was another case of Ahmadi-nejad appointing old friends, rather than a Pasdar takeover.
Engineers in all military forces serve on the fringe of the military; military forces are run by combat officers, not by engineers. Qasemi himself is a civil engineer like Ahmadi-nejad, and he served in the Pasdaran during the war like Ahmadi-nejad, but it has not been revealed if they served together during the war.
In the Majlis, Deputy Ali Motahhari, a longtime critic of the president, objected vocally that Qasemi should not be named oil minister because he is a military man. “The Pasdaran, as a military force, should not get involved with political and economic matters,” he said. “Unlike in neighboring countries, where the military is withdrawing from the political arena, a reverse trend has started in our country, which does not seem to be an auspicious sign.”
But the military isn’t taking over the Oil Ministry. One man, who has now retired from the military, is going to the Oil Ministry. While it is very common to believe that people remain loyal to their old organization when they go to a new organization, that is not generally true. As the American saying goes, “Where you stand generally depends on where you sit.” People move into a new organization and generally take on the coloration of that new organization.
There are always exceptions, of course. And Qasemi made noises like he might actually be an exception.
After he was approved for the Oil Ministry post and retired from the Pasdaran, Qasemi said he still feels like a Pasdar officer. “I am now assigned to the Oil Ministry, but I am emotionally linked to the Pasdaran,” he said.
He added that he thought Khatam ol-Anbiya should totally displace all, foreign oil contractors in the country. That was an especially interesting remark given that most European firms are already gone and the largest block of foreign contractors now in the country are Chinese. Qasemi said there was no need for Iran to have any foreign oil firms operating inside Iran.
Furthermore, Qasemi still talked as if he remained the chief of Khatam ol-Anbiya. He said Khatam ol-Anbiya is now the largest contractor in the country and should become even bigger.
His successor at Khatam ol-Anbiya, Abol-Ghassem Moza-fari-Shams, said Khatam ol-Anbiya will not seek contracts of less than $100 million, but will leave those to the private sector.
But it was the commander of the Pasdaran, General Mohammad-Ali Jafari, who fed the fears of a Pasdar takeover the most. On Qasemi’s ascension, Jafari said the Pasdaran ought to be even more involved in the economy. “The Pasdaran should play a role in advancing economic development,” he said. “Although the Pasdaran was brought into existence to protect the achievements of the revolution, it does not exist merely to confront foreigners or domestic disorder. The revolution is not threatened only by military forces, but also by economic and cultural challenges.”
In the Majlis debate, one surprising development was that Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, who normally remains neutral in such debates, spoke out in favor of Qasemi and against the talk of a Pasdar takeover. “The Pasdaran don’t want to grab the country’s politics,” Larijani said. “I ask you not to deprive the country of the services of a member of the Pasdaran.” He urged a strong vote for Qasemi as a warning to Iran’s foreign enemies, “so they don’t think that when they impose sanctions the Majlis will pay any attention.… If he were an unsuccessful person, then his name would not be on the sanctions list.”
Qasemi is not on the UN sanctions list, but he is on the lists produced by the United States, European Union and Australia. The EU sanction, however, does not deny him visas to enter the EU area, so Qasemi will be allowed to attend OPEC meetings at its headquarters in Vienna.
Besides Qasemi, Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi faces broad EU sanctions, though the EU decided to allow him to travel to Europe. Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi faces EU and US sanctions and an international arrest warrant issued by Argentina for involvement in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. And Fereydun Abbasi-Davani, the vice president and chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, appears on he UN, US and EU sanctions lists.
The other three cabinet nominees approved last Wednesday had all been in the cabinet already and all got more votes than they did in 2009:
• Minister of Industries, Mines and Commerce Mehdi Ghazanfari, 218-20-7. Ghazan-fari had been commerce minister before that ministry was combined with industries and mines.
• Minister of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare Abdol-Reza Shaikholeslami, 204-31-10. He had been labor minister before that ministry was combined with cooperatives and with social welfare.
• Minister of Sports and Youth Mohammad Abbasi, 165-61-19. He had been cooperatives minister previously.
Six weeks ago, the Majlis approved Housing Minister Ali Nikzad to be the new minister of Housing and Transport
The result of this combining of old ministries and creation of the new Ministry of Sports and Youth was to displace one cabinet member: Industries and Mines Minister Ali-Akbar Mehrabian was shown the door. He was given a cabinet post in 2009 even though he had been found guilty of intellectual property theft.
The cabinet has now been reduced from 21 seats to 18.
