Iranian.com reports:
Will Mr. Khatami run?, seems to be the question on many people's lips. Various activists, prominent reformist politicians and sympathizers have broadcast their entreaties, pleading with the former president to return to the political fold. As a matter of fact an organization by the name of Moj-e Sevom has been established with the more or less explicit aim of lobbying Mr. Khatami to announce his candidacy. The prospects do not look good as far as I can tell, but there is still hope for those of us who count themselves between the Principalists (Osulgarayan) and those biding their time until the “next” revolution, that will never come - though many Iranians were disillusioned with the pace of reform in the course of his second term, nostalgia quickly set in and a yearning for the days of Khatami is alive and well in Tehran today (particularly amongst students), and I of course say Tehran quite intentionally.
Khatami has thus far resisted, and previously insisted that Iranian politics is far too inclined toward "hero-worship" and the "personality cult", and therefore astutely perceived the problem of linking his fate to that of the broader movement - he has been vehemently criticized for not appointing a clear successor prior to his vacating the presidency - but then unlike Mr. Hashemi, Mr. Khatami isn't and has never conceived of himself as the Iranian kingmaker - a role that Mr. Hashemi will almost certainly play again, if he's still around, when Ayatollah Khamenei passes the metaphorical torch to the next Faqih (it should be remembered that Mr. Hashemi in 2007 was elected to the much coveted post of chairman of the Assembly of Experts, Majles-e-Khobregan) - the body that will appoint the next Supreme Leader, and which is put to the public vote every six years, albeit exclusively comprised of foqaha, Islamic legal experts.
As Mr. Khatami recognized, a reform movement bound to his personal charisma and charm rises with his victories, but is also bound to slip into oblivion upon his exit. Without a conventional party system (as opposed to a myriad of factions), or institutionalized power, such as that held by the conservatives in the form of the Faqih or judiciary (Khatami's appointments to the interior ministry, at one point a bastion of the reformists, have been rapidly overturned by Ahmadinejad's government, and of course even while in power it’s commonly opined, to some extent rightly so, that he was thwarted by murky figures lurking in the shadows at every turn – the problem of parallel legislation) - the two are of course tightly-knit often to the point of their differences being indiscernible - though Khamenei is also capable of distancing himself from the political fray, despite his often overt support of the Principalist factions.
The arrival of Ahmadinejad on the scene put paid to the idea that "civil society" had triumphed and that an ineluctable period of glasnost had been set in motion, compelling the mercantile-bourgeois republic to transform itself from the inside. The Fukuyamean-post-ideological triumphalism quickly ran out of steam (somewhere after Mr. Khatami’s first term), and as a result pundits have been quick to dismiss the reform movement in favor of coining a new dynamic i.e. the Principalists split between a fundamentalist-populist faction and rightwing-pragmatic faction, embodied to various extents in the personalities of Ahmadinejad, Qalibaf, Mohsen Rezaei and Larijani.
These factions of course exist, but the commentaries have underestimated the impact of Khatami's legacy simply because he wasn't their much awaited and frankly quite stupidly anticipated, Iranian Gorbachev. There was never going to be a "velvet revolution" and the misguided clinging to any such phantom merely distracts from the prospect of fomenting more meaningful changes within Iranian society at the grassroots level. Such a prospect has been dismissed by virtually all serious analysts – ex-CIA man, Robert Baer in his recent book The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower repeatedly despairs of the delusions homesick exiles have spoon-fed to Washington officialdom, delusions, which in his view have only gone to ensure that Iran shores up its position as the Persian Gulf's regional hegemon, while the United States looks on impotent and dejected in the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires.
For those of us who have eschewed such Chelabi-esque flights of fancy the roles of "civic agency" and "organic intellectuals" remain indispensable for the contestation and delegitimation of tired and ossified dogmas and manifest in the women's movement, student movement and labor movement. This triumvirate of Iranian civil society is in a sense the concrete perpetuation of Khatami's intellectual legacy (though I am by no means arguing that it owes its presence and voice to that legacy), which furnished Iranian society with a new lexicon, which stressed the rule of law, civil society, the republican element of the constitution and human rights, echoed and pushed for by a briefly unmuzzled press.
Though a huge swathe of Iranian intellectuals had long attempted to courageously propagate such a vision, it was only Mr. Khatami who was able to set such a precedent in a way that only an individual within the system could. In a certain respect, intellectuals have it easy (though they do have an important role to play); no responsibility, little accountability, no need to compromise or barter one's ideals away under pain of compulsion i.e. the process of drafting, ratifying and implementing policy. Now is certainly not the time to count Mr. Khatami out, it’s still early yet, and Mehdi Karrubi is the only one thus far to confirm his candidacy in the presidential elections due to take place in June of this year. Either way he will continue to play a significant role on the domestic and international stages, if not in the corridors of power
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