Iran

By William E. Smith

As he presented his government's 1987 budget to the Iranian parliament last week, Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi interrupted his discussion of financial matters to address himself to a more emotional topic. Declared Mousavi: "There will be no reconciliation on our side with the U.S." His speech, which included a ringing attack on the Soviet Union, was the latest volley in the continuing power struggle among Iran's ruling mullahs.

The issue at hand was the succession to the country's aging leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who is now 86 and reportedly in perilous health. Indeed, there is ample evidence that fervently anti-U.S. radicals like Mousavi are sharply at odds with pragmatists like Parliamentary Speaker Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 52, over the leadership of the Iranian revolution in the post-Khomeini era.

Prime Minister Mousavi's remarks in parliament seemed directed, at least in part, at the festering issue of the $506 million in blocked Iranian funds that is still held by the U.S. Now that secret talks between Washington and Tehran have been aborted by the Iranscam scandal, negotiations on the blocked funds are the only known contact between the two countries. The U.S. has acknowledged that the money belongs to Iran, but the two sides remain divided over a welter of technical details. At midweek the latest round of talks ended inconclusively.

The Reagan Administration has insisted that the talks have nothing to do with the five U.S. hostages still held in Lebanon.* But an Iranian official told reporters in the Netherlands last week, "If the Americans show their good faith toward our revolution, it is possible that people in Lebanon who are sympathetic to us will show their goodwill toward the Americans." That sounded like Rafsanjani-style pragmatism at work. On the other hand, it clashed directly with the hard-liners' refusal to grant concessions in order to regain the funds. Meanwhile, the U.S. is caught up in its own dilemma: while Washington is ready to release the money, it apparently does not want to yield one of its few remaining aces to the Iranians without at the same time assuring the return of the hostages.

The struggle for succession in Iran first surfaced when the U.S. arms-for- hostages scandal was revealed last November. It reached a peak last month during an extraordinary televised confession by Mehdi Hashemi, a leading radical politician and a close associate of the Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, 64, Khomeini's officially designated successor. Hashemi and a number of henchmen were arrested on charges of murder, kidnaping and sedition. According to reports from Tehran, the state's evidence includes such exotic weapons as vials of cyanide, booby-trapped shoes, exploding ink pens and remote-control model airplanes equipped with explosives. In early December, Khomeini ordered the government to "fully prosecute" the case.

While Hashemi, former chief of the Tehran bureau responsible for exporting Islamic-style revolution, is an expendable power broker, the case against him has wider political significance. The Iranscam affair became public knowledge after radical supporters of Hashemi reportedly leaked the story of Iran's covert diplomatic and military dealings with the U.S. to ash-Shiraa, the Lebanese magazine that Ronald Reagan subsequently described as "that rag in Beirut." Moreover, Khomeini's public support for punishing Hashemi has been interpreted by some observers as evidence that the radicals in the Iranian leadership are losing ground to the pragmatists.

Even so, Khomeini has gone to considerable lengths to avoid giving the impression that he has withdrawn his support of Montazeri as his handpicked successor. He has, for example, permitted Montazeri to characterize Hashemi as a sort of loose cannon, an Iranian-style Oliver North who frequently acted on his own. Montazeri has denied any complicity in Hashemi's illegal activities and has pressed for a full investigation at "whatever cost." In his televised confession, Hashemi admitted that he had "abused the confidence" of Montazeri.

Beyond that, the nature of the maneuvering for the succession is as murky as ever. Besides Montazeri, the contenders for the post-Khomeini leadership are Rafsanjani, the dominant figure in parliament and a power broker extraordinary; and Hojatoleslam Seyed Ali Khamene'i, 47, the country's hard- line President.

Of the three, Rafsanjani is the most flexible toward the West, a negotiator and pragmatist in a government of purists. He has initiated discreet diplomatic openings to the West, and is believed to have championed the negotiations with both France and the U.S. for the release of the remaining hostages in Lebanon. He is thought to have tried to reduce Iran's financial support of fanatical terrorism abroad. Some U.S. officials believe that he has argued for an end to the human-wave assaults against Iraq in order to ease public resentment over the war's harrowing cost in lives. Others, however, maintain that Rafsanjani has at times championed the suicidal mass attacks and has a reputation for tailoring his political and military views to meet the situation at hand.

His chief rival is Montazeri, who has known Khomeini for at least 40 years and whose power base is the vast network of clerics who exert enormous influence over the population. It is widely believed that Montazeri's aides maintain close contacts with the Lebanese Shi'ite captors of the American hostages and that his militant supporters worked to block the efforts of Rafsanjani to trade arms for the captives held in Lebanon. According to this theory, Rafsanjani retaliated by arresting Hashemi and his associates on a variety of charges, and the hard-liners in turn put an end to Rafsanjani's secret dealings with the U.S. by making them public.

The third candidate, President Khamene'i, is the only one who has remained unaffected by the U.S. affair. He has been the prime mover recently in Iran's somewhat improved relations with the Soviet Union and the resumption of natural-gas exports to Moscow. This is not likely to strengthen his chances for leadership. Since 1984, the Khomeini regime has arrested, imprisoned or executed most of the leaders of Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party. The continued Soviet occupation of Muslim Afghanistan has intensified Iranian opposition to Moscow. Afghan refugees have poured into Iran bearing tales of Soviet brutality, and Iran has been stepping up its support of the anti-Soviet Afghan rebels.

For the moment, neither Montazeri nor Rafsanjani appears to have been irreparably damaged by the recent brush with the U.S. Some Western diplomats believe that if Khomeini were to die tomorrow, Montazeri would become the country's religious leader and rule from the holy city of Qum, while Rafsanjani would run the government. But given the range of problems that Iran faces right now, such assessments could quickly change.

The attention of the Iranian leadership was focused last week on the war with Iraq and the so-called final offensive that Iran has vowed to launch before the end of March. Two weeks ago Iranian forces attacked four Iraqi-held islands in the Shatt al Arab, the waterway that separates the southern parts of the two countries. The Iranians briefly captured the islands, but were forced to retreat after Iraq counterattacked with helicopter gunships, heavy artillery, missiles and rockets. Visiting the battlefield later, journalists saw the bodies of hundreds of Iranian soldiers on the ground or in the swampy waters to the east of the Iraqi port city of Basra. The Iraqis' claim that 32,000 Iranians were killed in the fighting was undoubtedly exaggerated. But Lieut. General Mahir Abdel Rashid of the Iraqi Third Army Corps may have accurately described the engagement as "one of the bloodiest battles we've fought in six years of war."

Iranian leaders, including Rafsanjani, vehemently denied that the attack had been the beginning of the long-awaited offensive. Iran, boasted Rafsanjani, was still "counting down for the decisive final blow." On the other hand, some Western analysts contended that the wall of defenses around Basra, Iraq's second largest city, had prevented the Iranians from achieving even the limited objective of holding onto the four islands.

Despite Baghdad's success in repelling the latest Iranian attack, President Saddam Hussein has been unable to end the conflict with Iran through either force or negotiation. Some Middle East experts wondered whether his trip to Saudi Arabia last week, an unusual move for a man who does not often venture outside his own country, was a sign of nervousness. After visiting the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Saddam went on to al Ihsa for talks with King Fahd. The two leaders were said to have discussed the gulf war and the Islamic summit conference to be held on Jan. 26 in Kuwait.

That meeting could conceivably provide Saddam with another opportunity to seek a negotiated settlement for a war that the Iraqi President started in 1980 and has long since come to regret. But given Khomeini's capacity for wreaking vengeance upon his bitterest enemy, it may be that peacemaking is something he will reserve for the Ayatullah's eventual successor.

FOOTNOTE: *The five remaining U.S. captives: Terry Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press; Thomas Sutherland, acting dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut; Joseph Cicippio, the American University's comptroller; Frank Reed, the director of a private elementary school; and Edward Tracy, a writer. A sixth, U.S. Embassy Officer William Buckley, is believed to have been killed by his captors last year.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Johanna McGeary/ Washington