Professor Henry Srebrnik

Professor Henry Srebrnik

Saturday, December 28, 2024

Is The Iranian Regime in Trouble?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

On Oct. 3, 2023, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addressed a large crowd of government officials and international visitors in Tehran. When Khamenei’s remarks turned to Israel, he insisted that the Jewish state was a cancer that “will definitely be eradicated.”

Four days later, Hamas attacked Israel, and today the Middle East is a very different place. Iran’s Shia proxies and allies, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Hezbollah, have been largely vanquished, and Israel has destroyed much of Tehran’s military infrastructure.

So might it, instead, be Ian’s regime that will be “eradicated?” Many have made similar predictions over the past 45 years, and the theocracy remains standing, and a formidable foe, one that might yet become a nuclear power. Should the two most powerful states in the Middle East fight a full-scale war, that would have a devastating effect on the region and the global economy. Twice in 2024, they have launched direct missile attacks on each other.

Tehran and Damascus were allied for many decades, dating back to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In the 1980-1988 Iranian war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that followed, Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, supported Iran, which survived Iraq’s assault.

The alliance between the Shia clerics in Iran and the Assads, who were from the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, helped cement Iran’s power in a predominantly Sunni Middle East. The toppling of the Iraqi dictator in the American-led 2003 war also opened Shia-majority Iraq to ever-growing Iranian influence.

The Arab Spring in 2010–2011 had been a challenge to the Islamic Republic, especially when the unrest in Syria widened into a civil war. Tehran provided fighters, fuel and weapons. More than 2,000 Iranian soldiers, including generals, were killed.

With help from Hezbollah and Russia, Iran managed to prop up Assad for more than another decade. By improving its position in Syria, Tehran was able to ensure that Hezbollah remained the dominant force in Lebanon, as well.

In recent years, Iran seized on growing regional chaos, including the civil war in Yemen, to expand its reach with its support for the Houthis. The Iranian regime looked stronger than ever, putting the fear of God, so to speak, into its Arab Sunni rivals, especially Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

But now Israel has destroyed decades of Iranian investment in Hezbollah in an abrupt and humiliating fashion. Israeli forces have killed nearly the entire upper echelon of Hezbollah’s leadership, including its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and destroyed much of the group’s weaponry. “Israel has greater freedom of action in Iran today than ever before. We can reach anywhere in Iran as needed,” declared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Khamenei is putting on a brave face. “Iran is strong and powerful, and will become even stronger,” he claimed, in his first speech after the toppling of Assad. He insisted that the Iran-led alliance in the Middle East, which still includes Hamas, Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis and Iraqi Shia militias, would only strengthen.

But so far the evidence belies his words. The last public sighting of Assad was in a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Sayyid Abbas Araghchi Dec. 1, when the Syrian president vowed to crush the rebels advancing on the capital. Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, described Assad as the “front end of the Axis of Resistance.” Yet when the Assad regime collapsed, a weakened Iran was unable and unwilling to fight for him. All of this has left the regime reeling.

Will a humiliated Iran now redouble its efforts to go nuclear? It has been estimated that Iran could now enrich enough uranium for a weapon within about a week, if it decided to, though it would also need to construct a warhead and mount a delivery system, which experts say would take months or possibly as long as a year.

Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will try to re-impose his “maximum pressure”' strategy on Iran, predicts Raz Zimmt, a senior researcher at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies. “But I think he'll also try to engage Iran in renewed negotiations trying to convince Iran to roll back its nuclear capabilities.”

The Supreme leader is now 85 years old, and even before the recent escalation between Israel and the Islamic Republic, discussions about Khamenei’s succession were already ongoing. These concerns have now intensified. In recent meetings with the Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for selecting the next Supreme Leader, Khamenei urged members to be ready to swiftly choose a successor if needed.

Assembly member Heydari Kashani described them as taking place in an atmosphere of “martyrdom.” According to Kashani, participants wept as Khamenei emphasized the need for the Assembly to quickly select a new leader in his absence. This underscores concerns about potential unrest and the heightened risk of the regime’s collapse without Khamenei.

Escalating tensions with Israel, the re-election of Donald Trump, and mounting public discontent over shortages of electricity, natural gas, and fuel have placed the regime’s survival in jeopardy.

“Khamenei goes to bed worrying about his legacy and transition and is looking to leave Iran in a stable place,” according to Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the London-based think tank Chatham House. We shall know soon enough.

 

Saturday, December 21, 2024

Turkey is a Winner in the New Syria

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

Chief among the rebel forces that have ended President Bashir al-Assad’s rule in Syria is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HST), a Sunni Muslim group that was previously affiliated with al Qaeda. Their victory is being shared by Turkey.

Ankara has provided indirect assistance to HTS. The Turkish military presence in the northwestern Syrian town of Idlib largely shielded the group from attacks by Syrian government forces, allowing it to run the province undisturbed for years. Turkey managed the flow of international aid into HTS-run areas, which increased the group’s legitimacy among locals. Trade across the Turkish border has provided HTS economic support, too.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once close to Assad, had in recent months urged disparate rebel groups in Syria to unite. That included HTS, whose shock advance from its stronghold of Idlib in the northwest near Turkey led to the fall of Damascus.

Erdogan’s government said it told Assad that he had to make concessions to opponents or risk the 13-year Syrian civil war, frozen for years, erupting anew. Turkey said Assad ignored its warnings, to its ultimate cost.

Rather than worrying about Syria’s prospects after more than a decade of conflict, President Erdogan now sees opportunity in a post-Assad future. His optimism is well founded: out of all the region’s major players, Ankara has the strongest channels of communication and history of working with the Islamist group now in charge in Damascus, positioning it to reap the benefits of the Assad regime’s demise.

Since 2016, Turkey has occupied chunks of northern Syria. In 2017, it helped create a coalition of armed opposition groups called the Syrian National Army (SNA) to counter Kurdish militants there. In post-Assad Syria, Turkey ultimately wants to prevent Kurdish interests from taking root in a new Syrian government.

Turkish-backed rebels have wasted no time in pushing out Kurdish forces from two northern Syrian towns. That was in line with Erdogan’s long-held goal of creating a buffer zone inside Syria to exclude militants affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), an organization waging a war for autonomy in Turkey’s southeast.

The success of opposition groups against Assad with Turkey’s long-standing support points to Ankara potentially having more influence in Syria going forward. With Assad out of the picture altogether, Erdogan is getting ready to cash in on his years-long investment in the Syrian opposition. If it can avoid potential dangers ahead, Turkey could end up a clear winner in Syria’s civil war.

After all, Iran and Russia, Turkey’s main rivals in Syria, are humbled, and a friendly government could soon be set up in Damascus, ready to welcome back refugees. And the downfall of the Assad regime is set to change a delicate balance of interests between Turkey and Iran.

It fell to Mohammed al-Jawlani, head of HTS, one of the several Syrian anti-regime groups, to test Iran’s residual power. He chose as his target Aleppo, historically Syria’s most important city and second in population only to the capital Damascus. Yet with Iran’s proxy Hezbollah weakened by Israel and unable to come to Assad’s aid, the Damascus regime crumbled.

That left Iran with no quick-reaction options at all. Nor could Iran risk trucking troops into Syria overland across Iraq. Not even its own Shi’a militias, with tens of thousands of armed men, could have secured their passage across Kurdish controlled north-east Syria.

Iran and Turkey, who for years have maintained a delicate geopolitical balance, are now faced with competing interests in a post-Assad Syria. For Iran, the Assad regime was a critical strategic ally in the Middle East, and as Turkey is poised to gain influence, Iran’s ability to project power in the region has been steadily diminishing.

Tehran had long kept the Assad dictatorship in power, along with its Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, the largest non-state army on earth. And now, perhaps, the revolutionary wind that engulfed the Assad dictatorship could blow all the way to Tehran.

Iran and Russia lament the loss of a key partner in Assad, while Washington is still figuring out what the situation means for its own interests. But for Erdogan, it’s another step up in regional influence, and a signal of his growing global clout.

 

America’s Educational Caste System

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

America’s Educational Caste System

By Henry Srebrnik

In late March of every year, American students across the United States are notified of their acceptance or rejection from the Ivy League schools to which they applied.

“Ivy Day,” as it is called, provides a picture of admissions at the seven most elite and selective institutions of higher education in America: Harvard, Princeton and Yale first and foremost, followed by Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania. Their acceptance rates are in single digits and undergraduate enrollment at the eight Ivies averages around 8,500 students each.

(Prior to co-educational teaching, their women’s counterparts were the “Seven Sisters,” Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley.)

Along with peer universities such as the University of Chicago, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they are the pathways into the country’s elite. That’s because the United States has one of the steepest educational hierarchies in the world.

They are all private universities and, no surprise, incredibly expensive. The cost of attending an Ivy League school without financial aid is more than US$90,000 per year, including tuition, fees, housing, and other expenses. Tuition alone starts at US$52,659 for the least expensive of them. In 2023-2024, tuition at Columbia University cost US$69,045.

As their name implies, “Little Ivies” are small prestigious liberal arts colleges scattered across the Northeast, comparable to the Ivy League in terms of their academic excellence and selective admission standards. Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Haverford, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and Williams top the list. They too are known for their large financial endowments in comparison to their size, and their students come from very wealthy backgrounds. (A study conducted in 2013 found that 41 per cent of Swarthmore students came from families sitting in the top five per cent of the U.S. income distribution.)

Top state schools such as the Universities of California’s campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles, along with Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, and Wisconsin, may provide as excellent an education, but nowhere near the same social cachet. They are all far bigger in terms of enrollment. Berkeley and Michigan, for example, each enroll over 33,000 undergraduates.

Using hierarchical terms similar to those used in many sports, all these schools, armed with billion-dollar endowments, are in the “first division.” They are followed by at least three more “divisions,” extending down to unranked schools of dubious academic value.

Canadian universities, on the other hand, whatever their relative merits, are all within one grouping – call it the “University of Canada,” similar to the Canadian Football or National Hockey leagues. Higher education is not nearly as stratified in this country. It’s therefore less of a signifier by which people are streamlined for life depending on the university they attended.

The status of the top American institutions is not derived from their stellar academic departments or pedagogical commitment, but rather from the signalling value of their credentials, the wealth of their alumni networks, and their relative importance to corporate and government research apparatuses. Elite colleges simultaneously reproduce class inequality and belief in the justness of that inequality.

What first and foremost distinguishes the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons from other colleges are not the syllabi, lectures or undergraduate libraries but the access they provide to the economic, political, and cultural capital that one’s fellow students possess by virtue of their upbringing, prior education, family relations, and wealth.

Graduating from an elite school provides symbolic, social, and cultural capital, according to Shamus Khan, a Princeton professor of sociology.  “It affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquette of high-status settings,” he contends in “Legacy Admissions Don’t Work the Way You think they Do.” Your entire future may depend on it.

Recruiters for firms in finance, consulting, and law are obsessed with college prestige, typically identifying three to five “core” universities where they will do most of their recruiting. The résumés of students from other schools will almost certainly never even get read.

“Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities,” University of Texas Professor Lind writes in “Break Up America’s Elite,” “can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation. The lateral circulation of members of the same elite through revolving doors in the public, private, and nonprofit realms is a formula for oligarchy. They go on to dominate the rest of society when it comes to income.

“Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines,” notes New York Times journalist David Brooks, in “How the Ivy League Broke America.” As a result, maintains Columbia University political scientist Mark Lilla, today the cultural gap in America is the function of education. And the consequences, he explains in “America’s New Caste System,” are not just economic.

 “University does not only provide training for entering lucrative professions, it also socialises students into new styles of living,” in effect producing a caste system. And for those on its lower rungs, their “widely shared sense of exclusion, with all the attendant emotions of shame and resentment,” becomes toxic to democracies. We see these results clearly now.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.