Muhammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian regime’s parliament, has reportedly been floated as a potential negotiating partner for Trump. Despite his explicit denials of being involved in any talks with the US, Ghalibaf has become the subject of intense media speculation. Much of it has missed the mark when it comes to his wider role in Iran’s political system. In reality, Ghalibaf is a remarkably capable administrator, with bold economic ideas that could reshape Iran. His approach may represent the regime’s last viable chance to adapt and survive. This makes him simultaneously alluring and dangerous for Trump and the West.

The Daily Mail recently labelled Ghalibaf an “infamous butcher” for his alleged role in repressing the 1999 student protests. The current regime in Iran, though, is inherently based upon repression and violence. As such, no current or former official is truly uninvolved, not even many of the so-called ‘reformists’. Who can judge whether a street-level enforcer is more contemptible than the office-based pen-pusher who ensures that the street-level enforcer receives his salary on time? The question is best left to moral philosophers. It has little analytical value when it comes to understanding what role Iran’s parliament speaker might play in any negotiations with Washington.

Allegations of corruption, too, make for juicy headlines, but hardly matter. In a meritocratic, market-based economy, a corrupt official can be singled out as individually problematic, noteworthy in his own right. However, in Iran’s nepotistic, family-ties-based economic system, corruption is not a bug. It is the system itself. This has been so for hundreds of years, even before the current regime came into existence. In such a system, an honest official would likely be incapable of wielding influence or fulfilling his tasks. Why would the West wish to negotiate with someone who can’t get the job done?

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf himself is remarkably clear-eyed about the realities of the regime he serves. In a 2017 speech, widely reported in Iranian media, he said that the Iranian government was no longer serving the people. Instead, the government is serving the interests of a mere “4%” of the population: namely those who seek profit “without any effort, through rent-seeking, influence-peddling, administrative and financial corruption, or policy manipulation”. These profiteers, Ghalibaf argued, prevent the hardships faced by “96%” of the Iranian population from being addressed. The taboo-breaking, but fundamentally accurate speech triggered immediate backlash.

Ghalibaf has the standing to speak out because he is seen as someone whose loyalty is beyond doubt. According to claims published by the opposition media outlet IRBriefing and not yet independently verified, Ghalibaf’s mother comes from Khameneh in Iranian-Azerbaijan, the ancestral village of the now-deceased former dictator Ayatollah Khamenei. Back when the previous Pahlavi regime was still in power, the teenage Ghalibaf reportedly first distinguished himself by attending sermons given by Imam Khamenei and other rebellious, hard-line clerics like Abdolkarim Hasheminejad at a mosque in Mashhad, in north-eastern Iran.

When the Iran-Iraq War broke out not long after the Islamist revolution of 1979, the young Ghalibaf quickly worked his way up in the military hierarchy. He became a commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Imam Reza Brigade, a unit involved in some of the toughest urban combat of the war, in the frontline city of Bostan. Ghalibaf was barely 20 years old.

After the war ended, the regime’s founding father Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. Ayatollah Khamenei then took charge of the state, setting in motion Ghalibaf’s meteoric rise to the highest echelons of power in the 1990s. He held a range of senior positions – and even trained as an elite pilot alongside his official duties. But one posting stands out. In 1994, Ghalibaf was appointed as head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, an engineering firm entrusted with many of Iran’s most significant infrastructure projects. This was the golden age of the regime’s so-called “construction jihad”, Jahad-e Sazandegi in Farsi. Thus, the regime sought to reward its core deeply-Shia, rural support base by lifting Iran’s villages out of the bitter poverty that they had experienced during the Pahlavist era. “Construction jihad”, invigorating usually mundane efforts around infrastructure development with life-changing religious zeal, was such a success for the Mullah regime that it was ultimately exported to Lebanon. Hastily translated to Arabic as Jihad-al-Bina, it became a key avenue for the Tehran-funded Hezbollah terrorists to win over hearts and minds in rural Shia communities in its southern Lebanese heartlands.

The average Revolutionary Guardsman’s grasp of economics is limited to an awareness of the cost of the lead bullet needed to shoot dead someone protesting about high food prices. Ghalibaf, by contrast, displayed remarkable economic foresight. He ran for President against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. Seen as a tough, militarily-experienced candidate, he set clear economic priorities, appealing to those who vote their pocketbook. In campaign speeches, he denounced the “rentier” state. He urged Iranians to instead adopt a more future-proof model of development: “As long as the government uses oil revenues for current expenditures, we will not have business development”.

At the time, Ghalibaf’s economic views were controversial. But a decade later, they became the new consensus in the oil-rich Arab Gulf region. In 2016, even Saudi Arabia, once the textbook example of a petroleum-funded rentier state, announced vast structural reforms designed to end the state’s dependence on oil exports. The only country in the region that has been left behind, ironically, is Iran. The Mullah regime’s economically-illiterate leadership continues to pour its oil revenues down the drain. Instead of investing in sustainable transformation, it funds a largely-useless network of regional terrorist proxies out of sheer, unthinking fanaticism.

After the clerical regime elevated Ahmadinejad to his ill-fated tenure as president in 2005, Ghalibaf was shuffled off to serve as Mayor of Tehran, a post he held until 2017.

In those years, Ghalibaf transformed the Iranian capital, against all the odds. In fact, Tehran had not experienced such large-scale modernization since the time of Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar in the late 19th century. Back then, that visionary monarch converted the unspectacular small town known as ‘Dar al-Khalifa’ into the glamorous Belle Époque city of ‘new’ Tehran.

Ghalibaf’s mayoral administration promised fanatically-efficient “jihadi management”, harking back to his successes during the 1990s ‘construction jihad’. Before Ghalibaf became mayor, Tehran municipality had been struggling for nearly a decade to build the signature Milad Broadcasting Tower: Construction was still only 40% finished. With a height of more than 400 meters, the tower was designed to rank as the tallest building in Iran. The construction efforts, in essence, represented an attempt by the Mullah regime to redefine Tehran’s skyline in its own image. After Ghalibaf took charge of the stagnating project, the remaining “60% was built in less than three years”.

Ghalibaf promised to build “a metro station every month”. Indeed, Tehran’s nascent subway network was expanded so quickly that the system ran out of rolling stock to adequately service the new stations. The philosophy was clear: build first, worry about the rest – including the trains – later.

This was hardly an altruistic policy. After all, building the metro offered the theocratic regime immense symbolic and political rewards.

During the Qajar Belle Époque, Tehran had a pioneering tram network, but this was wantonly destroyed during the subsequent era of Pahlavi rule. Despite vowing to turn Iran into a well-developed “Japan of West Asia”, strongman Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s dreams of constructing a subway system in Tehran never got off the drawing board. In the 1960s, Iran’s newspaper-of-record Ayandegan lamented that “Tehran has no strength left and resembles a patient on the verge of death… Within ten years, Tehran will not be able to function without a metro.”

As Tehran’s middle-classes became increasingly secular in the 1990s, addressing this crisis offered the Ayatollahs a putative opportunity to claw back support. At the turn of the millennium, the first metro stations in Tehran were opened up. Much like Stalin’s Moscow metro, Tehran’s subway has also become a venue for mass indoctrination, filled to the brim with regime propaganda aimed at the captive audience of commuters.

For the regime’s clerical overlords, Ghalibaf’s subterranean construction frenzy may have had another upside. Iran’s leadership may have abused it as cover to build a tunnel city for themselves – perhaps in preparation for the nuclear Armageddon that the Mullah regime dreams of inflicting on Israel and the US. According to media reports, it is “not at all unlikely” that workers who thought they were building metro tunnels for the municipality were in fact unwittingly duped into also constructing the Ayatollahs’ bunkers.

The most defining legacy of Ghalibaf’s time as mayor of Tehran is neither the skyline, nor what lies beneath the ground, however. It is the “extremely supportive” pro-business, pro-development environment he created as mayor – even if this irked critics uncomfortable with the pace of capitalist urban renewal. As a result of Ghalibaf’s embrace of urban growth, numerous malls were created in Tehran, securing billions of dollars of private-sector investment for Iran’s capital, as well as much-needed additional tax income for the city administration. The city council’s locally-generated tax revenue, as a proportion of its gross revenue, doubled during Ghalibaf’s tenure in office. This reduced dependence on grant funding from the regime’s oil-price-dependent central budget. Precisely at this time, allegations of corruption within Tehran municipality started to be openly discussed by semi-official Iranian media. Regardless of their substance, it’s difficult to escape the impression that the prominent coverage given to these accusations may have been a form of institutional blowback: Sour grapes from other factions within the regime who felt threatened by the capital city’s growing financial autonomy and visible prosperity.

This may seem mundane – until one appreciates the scale and nature of what was constructed by the private sector. Iran Mall, the construction of which reportedly began in 2011 when Ghalibaf was mayor, is now the biggest shopping centre in the world. Featuring a stunning, publicly-accessible, open-plan library furnished with intricately-carved wood elements, and stalactite-vaulted, marble-floored halls, it may also be one of the most beautiful contemporary buildings in the world.

Every dynasty of rulers in Iran has produced its own distinct, architectural masterpiece: Be it the Marble Palace of the Pahlavis, the Shirazi Pink Mosque of the Qajars, or the Kalat Mausoleum of the Afsharids. When Iranians, few decades from now, look back at the dark times of the clerical regime, Iran Mall may come to be seen as the one work of transcendent beauty from that painful epoch. By the Ayatollahs’ logic of dour fanaticism, it is easy to dismiss the metapolitical value of allowing money to be spent on such artful constructions. When a mayor from deep inside the regime does so nonetheless, it shows that he is capable of perceiving a richer political reality, beyond the rigid, colourless confines of the regime’s groupthink.

In light of this, it is easy to see why Trump, himself a real estate developer by vocation, might find dealing with Ghalibaf enticing. This is exactly where the danger lies. No doubt, Ghalibaf brings to the table perceptive nuance, managerial competence and economic vision of a kind which no one else in the regime possesses. However, there is also no indication that he is using these extraordinary talents for anything other than the task of loyally working to uphold and renew the fanatical regime he is part of. Yes, he is undoubtedly ambitious. But this ambition appears to be situated firmly within the regime’s framework of political imperatives.

The Iranian-American writer Sohrab Ahmari has called the Mullah regime, in its current form, a “ghost regime”: stuck in the past, incapable of reviving its authority, constantly teetering on the verge of economic collapse. If the war ends in a negotiated deal that leaves Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf in charge of affairs in Iran, things may not remain that way for long. Far from dismantling the crumbling regime, an innovative ‘master builder’ like Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf might have the wherewithal to resurrect it. Is that really a risk Western policymakers can afford to take?

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)