by Amir Taheri
neither fact, however, explains fully why Iran at times appears unable to take and apply decisions that are demonstrably in its own interests as a nation-state. The main reason for Iran’s behavior is the conflict between state and revolution—a conflict that has continued, albeit with varying degrees of intensity, since 1979.
Initially, Khomeini, who led the revolution to victory and presided over its destiny during the first decade, had intended to destroy the state structures inherited from the Pahlavi dynasty. To him, everything associated with that state was Taghuti (satanic) and had to be “wiped out without a trace.” Muhammad-Ali Rajai, a Khomeini bodyguard who rose to become prime minister and then president of the Islamic Republic under the ayatollah, had a simple formula to explain the new regime’s approach to policy: “Whatever they [the shah’s regime] did, we will do the opposite.” This attitude led to the cancellation of hundreds of contracts that the shah had signed with foreign nations and corporations, often harming Iran’s interests by delaying or scrapping development projects. It was in that spirit that the nation’s nuclear power generation project was simply canceled, meaning a loss of $4 billion in initial investments.
Khomeini’s effort to replace the Pahlavi state with one of his own creation also extended to his insistence that the Constitution of 1906—which represented a rare national consensus and had nothing to do with the Pahlavis—be replaced with one written on his own orders. The ayatollah also tried to radically transform or completely replace as many of the state organs as he could. Between 1979 and 1980, he tried to replace the ministerial cabinet with his Islamic Revolution Council, a secret body of some thirty members appointed by him and answerable only to him. To give the council a coercive arm, the ayatollah created his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, generally known as Pasdaran, which was to replace the national army. At the same time, the so-called Imam Committees (Komiteh) were created to replace the urban police and the gendarmerie. Mistrustful of the bureaucracy, the ayatollah placed his own men as “imam’s representatives” within each government department, giving them the right of veto over all key decisions. At the provincial level, he made state-appointed governors subservient to Prayer Leaders appointed by himself.
Over time, however, Khomeini realized that he could not treat Iran as a tabula rasa on which to depict his ideal state. Many of the Iranian state institutions proved too resilient for him. He was eventually obliged to allow the regular army to exist, albeit in a truncated version and with no say in political decision-making. The regular police and gendarmerie also survived, although the Imam Committees continued to operate as instruments for distributing favor among the supporters of the revolution. Even the pre-revolutionary secret police, known as SAVAK (State Intelligence and Security Organization), managed to continue under the new name of VEVAK (the Islamic Republic’s Intelligence and Security Organization), especially insofar as counterintelligence was concerned.
Other organs as well as elements of the 1906 Constitution also survived the Khomeini onslaught, but with reduced power and influence. For example, Khomeini was obliged to accept the eminently un-Islamic principle of electing a parliament that had been established in Iran since 1906. He was intelligent enough to understand that any attempt at ruling without some form of an elected parliament could turn the middle classes against the revolution. Some organs of the state the ayatollah dared not touch, even only to change their names. Thus, the national Bank of Iran narrowly escaped being called “Islamic Bank of Iran” in 1980. An attempt to rename the national Iranian Oil Company so as to inject the term “Islamic” in 1981 also failed. Further, Khomeini abandoned his initial idea of changing the country’s name from Iran (Land of the Aryans) to Islamistan (Land of Islam).
All along, however, it was clear that Khomeini at best tolerated those state organs and political traditions that his revolution had inherited from the ancien régime. In time, the ayatollah’s obvious dislike of Iran’s state organs and traditions was reciprocated by those who represented them. Iran has one of the world’s oldest state structures, dating back to the sixteenth century, with a well-established bureaucracy and a deep-rooted tradition of public service. Even in the remotest parts of the country, one encounters families who boast more than a century of state employment and public service. The Pahlavi state had been built on the Prussian model of central control that strengthened the machinery of government at all levels. From the 1960s onwards, the massive revenues produced by oil exports had given the state further means with which to acquire popular favor and strengthen its position within society. With annual economic growth rates of 10 percent or more between 1971 and 1977, the Pahlavi state tried to base part of its legitimacy on the success of its economic development program. It was also able to draw on under-the-surface nationalistic sentiments that could, when the opportunity arose, offer a rival ideology to Khomeini’s radical Islamism.
nevertheless, the key factor that aborted Khomeini’s plan to destroy the “inherited Satanic state” completely was the eight-year Iran-Iraq war unleashed by Saddam Hussein. The ayatollah quickly realized that he could not fight on two fronts at once. He knew that he needed the support of the Iranian state structures, notably the armed forces, to prevent Saddam’s armies from marching through an undefended land to Tehran. Within ten days of the invasion, the Iraqis had captured almost 3 percent of Iranian territory and were knocking on the gates of such major oil cities as Ahvaz and Abadan. Hurriedly, the ayatollah called up thousands of army and air force officers, NCOs, and men released from prison, where they had languished for their association with the ancien régime, and dispatched them to the war front to stop the Iraqi advance.
Over the years, the revolution, the Khomeinist purges, the war with Iraq, and the internecine feuds that splintered the revolutionary camp created a system full of internal conflicts and contradictions, reflected in the “erratic behavior” mentioned above. As long as Khomeini was alive, he was able to draw on his revolutionary prestige and position as one of the top six theologians of Iranian Shiite Islam, to impose a decision whenever necessary. With his death in 1989, however, the contradictions of the system he had helped create gradually came into the open, furnishing the central theme of what is often seen as the “power struggle” in Tehran.
Some commentators have tried to reduce these contradictions to a mere rivalry between two camps often labeled “moderate” and “radical” or “reformist” and “conservative.” Iranologists, recycling the old techniques of Kremlinology, have tried to discover “doves” and “hawks” in Tehran’s ruling circles, without being able to identify the two camps clearly. This is partly because rival individuals and organizations often use almost exactly the same vocabulary and pursue their goals under the same slogans of revolutionary Khomeinism. The British politician Chris Patten, who served as a European Union foreign policy commissioner in the 1990s, was puzzled by the Iranian “schizophrenia.” It took him some time to realize that many of the Iranian officials with whom he negotiated were “mere actors playing official roles,” while faceless individuals who never met Western officials took the real decisions.
To understand why Iran behaves the way it does on any specific issue, it is essential to identify and understand the principal bodies that contribute to decision-making. These could be divided into four categories: the revolutionary organs, the state organs, the hybrid organs of the state and the revolution, and secret societies operating in parallel with both state and revolution. There is, of course, some overlapping in all cases. One must also take into account a number of para-revolutionary and para-state organs that could emphasize this or that part of their dual identity according to issues and circumstances.
The recognized organs of the revolution began to appear in the course of the 1978-79 revolutionary period, and they had no discernible existence in Iranian politics before that. The most important of these organs is the wali e faqih (Theologian Custodian). Often referred to as the “Leader of the Revolution” or the “Supreme Guide,” thi
s is the central institution of the Islamic Republic. The Supreme Guide represents the element of divine power that had its epiphany in the Prophet Muhammad and the twelve imams of Shiism who followed him. Because the twelfth imam, the “Awaited Guide” (Mahdi al-Muntazar), has gone into his grand occultation, the element of divine power is represented by the best of his “deputies,” that is to say the man chosen as the wali e faqih. The first Supreme Guide, Khomeini, was of course self-appointed and never faced an election. His successor Ali Khamenehi, however, was first elected by a hastily convened gathering of mullahs and under questionable conditions, first on a temporary basis in 1989, shortly after Khomeini’s death, and then for life in 1991. Under the 1979 Constitution drafted on Khomeini’s orders and approved in a referendum, the Supreme Guide, representing the will of Allah on earth, has virtually unlimited powers. He can order the suspension of the basic principles of Islam itself. He can also suspend the constitution, dismiss the elected president, and dissolve the elected parliament. He is the head of all three powers—the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature—and thus the head of state. All key officials of the state—including the elected president, cabinet ministers, provincial governors, ambassadors, military commanders, and heads of state-owned companies—must be appointed by him through special decrees. He is also commander-in-chief of all armed forces and has sole authority to declare war or make peace.
Although the Supreme Guide has unlimited executive powers and controls virtually every organ of state, his office must nevertheless be classified as a revolutionary organ for a number of reasons. The first is related to legitimacy. The Supreme Guide knows that his legitimacy stems directly from the 1979 revolution. Any decline in the power and prestige of that revolution would be translated into a corresponding diminution of the position of the Supreme Guide. It is also in the context of the revolution that the Supreme Guide can exercise unlimited power. Were he to acknowledge the supremacy of the state over revolution, he would transform himself into a functionary of the state, and thus someone who is bound by the state’s earthly laws and regulations.
The Supreme Guide is often in a difficult position, having to choose between the interests of the revolution and those of the state, which could happen to be in direct contradiction. In most major cases so far, the Supreme Guide has ruled in favor of the revolution rather than the state. This has often brought the Supreme Guide into barely concealed conflict with the president on issues of both foreign and domestic policy. When Khamenehi, the present Supreme Guide, was president he occasionally found himself in conflict with the Supreme Guide at the time, Ayatollah Khomeini. To be sure, the Supreme Guide always wins—or has until now. In 1989, for example, President Khamenehi realized that the fatwa issued by Khomeini for the murder of Salman Rushdie was harming the interests of Iran as a nation-state. Thus, Khamenehi publicly suggested that the fatwa be canceled if Rushdie recanted. Khomeini’s response came within hours in the form of a public castigation of Khamenehi. “He needs to return to school to learn more about Islam!” Khomeini announced. If the Supreme Guide decides that someone must die because this is good for Islam, the president has no right to reject the idea on the grounds that it is bad for the state! In a more dramatic clash between the Supreme Guide and the president in 1981, Khomeini simply dismissed President Banisadr with a nine-word decree.
Because he stands above factions, at least in theory, the Supreme Guide plays a major stabilizing role within the system. He is in a position to prevent one faction from crushing the others and imposing its monopoly on power for any length of time. The Supreme Guide has an abiding interest in promoting a dose of pluralism within the system, thus opening a space for discussion and debate with himself as the ultimate arbiter. This, in turn, provides the system with political safety valves to dissipate the negative energies of the ruling elite. Thanks to the existence of the Supreme Guide as an institution, the Islamic Republic has managed to avoid the politics of the bloodbath that is practiced by many ruling elites in the so-called “developing nations.” Rival factions within the Islamic Republic’s ruling elite do not murder one another because the Supreme Guide is always in a position to decide who wins and who loses and for how long. Today’s losers in the Islamic Republic always know that they are the reserve squad for the Supreme Guide, who could, when the time comes, send them back into the field. In 2000, Khamenehi’s intervention was decisive in discouraging attempts by the security services and professional revolutionary organs to undermine, perhaps even assassinate, President Khatami. At the same time, Khamenehi was also able to persuade Khatami to jettison his moderate discourse and lead the crackdown on a nationwide student revolt.
In much of the developing world, a group that has seized power through violence of one form or another starts by massacring real or imagined opponents and then embarks on its own internecine bloodletting. In Iran, however, the Supreme Guide has prevented rival cliques within the revolutionary minority from using violence against each other. One mechanism he uses is carefully managed elections in which he must approve all candidates and all eventual winners. By taking into account the public mood, the domestic and international realities of the moment, and, above all, his own interests, which he identifies with the interests of the revolution, the Supreme Guide decides which faction should win or lose in any particular election. Thus, Iranian elections today resemble primaries in U.S. political parties, with the difference that a single individual, the Supreme Guide, could make all the difference in the end.
To some Iranians as well as foreign observers, the institution of Supreme Guide might seem to be no different from the absolute monarchy that Iran had known for more than 2,500 years. This is why many Iranians jokingly refer to Khamenehi as “Ali Shah.” After all, the shahs, too, had based their claim of legitimacy on the spurious concept of “divine mandate.” Persian shahs were often called “the Shadow of Allah on Earth.” nevertheless, leaving aside superficial resemblances, the Khomeinist Supreme Guide is quite different from the traditional Persian shah. Part of the reason for Iran’s inability to absorb its revolutionary crisis and move on lies in that difference.
Theoretically at least, the office of the traditional Persian shah was a unifying factor because it blended all the contradictory realities of the nation into a single overarching institution that cut across religious, ethnic, and class differences. Iran was one nation with one shah. The Khomeinist Supreme Guide, to start with, claims to be the chief Shiite priest. At the same time, as his most popular designation in official propaganda indicates, he is the “Leader of the Revolution.” Thus, he cannot claim to represent non-Shiite Iranians or counterrevolutionaries. The traditional shahs regarded anyone who was Iranian by birth or naturalization as their subjects. The Supreme Guide cannot do so, if only because he poses conditions that not all Iranians could fulfill. Revolt against a traditional shah was never regarded as anything more than a secular act or a crime under the penal code. Revolt against the Supreme Guide is presented as a sin in religious terms. More than 90 percent of those executed by the Khomeinists because of their opposition to the system were charged with “waging war against Allah” by defying the Supreme Guide. The traditional Persian shah did not see the state as a potential rival or enemy; the Iranian state was his state. For the Khomeinist Supreme Guide, the Iranian state is no more than an instrument in his broader mission as “Leader of the Muslim Ummah Throughout the World.” Worse still, the Iranian state can never be trusted to support the revolution, or, indeed, Islam itself, on all issues and occasions. This is because the interests of Iran as a nation-state do not always coincide with either the Khomeinist revolution or Islam itself.
The belief that the Supreme Guide must not, indeed cannot, depend exclusively on the Iranian state structures is reflected in the parallel organs that have sprung up around the office of the wali e faqih. Commonly known as the “Office of the Leader” (Daftar Rahbar), the organization controlled by and responsible to Khamenehi is a state within the s
tate in all but name. never included in the official organigram of the Islamic Republic, it is not open to scrutiny by the country’s legislative or judicial institutions. It is also the only organization using public money that is not subjected to state accountability. The “office” is reported to have an annual budget of around $2.5 billion, of which only part is provided by the state. It is also reported to employ around three thousand people in its various branches in Tehran alone. These figures, however, do not reflect the full size of an octopus at the heart of the Iranian reality today. The Supreme Guide controls thousands of businesses through so-called “foundations” whose chief executives and managerial boards he appoints. According to some studies, these “foundations” account for more than a quarter of the private sector of the Iranian economy, representing an annual turnover of $30 billion. Because they never open their books to public scrutiny, no one knows how much money these foundations make or what part of their profits are funneled through the Supreme Guide.
Treating the Iranian state as a potential enemy, the Supreme Guide has infiltrated its key organs thanks to a network of functionaries directly answerable to him. Every government office includes a section called “Office of the Leader’s Representatives,” usually headed by a mullah acting as the ideological commissars of the Communist Party did in Russia under the Bolsheviks. A “representative of the leader” shadows every state functionary above a certain rank both at home and abroad. In most capitals, especially in Muslim countries, the Supreme Guide maintains unofficial embassies—offices charged with exporting the revolution, spying on Iranian exiles, and coordinating operations with Muslim and non-Muslim radicals and anti-American groups. All these functionaries are paid by the state, but they work only for the Supreme Guide. When it comes to “sensitive areas” such as the military, security, and media organizations, the Supreme Guide controls both the official command structures and the informal advisory groups appointed by him.