by Amir Taheri
Back to civilian life after the war, Ahmadinejad served in a number of posts in various provinces and in 1994 was appointed governor of the newly created province of Ardebil in the northwest. By all accounts, he did well in Ardebil, at least well enough for his fellow governors to name him “Outstanding Governor of the Year” in 1995 and 1996. Using his provincial base, Ahmadinejad helped create a network of young radical revolutionaries who labeled themselves “Builders of the Islamic Iran” (Abadgaran Iran Islami).
With help from that network, he was able to get himself elected mayor of Tehran in 2003. now under the national limelight, he started building his persona. He presented himself as the son of a poor blacksmith from a poor district of the capital, who had known hunger and deprivation. He attacked the “new rich” and accused “bigwigs,” whom he never named, of “plundering the nation in the name of Islam.” Tehranis who had never warmed up to the Khomeinist regime began to see Ahmadinejad as something of an opposition leader. The fact that he seldom mentioned either Khomeini or Khamenehi, preferring to refer directly to the Hidden Imam, created the impression of an outsider angry about the regime’s corruption, brutality, and inefficiency. Ahmadinejad was everything that most other grandees of the regime were not. He refused to get a salary as mayor, preferring to depend on his income as a part-time lecturer at his alma mater; he drove his own car, a battered old Peugeot; and he continued to live in his modest house rather than the mayor’s official residence. The man who manufactured Ahmadinejad’s image as an Islamic Robin Hood was one Mojtaba Hashemi Samareh, a friend from his student days. It was also Samareh who encouraged Ahmadinejad to think of standing for the presidency. In 2005, most Iranians felt betrayed by the ruling elite, symbolized by Khatami and his promises of reform. Also, they were fed up with mullahs. In the subsequent presidential campaign, a woman approached Hashemi Rafsanjani, the candidate of the establishment, and knocked his turban off with the cry “no More Mullahs!”
24
We Can!
Ahmadinejad entered the presidential race with the slogan “We Can!” This was designed as a rejection of the outgoing President Khatami’s claim that his administration had been unable to fulfill its promise of reform because of gridlock in the system. At first, few people gave Ahmadinejad any chance of registering on the electoral radar. Unlike the mullahs and the hostage-holders of the U.S. embassy, who had won notoriety thanks to the media, Ahmadinejad was a total unknown outside Tehran and Ardebil, where he had served as governor. Also, he had no money to spend on lavish advertising campaigns as did Rafsanjani, Iran’s richest man, and the other main candidates, including the former police chief Muhammad-Baqer Qalibaf and the mullah Mehdi Karrubi, the well-funded candidate of Khatami’s faction. However, Ahmadinejad had three advantages over his rivals.
First, he immediately came across as sincere. Revolutionary slogans mouthed by people like Rafsanjani, Karrubi, and Qalibaf sounded false. Here were wealthy men living in palatial mansions and spending vast sums on advertising, and yet talking about “the poor, the dispossessed.” Their expensive clothing and bulletproof limousines told a different story. In contrast, Ahmadinejad traveled by bus, had no bodyguards, spent no money on posters, gave no free meals to would-be voters who attended his meetings, and lambasted “the lying rich, the corrupt moneybags, the leeches bloated by our blood.” His signature item of clothing was a blouson of the type that were on sale in Tehran’s poor districts for the equivalent of three dollars. The overly made-up and bejeweled ladies supporting Rafsanjani mocked Ahmadinejad by calling him amaleh, a derogatory word for construction workers. But he welcomed the sobriquet and made it a campaign theme: “We are the amaleh of the Imam and the people!” he would shout, bringing wild cheers.
Ahmadinejad’s second advantage was that he could run as an opposition candidate because, in the minds of most Iranians, he was not identified with the regime. Iranians knew Rafsanjani too well to trust him again. They could not trust Karrubi, who appeared as a down-market version of Khatami minus the smile. Qalibaf was disliked because, as chief of police, he had crushed demonstrations by students and workers, and earned the title of “the Butcher of Tehran.” Worse still, he had as his chief of staff for the campaign a certain Mohsen Khamenehi, son of the Supreme Guide and a notorious influence peddler. Ali Larijani, head of the state-owned radio and television and the candidate of the radical wing of he IRGC, also suffered because people knew him too well. For over a decade, he had given them a radio and TV network that offered nothing but lies, propaganda, and low-quality entertainment. If the voters wanted “none of the above,” their choice had to be Ahmadinejad.
Finally, Ahmadinejad benefited from the fact that Khamenehi and the high command of the IRGC were determined that the next president not be turbaned. Khamenehi was concerned about growing popular anger against the mullahs who occupied all key positions, and he hoped that replacing a turban with a hat, even a military cap, might ease tensions. The IRGC commanders believed that after twenty-four years with the mullahs at the top, it was their turn to occupy the presidency.
Ahmadinejad, Larijani, and Qalibaf were all candidates of the IRGC, the last one as the favorite. Khamenehi and the IRGC commanders assumed that no one would win in the first round of voting and that the second round would be between a mullah and a “hat-wearer” (mukalla). Until the last moment, they believed that Karrubi would be the mullah and Qalibaf the mukalla. The results of the first round provided a big surprise, however: the second round was to be fought between Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad, with Qalibaf coming in a poor fourth. Everyone knew that Khamenehi would never allow Rafsanjani to return as president and regain the position of strongman he had lost eight years earlier. Khamenehi and Rafsanjani had been friends for thirty years before becoming rivals, the surest recipe for unquenchable hatred. Qalibaf had made a fool of himself by dropping hints that he would become a benevolent despot like Reza Khan, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, and rescue the nation from economic meltdown, social breakdown, and war. To Khamenehi, this portrayed a man too big for his boots. The Supreme Guide and the IRGC top brass had no choice but to help Ahmadinejad crush Rafsanjani, which he did in the second round by winning almost 63 percent of the votes.
Many wondered how a candidate who was unknown six weeks earlier could collect seventeen million votes without any advertising campaign. In Khomeinist Iran, however, voters form only part of a more complex mix that produces the results. If necessary, ballot boxes could be filled or emptied, and even the dead could be made to vote in thousands. Announcement of the results was postponed three times until the Supreme Guide and the IRGC top brass had agreed on who should win and by how much. Karrubi, embittered by his poor showing, quipped: The evening of voting day, I went to bed convinced that I had won. The following morning, I woke up a loser!
Despite all that, Ahmadinejad is the first president of the Islamic Republic who does not feel himself indebted to individuals or circles within the regime. He just happened to be the right man at the right time, the second choice of rival factions who realized that their first choice could not be imposed. This is why Ahmadinejad seldom mentions either Khomeini or Khamenehi. He goes directly to the Hidden Imam, making it more difficult for his rivals to attack him. Building his populist image further, he is the first president of the Islamic Republic to go on periodic tours to all provinces, holding the meetings of his cabinet in provincial centers rather than Tehran. In these tours, he also distributes a great deal of money, something he can do thanks to spiraling oil prices. In his first year as president, Ahmadinejad has had more oil money to play with than all of Iran’s previous rulers combined since the first oil well was inaugurated in Masjed Suleiman in 1908.
Ahmadinejad’s critics within the establishment have a dilemma. They seek supporting Khomeinist terms but speak a technocratic language that sounds odd in a revolutionary context. They accuse Ahmadinejad of provoking hyperinflation by just splashing money around. Ahmadinejad, however, says he is trying to
help the poor on behalf of the Hidden Imam. “Economics is nothing when it comes to the science of ladduni [i.e. secret knowledge of the imams],” he says. What is “socially just” could never be wrong even if it is economically inadvisable. In other words, his devil-may-care economic policy is justified because he is trying to serve Allah.
To many in the West, especially in the European Union, Ahmadinejad’s election was the worst news possible. They had deluded themselves into believing that Khatami’s presidency was a golden age of liberty, brutally ended by Ahmadinejad. In 2005 it was fashionable to knock “neo-cons” and conservatives in general, so the Western glitterati presented Ahmadinejad as both an unhinged adventurer and a champion of the “conservative” faction in Tehran.
Ahmadinejad is neither. He is a radical revolutionary acting in accordance with the character of the Khomeinist ideology, a messianic movement whose ambition is to reshape the world after its fashion. On every one of the controversial issues that have provoked Western glitterati ire against Ahmadinejad, his rivals in Tehran, including Rafsanjani and Khatami, have always held identical views. On the nuclear issue, the program was revived under Rafsanjani just weeks after Khomeini’s death in 1989. Iran’s clandestine relations with A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who sold Tehran nuclear knowhow and equipment, started under Khatami. It was under Khatami that the budget allocated to the nuclear project was increased fivefold. In 2005, it was Khatami who ended a two-year suspension of Iran’s uranium enrichment program. neither Khatami nor Rafsanjani has ever accepted the Holocaust as a historical fact. nor has either of them acknowledged the right of Israel to exist. Throughout Rafsanjani’s presidency, the Islamic Republic waged a proxy war against Israel through the Lebanese Hezballah. Under Khatami, the Islamic Republic emerged as the principal source of funding for radical Palestinian groups and, in 2002, was caught red-handed smuggling arms to Yasser Arafat’s Al Fatah group in the Karin A cargo ship. In 2003, King Abdullah II of Jordan revealed that Tehran had set up seventeen secret cells on Jordanian territory for “terrorist operations.” The Rafsanjani-Khatami duo often spoke of a “dialogue of civilizations” but allowed no dialogue inside Iran itself. Under Khatami, the Islamic Republic occupied the second position on the list of nations for the number of executions, just behind the People’s Republic of China, with a population twenty times that of Iran. More newspapers and magazines were closed under Khatami than during Ahmadinejad’s presidency—at least up to the spring of 2008.
Ahmadinejad rejects the “dialogue of civilizations” because he believes that there is no civilization outside Islam. Instead, he speaks of a “clash of civilizations” both inside Iran and in the world at large. He does not want a seat at any international panel; his dream is to abolish the capitalist system that has produced the world as we know it. He does not want Iran to become a member of the World Trade Organization, which he has described as “a club of global thieves.” nor is he tempted by the offer of preferential trade relations with the European Union, which he sees as “a family of fat parasites living off other nations.”
Ahmadinejad’s major sin is his refusal to practice kitman, an old tradition under which lying for a cause that one believes to be good is not only permitted but obligatory. He is saying aloud what Rafsanjani and Khatami have always thought in silence. He has already purged the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of so-called reformist diplomats, seized control of the two ministries that deal with security, and sponsored a major reshuffle of the top brass both in the IRGC and the regular armed forces. Over four thousand people have lost top jobs in government and/ or the public sector of the economy controlled by the state—jobs that have gone to Ahmadinejad’s friends and allies. Ahmadinejad has also ordered the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Islamic Guidance to crack down on all forms of “heathen” influences, from CDs and DVDs to colorful pashminas for women. One of his first moves was to pass the law on the Islamic national Dress Code and unleash the “moral squads” against transgressors. Over the past three years, the Islamic Moral Brigades have been clashing with groups of young Iranians on the streets of Tehran and other major cities over “immodest dress.” Television footage of young men and women engaged in scuffles with “moral squads” may lead some in the outside world to assume that the opposition to the Khomeinist regime is mostly urban and middle class, and solely concerned with greater social freedoms. That, however, is only part of the story. While social issues continue to poison life in Iran, it is economic issues that spell the most trouble for Ahmadinejad’s presidency.
A review of Ahmadinejad’s first term as president provides two contrasting pictures. He has won much admiration at home, some of it grudging, by claiming that he has managed to stand up to the United States without incurring major costs. Each time he thumbs his nose at the Great Satan, his revolutionary base feels flattered. More broadly, beyond his base, he is admired for his attempt at fighting corruption, though his tough talk has seldom translated into concrete action. Ahmadinejad has also strengthened his links with the military, especially the IRGC. In his three national budgets so far, expenditure on defense has risen by a whopping 21 percent, the biggest increase in the history of the Islamic Republic. The president is clearly convinced that a war is coming and the Islamic Republic had better be as prepared for it as possible. A new multibillion-dollar accord with Russia would supply the Islamic Republic with a range of modern weapons, including a generation of long-range surface-to-air missiles capable of hitting high-flying U.S. bombers. Arms deals have also been signed with China and north Korea, giving the IRGC the sense that the military is receiving the priority they felt they had lost under Khatami.
While consolidating his base in the IRGC and among groups of seasonal workers and ruined peasants who have poured into cities—groups that sociologists describe as the lumpen—Ahmadinejad has provoked the emergence of a new internal opposition to the regime. In 2006, tens of thousands of angry workers, forming an illegal umbrella organization, flexed their muscles against Ahmadinejad on International Labor Day (May 1) in Tehran and a dozen provincial capitals. Marching through the capital’s streets, the workers carried a coffin draped in black with the legend “Workers’ Rights” inscribed on it. They shouted “no to slave labor! Yes to freedom and dignity!” Ahmadinejad had centered his 2005 presidential campaign on a promise to “bring the oil money to every family’s dinner table.” After the election, his position was boosted by a dramatic rise in oil prices, providing him with more than $100 million a day in state revenues. And, yet, all official statistics show that, with inflation running around 20 percent and unemployment jumping to more than 30 percent, the average Iranian is worse off than three years ago. Under Khatami, the Islamic Republic scored average annual economic growth rates of around 4 percent. In a nation that needs to create a million new jobs to cope with its demography, that kind of growth was not enough to point to any Eldorado anytime soon. But it was enough to prevent the economy from sinking. Under Ahmadinejad, however, the growth rate has dropped to around 3 percent—despite rising oil revenues.
Because it controls the oil revenue, which comes in U.S. dollars, the Khomeinist regime has a vested interest in a weak national currency. (It could get more rials for the same amount of dollars in the domestic market.) Ahmadinejad has tried to exploit that opportunity by printing an unprecedented quantity of rials. Economists in Tehran speak of “the torrent of worthless rials” that Ahmadinejad has used to finance his extravagant promises to eradicate poverty. The result has been massive flights of capital, mostly into banks in Dubai, Malaysia, and Austria. Ayatollah Shahroudi, the Islamic chief justice, claims that as much as $300 billion may have left the country since Ahmadinejad was sworn in as president. Other estimates put the figure at three times that. According to Abbas Abdi, a Tehran researcher and loyal critic of the regime, Iran is experiencing its worst economic crisis since the late 1970s. The effects are seen in the slumping of real estate prices for the first time since 1997, even in Tehran�
��s prime districts. Printing money and spending on a no-tomorrow basis are not the only reasons for the crisis. Ahmadinejad’s entire economic philosophy seems to be designed to do more harm than good.
The president’s favorite catchword is khodkafa’i, or “self-sufficiency.” To the horror of most Iranians, especially the millions connected with the bazaars, who regard trade as the noblest of pursuits, Ahmadinejad insists that the only way Iran can preserve its “Islamic purity” is to reduce foreign commerce. “Whatever we can produce, we should do ourselves,” he likes to say, “even if what we produce is not as good, and more costly.” His rationale goes something like this: The global economic system is a “Jewish-Crusader conspiracy” to keep Muslim nations in a position of weakness and dependency. Thus, Muslims would do better relying on their own resources even if it means lower living standards. One of President Ahmadinejad’s first moves was to freeze a six-year-old policy designed to help the Islamic Republic become a member of the World Trade Organization. In Ahmadinejad’s book, the WTO is just another “Jewish-Crusader” invention to make the inferior position of Muslim economies a permanent feature of international life.
It was with reference to khodkafa’i that Ahmadinejad decided to harden the regime’s position on the nuclear issue, even if that meant United nations sanctions and even war. The president claims that the seven countries currently capable of producing nuclear fuel plan to set up a global cartel and control the world market for enriched uranium, once mankind, having exhausted fossil fuels, is forced to depend on nuclear energy. On such a day, the Islamic Republic will find itself at the mercy of the infidels, unless, of course, it learns how to produce its own nuclear fuel.