The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution

by Amir Taheri

  Convinced that Islam is destined for war against the infidels—led by the United States—Ahmadinejad is determined to preserve what he regards as the Islamic Republic’s “independence.” One of his favorite themes is the claim that good Muslims, forced to choose between freedom and independence, would prefer the latter.

  Khodkafa’i has had catastrophic results in many sectors of Iran’s economy. Unable to reduce, let alone stop, imports of mass consumer goods controlled by powerful mullahs and Revolutionary Guard commanders, including almost half the nation’s food, Ahmadinejad has tightened import rules for a range of raw materials and spare parts needed by factories. The policy has all but killed the once buoyant textile industry, destroying tens of thousands of jobs. It has also affected hundreds of small and medium-size businesses that, in some cases, have been unable to pay their employees for months.

  Ahmadinejad has also used khodkafa’i as an excuse to freeze a number of business deals aimed at preventing the collapse of Iran’s aging and semi-derelict oil and gas fields. He has vetoed foreign participation in building oil refineries, forcing the Islamic Republic to import more than 40 percent of the refined petroleum products consumed in Iran. The prospect of a prolonged duel with the United nations and a possible military clash with the United States has also hurt the Iranian economy under Ahmadinejad.

  One result of the president’s policy is the series of strikes that have continued in Tehran and at least twenty other major cities since last autumn. In 2005, one major strike by transport workers in Tehran brought the capital city of fifteen million inhabitants to a standstill for several days. At any given time, tens of thousands of workers are on strike in industries as diverse as gas refining, paper and newsprint, automobile manufacture, sugar cane plantations, and copper mining.

  Ahmadinejad, however, is determined to impose what looks like a north Korean model on the Iranian economy. He has already dissolved the Syndicate of Iranian Employers as a capitalist cabal, and replaced it with a government-appointed body. He is also pushing a new labor code through the Islamic Majlis to replace the existing one written with the help of the International Labor Organization in the 1960s and amended in 1991. The proposed text abolishes most of the rights won by workers throughout the world thanks to decades of social struggle and political reform. Ahmadinejad believes that Western-style trade unions and employers’ associations have no place in a proper Islamic society, since the division of people into employees and employers is a “Jewish-Crusader” invention. In Islam, employers and employees are part of the ummah (community of the faithful), bound by divine laws that can’t be questioned. They ought to operate through the institution they both share, the Islamic state, which can keep the “community of the faithful” free of class struggle—a typical affliction of infidel societies. Ahmadinejad insists that an individual’s life is a “borrowed gift” meant to be spent only on preparing the return of the Mahdi, and thus all talk of fixing working hours and annual holidays is a sign of impiety. According to the new labor code, presented to the Majlis at the end of 2007, terms of employment are to be fixed by the employer and the employee through an agreement between “two Muslim brothers.” The code would outlaw the formation of unions, abolish the minimum wage, and allow employers to fire any worker they wished instantly and without compensation.

  When confronted with bad economic news or news of growing social unrest, Ahmadinejad has always been philosophical: We are preparing for a transformation of man’s existence, something never before experienced in history; the Imam is coming back and Islam is to rule the world! Should we allow petty issues of this life to divert our attention from the glory that awaits us? This kind of discourse resonates with the radical Khomeinist base and elements benefiting from the rentier state. Even some in the senior ranks of leadership are seduced by this upbeat message of hope, especially because it comes after eight years of generally pessimistic signals from Khatami. To outsiders, the idea that Iran is now at the vanguard of a universal revolution may look like a sure sign of hubris. To Khomeinist insiders, however, it is the fulfillment of the late ayatollah’s promise. “The Islamic Republic of Iran is the heart of the Muslim nation and the center of the worldwide awakening of Islam,” Khamenehi said in May 2008. “This is why the bullying power and oppressors are afraid of increasing attention by Muslims everywhere to this Iranian model. All the political, economic, security, and propaganda attacks of the Imperialists against the Islamic Republic is to prevent Muslims from adopting the model of our Islamic Republic.”1

  Ahmadinejad is a typical “hastener” of the Imam’s return. He sees the signs of “return” everywhere and all but openly claims regular sightings of the Mahdi. A generation ago, most Iranians would have regarded anyone holding such views as deranged. It was considered arrogant, if not impious, to try to force the Imam’s hand. Today, however, one finds “hasteners” everywhere in Iran. According to the official media there are hundreds of sightings of the Hidden Imam each year and all over the country. And, as might have been expected, there are men, and one woman, who claim to be the Returning Imam, much to Ahmadinejad’s chagrin. The female Hidden Imam is a certain Ruqiyah Begum, a seventy-seven-year-old seamstress from Kerman who in 2006 claimed that she was inhabited by the Mahdi. Ahmadinejad has also tried to connect now-Ruz, Iran’s national and non-Islamic new Year, to the idea of the Hidden Imam. He started his new Year message on March 21, 2008, with a special prayer of the “hasteners,” imploring the Mahdi to hurry up to lead his followers on a campaign for establishing justice throughout the world.

  25

  A Case of National Schizophrenia

  What to do about Iran? As we have seen, the question has haunted successive administrations in Washington for three decades. The real question, however, is the one asked by most Iranians themselves: what to do about the Islamic Republic in Iran?

  As we have shown, since the establishment of the Khomeinist regime in Tehran, there are two Irans. There is Iran as a nation-state with a long history going back three millennia, and a culture of beauty and diversity. As a builder of civilizations, this Iran, despite the numerous ups and downs of its history, has demonstrated a rare degree of resilience. Dozens of nations in the Middle East, the first birthplace of nations and cradle of civilizations, have disappeared. Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Anshan, Elam, Phoenicia, Carthage—all are gone, leaving behind only names. Iran, however, is still around. Ernest Renan described this Iran as an eternal stream that may disappear underground for a while, but always resurfaces with greater energy.

  Then there is the other Iran, the transient one, which is perceived by many as a threat to regional stability and, indeed, world peace. This Iran is the vehicle for Khomeinism, a fascist movement based on a perverted interpretation of Shiism, itself a minority version of Islam. Like all other fascist states, this second Iran is a destroyer of civilization, starting with Iran’s own heritage, and a practitioner of terror and violence both at home and abroad. It has killed Iranians by the tens of thousands, and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands outside Iran. It has driven more than five million Iranians into exile and has turned a further four million into displaced persons inside the country. Khomeinism has provoked what the World Bank calls “the biggest brain drain in history.” It has tried to de-Iranize Iran, thus seeking to achieve what Arab, Mongol and Turkic invaders failed to do over almost fifteen centuries. It has sponsored and organized terrorist operations in more than two dozen countries on all continents. Iran today is a nation hijacked by a mad ideology and its adepts, who claim they have discovered the ultimate version of Truth and regard it as their duty to impose that Truth on all of mankind. The problem that humanity faces today is not with Iran as a nation-state and a country; it is with Iran as a vehicle for Khomeinism, Iran as the Islamic Republic, Iran as a cause rather than a country. This makes the task of making policy in Iran difficult. A hijacked aircraft laden with explosives and with hundreds of innocent people on board is a clear and present dan
ger. But the problem is not with the aircraft or the passengers; it is with the hijackers. The question, therefore, is how to neutralize the hijackers without harming the passengers and the aircraft.

  This is not the first time that Iran has been hijacked and transformed from a country into a cause. For almost a century under direct Arab rule, Iran was used as source of manpower for Islamic expansion. In the region of Isfahan alone, over sixty thousand young men were press-ganged into the armies of the caliph and sent to north Africa to take part in wars of conquest there and in southern Europe. none of them returned. Islamic wars of conquest remained a drain on the population of Khorassan for two more centuries. nor is Iran the first nation to be hijacked and transformed into a vehicle for the pursuit of a diabolical cause. In more recent times, this is what happened to Russia under the Bolsheviks, to Italians under the Fascists, and to Germans under the nazis. The problem that the world had was not with Russia, Italy, or Germany as countries but with sick ideologies of which Khomeinism is one of the latest bastards.

  As a nation-state, Iran could be a rival or even an adversary of other nation-states. It could even go to war against them. But it would never pose an existential threat to them. nation-states, even when they make war, always end up accepting some rules of coexistence. This cannot be the case with causes. Khomeinism is not seeking territory, border changes, greater markets, access to natural resources, or even influence and prestige—things that any normal nation-state might seek. Khomeinism wants to seize control of other people’s lives, at individual and national levels, and remold them into future soldiers of the returning Hidden Imam. In normal political parlance, Khomeinism does not want anything in particular; it wants everything.

  Khomeinism is like the beasts in the Chekhov story in which a man riding a troika in the snows of Siberia is pursued by a pack of wolves. To stop the wolves, the man continues to throw food at them. He ends up killing the dogs that pull his troika one by one, feeding them to the wolves. Only then does he realize that what the wolves wanted all along was to devour him. Many Iranians have had a similar experience under Khomeinism. In the Persian alphabet, the three vowels a, o, and i are labeled horouf elleh, which means “sick letters.” This is because they can be interchangeable, according to dialects. Thus, the word Irani, meaning “Iranian,” could become Irooni in its “infirm” form. The word Irani means “noble, upright, brave.” The word Irooni, on the other hand, means “devious, opportunist, cowardly.” As the Iranian nationalist writer Zabih Behrouz explained, Irani and Irooni could coexist as the two sides of the same coin, but would never become one. Irani resists injustice and tyranny, and is prepared to suffer prison, go into exile, or even die, but would not submit to anti-Iranian rule. If none of these options is available to him, he could remain on the sidelines, retreat into his Sufi fraternity, and wait until the time comes for action. Irooni, on the other hand, tries to accommodate himself to the established order. The rulers want him to grow a beard, so he grows one, using his face as an advertising space for the dominant ideology. The rulers demand that he pray five times a day; he underlines his devotion by praying twice as many times. Irooni wears the hijab in Iran but discards it abroad. He or she flatters the rulers with the most flowery of lexicons, but curses them behind their backs in the vilest language possible. In the end, the effect that Irooni has on the despot could be as deadly, if not deadlier, than that of his Irani counterpart. Irooni is known as pesteh khandan (smiling pistachio) because he always looks pleased when he is in the presence of his oppressors. What the oppressors do not know is that the “smiling pistachios” are keeping their poisoned daggers well hidden behind their backs.

  Like his Irani counterpart, Irooni knows how to wait. It is not for nothing that the theme of waiting is so important in Iranian culture, both religious and secular. In pre-Islamic Iran, the waiting was for King of Kings Kaykhosrow, who had disappeared in the snows of Mount Damavand at the peak of his power and glory. In Islamic Iran, the waiting is for the Hidden Imam. Khomeinism, like other totalitarian ideologies, forces ordinary people into either becoming heroes and risking their lives or operating as plotters in the dark. The Khomeinist despot will never know what “his people” really think until the pillars of his rule begin to crumble.

  The first step towards effective policymaking on Iran is to understand the duality of the Iranian reality today: how to restrain and ultimately neutralize Mr. Hyde without killing Dr. Jekyll or turning him into an enemy? The starting point should be the choice of vocabulary. When we oppose the export of terror we must make it clear that it is the Islamic Republic, and not Iran, that is doing the exporting. President Clinton’s first secretary of state, Warren Christopher, called Iran a terrorist nation. He would have been correct had he said that the Islamic Republic was a terrorist regime. His successor, Madeleine Albright, called Iran a rogue nation; again, a rogue regime would have been the apt expression. President George W. Bush recognized the subtle, but vital, distinction by constantly saying that he and the people of the United States had no problem with Iran as a nation. Bush underlined the theme by sending special messages to the people of Iran on the occasion of now-Ruz, the Iranian new Year, which coincides with the spring equinox.

  Lobbyists for the mullahs, and incurable anti-Americans who share the Khomeinist hatred of the United States, make a point of using Iran to mask the ugly face of the fascist regime. One typical example was an op-ed written by the former Islamic Republic ambassador to the United nations for the New York Times. He described himself as “Iran’s ambassador” and made sure that the term “Islamic Republic” was never mentioned. He made no reference to Ahmadinejad, as if he did not exist. He wanted the Times’ readers to gain the impression that there was no such thing as an Islamic Republic; there was only Iran, a soft and reassuring concept. The American linguist noam Chomsky and the French neofascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, two defenders of the Khomeinist regime in the West, never refer to the Islamic Republic. They talk of Iran, a heroic Third World nation standing up to “American imperialism.” The word “Iran” generally evokes pleasant images: beautiful carpets, Persian miniatures, aristocratic cats, golden caviar, the roses of Isfahan, and persimmons, peaches, and pistachios. Those with a wider general knowledge would think of the poets Rumi, Omar Khayyam, and Hafez, and of Cyrus the Great, the first major defender of human rights in history. Others may think of the splendors of Persepolis and Susa, and the glories of ancient and/or Safavid Iran. The term “Islamic Republic,” on the other hand, recalls hostage-taking, terrorist operations, crowds chanting “Death to America,” and mullahs stoning women to death. Today, the two images come together. In policymaking, however, it is important to distinguish the two in order to discern potential friend from actual foe.

  Fellow travelers and useful idiots often tried to soften the image of the Stalinist regime by referring to the USSR as “Russia.” For Russia, too, struck sympathetic chords, at least outside countries that had suffered from its imperial expansion. Russia was the Bolshoi Ballet and Swan Lake, Pushkin and Tolstoy, borsht and blini, and, of course, Tchaikovsky and Borodin.

  President Clinton—genuinely though mistakenly sympathetic towards the Khomeinist regime—looked on the map and recognized Iran as a large country in a vital geostrategic location. He also noticed that Iranians, according to numerous polls and other studies, had a favorable opinion of Americans. Thus, he offered a “grand bargain,” which included the acknowledgement by the United States of Iran’s position as the principal regional power, something that President nixon had also done in the 1970s. Clinton did not understand that he was dealing not with Iran but with the Islamic Republic. He didn’t realize that while it was possible to deal with Iran, dealing with the Islamic Republic was an impossibility. The “grand bargain” was not to be, however. Scheduled to be unveiled during the millennium summit at the United nations in new York with an “accidental” encounter and handshake between Clinton and Khatami, it was scrapped at the last minute by the Islamic
Republic’s Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenehi, who had decided there was no point in striking a bargain with a U.S. president on the point of leaving office. Clinton was left pacing the corridors of the Un, waiting in vain for his “accidental” meeting.

  Initially, the administration of President George W. Bush was inclined to ignore the Islamic Republic—a “tar-baby” that if touched would bring only grief. But the attacks of 9/11, followed by the U.S. campaign to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, inevitably moved the Islamic Republic closer to the center of White House attention. By an accident of history, the mullahs actually shared Bush’s objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq, since both the Taliban and the Baath movement were sworn enemies of the Islamic Republic. For a few months, Tehran and Washington conducted bilateral talks and even cooperated on the ground in Afghanistan. Soon, however, it became clear that they held diametrically opposed visions of the future of the Middle East.

  Bush had concluded that the terrorist attacks on the United States had flowed out of six decades of American support for a Middle East status quo dominated by reactionary and often despotic regimes. To ensure its own safety, America now had to help democratize the region. The Islamic Republic, by contrast, saw the elimination of its two principal regional enemies as a “gift from Allah” and an opportunity to advance its own, contrary vision of the Middle East as the emergent core of a radical Islamist superpower under Khomeinist leadership. Still, throughout its first term, the Bush administration did its best to skirt the Iran issue, despite occasional rhetorical outbursts like the president’s linkage of the Islamic Republic with Iraq and north Korea in an “axis of evil.” When asked about the administration’s Iran policy, officials would respond that there was a policy, only it was not on paper. By the start of the second term, the Bush administration had identified the Islamic Republic as a principal obstacle to the president’s policy of democratization. By now, indeed, Tehran had become actively engaged in undermining the U.S. position in both Afghanistan and Iraq, while creating radical Shiite networks to exert pressure on such American allies as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain. nor was that all: the Islamic Republic was gaining influence over radical Palestinian groups, including Islamic Jihad and Hamas, by supplying them with funds and weapons. Khomeinism was recognized as a transnational movement whose interests did not always coincide with those of Iran as a nation-state.