The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution

by Amir Taheri

  By contrast, in opting for regime change, the United States would send a strong signal to the democratic movement inside Iran, as well as throughout the Middle East, that the Bush Doctrine remains intact and that the Khomeinist movement is doomed. Such a policy would also encourage Iran’s neighbors, and other powers concerned about aggressive Khomeinism, to resist the political and diplomatic démarches of the Islamic Republic without fear of being caught out by a surprise deal between Tehran and Washington. European, Russian, and Chinese officials tell us that while they know that the Islamic Republic is a danger to everyone, they also take two points into consideration. The first is that if the Islamic Republic really runs out of control and embarks on some major mischief, the United States and/or Israel will deal with it. Thus others need do nothing but wait and watch and, when possible, profit from doing business with the Khomeinist regime. The second consideration is that any attempt at undermining the Khomeinist regime might be suddenly disrupted by a deal between Tehran and Washington. A U.S. commitment to regime change in Tehran would send a clear signal that no such surprises would be possible. It would also convince others that doing business with the Khomeinists might not be all that profitable after all.

  In the United States itself, a policy of regime change vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic would have the immense advantage of moral and political clarity. If backed by the requisite political will, it could open the way for a truly bipartisan approach to dealing with a regime now identified as the United States’ most determined and potentially dangerous adversary in the region. For it is hard to imagine a democratic and pro-Western Middle East being built without Iran, the largest piece in any emerging jigsaw puzzle. nor could U.S. victories in Afghanistan and Iraq be consolidated without change in Iran, or meaningful progress be made towards resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict as long as the Khomeinist regime is determined to pursue its “wipe-Israel-off-the-map” strategy. Abroad, a U.S. policy of regime change would give heart to all those who are rightly worried by the alliance that Ahmadinejad is trying to build with thugs and lunatics like north Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and the Castro brothers in Cuba. Ahmadinejad has also talked of a Tehran-Moscow-Beijing axis to confront the United States. He has attended the summit of the Shanghai Group—composed of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan—as a guest, and applied for full membership. More importantly, today, Tehran is the ideological capital of international terrorism, with more than sixty groups from all continents gathering there each February for a global terror-fest. A triumphant Ahmadinejad, armed with nuclear weapons, would only boost the international terrorist movement, thus further undermining the security of the United States and its allies. This alone is a powerful argument for regime change.

  Some might object: even granting the virtue of the idea, how realistic is regime change in Iran? Can it happen? The short answer is yes. Without underestimating the power still held by the mullahs over the Iranian people, let alone their ability to wreak havoc in places near and far, a number of factors suggest that, like other revolutionary regimes before them, their condition is more fragile than may at first appear.

  The Islamic Republic is one of those cause-stricken regimes that cannot stop unless they are stopped. Ahmadinejad himself has described it as “a train without brakes”; it has to surge ahead until it hits something hard in its path. The Fascist and nazi regimes of Italy and Germany came to an end when they hit something hard in their way. The same happened to the militarist regime in Japan. nasser’s regime in Egypt came to a close when it, too, hit something hard in 1967. In a sense, even the collapse of the USSR was in part due to its military defeat in Afghanistan combined with unprecedented firmness on the part of Moscow’s American adversaries.

  Khomeini was not the first mullah to seize control of a community and use its resources for war and oppression in the name of a messianic mission. In the nineteenth century, the Akhund of Swat, in the tribal mountains of what is now Pakistan, fought the British and the local emirs for a generation. Mullah Hassan, labeled the “Mad Mullah,” in the Horn of Africa and the self-styled “Mahdi” in Sudan featured in similar versions of “jihad against the infidel.” In every case, their enemies, including the British, tried all variations possible on appeasement, and failed. To the illusion-stricken mullahs, any suggestion of negotiations and compromise sounded like an admission of guilt and weakness by the infidels. We have seen the latest illustration of this in Afghanistan, where the Taliban under Mullah Muhammad Omar proved unable to make the slightest concession even to save their regime. The Taliban foreign minister Mullah Ahmad Wakil Mutuwakkil described Osama bin Laden as “a chicken bone stuck in our throats,” but he was categorical that his regime could not agree to extradite bin Laden even for an Islamic trial by judges in his native Saudi Arabia. Remembering Bill Richardson’s “begging posture” at Kandahar, Mullah Mutuwakkil was convinced that the United States would have “no stomach for a war.”2

  In 1979, at the start of the Khomeinist regime, the ayatollah feared hostile action on the part of the United States. That fear was one reason he was prompted to wear a reassuring mask by appointing the pro-American Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister. The ayatollah dispatched Bazargan for a meeting with Brzezinski to reassure the Carter administration. But then came the raid on the U.S. embassy, and Washington reacted with attempts at appeasement. This only encouraged the more radical elements in the Khomeinist ruling clique, and within months almost all moderate elements were purged.

  When Reagan became president, the perception of the United States in Tehran changed. Reagan not only toughened the diplomatic discourse against the Khomeinist regime but also took military action against it in 1987. The combined effect was a retreat of the radicals. The ayatollah immediately stopped disrupting Arab oil shipping in the Persian Gulf, agreed to a Un resolution to end the war with Iraq, and expelled the radical elements, then led by Prime Minister Mussavi Khamenehi, by abolishing his post altogether. American toughness helped the rise of the more moderate elements led by Rafsanjani.

  Under the first President Bush, who briefly attempted appeasement, the tide turned against the moderates in Tehran as the radicals, assured that the United States would not act against the regime, made a spectacular comeback and won control of the Islamic Majlis under Ayatollah Ali-Akbar nateq-nuri. Then came the Berlin trials that charged the Supreme Guide, the president, and two key ministers of the Islamic Republic with complicity in the murder of four Iranian Kurdish dissident leaders in Germany. Once again, the regime had bumped into something hard. It retreated by putting forward the smiling face of Muhammad Khatami as president.

  President Clinton’s attempts at appeasement also produced the opposite results as the Khomeinist establishment concluded that it could pursue its ambitions without encountering resistance. The regime speeded up its nuclear program in the face of international opposition.

  Then came the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Khomeinists feared that they may be the next target. To placate the United States, they briefly cooperated in stabilizing post-Taliban Afghanistan and also suspended uranium enrichment. Soon, however, they concluded that the United States divided against itself was in no position to take any meaningful action against them. The nuclear program was resumed with greater vigor and the regime went on the offensive throughout the region. The combined outcome of Clinton’s appeasement and Bush’s inability to develop any policy on Iran was the victory of the most radical faction of the regime under Ahmadinejad.

  Even now, another signal of appeasement from the United States under a new administration is sure to translate into a further radicalization of the Khomeinist regime. Is someone more radical than Ahmadinejad possible? The answer is yes. The Khomeinist system is programmed to retreat when it meets something hard, but to surge ahead when it encounters no barriers in its way. Thus, even if one seeks mere behavioral change, that is to say tactical concessions, from
a regime that remains a strategic foe, only a policy perceived to be aimed at regime change could produce the right impression on the Khomeinists.

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  Conditions for Regime Change

  For regime change to happen, a number of conditions must obtain. First among these is the loss of regime legitimacy. The Islamic Republic owed its initial legitimacy to the revolution of 1979. Since then, successive Khomeinist administrations have systematically dismantled the vast, multiform coalition that made the revolution possible. The Khomeinists have massacred their former leftist allies, driven their nationalist partners into exile, and purged even many Islamists from positions of power, leaving their own base fractured and attenuated.

  The regime’s early legitimacy also derived from referendums and elections held regularly since 1979. In the past two decades, however, each new election has been more “arranged” than the last, while the authoritarian habit of approving candidates in advance has become a routine part of the exercise. Many Iranians saw the presidential election of 2005, in which Ahmadinejad was declared a surprise winner, as the last straw: credited with just 12 percent of the electorate’s vote in the first round, he ended up being named the winner in the second round with an incredible 60 percent of the vote. In the parliamentary election of March 2008, voter turnout fell to 47 percent, the lowest since 1979. More significantly, perhaps, the turnout in Tehran and other major cities was below 30 percent. A triple alliance of hard-line Khomeinists won almost two-thirds of the seats in the Islamic Majlis with just 13 percent of those eligible to vote.

  Still another source of the regime’s legitimacy was its message of “social justice” and its promise to improve the lives of the poor. This, too, has been subverted by reality. Today, more than 40 percent of Iran’s seventy million people live below the poverty line, compared with 27 percent before the Khomeinists seized power. In 1977, Iran’s GDP per capita was the same as Spain’s. Today, Spain’s GDP is four times higher than Iran’s. As the gap between rich and poor has widened to an unprecedented degree, the corruption of the ruling mullahs and their ostentatious way of life have made a mockery of slogans like “Islamic solidarity.”

  A report prepared by the Welfare Organization (Sazman Behzisiti) in the Ministry of Public Health, leaked in March 2008 and widely published on the Internet, offers a devastating portrayal of life in the Islamic Republic.1 It shows that as far as life expectancy is concerned, Iran, which was in the 45th place among members of the United nations before the revolution, has dropped to the 133rd place, and the average Iranian’s life is six years shorter than in 1977. The report also speaks of “suicides reaching epidemic scale.” In 2007, there were more than 42,000 officially recorded suicides, compared with 1,612 in 1977. Before the revolution, divorce was rare in Iran and unknown in some rural areas. now, over 30 percent of all marriages end up in divorce, according to the report. The main reasons for this “epidemic of divorce” are unemployment, poverty, drug addiction and depression. The number of drug addicts is estimated at around 4.5 million, a tenfold increase over the pre-revolutionary era. A marginal phenomenon confined to big cities before the revolution, prostitution has developed into a growing industry. Tehran alone is reported to have almost half a million full-time or part-time ladies of leisure, in a total population of twelve million. In some cases, the true extent of prostitution is masked because some of it is presented as temporary marriage or mut’ah, which is regarded by the mullahs as praiseworthy. The ministry’s report warns that depression is becoming “a national disease.” It estimates that between 10 and 12 percent of the population, almost 15 million people, suffer from chronic depression. As reasons for this, the report cites “poverty, sociopolitical violence, domestic violence, unemployment, divorce, drug addiction, the feeling of lack of freedom, social disappointment, prostitution, inflation, discrimination, violation of the rights of citizenship.” The report notes: “In the past, too, our society faced similar problems. However, depression has spread much more widely in recent years. The age of depression has dropped from 27 years to 17.”

  In an implicit criticism of what it labels “a policy of denial,” the report recalls that “it took years before Iranian government leaders and officials stopped denying the existence of social ills. It was not so long ago that we were told that there was no AIDS in Iran and no prostitution, and no suicides.”2 By sending a clear message that they support regime change, the United States and other major democracies will further undermine the Khomeinist regime’s claim of legitimacy.

  Khomeinism had also sought legitimacy by claiming it would empower the poorest sections of society. Three decades after the revolution, however, it has created a new nomenklatura enjoying power and privilege unknown to its counterpart under the shah. This new class of rulers consists of mullahs and their siblings, the military, and the bazaaris allied to them. The shah’s critics claimed that a club of “a thousand families” ruled the country. Today, critics of the regime speak about a club of just “a hundred families.” The initial phase of the revolution that had allowed thousands of people from modest social backgrounds to achieve a degree of social mobility ended in the late 1980s; since then, only regime insiders have been allowed to ride the social elevator.

  A second condition for regime change is the presence of a major split within the ruling establishment itself. The list of former Khomeinists who have distanced themselves from today’s regime reads like a who’s who of the original revolutionary elite. It includes former “student” leaders who raided the U.S. embassy in 1979, former commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and dozens of former cabinet ministers and members of the Islamic Majlis. Most have adopted a passive stance vis-à-vis the regime, but a surprising number have clearly switched sides, becoming active dissidents and thereby risking imprisonment, exile, or even death. Any decline in the regime’s international stature could deepen this split within the establishment, helping to isolate the most hard-line Khomeinists.

  Here, one might apply what could be labeled the “Yeltsin test,” after the first president of post-Communist Russia. At some point in the late 1980s, Boris Yeltsin, who had been a top Communist apparatchik and Politburo member, realized that the Soviet system could not be reformed. After the so-called August coup against Gorbachev, Yeltsin decided it was time to come out of the closet, so to speak, and publicly announce what he had believed in private for some time: that the only way forward was regime change. In a historic address to the Russian nation, Yeltsin described the Bolshevik Revolution as a catastrophe and invited his people to build a free society.

  Applying the Yeltsin test to Khomeinist leaders is not easy, if only because most dare not speak their mind for fear of assassination. nevertheless, it is clear that many figures within the establishment have concluded, at least in private, that only regime change could save Iran from its present crisis and greater catastrophes. Among those who might pass the Yeltsin test and who are still in Iran are Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri; Ayatollah Abdallah nuri, a former interior minister; Ayatollah Mohsen Kadivar, a former parliamentarian; Hashem Aghjari, a former IRGC member; and Emadeddin Baqi, a prominent ex-Khomeinist writer and preacher. There are others who have understood the lesson of Yeltsin but lack the courage, or perhaps the wisdom, to come into the open.

  Still others have succumbed to despair about a revolution for which they gave so much only to observe with horror the tragedy it has created for Iran. Some have withdrawn from public life, or even gone into exile. A few have destroyed their lives with drugs and alcohol. Cafes in Paris’s Left Bank are still full of aging, sometimes derelict Iranian revolutionaries including former high officials of the Khomeinist regime, trying to drown their chagrin in cheap wine and nostalgia. Their endless talk hovers around “what we dreamed of, and what we created.” Some are in touch with internal dissidents and still hope to save the revolution, not knowing that the revolution’s worst enemy is itself.

  The principal theme of internal diss
idents is the need for the secularization of the political system, chiefly by abolishing the concept of walayat e faqih or rule by a single theologian. According to President Khatami, speaking in 2005, “Those who preach secularization seek the destruction of our Islamic system. Whatever we do, we must make sure that religion remains paramount in all aspects of life.” That speech marked a break between Khatami and small but influential circles of intellectuals who, while remaining within the regime, advocate some measure of secularization in the hope of leading the Khomeinist system out of impasse. To be sure, secularization in the current Iranian context does not mean anything like the “separation of church and state” in the West or the Kemalist enterprise in Turkey. In the Iranian context secularization has a more limited meaning and more modest ambitions.

  Iranian secularization appeared in its earliest version in the last years of the nineteenth century and grew to play a role in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. In what may look like an intellectual sleight of hand, Iranian secularists proposed that political power be looked at from two angles. The first concerned the origin of power. They had no difficulty admitting that power was of divine origin, which bestowed on it a certain dignity that, they hoped, would protect it against abuse by ambitious individuals and groups in pursuit of selfish goals. The second angle concerned the exercise of power, in other words its practical reality. Here, Iranian secularists emphasized the human rather than the divine aspect. While power in itself was noble because divine, its exercise by humans could involve ignoble deeds.