by Amir Taheri
30
A Heaving Volcano
If many of the preconditions for regime change are in place, is the time right? To this, too, the answer is yes. Again without underestimating the power of the mullahs, the truth is that Iran today, far from being the island of calm portrayed in some leading American newspapers, is more nearly like a heaving volcano, ready to explode. This does not mean that the regime is going to collapse anytime soon or that the current economic crisis is sounding its death toll. What it means is that the Khomeinist regime has become overthrowable, something that it was not in the first two decades of its existence. But even overthrowable regimes do not fall on their own; someone must overthrow them.
In the words of Muhammad-Mahdi Pour-Fatemi, a member of the Islamic Majlis, Iran today is passing through “the deepest crisis our nation has experienced in decades.” Because of “policies that have produced nothing but grief for our nation,” Pour-Fatemi has courageously said, “the Islamic Republic today is isolated.” The fall in value of the Iranian currency—despite rising oil revenues—and the massive increase in the rate of unemployment over the past two years signal an economic crisis already heralded by double-digit inflation. In some cases, the government has been unable to pay its employees—including the protesting teachers—on time. In 2006 and 2007, it faced difficulty financing over half its projects, forcing hundreds of private contractors into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, fear of an international crisis over the nuclear issue, and the possibility of even more biting sanctions imposed by the United nations and/or the United States, have put a damper on the economy’s only buoyant sector: real estate. According to Ayatollah Shahroudi, the regime’s chief justice, the flight of capital from the Islamic Republic, which started as a hemorrhage, has been transformed in the past two years into “a flood.”
It is not only on the economic front or in his confrontations with labor unions and women’s and student organizations that Ahmadinejad is coming under pressure. As noted above, his regime also faces growing ethnic unrest that has led to bloodshed in provinces with non-Persian majorities: the Kurds in the west, the Arabs in the south, and the Baluch in the southeast, among others. Over the past eighteen months, hundreds of people have been killed in clashes with the central security forces. Dozens of ethnic leaders have been executed, thousands have been put under arrest, and many more have been driven into exile in Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. So uncertain is the security situation in the affected areas that Ahmadinejad has been forced to cancel planned visits to eight of the nation’s thirty provinces.
In an effort to terrorize the people, the regime has ordered a dramatic increase in the number of executions, mostly by hanging in public. In 2007 alone, over 400 people were executed, while at least 150 more, including five women, were scheduled to be hanged or stoned to death, according to Saeed Mortazavi, the chief Islamic prosecutor.
The current wave of executions is the biggest Iran has suffered since 1984, when thousands of opposition prisoners were shot on Khomeini’s orders. not all executions take place in public. In the provinces of Kurdistan and Khuzestan, where ethnic Kurdish and Arab minorities are demanding greater rights, several activists have been put to death in secret, their families informed only days after the event. The campaign of terror also includes targeted “disappearances” designed to neutralize trade union leaders, student activists, journalists, and even mullahs opposed to the regime. According to the latest tally, more than thirty people have “disappeared” since the start of the new Iranian year on March 21. To intimidate the population, in 2007 the authorities also carried out mass arrests on spurious grounds. According to General Ismail Muqaddam, commander of the Islamic Police, a total of 430,000 men and women have been arrested on charges related to drug use. A further 4,209 men and women, mostly between ages fifteen and thirty, were arrested for “hooliganism” in Tehran alone. The largest number of arrests, totaling almost a million men and women according to Muqaddam, were related to the enforcement of the new Islamic Dress Code, passed by the Islamic Majlis in May 2006. Most of those arrested, he says, spent a few hours, or at most a few days, in custody as a “warning.” According to the deputy chief of police, General Hussein Zulfiqari, an additional 6,204 men and women were in prison on charges of “sexual proximity” without being married.
The wave of arrests has increased pressure on the nation’s inadequate prison facilities. At a press conference in Tehran in 2007, the head of the national Prisons Service, Ali-Akbar Yassaqi, appealed for a moratorium on arrests. He said Iran’s official prisons could not house more than 50,000 prisoners simultaneously, while the actual number of prisoners at any given time was above 150,000. Yassaqi also revealed that each year on average some 600,000 Iranians spend some time in one of the 130 official prisons. Since Ahmadinejad ordered the crackdown, work on converting forty-one official buildings to prisons has started, with contracts for thirty-three other prisons already signed. nevertheless, with the annual prison population likely to top the million mark in 2008, Yassaqi believes that even this new capacity might prove insufficient. There are, however, an unknown number of unofficial prisons as well, often controlled by the IRGC or militias working for various prominent mullahs. In 2008, human rights activists in Iran published details of a new prison in Souleh, northwest of Tehran, staffed by militants from the Lebanese branch of Hezballah. According to the revelations, the Souleh prison is under the control of the Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenehi, and is used for holding the regime’s most “dangerous” political foes.
The nationwide crackdown is accompanied by efforts to cut Iranians off from sources of information outside the Islamic Republic. More than four thousand Internet sites have been blocked, and more are added to the list each day. The Ministry of Islamic Orientation has established a new blacklist of authors and book titles twice as long as the one in effect a year ago. In 2007, some thirty newspapers and magazines as well as two news agencies were shut down and their offices raided. At least seventeen journalists were in prison, two already sentenced to death by hanging.
The regime is trying to mobilize its shrinking base by claiming that the Islamic Republic is under threat from internal and external foes. It was in that context that the four Iranian-American hostages held in Tehran were forced to make televised “confessions” about alleged plots to foment a “velvet revolution.” In 2007, over forty people were arrested on charges of espionage, twenty in the southern city of Shiraz. Khomeinist paranoia reached a new peak when the authorities announced, through the Islamic Republic news Agency, the capture of four squirrels in the Western city of Kermanshah and claimed that the furry creatures had been fitted with “espionage devices” by the Americans in Iraq and smuggled into Iran.
Ahmadinejad likes to pretend that he has no worries except “infidel plots” related to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. The truth is that, faced with growing popular discontent, the Khomeinist clique is vulnerable and worried—extremely worried. The outside world would do well to monitor carefully and, whenever possible, support the Iranian people’s fight against the fascist regime in Tehran. Iran today is not only about atomic bombs and Iranian-American hostages. It is also about a growing popular movement that may help bring the nation out of the dangerous impasse created by the mullahs.
Since his election Ahmadinejad has been desperate to provoke a mini conflict with the United States in order to divert attention from the gathering storm inside Iran. He is trying to position himself as the leader of the non-Aligned Movement, in the hope of creating an alliance of all the anti-American and antidemocratic forces in the world, including those in the West itself. His strategy is premised on the assumption that the West has no stomach for a real fight, and that the worst that could happen to his regime is a few attacks on its nuclear sites—something that would have the advantage of shifting the focus from his domestic problems and bestowing on his regime a veneer of victimhood. Most of all, he is hoping that the next American president will revert to the confused
policies pursued by previous U.S. administrations.
In his address to the Un General Assembly in September 2006, President Bush showed unmistakably that he understands the desire of the people of Iran for freedom and self-determination. If that is the vision, the best way to proceed towards implementing it is to remain guided always by the recognition that the Islamic Republic is evil because its nature is evil—and that, although its behavior may intermittently be influenced, ultimately the regime itself must be defeated and replaced. With a clear compass, the litmus test for any particular policy towards Iran will likewise be clear: does this activity, program, or initiative help or hinder regime change? Under this general guideline, any number of specific policies can be envisioned, some of them already in place. For instance, the adoption of a regime-change strategy does not preclude American participation in diplomatic initiatives focused on particular issues, such as the efforts to engage the Islamic Republic in the matter of its nuclear ambitions. But the crucial criterion is that process must not be allowed to become a substitute for policy. In the hope of winning concessions from the mullahs, the three EU partners in the talks—Germany, France, and the UK—have chosen to ignore the question of the sanctions already envisaged under the nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty for the regime’s repeated violations of its provisions; the United States, by contrast, can and should press for their application.
Flexibility is also key. no one knows for sure how long it will take the Islamic Republic to develop or deploy a serious arsenal of nuclear weapons. Just as diplomacy need not be ruled out on this and other issues, the military option should also remain on the table. Just as tactics of containment and even of détente need not be ruled out when and if they seem clearly designed to hasten regime change, neither should tactics aimed at rollback.
Like a pair of angry cats contesting the same space, Iran and the United States have been frowning and making warlike gestures over who should set the agenda in the Middle East for a quarter of a century. At some point, the two cats must jump at one another. In a sense, as we have already shown the two have been at war since 1979 when Khomeinist militants raided the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took its diplomats hostage. The question, therefore, is not whether to go to war, but how to end a war that has been going on for three decades.
Since Ahmadinejad’s election, the Islamic Republic has been preparing for another high point in its protracted war. Tehran has intensified the arming of Hezballah, renewed contacts with Shiite militants in Arab states, and increased its military budget by 21 percent. It also resumed uranium enrichment to put its controversial nuclear program into high gear, thus provoking a diplomatic tussle with the United States and its allies. In Afghanistan, Iran reactivated Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb Islami militia, shipped arms to the Is’haqzai Pushtun tribe, and helped Hazara Shiites raise an army of 12,000. Iran also opened its borders to fleeing Taliban and al-Qaeda militants. According to Arab intelligence sources, some thirty senior “Arab Afghans” are in Iran. To exert pressure on another U.S. ally, Iran has shipped arms to Baluchi rebels in Pakistan, including Marri tribesmen led by nawab Khair-Baksh. next, Tehran established contact with Palestinian radicals, notably Hamas, feting its leaders in Tehran and providing aid worth $500 million. Last year’s capture of Iranian military advisors in Gaza shows that Tehran was also involved in training Palestinian fighters. In the summer of 2006, Tehran fought a proxy war against Washington in Lebanon, as Israel, the United States’ regional ally, dueled with Hezballah, the Islamic Republic’s cat’s-paw in the Arab world. A month before the war, Tehran had signed a defense treaty with Syria, turning it into a client state. In April and May 2008, Tehran, again using Hezballah, organized a political coup against the pro-Western government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora in Lebanon. The conflict ended with Hezballah gaining an effective veto on government decisions, while two Un resolutions demanding that the Shiite militia be disarmed were put on the back burner.
Since 2006, however, Iraq has become the principal battleground in the indirect war between the Khomeinist regime and the United States. Tehran strategists assume that if the Americans run away, Iraq will be divided into three mini states: Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite. Invoking the nineteenth-century Treaty of Erzerum, which gives Iran certain rights in Iraq’s Shiite areas, Tehran hopes to play “big brother” to a future mini state in southern Iraq. The list of U.S. accusations against Tehran includes:
• Supplying Iraqi militants with roadside bombs, known as explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), which have killed at least 170 U.S. soldiers and maimed over 600 others.
• Supplying Iraqi insurgents, both Sunni and Shiite, with sniper rifles bought by Iran from Austria in 2002.
• Recruiting, training, and financing a number of Iraqi Shiite militias, notably the Mahdi Army, led by Moqtada Sadr.
• Setting up command-and-control networks to coordinate insurgent attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. Seventy-eight members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and security services have been arrested in Iraq, including seven senior officers captured in raids in Erbil and Baghdad. Among them were Muhsin Shirazi and Muhammad-Jaafar Sahraroudi, who have been in charge of pro-Iran militant groups abroad since the 1980s.
• Offering safe haven to anti-U.S. militants, including Jamal Jaafar-Muhammad, a member of the Iraqi national Assembly who coordinated the smuggling of EFPs into Iraq. Moqtada Sadr is also in Iran along with Abu-Hamza, a leader of al-Qaeda, and Ramadan al-Shalah, leader of the Islamic Jihad Organization.
The Islamic Republic cannot allow the imposition of a Pax Americana in which Khomeinism could have no place. The United States, for its part, cannot allow its Khomeinist foes to dominate a region that contains half the world’s oil and gas reserves. The conventional wisdom is that with the U.S. Army bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington cannot wage full-scale war against the Islamic Republic. This ignores the fact that the U.S. navy and Air Force remain fully free and ready for action. In any case, the choice is not limited to either invading Iran or surrendering to the mullahs. Between the two, a range of options is available. Some are already being used. These include moves known in military jargon as “proximity pressure.” In 2007, President Bush changed the rules of engagement in Iraq to allow U.S. forces to capture or kill Khomeinist infiltrators. The arrival of two naval battle groups in the Persian Gulf soon afterwards represented the biggest concentration of firepower there since 1990. These could take out the Islamic Revolutionary Guards positions close to or along the Persian Gulf, including key strategic assets like the bases in Dezful, Bushehr, Bandar Abbas, the Jask Peninsula, and Konarak. The Islamic Republic’s nuclear installations in Klardasht, Arak, Tehran, natanz, and Isfahan, along with the uranium mines of Bafq and Sarcheshmeh, could also be destroyed, postponing the emergence of the Khomeinist regime as a nuclear power by years. Other targets include the bases and headquarters of the so-called Quds (Jerusalem) Corps that Tehran uses for “exporting revolution.” Located in western Iran, close to Iraq, these could be taken out with a combination of air attacks and ground commando raids.
Such moves by the United States would face the Khomeinist leadership with a tough choice: whether to retaliate, thus provoking a full-scale war. The Islamic Republic could retaliate by using its Lebanese and Palestinian clients for attacks against Israel. It could also organize terror operations in several Arab states and in Europe, while making life harder for NATO in Afghanistan. Escalation, however, would provide Washington with the excuse to hit the command-and-control structures of the Khomeinist regime, including in Tehran itself. The idea is to show the Khomeinists that asymmetric warfare is a game that two can play, and that they, too, could end up having a dose of their own medicine.
Every time it has met something hard in its way, the Khomeinist regime has stopped or even backtracked. This is why the worst way to deal with it is through flattery and appeasement. In dealing with this dangerous enemy of democracy, the United States and other modern democra
cies should have the courage of their convictions. Remaining committed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and to promoting peace and democratization in the greater Middle East, are the surest means of preparing the ground for a strategic political defeat of Khomeinism, which is as doomed to destruction as were Communism, fascism, and pan-Arabism in their times.
Above all, the United States should be resolutely on the side of the Iranian people, as President Bush has repeatedly stated, including messages delivered on the Iranian new Year.. Programmatically, two things are needed here: assuring Iranians in no uncertain terms that the United States will never endorse or grant legitimacy to the current despotic regime, and helping to expose the Islamic Republic’s repressive policies, human rights violations, rampant corruption, and wanton subsidization of some of the worst terror groups on the face of the earth. More important and ultimately perhaps more effective is for the United States to use its immense bully pulpit to publicize the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom.
Ahmadinejad’s strategy is based on two assumptions, one about going, the other about coming. The one about going is built around the belief that the next U.S. administration will abandon America’s traditional positions in the Middle East, not to mention the victories won in Afghanistan and Iraq. The assumption about coming feeds on the illusion of the Mahdi’s return.1 In the spring of 2008, however, there was no evidence that the Americans were going or that the Mahdi was coming. A more robust and coordinated American posture on the economic, diplomatic, political, and moral fronts would create forceful pressure on the current leadership and inspire new courage in its opponents.