by Hooman Majd
His sermon presented a somewhat softer line than the Supreme Leader would take, but it was not completely off message. The Leader himself, after all, had said, with respect to President Obama’s New Year message to Iran and Iranians, one in which Obama had praised Iranian culture, that “if the U.S. changes, then Iran will change too.” Obama’s optimistic words about the future of U.S.-Iran relations, “it is a future where the old divisions are overcome,” were met cautiously by Iranian authorities. But Iranians, and mullahs in particular, are masters of rhetoric, and from their perspective it is not Iran that has the clenched fist (for Iran has never in their minds threatened the United States) that President Obama had spoken of in his inaugural address, but rather the United States, with its threats of military action and with its troops and navy surrounding Iran, to say nothing of the unilateral sanctions and the other pressures the United States has brought to bear on the Islamic Republic. To paraphrase Jerry McGuire in the 1996 movie of the same name, what Sadoughi and the other clerics seemed to be saying to President Obama in the early days of his presidency was that you can’t out-rhetoric the masters of rhetoric, so “show us the rials.”
Moving on, Sadoughi then described Israel in far less inflammatory language than Ahmadinejad used at the conference in Geneva a few days earlier. Sadoughi nonetheless defended the Iranian president he is opposed to, and chided the Western participants at the conference (parroting the pragmatist and centrist former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, who made a similar speech at prayers that day in Tehran), who “allegedly are against racism and are defenders of free speech,” for their hypocrisy in walking out on the Iranian president’s talk, thereby insulting not only him but the “Iranian nation.” The Friday prayer leader will not stray too far from the Supreme Leader’s stated views (and his instructions on the content of his weekly address, which are faxed to Imams Jomeh offices across the country the night before), but Sadoughi’s description of the Ahmadinejad imbroglio before the election controversy is a perfect example of Western lack of understanding of the Iranian psyche. Whether we like it or not, the majority of Iranians, both conservative and liberal, indeed most in the Muslim world, generally agree with the sentiments Ahmadinejad has often expressed regarding Israel (except perhaps for his frequent questioning of the Holocaust), but most would prefer that he express them in more polite language, if at all. This was a subject of fierce debate in the presidential campaign a few weeks later. (The length of Iranian presidential campaigns is limited by law to four weeks, but they can begin unofficially a few weeks earlier.) Indeed, a day after Ahmadinejad returned to Iran from Geneva, Sadeq Kharrazi, a senior official in the Khatami administration and a staunch reformist (and main author of the 2003 offer to the Bush administration to enter into negotiations), wrote on his website that what Ahmadinejad had said was nothing new and merely an affirmation of the Islamic Republic’s thirty-year stance toward Israel. He admonished Ahmadinejad instead for attending the conference in the first place (and the Foreign Ministry for its ill advice), thereby embarrassing Iran as the only country that sent its head of state to a lower-level meeting, and for subjecting Iran to wide ridicule with his choice of venue and words.
Beyond relatively respectful criticism of Ahmadinejad, though, privately some ordinarily judicious and influential Iranians whispered to me that they were becoming more and more convinced that Ahmadinejad had to be an Israeli agent, perhaps a sleeper Mossad man recruited long ago and activated before he became president. Why? Apart from the obvious benefit to Israel of almost all of his unnecessary rhetoric, from the Holocaust to belligerent cartographic questions, they said, his speech at the UN conference was a gift to Israeli public relations. Before the conference, Israel was under severe criticism from even its allies in the West (and certainly the media) for the siege of Gaza, and Ahmadinejad in one fell swoop removed the issue of Gaza from the Middle East discourse, for the time being anyway, something Israeli propaganda had been unable to do. A collective sigh of relief, some Iranians suggested, must have been audible in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Not satisfied with merely having given the obligatory reading of the days’ events from the point of view of the clergy (and the Supreme Leader), Sadoughi also found time before leading the prayers to criticize the government, in this case for failing to ensure that Iranian pilgrims traveling to Iraq were adequately warned or protected from danger, for a large number of them were killed the day before in a suicide bombing near Baghdad. (Hundreds of Iranians—the most pious Shia Iranians, who form the backbone of support for the Islamic Republic—have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, usually by roadside bombs or suicide bombers, a fact rarely mentioned when Iran is accused of being behind some of those suicide attacks or the manufacturer and exporter of the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.) And never missing an opportunity to criticize the United States too, Sadoughi mocked the invasion of Iraq “in the name of bringing freedom to the Iraqis.” However, unlike past Friday prayers and prayers in Tehran, there were no chants of “Death to America” or “Death to Israel” at the end of his speech, not even half-hearted ones. Yazd, it seems, had moved on.
A city smack dab in the middle of Iran on the ancient silk route, Yazd is a place where Iranian politesse takes on extreme forms (and even comical ones, such as when I was boarding my flight from Tehran and a bottleneck was created at the aircraft doors, not because of the large crowd squeezing in, but because men with heavy Yazdi accents simply refused to board ahead of their companions, much to the bemusement of a large group of tourists). As a reminder of the political conflicts that exist in Iran, but that were less obvious in the days before the presidential election, a number of hard-liners (thankfully in the minority that day) attending the Friday prayers approached Sadoughi as he made his way to his car after his sermon and they demanded to know, rather rudely, why he hadn’t defended the president more forcefully. Sadoughi, not one to be intimidated, responded that he had disagreed with Ahmadinejad’s decision to attend the conference at all, and as such, any defense of him was perhaps too generous on his part. With that, he hurried into his waiting car, asked me if I wanted to join him on a trip to Ardakan (which I politely declined), and sped off with his guards. I was directed to another waiting car, driven by a university professor who was a friend of the family’s, and I sat in the passenger seat. A Revolutionary Guardsman jumped in the back for a ride to the Imam Jomeh’s compound, and he casually threw the Kalashnikov rifle on the seat next to him. It was the safest ride in town, I thought, but I still wondered if MOIS agents were following somewhere behind.
THAT SPRING DAY in Yazd had been one of not only affirmation but also discomfit. Affirmation that despite the sometimes heavy and clenched fist of the theocracy, to borrow President Obama’s phrase, Iran’s experiment in democracy, or at least an Islamic democracy, was still alive and well. The Supreme Leader supported a cleric openly in disagreement with his government. The cleric had fearlessly confronted the government’s supporters, and the upcoming presidential election still promised to affirm that the republican aspect of the Islamic Republic was as powerful as the theological one.
At the same time, it was discomfiting because there were signs that the state apparatus under President Ahmadinejad, an apparatus created and supported by the more radical and extreme clerics, was becoming more onerous. It wasn’t just young Mohammad Sadoughi’s unease in the morning during our tea, but his later afternoon confession to me that he had had doubts about his seminary training in Qom. The only son of an Imam Jomeh, the grandson of an Ayatollah who was martyred in his presence (assassinated by a suicide bomber at the Molla Esmail Mosque in the early days of the revolution), he had felt an obligation to enter the clergy from an early age. He had faithfully studied at a seminary while also studying at university, but he told me that during the presidency of Ahmadinejad (ironically, a layman after successive mullah presidents), the “hezbollahi” contingent had been bullying seminary teachers and students ali
ke to “follow their line,” and they were squeezing out the independent thinkers and intimidating students who wished to further their study of Islamic law and theology but not necessarily politics. In Iran, Hezbollah, or “Party of God,” now known in the West more as the name of the Shia political and military organization in Lebanon (itself a creation of the Islamic Republic), has always meant, particularly when used as hezbollahi (Hezbollah-like, or belonging to Hezbollah), a person with a certain kind of radical Islamic philosophy, a political philosophy that some in the Shia clerical community, whether “quietist” (for non-involvement in politics) or just moderate, are at odds with. (It is another paradox that while in Iran many use the term “hezbollahi” disparagingly, even those who do, tend to support Lebanese Hezbollah in their goals and tactics.)
DESPITE MY SLIGHT discomfort at hearing a pessimistic view of a resurgent authoritarianism under the presidency of Ahmadinejad, and about his brand of politics having penetrated the mosques and seminaries, I nonetheless remained optimistic as I headed back to Tehran that fine late spring day. Ahmadinejad, after all, had been elected with a large majority in 2005, and if he, like our very own President Bush, had tried to stifle dissent, even resort to extra-legal methods during his presidency, then the voters who had put him in office would either reward or punish him on June 12, depending on their opinion of his record. Not that I was particularly optimistic that punishment would be his fate, for six weeks before the election the opposition appeared to be in disarray. But like the 2004 election in the United States, if the voters returned Ahmadinejad to the address on Pasteur Avenue (the presidential compound), then at least the democratic process worked, even if I wasn’t happy with the results.
At the home of Sadeq Kharrazi one evening a few days later, I tried to understand why, with so much talk about the failure of Ahmadinejad to provide even modest economic benefits to his base, the working class, the opposition was not yet able to mount any serious challenge to him. Sadeq explained, in the very Persian way of dealing with hard numbers rather than percentages when it came to political support, how Ahmadinejad still had a lock on the presidency. “He has ten to twelve million solid supporters—there can be no doubt about that. If twenty-five million go to the polls [and six weeks before the election it appeared that the turnout would be low because of general apathy toward the opposition candidates], then in a multi-candidate field he has the majority. As it is now, we will be guests of Mr. Ahmadinejad for another four years.” Sadeq was a strong supporter and close confidant of former president Khatami; he and other reformists had urged Khatami to run again as the only candidate who stood a chance of defeating Ahmadinejad, something Khatami reluctantly agreed to in February 2009, only to back out a month later when Mousavi announced his own candidacy.
Khatami had been put in an awkward position: he had, from the year before, when reformists and opponents of Ahmadinejad prevailed on him to run, maintained that the best reform candidate would be the former prime minister Mousavi, and that if he would run, then Khatami would see no reason to be in the race himself. Mousavi had consistently refused to run for office, and as far as the reformists were concerned, he had taken himself out of consideration by the time Khatami announced his candidacy. The day Mousavi changed his mind and announced his candidacy, after Khatami had already begun campaigning, some of Khatami’s supporters felt betrayed, but there seemed to be a method to the madness. Khatami told me that he had had a meeting with Mousavi before he bowed out, wanting to make sure that Mousavi intended to stay in the race and not drop out at the last minute as a strategy to put pressure on Ahmadinejad right up until the end, a strategy that could have been brilliant but also carried risks. Pressuring Ahmadinejad with multiple challengers who could appeal to different constituencies, only to have all those challengers unite before the vote, could have drawn support away from the incumbent, but it also could fracture the opposition irreparably, particularly if rival reform candidates turned on each other, as candidates do in American primaries, in order to court support. Mousavi assured Khatami that he indeed was in the race to win, and he felt that if Khatami withdrew and supported him, he would have a strong chance of defeating Ahmadinejad.
Rumors flew around Tehran as the news of Mousavi’s candidacy and Khatami’s withdrawal was made public. One rumor that gained favor was that the Supreme Leader—uncomfortable with Khatami’s popularity and his early campaign successes, indicating that he very well might defeat the Leader’s protégé Ahmadinejad—had prevailed on Khatami to withdraw. That was untrue, for although the Supreme Leader didn’t personally approve of another Khatami presidency (much as he didn’t approve of another Rafsanjani presidency in 2005), he had not yet, in early 2009, jumped into the fray of factional politics; he continued to maintain a position of indifference, at least publicly and even to the candidates, when it came to who might challenge the sitting president. The other rumor, which was likelier true but which circulated only among certain political operatives, was that Ali Larijani, the speaker of Parliament and a close associate of the Supreme Leader, had pressured Mousavi to run in the knowledge that if he accepted, Khatami would knock himself out of the race. Larijani, who had commented that Khatami’s candidacy was “a good thing” when it was announced, had also seen signs that Khatami might actually win and sensed that the top leadership of the Revolutionary Guards and other hard-line conservatives were threatening to prevent another Khatami presidency at all costs (which presumably meant manipulating the vote, or worse, if necessary).
Conservatives were worried about Khatami for many reasons, but mostly, and ironically, because of the precedent that Ahmadinejad had set with respect to the power of the presidency. Until Ahmadinejad was elected, no Iranian president had actually acted with the authority of a president, in other words, acted as the “decider,” as George Bush was once fond of saying. Khatami had Ahmadinejad to thank for showing that a president could do very much what he wanted (with some limits, of course) without too much regard for the opinions of the Supreme Leader, who was forced, on occasion, to publicly distance himself from some of the president’s more outlandish ideas and proclamations. And Khatami had expressed the view that if he were to become president again, he would, like a left-wing (and saner) version of Ahmadinejad, be far less cautious in ensuring that Ayatollah Khamenei was on board for every decision, big or small, or that he would even be consulted beforehand on certain matters of state, as Khatami had always done in the past. No more Mr. Nice Guy, in other words—not when it came to wielding power and authority.
For the conservatives who worried that an invigorated Khatami might be difficult to control, a simple solution to avoiding a potential crisis was to convince Mousavi, also a reformist but a far less polarizing figure than Khatami, to run instead. Besides, as a relative unknown (he had been retired from politics for twenty years), Mousavi would face an uphill battle in the race. The Supreme Leader and other conservatives would have little issue with a Mousavi campaign, and would probably tolerate a Mousavi presidency knowing that it would be weak, certainly much weaker than a Khatami presidency, in the face of a conservative-dominated Parliament and powerful conservative clerics. It was, if true, a brilliant move on the Supreme Leader’s part to get rid of Khatami, but then again everyone, it seems, seriously misjudged Mir Hossein Mousavi.
“DON’T WORRY, Hooman,” said a friend, and former senior member of the leadership, to me one late night in his Tehran home. “If Ahmadinejad wins, he’ll be impeached within eighteen months.” Reformists and conservative opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were already sharpening the knives weeks before the election, expecting that the incumbent president stood a good chance of winning. Of course, Ali Larijani, the speaker of Parliament, would have to be on board for impeachment, for the impeachment of a president rests solely with the Majles. He was known to despise Ahmadinejad personally; it was Ahmadinejad who had had him removed as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and as chief nuclear negotiator, but Larijani wo
uld also have to convince his mentor, Ayatollah Khamenei, that impeachment was the best course of action. Presumably Larijani, who had presidential ambitions himself, would have a vested interest in seeing his nemesis disappear from the political scene. He had run for Parliament from Qom (not where he’s from), after all, with the full backing of the clerical elite, positioning himself to make a bid for the presidency once Ahmadinejad was out of the way. If Ahmadinejad could be impeached, Larijani would be in the best position to win the snap election that would have to be called under the constitution. But, nemeesheh, I thought. Impeachment had never happened, and even if there were those who wanted to rid Iran of Ahmadinejad and his clique, there was no guarantee that he would go quietly, or that he wouldn’t take down a good number of the elite with him by exposing the many files he kept on various members of the Iranian leadership. Nemeesheh.