by Hooman Majd
The Iranian presidential election of 2009 changed the U.S.-Iran dynamic, of course, in a way that had been wholly unpredictable. Some on the American left (and many Iranians living in the United States) had already heavily criticized President Obama for suggesting that as far as America was concerned, there would be no difference between an Ahmadinejad and a Mousavi presidency. He was right, of course, for Mousavi was a regime insider and had made it clear in his campaign that when it came to the nuclear issue, the most pressing matter to Obama and the United States, his policy would not be very different. In fact, he barely acknowledged that the nuclear issue was an issue he had any control over; the Supreme National Security Council, of which he, as president, would be only one member, controls such decisions. On other matters of great concern to the United States, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran’s influence in the region and beyond, and Iranian involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mousavi also differed only slightly from Ahmadinejad, and again, they were areas where an Iranian president might have some influence but not areas where he would be the decider, to use George Bush’s term again.
The decider on matters of national security, foreign policy, and military strategy is the commander in chief of the Islamic Republic, the Supreme Leader, and he isn’t called Supreme for nothing. (According to some reports, Obama, in recognition of that supremeness, had sent one or two letters directly to Ayatollah Khamenei, but neither the White House nor the Iranian office of the velayat-e-faqih would confirm or deny it.) President Obama was correct in believing he would face a difficult foe and tough negotiator in Iran no matter who won the presidential election, but Mousavi supporters, indeed supporters of all three challengers to Ahmadinejad, recognized that it would be much easier for President Obama to break bread with Mousavi or one of their candidates, any candidate, than with a Holocaust-denying, Shia millenarian like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And there was the expectation, not just in Iran but across the world, that the next president of Iran would be negotiating at some point on behalf of his nation and his Supreme Leader with the new, black, and son-of-a-Muslim president of the United States.
President Ahmadinejad, perhaps unreasonably, held out hope that a face-to-face meeting might happen sooner rather than later. Well after the election and during a lull in the street violence, he reiterated his offer to meet with and “debate” Obama at the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly, where both he and Obama were due to deliver statements. Immediately after the flawed vote, Ahmadinejad had complained—whined really—that Obama did not congratulate him on his astounding victory, especially as he had congratulated Obama on his victory, a felicitation, he reminded us, that had not yet received so much as a simple thank you. Ahmadinejad was not going to forget the perceived slight, it seemed, but he was determined to engage Obama nonetheless. The White House, meanwhile, seemed at a loss. It was impossible for Barack Obama to ignore the brutality on the streets of Tehran and the overwhelming evidence that the Iranian electoral count was tainted. But he was also aware, much more so than his predecessors, that interfering in the internal politics of Iran might endanger the very groups the United States was inclined to support.
PRESIDENT OBAMA continued to walk a fine line, a very fine line, between expressing support for the opposition to Ahmadinejad, for the Green Movement, and not interfering in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation. That balancing act exposed him and his administration to charges from all sides of the political spectrum (both in the United States and in Iran) that either he wasn’t doing enough to support a democratic movement or, when he did express concern about government brutality, he was injecting the United States into Iran’s internal affairs. Curiously some on the American right, such as former vice president Dick Cheney and Senator John McCain, who began criticizing the Obama administration for its tepid support of Iranian protesters and the Green Movement, were the very same politicians who had once, quite recently, called the leaders of the Green Movement terrorist supporters and enemies of the United States, and had encouraged the notion of a military strike against Iran.
Iran-expert exiles, by far the majority siding with the Green Movement, weighed in with the White House and on television and radio programs. Some demanded that Obama refuse to negotiate with an illegitimate president, while others advised caution in his Iran policy. In the end, there was little that President Obama could do, other than fulfill his campaign promise to use diplomacy to end the threat of a nuclear Iran. Refusing to negotiate would enable the Ahmadinejad government to claim that the United States, as was the case with Hamas’s election, only respected democracy if its preferred candidates won. Those who argued that human rights should be at the top of any U.S. agenda with respect to Iran were ignoring the fact that unless the United States first had some form of relationship with Iran, even if it began with a nuclear deal, arguing about human rights was going to be ineffective and possibly counterproductive. Iranian government officials pointed out to me time and again that President Obama’s famous “Cairo speech,” his first message to the Muslim world five months into his presidency, was delivered in the capital of a country not only where hundreds of political prisoners languished in jails, but also where security forces perpetually broke up labor strikes, street protests, and demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak’s government, using as much violence and bloodshed as in Iran, if not more—and with nary a peep from either the White House or the Western media. For some Iranians, the American measure of human rights was merely whether pop-singer Beyoncé would be able to perform a concert (yes in Egypt, as she did; no in Iran, where female vocalists can only perform live if they are background singers—in hijab). Nonetheless, as the Green Movement continued to show strength into 2010, the calls for President Obama to support the opposition grew, particularly from Iranian expatriates, but Obama generally resisted the temptation. The experts never adequately answered the questions of why the Iranian government, which had never listened to unilateral U.S. demands in the past, would suddenly change course if Obama rattled his saber. Doing nothing was not the worst option for President Obama, unlike all the bad options he faced in Afghanistan and Iraq, but pressure, especially after nuclear talks seemed to go nowhere, was building and it was going to be hard for the administration to remain as aloof as it had been in its first two years.
PRESIDENT AHMADINEJAD didn’t ultimately get his one-on-one meeting with Obama at the UN in 2009, even though he sat patiently through Obama’s speech—delivered before the revelation that Iran had built a secret nuclear site near Qom—listening intently through his earphones, perhaps in the hope that Obama would reciprocate and sit through his speech. But Ahmadinejad had the misfortune to be scheduled to speak much later in the afternoon. Before the Iranian president took the microphone, however, Muammar Qaddafi, in his first-ever address to the world body, spoke for over an hour and a half, ignoring the fifteen-minute unofficial time limit (as most leaders do) and causing his personal interpreter, one he flew in from Tripoli, to collapse toward the end, shaking and screaming, for everyone to hear, “I can’t take it anymore!” Ahmadinejad’s speech was delayed by well over an hour, and by that time some delegates might have felt as Qaddafi’s interpreter did: the thought of another rambling, repetitive diatribe against the West and the UN Security Council by a Muslim leader would be too much to take. When Ahmadinejad took to the podium, only a handful of countries’ delegates were in the room, so he spoke to an almost empty chamber (which was not shown on Iranian state television). Needless to say, neither President Obama nor the U.S. delegation were in their seats, and it is unlikely that they would have been, even if Ahmadinejad had spoken earlier. For as President Obama remarked later in the fall when signing another one-year extension of sanctions on Iran, “Our relations with Iran have not yet returned to normal.” The Iranian president immediately condemned the statement as “childish” and a “grave blunder.” (Ahmadinejad is, I’m sure, unaware of the racist implications of calling a black man childish, and he probably though
t it actually much sweeter than the usual Iranian denunciation of American presidents.)
Ahmadinejad and his obedient foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, recognizing Barack Obama’s popularity even in countries where Iran held greater sway than the United States, had in fact tried hard on their 2009 visit to New York to strike a conciliatory, polite, and even admiring tone with respect to the American president. Their buddy Hugo Chavez had joked, after all, in his address to the UN, that the podium “no longer smelled of sulfur,” a reference to his previous pronouncement at the world body that likened George W. Bush to the devil himself. In every public appearance and interview, Ahmadinejad and Mottaki went out of their way to praise Obama the person, if not the U.S. government, and to present themselves as the kind of statesmen their own people no longer seemed to think they were.
Ahmadinejad was in the middle of an interview with Time magazine the morning that President Obama, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France by his side, announced to the world that Iran had a secret uranium enrichment facility under construction in a mountainside on a heavily fortified Revolutionary Guard base near Qom, unannounced and hidden from UN inspectors. Early in the interview, Time’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, broke the news of the upcoming announcement to Ahmadinejad, who smiled uncomfortably as he listened. “Mr. Obama is about to say this?” he asked incredulously. When Stengel affirmed it, Ahmadinejad’s response was, “So, is all the information that Mr. Obama receives of the same nature?” Although not entirely a clear response, it was Ahmadinejad’s way of saying that he believed Obama was being ill advised and fed inaccurate information. Not that Obama himself was in the wrong, but that he was being manipulated by other forces. It was clear to any Iranian that Ahmadinejad’s reaction was genuine, even if his ta’arouf about Obama, unwilling to condemn him directly, was calculated. The Iranian president wasn’t caught in a “gotcha!” moment as some believed, for Iran had already informed the IAEA two weeks prior of the nuclear site and believed it was well within its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty; rather, he was surprised that Obama would resort, in his mind, to a crude anti-Iran propaganda moment. Obama, hero of the world, he of the “extended hand,” follow the standard U.S. foreign policy playbook? Nah! He must have been under the influence of bad advisors. Ahmadinejad and others in the Iranian leadership were perhaps shrewd enough to recognize that it was foolhardy to demonize Obama less than a year into office, but they were also thinking, unlike “tea partiers” in the United States, that “the black man with an African and Muslim name who might even hail from Bushehr can’t be all bad.”
IRANIANS WEREN’T the only people to be thrown off balance by the election of President Obama; leftists everywhere, including in the United States, were busy adjusting to the idea that their vehement denunciations of the George Bush era and an American foreign policy that harked back to the darkest days of imperialism were finally being heard, and taken seriously, across the globe. It was always a curious phenomenon that Americans on the far left generally sympathized more with the right in Iran—the hard-liners who believed America could do no good—than with the reformists and liberals on the Iranian left who believed in a more democratic society at home and greater interaction with the West, even a Satanic America, abroad. Leftists who in the 1960s and 1970s were quick to throw their support behind democratic movements in Latin America and elsewhere were generally and remarkably silent when it came to Iran, perhaps because Iran’s anti-imperialist and anti-American stands were more attractive to their own philosophies than the idea of an Iran in the American camp, with a Starbucks and a McDonald’s on every Tehran street corner, F-18s and Stingers in its arsenal, and ExxonMobil getting even richer delivering Iranian oil to American automobiles.
The 2009 election in Iran, or particularly the brutal and bloody aftermath, caused many on the American left to re-examine their view of the government in Iran, and many leftist luminaries (such as Noam Chomsky) threw their support to the Green Movement even as they continued to decry American interference in Iran’s internal affairs and U.S. imperialist goals in the region. Many American liberals turned Green, literally on their Facebook profiles and figuratively in their expressions of sympathy for Iranian protesters, but very few advocated an American policy that would inject the United States directly into the Iranian crisis. Just as the extreme left began to view Obama with an almost equal disdain as the extreme right, however, some American leftists began to blame the United States for Iran’s post-election disturbances rather than an increasingly fascistic Iranian administration. It came as no surprise, then, that some dissenters, both Iranian and American, in an America shocked by the events in Iran in 2009, claimed not only that the presidential election was free and fair, or as free and fair as those in the United States, but that any street protests, and accompanying media coverage, were part of a larger plot to overthrow the regime in Tehran.
I WAS PRESENT when a handful of those dissenters gathered in New York’s Greenwich Village two months after the election, away from the glare of the media (with the exception of the bureau chief and cameraman from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, or IRIB, network), to present the case for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They managed to attract a standing-room-only crowd: Iranians who curiously, with the exception of a lone hijab-clad young woman (in a green headscarf no less), did not adhere to Islamic dress codes, and progressive Americans of all ages, some in T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Arrest Bush” or “End the blockade on Cuba,” who remain reliably and charmingly steadfast in their conviction that the United States is up to no good in its adventures abroad.
One speaker described the incongruity of the signs printed in English carried by Tehran demonstrators (“Where is my vote?”), pointing to it as an example of a pre-planned foreign plot, perhaps unaware that Ahmadinejad’s own government hands out signs, also in English, at pro-government rallies. Another speaker claimed that “this was one of the freest elections in the recorded memory of the Islamic Republic,” presenting Interior Ministry charts and figures that showed the breakdown of the vote tally, oblivious to the comedic aspect of presenting as irrefutably factual the numbers provided by the winner in a disputed election.
Sara Flounders, a director of the International Action Center, a progressive activist nongovernmental organization, or NGO, founded by Ramsey Clark, said she believed the events of the previous two months proved there had been evidence of American interference and malfeasance. However, an Iranian-American peace and human rights activist reminded her that “we in the progressive movement have to be very careful not to fall into the dichotomy of either/or, and it’s hard for us to forget that we have an Islamic Republic that in terms of political process is not progressive, has been very oppressive, and at the same time we should remember that the Iranian government has been executing a lot of political prisoners in the past thirty years,” her statement betraying the unease even some Iranian supporters of the regime felt with the events of the summer of 2009. “Unfortunately,” Flounders replied in a cool and deliberate tone, “in a crisis, you do have to choose sides, and there is an either/or.” The crisis for her was that the election unrest was an attempt to overthrow the Islamic Republic—virtually the last stand on the planet for reflexive anti-Americanism—and the side these activists wanted to be on was not America’s, not even in the age of Obama.
This group represents a tiny minority, to be sure, but despite their mistrust of American intentions and President Obama’s commitment to progressivism, Obama was actually doing precisely what they wanted. Progressives in America generally worry less about Iran’s nuclear program than mainstream Democrats or Republicans do, some choosing to believe that even if Iran develops a bomb it has every right to do so, given the hostility that emanates from the United States and Israel, both of which, they are quick to point out, already have many nuclear bombs. And an America that speaks to Iran respectfully is preferable to an America that threat
ens and sanctions it, regardless of the nature of the Tehran regime.
Progressives must have been relieved then, when in October 2009 President Obama made good on his offer to negotiate with Iran without preconditions and secured what appeared to be a deal on Iran’s nuclear program that could satisfy all sides. Ahmadinejad’s government, keen as ever to conclude an agreement quickly and make friends with Obama, indicated its approval for what was to be an exchange of Iran’s low-enriched uranium stock for the higher-enriched uranium it needed to fuel its medical reactor in Tehran. For a moment it seemed that both Ahmadinejad and Obama would be able to take credit for lowering the temperature in a crisis that was threatening to boil over to war, particularly since the election of the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel. With most of Iran’s uranium supply removed from the country only to be returned as fuel rods, the threat of its building a bomb would be radically diminished as far as the United States and its allies were concerned. Unlike in past discussions, which had always included a demand for Iran to suspend enrichment activities, because no mention of enrichment was made, Ahmadinejad immediately claimed a victory over the West. However, he didn’t anticipate the criticism that followed from across the entire Iranian political spectrum, from staunch reformists to the hard-liners to his right. In many ways it was a taste of his own medicine: suddenly it was him and not a reformist who was being accused of bending over backward for the United States, and making deals that were not in Iran’s interest. It didn’t help that the U.S. government and the Western media portrayed the 2009 deal as one restricting Iran’s ability to manufacture a bomb, implying a weaker Iran and undercutting any support there might have been for the deal in Iran.