by Hooman Majd
No, Ahmadinejad wasn’t going to get away with it—not even with a partner like Obama. The conservatives he had alienated jumped to declare the deal a mistake, with Ali Larijani, the speaker of Parliament going as far as saying, “The recent actions of this country [United States], presenting unimportant and irrational proposals in the nuclear issue which they have called just and fair, all indicate that the alleged change [in American foreign policy] was nothing but a deceitful symbol aimed at deceiving naive politicians.” Ahmadinejad, naive? The reformists and the Green Movement meanwhile, sensing an opportunity not to be lost, also declared Ahmadinejad’s deal an insult to Iran (echoing his description of Khatami’s dealings with the West), positioning themselves as defenders of Iran’s rights who, unlike the president, wouldn’t be so easily seduced by the man from Bushehr.
The deal that was offered was in reality not that different from an idea floated during the presidency of Khatami, to send Iran’s enriched uranium to Russia for conversion into fuel rods for its yet-to-be-built reactors. That idea had been anathema to conservatives at the time, including Ahmadinejad, who felt that reliance on foreign suppliers of fuel could only lead to diminished independence for Iran. Ahmadinejad in 2009 had made the mistake of believing he was the decider, perhaps because of his easy win at the ballot box (or easy win on Interior Ministry computers), when in reality powerful men opposed to him still held sway with the real decider, the Supreme Leader, who would not be seduced so easily. Nevertheless, Ahmadinejad scrambled, looking for a way to salvage a nuclear deal while backing off from his initial assertion that what had been offered was a win for Iran. In an offer Foreign Minister Mottaki made just before Christmas, Iran floated the idea of a simultaneous exchange of its uranium for fuel rods, a gradual swap of uranium on Kish Island, in the Persian Gulf. But the United States was steadfast in its assertion that Iran either accept the deal as offered in October or face additional sanctions and penalties in 2010.
THE WESTERN MEDIA paid scant attention to Iran’s counteroffers while the Iranian media made them headlines, indicating to Iranians that it was the United States, even under a new president, that was not following up on its promise to negotiate with Iran. As late as a week before Christmas 2009, President Ahmadinejad made another appeal for talks, almost pleading with the United States to consider alternatives to its original proposal. Again, this appeal made headlines in Iran but hardly warranted a mention in the Western mainstream media. “Iran is ready to strike a uranium enrichment deal if the United States and the West respect the Islamic Republic and stop making threats,” was one headline in the state-controlled media. Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying, “Everything is possible, 400 kilos, 800 kilos, it’s nothing,” a reference to the amount of enriched uranium Iran was expected to ship out of the country under a confidence-boosting agreement, and “We are ready to sit down at the table to reach an agreement.” He added that no deal could happen while Iran was being threatened, a return to the Iranian insistence, for years, that Iranians would not buckle under threats or intimidation, a hallmark, they were convinced, of the Bush administration’s approach to Iran. “From the outset, delivering 1200 kilos of uranium was not a problem for us.” At the climate change conference in Copenhagen at the end of the year, Ahmadinejad remarked, “But they believe they can wave a stick to threaten us—those days are over—they are threatening us now, with sanctions, with resolutions, pressure, it’s going backwards.” Ahmadinejad was reiterating what every Iranian official has expressed to me vis-à-vis American threats and the concept of “carrots and sticks”: fear would not drive their decision. “If we want to make a bomb we would not be afraid of the United States,” he said, “but we do not want to make a bomb.”
For Obama doubters in Tehran, the actions of the administration in late 2009 were a vindication of their belief that the new U.S. president was at best only willing to pay lip service to real change, especially after Iranian officials indicated a willingness to negotiate with the United States further. Two days of face-to-face diplomacy, a deal structured by the West and offered to the Iranians, and rejection of any subsequent counteroffers qualified as change? Threats of “crippling sanctions” unless Iran did as it was told qualified as respectful engagement? While the U.S. Congress set about debating petroleum sanctions against Iran, and as the United States geared up to send additional troops into Afghanistan, the Iranian government continued to assail Obama’s faux change in foreign policy.
Having voiced moral support for Iran’s opposition, as recently as in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, President Obama had, in fact, made diplomacy more challenging. Not only had the opposition voiced strong opposition to the nuclear deal as presented by the West, they had warned Obama not to expect some advantage because of the Iranian president’s apparent domestic weakness. Mehdi Karroubi, the most outspoken of the opposition leaders, said, in an interview with the London Times only a week after Ahmadinejad’s pleas in Copenhagen for further diplomacy, that “we ask Western governments not to use this internal situation as a bargaining chip with the present Iranian Government to reach agreements which would undermine the rights of the Iranian people.” Karroubi was indicating that any deal that looked good to the West would come under close scrutiny in Tehran, not just by Ahmadinejad but also by every other political figure with any influence with the leadership. In the same interview, he also warned the West, a code word for the United States and therefore Obama, not to interfere in the domestic squabbles in Iran, not to give in to the temptation to offer support, moral or otherwise, to the Green Movement. “The challenges in this country should be solved by its own people,” he said, quite confident that the civil rights movement he led would be ultimately successful in its goals.
Meanwhile, Obama’s critics in America, who had been quick to criticize his Iran strategy at the country’s first vacillation, didn’t understand that a nod and a wink from an Iranian president was meaningless, not deceitful. Iran’s president was always going to need the approval of Parliament, powerful politicians, and the Ayatollahs before finally committing his signature to any memoranda of understanding. Obama, who did seem to understand initially, had kept his cool and vowed to continue his policy of dialog and patience in dealing with a country that had confounded the United States for over thirty years. However, as the end of the year approached, there had been no more meaningful dialog with Iran, not even on Afghanistan, a country where Iran had great influence and had hoped to be consulted, as it was in 2001, with respect to the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which remained Obama’s biggest headache.
In late 2009, though, Senator John Kerry floated the idea of visiting Iran, an initiative supported by the White House and another attempt by the Democratic administration, it seemed, to engage Iran, even if only on a “track two” basis. And again, supporters of the Green Movement outside Iran worried out loud that the United States might appease the mullahs, no doubt adding to confusion in an Obama administration still trying to formulate its Iran policy. In any event, after careful examination in Tehran, Parliament rejected the idea of a Kerry visit (which would have been ostensibly to meet Speaker Ali Larijani, as a fellow parliamentarian). Parliament spokesmen suggested, for the umpteenth time, that dialog was not something they were anxious to engage in; rather, they were looking for concrete signs that the U.S. administration was going to change its policy toward Iran. But perhaps the Iranians were really waiting for what some commentators and analysts began to hope for after the election of Obama, a “Nixon to China” moment to jump-start Iranian-American relations, not a visit by a mere senator. If President Obama were ever convinced of the value of such a visit, it would represent to the Iranians a leap in their international standing—placing them on par with China (although in 1973 China did not yet clothe or furnish the houses of the majority of Americans, it was nonetheless a power to be reckoned with). A “Nixon to China” initiative, though, is unrealistic for the foreseeable future, given the circumstances of a post-20
09 Iran, but President Obama can, if he wants, find a balance between doing nothing and embracing the regime. This would require extensive use of ta’arouf, though, something notably lacking in Obama’s first State of the Union address, in January 2010, in which he “promised” Iran (in a not-so-veiled threat) that it would “face consequences” if it ignored its “obligations.”
NO DEAL between the United States and Iran, whether caught up in an internal political crisis or not, whether with a hard-line or liberal reformist president, was ever going to be easy, and Obama had already said as much. However, there was something perverse, at the beginning of 2010, and a year into the Obama era, about U.S.-Iran relations being worse than at the end of the Bush administration, about tensions over Iran’s nuclear program reaching their height, and about pessimism on all sides for a peaceful solution to the crisis, let alone a détente in relations. Blame was being apportioned from and by both sides, but it was fair to say that Obama’s election clearly hadn’t been enough for some Iranians to recognize that he represented a departure from sixty years of American heavy handedness in its foreign policy, not enough anyway, to set Iran-U.S. relations on the right track.
Obama had recognized early on that it was the Supreme Leader who mattered in Iran, at least when it came to diffusing the nuclear crisis or working toward normalization of relations, not the administration in power, and much of Obama’s outreach was directed, if not directly, to the Ayatollah. The Supreme Leader had cautiously maneuvered around Obama’s outreaches and his extended hand, waiting for, as he himself said, “the day the relations with America prove beneficial for the Iranian nation.” That day wasn’t going to be chosen by Ahmadinejad or the opposition, but by the Supreme Leader alone. President Obama, his honeymoon deemed long over by the end of his first year in office, even by the progressive wing of his party, was going to have to be patient, and aware of Iranian politics and the Iranian psyche if he wanted progress both on the nuclear front and on relations with Iran in general.
In February 2010, only days in advance of the important holiday celebrating the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, both former president Khatami and Mousavi once again warned the United States against interference in Iran’s affairs. Khatami went as far as to say that the Green Movement was under no illusions that America had benevolent intentions toward Iran, any Iran, a clear reference to America’s dealing with the nuclear issue. President Obama ignored the warnings, and issued, along with the Europeans, a pre-emptive warning of his own to Iran, demanding that it respect the rights of demonstrators marching and protesting on the important holiday. By now, Iranians, both in the leadership and among the public, were as aware of Obama’s domestic struggles as Americans were, and “tea party” was as well known a phrase in Tehran as in Washington. Obama, increasingly under attack in the United States and his message of “hope” less resonant with an impatient public, was also becoming an easier target for Iran, his message of “change” more readily derided. When President Ahmadinejad ruffled Western feathers by announcing, the same week as Iran’s holiday celebration, that it would begin further enrichment of uranium for its Tehran reactor unless the West returned to the negotiating table, President Obama’s harsh response that Iran would face strong sanctions for its “misbehavior” (for doing something fully allowed under the Non-Proliferation Treaty) elicited no reaction by the opposition and hardly a shrug by the government, confident that in a week when it most needed its people’s support, they would rally to Iran’s, and not Obama’s, side on the issue of its nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad, during his speech to a huge crowd at Azadi Square on February 11, the anniversary itself, barely mentioned Obama. After he defiantly announced that Iran had formally become a nuclear state, he said, “We expected Mr. Obama to make changes. We are told that he is under pressure. Okay!” Ahmadinejad’s informal ta’arouf recognizing Obama’s domestic problems was followed, predictably, with advice for the American president. “He should act rightly and based on respect to nations,” Ahmadinejad said, adding, in case the sympathies of some in his audience were still with the man from Bushehr, “Unfortunately, hope for changes by him is rapidly fading and turning to mishap. His conduct disappoints all.” On that point, Sarah Palin and her fans in the tea party movement were firmly in agreement with the Iranian president.
AT THE HEIGHT, or more realistically the depths, of the Bush presidency, an American friend of mine wistfully said to me, after a long evening of discussing America’s woes, “Gee, I wish we had a Supreme Leader”—in other words, someone to control the president and his party. During President Ahmadinejad’s first term, many Iranians felt the same way, about the United States and Iran, where it was perhaps a benison that there was still someone their erratic president had to answer to. But America had moved on by 2009, and Iran had tried to do the same, in the June 2009 election, its voters inspired with the same hope for change that drove Americans to vote a young, relatively unknown black man to the highest office in the land. The disappointment that ensued for many Iranian voters was almost too much to bear, and for some of them, a Supreme Leader, or at least the power consigned to him, had outlived its usefulness, but trust in the country, and even its Ayatollahs, remained high. No matter how the Ayatollahs’ democracy evolved—with or without the Supreme Leader—Obama would still have to appeal to not just a government and a people, but to the Ayatollahs as well.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UNCLEAN
Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken.
—PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, May 8, 2008
We are opposed to the idea that the people who live there [Israel] should be thrown into the sea or be burnt.
—PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, September 18, 2008
“Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Revealed to Have Jewish Past”
—Headline, The Daily Telegraph, October 3, 2009
On a scorching hot Friday evening toward the end of Tehran’s summer of 2008, Fifteenth Street off Yousefabad Avenue, a mostly residential street almost parallel to Valiasr Avenue, Tehran’s longest tree-lined boulevard (and once named Pahlavi Avenue for the former Shah’s family), was quiet, as most streets are on Fridays, the Muslim Sabbath. A nondescript mid-century brick building near a street corner, adorned with familiar Persian blue and turquoise tiles, drew no particular attention or even a glance from the occasional passerby (or a passenger jumping out of a stopped car to buy groceries at the deli a few yards away), but for anyone who cared to notice, the lettering above the intricate tile work was, incongruously in a nation where almost everything is written in the Arabic script, Hebrew. The Yousefabad Synagogue (Kenisa-ye Yousefabad, in Farsi) is one of the largest, and perhaps Tehran’s most famous, among the approximately thirteen active synagogues in the metropolis of twelve to fifteen million people (paradoxically, there is not one Sunni mosque). In what is a wealthy and upscale neighborhood, on Friday evenings at sundown the temple attracts enough Iranian Jews, young and old, to completely fill its three or four hundred seats; women are segregated off to one side, and men and boys overflow onto the balcony upstairs, or simply stand at the back, reciting their prayers.
That a Jewish community exists in Iran, let alone that synagogues and churches do, often comes as a surprise to most Westerners unfamiliar with the Islamic Republic. But Iran’s experiment in Islamic democracy, one that has evolved in fits and starts ever since Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a new political system in 1979, would not have any legitimacy as a democracy or even quasi-democracy were it not for how it accounts for religious freedom, and for its religious minorities, minorities that have existed and lived in Iran since its founding as the Persian Empire over twenty-five hundred years ago. If one of the fundamental principles of democracy is that all citizens of that democracy are equal before the law, then Islamic democracy has not quite taken hold in Iran, for, to borrow George Orwell’s depiction in Animal Farm, some citi
zens, the Shia, are still more equal than others. Islam is generally thought to be intolerant of other religions, and it can be, much like all religions, depending on how it is practiced. But in Iran, Shia Islamic, despite its Shias being more equal, religious freedom has a funny way of existing side by side with extreme intolerance of un-Islamic behavior of any kind, which would, one might think, preclude religious freedom altogether, much like in Saudi Arabia, where it is illegal to be anything but a Muslim.
THE GATE to the Yousefabad Synagogue was half open at 6:30 p.m. the evening I ventured there, well before sundown, and other than a woman standing waiting for someone or something, in a full-length Islamic-correct manteau (lightweight overcoat that conceals the shape of the body) and a properly tied scarf covering all of her hair, there was no one in the courtyard. I wandered in and peeked through the open doors of the temple; a handful of men were scattered about, sitting and reading miniature prayer books.