The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge

by Hooman Majd

  As a few in the Western media began to unhelpfully label the demonstrations as the “Twitter Revolution” (because of the use of Twitter by Iranian citizen-journalists) and as the government periodically shut down cell phone and text messaging services, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted publicly that the U.S. State Department had requested that Twitter delay a scheduled maintenance (that would have disrupted services) so that Iranian forces for democracy could continue to communicate on the ground in Tehran. It was a small gaffe, and an unintentional one (that she inexplicably repeated six months later, in a talk at Georgetown University, where she tried to demonstrate U.S. support for the opposition to Ahmadinejad), but the Iranian government leapt to describe her admission as “proof” that the United States planned and supported the unrest. It was hardly that, but Secretary Clinton did lend the Iranian government’s line some credence, at least as far as its supporters were concerned, as well as those who might have supported the demonstrators but were wary of foreign interference in Iran, interference that even President Obama had acknowledged had a very long and unfortunate history.

  If Ayatollah Rafsanjani had been successful in changing the Supreme Leader’s mind about the election, or if he had gathered the votes in the Assembly of Experts to remove him, or to force him to retire, the Revolutionary Guards probably would have gone along with whatever changes ensued, as long as they wouldn’t be directly affected. That Major General Mohammad Ali (Aziz) Jafari, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, didn’t congratulate Ahmadinejad on his “glorious” victory for two whole days after the Supreme Leader did, indicates that he may have been privy to some of the discussions among the clerical leadership and was waiting to see whose revolution he was meant to be guarding. Jafari, who was appointed to his post by the Supreme Leader in 2007, was not known to be in the Ahmadinejad hard-line political faction. In fact, he was close to both Mohammad Qalibaf, the conservative and popular mayor of Tehran and a rival of Ahmadinejad’s (who he is reputed to despise), and to Mohsen Rezai, the conservative candidate who believed that the vote was fraudulent (although he withdrew his official protest twelve days after the vote, presumably because as a loyal military man, he recognized by then that his commander in chief was there to stay, and wasn’t going to change his mind).

  At the time of Jafari’s appointment, many Iranians viewed it as the Supreme Leader’s check against the influence of Ahmadinejad and his extremist allies. However, after the election of 2009, Jafari’s name became synonymous with the crackdown and the enforcement of Ahmadinejad’s rule. The general’s comments in the months following the election indicate to many that he willingly took on the expanded role of enforcing security throughout the country, and his accusations that the reformers were looking to overthrow the Supreme Leader led some to believe that the Guards were complicit in vote fraud. But as a military man charged with protecting the revolution, and by definition the Supreme Leader, it would have been highly unusual for him to not follow his commander in chief’s orders, and he likely did believe that the reformers were intent on changing the system to such a degree that the structure he knew, with Ayatollah Khamenei at the very top, would be threatened. For months, after Mousavi declared his candidacy and publicly embraced Khatami as his mentor, there had been talk in Tehran, quite openly, that a Mousavi win would in effect mean a sort of dual Supreme Leadership: on the conservative side Ali Khamenei, and on the liberal side Mohammad Khatami. Since President Ahmadinejad had already set the precedent of defying the Supreme Leader on occasion, the argument was that a Mousavi-Khatami allied administration would also exhibit a heretofore unseen independence, bolstered by support from Ayatollah Rafsanjani as well as a number of other influential senior Ayatollahs, and the office of the Rahbar would be weakened. Nothing is true? According to which Ayatollah?

  When I was in Tehran in the months leading up to the election, I tended to dismiss this talk as harmless, typical of Iranian gholov. Aziz Jafari did not think so, however. In a speech to fellow senior Guardsmen in early September, he revealed that Khatami had declared back in February, some four months before the election, that if Ahmadinejad could be defeated, then the Rahbari, the Supreme Leadership, would be effectively eliminated. I hardly think Khatami would have used those words, for I have had many conversations with him about the politics of the velayat-e-faqih, and he has never, not even in absolute privacy and off the record, declared his opposition to the political structure of the Islamic Republic. Regardless, Jafari’s speech proved that he and his intelligence division were listening to every one of those private conversations in Khatami’s office and home. Khatami has never been silent about his view of the role of the Supreme Leader more as a guide than an executive, and ironically shares with Ahmadinejad a philosophy that the elected president should be allowed more leeway in executing policy. But Khatami, like Khamenei, is a mullah, and perhaps if Ahmadinejad were a cleric too, the Supreme Leader would tolerate his insolence less.

  JAFARI AND his colleagues at the top of the Guard command would not necessarily oppose more leeway for the president (as evidenced by their comfort with Ahmadinejad), but they would oppose the president of Iran taking control of the military—in other words, becoming the commander in chief. They would also resist relinquishing the Revolutionary Guards’ vast interests in the economy of the country, which have expanded under the presidency of Ahmadinejad. (It was under Khatami, after all, that the new international airport in Tehran, the Imam Khomeini airport, was inaugurated by the president one day and seized by the Guards the next, and then closed until they completed their takeover of operations at the airport, ostensibly due to issues of “national security.” That the Guards ended up with all the concessions, including the duty-free shops, at the airport, worth millions a year, was not, in many Iranians’ view, incidental.) While some in the West and in Iran continue to describe the post-election political situation as effectively a Guards’ coup, that the Guards by their control of security as well as expanded control of the economy are the de facto leaders of the country and are more important than the Supreme Leader himself, that analysis ignores the fact that without a Supreme Leader and the religious sanction he gives, the Guards’ very raison d’être is in question, an issue at the heart of Jafari’s speech when he accused Khatami of plotting to overthrow his Rahbar.

  One member of the Guards’ senior command, though, General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Qods Force (the foreign expeditionary arm of the Guards) since the beginning of the decade, was noticeably quiet during the post-election crisis. As a commander charged with the execution of foreign policy, he might not ordinarily have been expected to express any views on domestic events, but he is perhaps as powerful as Jafari—allegedly reporting directly to the Supreme Leader—and with the Guards seeing foreign plots behind the unrest and taking on the responsibility for national security, it would not have been surprising, either, to hear from one of the most powerful men in Iran. Soleimani, though, is from the same part of the country as Rafsanjani, he was taken under the Ayatollah’s wing during his presidency in the 1990s, and he is known as a fierce soldier—a decorated war hero—who is loyal to the principles of the Islamic Republic and his commander in chief, factors that were not incompatible with loyalty to Rafsanjani as well, at least not until mid-2009.

  Importantly, General Soleimani was the man responsible for nurturing Iraqi anti-Saddam groups based in Iran during the years leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and he developed close friendships with Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president of Iraq, and a number of other important Iraqi political figures, making him indispensable in Iran’s foreign policy formulations (in which Rafsanjani has also always played an important role). Soleimani has been, according to Iranian officials, a target of the U.S. military despite those friendships, and he no longer risks traveling to Iraq as he did after the fall of Saddam Hussein. When Talabani wants to meet with Soleimani, both men drive to their borders to speak face-to-face. (During one of those
meetings, in March 2008, Talabani secured an Iranian commitment to help contain the Mahdi Army violence in Basra.) Soleimani’s record, his devotion to the revolution and to Iran’s national security, ensures that he is an important cog in the military apparatus, but he also commands the devotion of the men who have served with or under him—a friend of mine who served with him during the war with Iraq can barely bring himself to talk about Soleimani without shedding tears over his devotion to his men and his country.

  The Qods Force commander is a powerful figure in Iran, to be sure, but it is his direct access to the commander in chief that makes him, along with Jafari, a critical player in deciding the future of the Islamic state. Could he have been unsure, in June 2009, about who that commander in chief might be, or whether his former patron Rafsanjani might prevail in his power struggle with Khamenei? Or did he simply choose not to enter the fray of factional politics because of his inclination to secretiveness and his sense of duty as one not charged with internal affairs? Answers to these questions would be speculative, but Soleimani is likely to be an overall commander of the Guards someday, and he cannot have had no opinion on what was transpiring in his nation, even as he was focused on promulgating the Islamic Revolution abroad rather than protecting it at home.

  Guardians of the Revolution. Their revolution had a beginning, but it has no end. And they, Jafari and Soleimani and all their lieutenants and the tens of thousands of troops they command, along with an untold number of Basij, the volunteer army Ayatollah Khomeini created at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War and now under the command of the Guards, are sworn to defend it to the death. The revolution might mean different things to different members of the Guards, all the way up the chain of command, but what they all share is an undying devotion not just to the revolution but to Shia Islam as well. The leaders of the Green Movement, Shias and devotees of the revolution themselves, recognize that, and know that in the years to come none of their goals can be accomplished at the expense of their faith. Nor would they want them to.

  Shia concepts of martyrdom, but more important victimhood, concepts deeply imbedded in the Iranian psyche—even in the psyche of non-Shia Iranians—play a bigger role in the culture of politics than is imagined in the West. We are Shia, Iranians say; our sect has long been a victim of greater Sunni oppression in the Muslim world; our original saints, the blood of the prophet in their veins, were victims of cruel and despotic Caliphs a millennia and a half ago, and we still weep for them, on cue and on time, every year. For centuries we have been the victims of foreign imperialist ambitions, then victims of tyrant Shahs who suppressed any democratic movement that would limit their power. Our latest political model, an Islamic Republic we voted for, has been a victim of foreign plots to destroy it, our independence a thorn in the side of every greater power. We were victims of Saddam, much more so than you Westerners, and yet no one wept for us as he gassed our children and rained bombs down on our cities. We are victims of a Western attitude of superiority that deems nuclear technology to be safe in the West’s hands, but unacceptable in the hands of Shia Iranians, even as European man has wreaked more havoc on the planet than any other species.

  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who embodied the democratic notion, never before tested in Iran’s history, that all citizens have equal access to power, is the victim of scurrilous attacks by an established elite. Ayatollah Rafsanjani, representative of that elite, is a victim of Ahmadinejad’s relentless attacks on him and, worse, on his defenseless family. Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Mohammad Khatami are all victims of Ahmadinejad’s and Khamenei’s vengeful intimidation tactics and their attempt to remove the democracy from their Islamic democracy; their supporters are victims of a stolen election. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are victims of plots, foreign and domestic, to illegally overthrow them, to remove the Islamic from their mardomsalari’e dini, their self-proclaimed Islamic democracy; the Revolutionary Guards and Basij are victims of violent, Molotov cocktail–throwing mobs of protesters. The peaceful protesters are victims of a brutal military apparatus determined to crush their rights to protest and peaceful assembly, guaranteed under the Islamic Constitution. Iranian exiles and those inside Iran opposed to an Islamic regime altogether are victims too, victims of fate, a fate they believe has led to the loss of the soul of their Persian nation. We are all victims, all of us Iranians, and no matter on which side of the political fence we fall, we understand our victimhood, as well as that of our leaders. And we mourn our victims like no other peoples, seeking unforgiving vengeance for every wrong, real and perceived, and wishing death to every enemy, even when the enemy is ourselves.

  The millions of Iranians, and the leaders who have braved the stern and unforgiving dictates of a regime they helped to create, are looking to finally break free from what has defined their political lives, and when they are successful—and they will be, in an Ayatollahs’ democracy or not—there will be, finally, no more victims.

  Tamam Shud—The End

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A special thanks to Seyed Mohammad Khatami, Seyed Ali Khatami, Ali Ziaie, Fatemeh Ziaie, Amir Khosro Etemadi, Sadeq Kharrazi, Iman Mirabzadeh Ardakani, Alireza Tabesh, Mohammad Sadoughi, Saman Majd, Maurice Motamed, Kaveh Bazargan, Mehdi Faridzadeh, Karri Jinkins, Davitt Sigerson, Glenn O’Brien, Michael Hainey, Lindsay Edgecombe, Ken Browar, Ann Curry, Richard Greenberg, David Lom, Drew Levinson, Ali Arouzi, Mike Simon, Robert Windrem, James Toback, Michael Zilkha, Mehrdad Khajehnoori, and Andrew Gundlach.

  I would also like to especially thank my editor, Tom Mayer; my agent, Andrew Wylie, and his associates Rebecca Nagel, Sarah Chalfant, and Luke Ingram at The Wylie Agency in New York and London; Helen Conford at Penguin UK; and Thomas Gagnon at The Lavin Agency.