Although some in the West were disillusioned when President Khatami sided with the hard-line leadership in the summer of 1999 and let them break up student protests, it seemed that many Iranians agreed with him that evolutionary change was better than runaway violence. There was good reason to think he was right: after the experience of one revolution, it was understandable that Khatami and many other Iranians were unwilling to risk their hopes for change on the outcome of street violence.31 Through all this period, the vigor of the expanded free press in Iran encouraged the belief that reform would prevail.
With the election of the strongly reformist sixth Majles in May 2000 (reform-oriented candidates secured 190 seats out of 290), many observers thought the reformers were at last in the driver’s seat. Some people speculated that Iran might now move in the direction of a moderated form of religious supremacy, with the clerical element in the system guiding occasionally from the background, rather than taking a direct role as it had since 1979. But in retrospect, it seems that the attacks on former President Rafsanjani in that election campaign were a decisive error by the reformist press, in which they overreached themselves and drove an embittered Rafsanjani, who had previously tried rather ineffectually to arbitrate between the two camps, over to the hard-line side. Beginning in the summer of 2000, hard-line resistance to the reformist program stiffened and became more competent, perhaps reflecting Rafsanjani’s advice. A sustained and targeted series of arrests and closures brought the flowering of the free press to an end.32 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei intervened personally to prevent the new Majles from overturning the press law that facilitated this crackdown (passed by the previous Majles in the last months of its term). And the Majles generally found themselves blocked by hard-line elements in the Iranian system from making any significant progress with the reform program. If ever Khatami missed the chance to confront the hard-line leadership over his popular mandate for reform—a confrontation that was probably unavoidable if the reform project was to succeed—this was surely the time. But the moment passed, the free press faded, and the hard-line party regained confidence. The testing of the Shahab III medium-range missile in July 2000 also marked a new phase of sharpened international concern over Iranian weapons programs and nuclear ambitions.
9
FROM KHATAMI TO AHMADINEJAD, AND THE IRANIAN PREDICAMENT
“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
—Winston Churchill (speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943)
Since 1979, Iran has followed a lonely path of resistance to the global influence of Western values—particularly that of the United States. One could see this as a reflection of the Iranians’ continuing sense of their uniqueness and cultural significance. The Iranian revolution in 1979 was the harbinger of Islamic revival more widely, showing that previous assumptions about the inevitability of development on a Western model in the Middle East and elsewhere had been misguided. As often before, others followed, for better or worse, where Iran had led. Some hoped in the late 1990s that the Khatami reform movement might show the way out of Islamic extremism at the other end, but although there is good evidence that Iranians are today more skeptical of religious leadership and more inclined to secularism than most other nationalities in the Middle East,1 that hope appears, at least for the moment, to have been premature.
The failure of the West fully to take advantage of the opportunity offered by a reformist president in Iran already looks like a bad mistake. One such opportunity came after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States when members of the Iranian leadership (not just Khatami, but also Khamenei) condemned the terrorist action in forthright terms, and ordinary Iranians showed their sympathies with candlelit vigils in the streets of Tehran—more evidence of the marked difference of attitude between Iranians and other Middle Eastern peoples. Another opportunity came after Iran gave significant help to the coalition forces against the Taliban later in 2001, helping to persuade the Northern Alliance to accept democratic arrangements for post-Taliban Afghanistan.2 In 2002 Iranians were rewarded with President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, which lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea. Finally, the Bush administration ignored an Iranian offer in the spring of 2003 (shortly after the fall of Baghdad), via the Swiss, for bilateral talks toward a Grand Bargain that appeared to promise a possible resolution of the nuclear issue and de facto Iranian recognition of Israel.
The purpose of all this is not to reinforce the cringing sense of guilt that bedevils many Western observers who look at the Middle East. It is not All Our Fault, and no doubt if the Iranians had been in the position of strength that Britain was between 1815 and 1950, or that the United States has been in since then, they would have behaved as badly, and quite possibly worse. The Iranians also missed opportunities for rapprochement in the Khatami years. But too often we have gotten things wrong, and that has had a cost. It is important to see events from an Iranian perspective, to see how we got things wrong, and to see what needs to be done in order to get them right. The most important thing is this: if we make commitments and assert certain principles, we must be more careful to mean what we say and to uphold those principles.
The Iranian reaction after 9/11 shows in high relief the apparent paradox in Iranian attitudes to the West, in general, and to the United States, in particular. As we have seen, Iranians have real historical grounds for resentment that are unique to Iran and that go beyond the usual postures of nationalism and anti-Americanism. But among many ordinary Iranians there is also a liking and respect for Europeans and Americans that goes well beyond what one finds elsewhere in the Middle East. To some extent this is again a function of the Iranians’ sense of their special status among other Middle Eastern nations. Plainly, different Iranians combine these attitudes in different ways, but the best way to explain this paradox is perhaps to say that many Iranians (irrespective of their attitude to their own government, which they may also partly blame for the situation) feel snubbed, abused, misunderstood, and let down by the Westerners they think should have been their friends. This emerges in different ways—including in the rhetoric of politics, as is illustrated by a passage from a televised speech by Supreme Leader Khamenei on June 30, 2007:
Why, you may ask, should we adopt an offensive stance? Are we at war with the world? No, this is not the meaning. We believe that the world owes us something. Over the issue of the colonial policies of the colonial world, we are owed something. As far as our discussions with the rest of the world about the status of women are concerned, the world is indebted to us. Over the issue of provoking internal conflicts in Iran and arming with various types of weapons, the world is answerable to us. Over the issue of proliferation of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons, the world owes us something.3
The troubled course of the relationship between Iran and the West has entered a new and more confrontational phase under President Ahmadinejad. His June 2005 election campaign was successful because, with the organizational backing of the Pasdaran, he articulated the discontent of the poor and the urban unemployed, manipulating yet again Shi‘a indignation at the arrogance of power. His opponent in the final stage of the election was former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who for many Iranians represented the worst of the corrupt cronyism of the regime. But many voted for Ahmadinejad simply because for once they had a chance to vote for someone who was not a mullah. Most foreign observers, often unduly influenced by their contacts in prosperous, reform-inclined north Tehran, were taken completely by surprise at the result. Prior to his election Ahmadinejad, who had visited poorer parts of the country that had not seen a politician for years, emphasized economic and social issues; his religious enthusiasm and his urge to cut a figure in international relations has blossomed only since then. The election was far from fair or free—many reformists openly boycotted it, in protest at the exclusion of their candidates by the Guardian Council. In the second round Ahmadinejad received at most s
ixty percent of the vote in a sixty percent turnout—less than forty percent of the total number of electors. In the first round of the elections, with a wider field of candidates, he was the first choice of only six percent of the voters.
In the summer of 2005 Niall Ferguson warned that Ahmadinejad could be the Stalin of the Iranian revolution. Ahmadinejad may have the instincts and aspirations of a Stalin, but the political position in Iran is not so open to his ambitions, and he seems unlikely to prove a figure of the same fierce, sinister intelligence. For months the Majles blocked—in the end, successfully—his appointment of favorites and hangers-on to his cabinet. It seemed unlikely then, and seems even more unlikely now, that Ahmadinejad can deliver on his promises to the poor. His economic management has been heavily criticized within Iran, and his introduction of gasoline rationing in the summer of 2007 seems likely to undercut his populism further. After the introduction of the gas rationing, a poll appeared to show that 62.5 percent of the people who voted for Ahmadinejad in 2005 would not do so again.4 But if the nuclear confrontation with the West, for which he has been the figurehead, leads to sanctions, it could give him and the regime as a whole an alibi for their failure yet again to deliver on the economy and jobs.
Some observers of the situation in Iraq and Iran have warned apocalyptically of the danger of a nuclear-armed Iran controlling a Shi‘a-dominated Iraq, a resurgent Shi‘a Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a rising (Sunni) Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza, combined with Iranian-backed Shi‘a movements erupting in Bahrain and along other parts of the southern coast of the Persian Gulf. This is not a combination that Israel (let alone others) can afford to be complacent about, and the threats of President Ahmadinejad, even if more rhetoric than real, are still significant and influential.
But all is not quite as it may seem. In the wider Middle East, with the possible exception of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shi‘as show little enthusiasm for Iranian-style Islamic rule. For Shi‘ism as a global phenomenon, the velayat-e faqih looks increasingly like a radical step too far, and otherwise the most extreme voices in Islam come from the Sunni side. Under the influence of Al-Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr, Iraqi Shi‘as have maintained an independent line, though more attacks and provocations by Sunni insurgents may push them further into the arms of the Iranians. Iran has an influence on Shi‘a Iraq, and the Iranians tend to see themselves as the protectors of the Iraqi Shi‘as—as they do for Shi‘as elsewhere. But the Shi‘ism of southern Iraq, centered on the great shrines of Najaf (the tomb of Ali), Karbala, and Samarra, has an authority of its own, independent of Iranian Shi‘ism, which is centered on the theological schools of Qom. Iraqi Shi‘as do not necessarily trust the Iranians. And many ordinary Iranians do not much like seeing their government spending money and effort on behalf of foreigners—whether Iraqis, Lebanese, or Palestinians—when plenty of Iranians lack jobs, housing, and decent living conditions.
The ruling regime in Iran has many faults, but it is more representative than most in the Middle East outside Israel (though the trend is not encouraging—the Majles elections of 2004 and the presidential elections of 2005 were more interfered with and less free than previous elections). Despite repressive measures by the state, Iran is not a totalitarian country like the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It is a complex polity, with different power centers and shades of opinion among those in power. There is space for dissent—within certain boundaries. Iran still has the potential for self-generated change, as has been recognized by observers from Paul Wolfowitz to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah. Important independent Iranian figures like Shirin Ebadi and dissidents like Akbar Ganji have urged that Iran be left alone to develop its own political solutions. One theory of Iranian history, advanced by Homa Katouzian and others,5 is that Iran lurches from chaos to arbitrary autocracy and back again. There is certainly some evidence of that in the record. Perhaps increased political freedom would merely unleash chaos, and no doubt there are pragmatists within the current Iranian regime who make just that argument for keeping things as they are. One could interpret the crisis of the reform movement in 2000, followed by the press crackdown, as another episode in the Katouzian cycle. There are signs of disillusionment and nihilism among many young Iranians after the failure of the Khatami experiment.6 But I don’t believe in that kind of determinism. There is real social and political change afoot in Iran, in which the natural dynamic toward greater awareness, greater education, and greater freedom is prominent. Other Europeans in the seventeenth century used to say that England was a hopelessly chaotic place, full of incorrigibly violent and fanatical people who clamored to cut off their king’s head. A century later England was the model to others for freedom under the law and constitutional government.7
There are grounds for some cautious optimism. The preparedness of Iran and the United States in the spring of 2007 to speak to each other openly and directly for the first time since the hostage crisis is in itself a great step forward that looked impossible—from the perspective of both sides—a year or two ago. The talks are about Iraq. A priority for those talks must be to induce Iran to end the attacks on U.S. and British servicemen in Iraq by Shi‘a militia that have caused too many deaths and terrible injuries (the frequency of the attacks seems, in the winter of 2007/2008, to be diminishing). But attempts to lay a major part of the blame for the current problems in Iraq at the door of the Iranians have been dishonest. When the U.S. government presented a dossier in February 2007 detailing allegations that Iran had supplied components for explosive devices to attack coalition armored vehicles, the number of deaths they connected to such attacks was 187, and the validity of the allegations was disputed.8 At that time the total number of casualties among U.S. and coalition servicemen in Iraq was more than three thousand. Overwhelmingly, coalition servicemen have been killed and wounded not by Shi‘a militias backed by Iran, but by Sunni insurgents backed by—whom? Presumably by elements within countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia.9 But we don’t hear so much about that. Iran has been accused of trying to destabilize the new Iraqi government. But why would Iran wish to do that when Iraqi Shi‘as sympathetic to Iran are running that government already? Like the capture of the British sailors and marines in the spring of 2007, Iranian involvement in Iraq is better explained not as aggrandizement aimed at any other outcome, but rather as a reminder from the Iranians to the United States and Britain that Iran has permanent interests on her borders. The Iranian regime, as pragmatism would suggest, has always insisted on its desire for stability in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
It does not look like a good time, with Ahmadinejad in power, for the West to attempt a rapprochement with Iran. But willy-nilly, the United States and Britain need Iranian help in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the region in general. This is a simple reflection of the fact that Iran is a permanent and important presence in the Middle East, and that Iran has been the prime beneficiary of the removal of the Taliban and Saddam, Iran’s former enemies. The present government of Iran is far from perfect, but there are other governments in the Middle East that are as bad or worse—on democracy or human rights—whom we have few scruples about describing as close allies. If we can deal respectfully with Iran as a partner and an equal—and not merely, as too often in the past, as an instrument to short-term ends elsewhere—we might be surprised at how far even the current hard-line regime would go in taking up the partnership. Then we would see the beneficial effects a better relationship could have within Iran. The Iranian leadership is not just Ahmadinejad, and his leverage in the Iranian system is less than it appears. The wider leadership circle—those who coordinate decisions in the Supreme National Security Council—is substantially the same as it was in 2003, when it authorized the Grand Bargain offer.
There are many bleak aspects to the current situation in Iran. The arrests of women and visiting academics in the spring of 2007 were yet another retrograde step. Arrests to enforce the dress code (which relaxed significantly in the Khatami period) and prevent so-called im
morality in public, such as a couple holding hands or kissing, intensified at the same time.10 Khatami’s purge of the MOIS has been reversed and many of those suspected of complicity in the serial murders of 1998 have returned. Peaceful demonstrations are broken up and demonstrators arrested and held for extended periods. It is sad beyond words that the president of a country with such a diverse and profound intellectual heritage—and such an ancient and important Jewish presence—should seek to make a splash with a conference for an international rag bag of wild-eyed Holocaust deniers and an exhibition of offensive and inane cartoons. But the propensity of the Iranian regime to Holocaust denial did not begin with Ahmadinejad, just as Iranian support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and their attacks on Israel, goes back many years. Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map—or according to a more precise translation, “erased from the page of time”—was foolish and irresponsible.11 His position on the problem of Israel and the Palestinians—that Israel was created for European Jews as a manifestation of European guilt after the Nazi Holocaust, and that the Israelis should go back to Europe—was ignorant and crass. The Jews of Israel came from a wide variety of countries over a long period, including large numbers in the last two decades from the former Soviet Union. Plainly the shock of the Holocaust was one factor in the establishment of Israel, but so too was the poor position of Jews in Islamic countries at that time. In the years immediately after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, roughly equal numbers came from Islamic countries on the one hand, and from Europe on the other (including, for example, around 260,000 from Morocco, 129,290 from Iraq, 29,295 from Egypt, 229,779 from Romania, 156,011 from Poland, and 11,552 from Germany in the period 1948–195512). Of course, many tens of thousands of Iranian Jews went to Israel in those years also. In that period Jews in the Middle East, just as much as the Jews of Europe, were seeking a country in which they could be masters of their own destiny—in which they could resist persecution with their own means, as opposed to hoping uncertainly for the friendly intervention of non-Jewish state powers, as had always been the case in the Diaspora. Anti-Semitism had not been just a European phenomenon, and in some degree the present problem of relations between Muslims in the Middle East and Israelis is merely a transformed and relocated version of the old problem of how the majority of Islamic peoples of the Middle East related to the minority of Jews (and other dhimmis) in their midst. Notwithstanding the real need for a solution to the suffering of the Palestinians, for Ahmadinejad to expect the Israelis to return to their former status as second-class citizens and victims in the Middle East is unrealistic political posturing.
A History of Iran Page 33