A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  THE NUCLEAR DISPUTE

  Ahmadinejad’s provocative remarks about Israel sounded the more threatening because of the continuing dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. Most Western states suspected Iran of trying to acquire a nuclear weapon capability, which, if acquired, would have been a contravention of Iran’s commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and associated agreements. The Iranians claimed that they had no nuclear weapon ambitions and said, correctly, that the other NPT signatory states were bound to assist Iran’s civil nuclear program under their NPT commitments. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found no clear evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapon program. But after the discovery of undeclared nuclear sites at Arak and Natanz in 2002, the IAEA said that the Iranians had repeatedly failed to meet safeguards obligations and that it could not be confident that there were no further undeclared nuclear activities or materials in Iran. The IAEA’s chairman, Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, called for greater cooperation and openness from the Iranians to dispel legitimate suspicions about an Iranian nuclear weapon program. Others pointed out that Iran had not been obliged to declare the sites at Arak and Natanz because they were not yet operational. In the autumn of 2005, the IAEA declared that Iran was not in compliance with the NPT Safeguards agreement. After that, the UN Security Council called upon Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and then imposed sanctions.

  Uranium enrichment is achieved by spinning uranium gas in a centrifuge to separate the more fissile Uranium-235 isotope from the less fissile Uranium-238 isotope. Uranium-235 is the isotope needed for nuclear reactions, and uranium containing a higher than normal proportion of Uranium-235 is described as “enriched.” Uranium enriched to between two and three percent is satisfactory for a civil nuclear reactor but needs to be further enriched to ninety percent or more for a nuclear weapon. This is the problem: civil uranium enrichment is a legitimate activity under the NPT. But once the enrichment process has begun, the difference between enrichment to levels consistent with civil use and the levels necessary for weapons is difficult to verify from outside. Iran has been enriching uranium since April 2006, and estimates for the time needed to gather enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb range from two to eight years, depending on the number of centrifuges and the efficiency of the operation.

  The Israeli and U.S. governments, among many others, made plain early on that they would not accept Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. But within Iran, Ahmadinejad and other politicians presented opposition to their program as Western blocking of Iranian civil nuclear power, and the dispute produced an upsurge of nationalist feeling in favor of Iran’s right to nuclear power. This shaded ambiguously into support in some quarters for Iran to be a nuclear power—that is, a power with nuclear weapons, like Pakistan, India, Israel, France, Russia, China, the UK, and the United States. Meanwhile, as the clock ticked and the centrifuges spun, Israel warned that it would take military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear (weapon) program if it was not halted by other means. Some of the rhetoric against Iran in the United States could be dismissed as ignorance and political scaremongering. Israeli concerns could not.

  If the Iranian leadership had been determined to acquire a nuclear capability, even Israeli or U.S. bombing campaigns could have not stopped it indefinitely—the processes could have been dispersed and concealed in deep underground bunkers, if they had not been already. But the declaration by Iranian religious leaders against ownership of nuclear weapons counted for something. A capability to produce a nuclear weapon in circumstances of an acute security crisis would have been almost as desirable for the Iranian regime as a weapon itself: it would have had most of the deterrent effect of an actual weapon—and the only real utility of nuclear weapons is deterrence. That may have been the real Iranian aim (very much with the experience of the Iran-Iraq War in mind)—but even that may not have been a fixed, determined aim. If Iran had been able to normalize its relations with the United States, remove the threat of regime change, and obtain even a limited version of the sort of security guarantees U.S. allies enjoy, the perceived need for a nuclear weapon capability would have been much reduced, if not removed altogether. That may have been part of the significance of the Grand Bargain offer of 2003. After the National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007, and the revelation it contained, that the U.S. intelligence agencies collectively believed that Iran had halted its nuclear weapon program in 2003, tension eased and the possibility of negotiation toward a resolution of the nuclear dispute and normalization of relations became a little more realistic. At least the danger of conflict receded, for a time.

  EMPIRE OF THE MIND?

  The deeper, reflective, humane Iran is still there beneath the threatening media headlines. Iranian cinema is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the country since the revolution. Banned from the themes of violence and sex regarded by Hollywood as indispensable, Iran has produced a cinema of unique poetic artistry and universal appeal that has won many international prizes. Directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and his daughter Samira Makhmalbaf have become internationally recognized through films like The Apple, 10, Taste of Cherry, The Circle, Blackboards, and Colour of God. Many of these films develop subjects dealing with the mistreatment of women, the vulnerability of children, the effects of war, the distortions of Iranian politics and society, and other themes critical or tending to be critical of the Islamic regime. Some say that many Iranians, especially young Iranians, never watch these films, choosing instead to see Hollywood-style film romances that never get an outing in the West. But this cinema nonetheless shows the enduring greatness, the potential, the confidence, and the creative power of Iranian thought and expression.

  Iran and Persian culture have been hugely influential in world history. Repeatedly, what Iran has thought today, the rest of the world (or significant parts of it) has believed tomorrow. At various stages Iran has truly been an Empire of the Mind, and in a sense it is still—Iranian culture continues to hold together an ethnically and linguistically diverse nation. Iran is poised now to take on a bigger role in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the region generally than it has taken for many years. But is Iran an empire of the future? In other words, can Iran take the role of importance and influence in the Middle East and the wider world that is her due?

  This has to be considered doubtful. One element of the doubt is whether the wider world community will allow Iran that role. But another doubt, the main doubt, is whether today’s Iran, governed by a narrow and self-serving clique, is capable of that wider role. In the past, at its best, Iran attained a position of influence by fostering and celebrating her brightest and best minds—by facing complexity honestly, with tolerance, and by developing principles to deal with it. Today Iran is ruled by merely cunning minds, while the brightest and best emigrate or are imprisoned, or stay mute out of fear. A generation of the best-educated Iranians in Iran’s history have grown up (more than half of them women) only to be intimidated and gagged. Iran’s international position has been one of extreme isolation for over twenty years, and when one of Iran’s sharpest and most humane minds, Shirin Ebadi, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the enthusiasm with which she was feted in the wide world contrasted dismally with the way she was ignored by the Iranian government on her return. Since 1979 Iran has challenged the West, and Western conceptions of what civilization should be. That might have been praiseworthy in itself, had it not been for the suffering and oppression, the dishonesty and disappointment that followed. Could Iran offer more than that? Iran could, and should.

  EPILOGUE

  Since the early editions of this book were published in late 2007 and early 2008, events in Iran and about Iran have continued to attract attention around the world. But events in the wider world have had their effect in Iran, too. The election of President Barack Obama at the end of 2008 created a new predicament for the ruling group around Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Obama’s early declarations of openness to direct tal
ks with the Iranians, his preparedness to speak of the Islamic republic as such rather than in circumlocutory terms that avoided appearing to recognize the regime, as previous administrations had done, and his cleverly crafted Noruz message in March 20091 challenged the stale rhetoric of the Iranian regime and forced them to contemplate a change in their own policies of intransigence. But both sides knew that little could be expected to shift in the U.S.-Iran relationship in advance of the Iranian presidential election scheduled for June 2009. Many people, both outside Iran and within, hoped that the election would produce an Iranian leader with a new, positive outlook to complement Obama’s, permitting some real progress at long last.

  It was not to be. Once again, the Iranian presidential election produced a surprise—all the more so because this time the surprise was of a different order altogether from the surprises of past elections. In 1997 and in 2005, surprise outsiders had won the elections. This time the surprise was in the conduct of the election itself, which led to weeks of demonstrations and unrest of an intensity not seen since the revolution of 1978–1979.

  In the last week before election day on June 12, many observers discerned a growing wave of enthusiasm for the leading opposition candidate, Mir-Hosein Mousavi. Mousavi had served as prime minister during the Iran-Iraq War, but, like Khatami before him, he appeared to have neither the track record nor the charisma of someone likely to shake the foundations of the state. The perception of a developing movement behind Mousavi was reinforced by early indications of a high turnout, suggesting that pro-reform voters who had boycotted the election in 2005 had turned out to vote this time. But although the votes, when they were counted, certainly showed a high turnout—eighty-five percent—they gave Ahmadinejad a whopping sixty-three percent of the vote, well over the fifty percent threshold needed to win the poll outright (less than fifty percent would have meant a second round of voting, with a run-off between the two candidates who had won most votes in the first round).

  In assessing the outcome of the election, it is necessary to be clear that no one has yet produced conclusive proof that the results were falsified. But there were a number of suspicious indications. One was that previous precedents for release of the results were abandoned—normally results emerged by region, but this time successive announcements were made on the basis of a larger number of votes counted each time, for the country as a whole—and each time the proportion of each new tranche of votes going to each candidate was suspiciously similar. The distribution of votes for each candidate, when the final results were out, showed again the same suspicious consistency across rural and urban voting districts, and in those dominated by religious and ethnic minorities—as if someone had picked figures for the final result and had then applied that formula to each part of the country in arbitrary fashion, with the help of a computer program. Against all previous experience in Iranian elections, there was no significant sign of a swing toward candidates in their home districts: the proportional formula held up even there.

  The regime’s handling of the results deepened suspicions to the point at which the election looked increasingly like a coup carried out by the ruling group to keep Ahmadinejad in office. Several months before the election, Supreme Leader Khamenei had made statements supportive of Ahmadinejad that already marked a departure from previous practice. After the election results came out, Khamenei spoke forcefully in support of Ahmadinejad’s reelection within a few hours, acclaiming it as a divine judgment; previously the Supreme Leader had waited until the Guardian Council ratified the result, which usually took three days. Even before the final results were known, in the small hours of the morning, police and troops were on the streets to forestall demonstrations. They surrounded the Interior Ministry (from which the results were being announced) and Mousavi’s campaign headquarters, severely hampering the opposition movement’s communications and their ability to respond to events.

  Over the following weeks a number of rumors emerged that, taken together, may go some way to explain how the election turned out as it did. It seems that the ruling clique became increasingly concerned in the spring of 2009 that the elections might develop a bandwagon effect comparable to that which resulted with the election of President Khatami in 1997—an outcome they were determined to avoid. One version says that the government conducted a secret poll that showed an outright win for Mousavi. Several reports purporting to come from dissidents in the Interior Ministry alleged that reformist-oriented staff were purged and swiftly replaced by Ahmadinejad’s supporters, who set about a plan to falsify the results. There were a number of suggestions that the cleric most closely associated with Ahmadinejad—Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi—had issued a ruling that all means were legitimate to ensure the continuation of the prevailing form of Islamic government.

  It is plain that many voters turned out for Ahmadinejad on June 12. The usual judgment is that his support was strongest in the countryside and among the poorer sections of the electorate. Voters who distrusted both the regime and the perceived urban sophistication of the opposition candidates, and still were disenchanted with the reformists, may have voted for Ahmadinejad because, unlike other politicians, he looked and sounded like them—they understood him and felt they could trust him in spite of his failure to reverse worsening economic conditions and standards of living in his first term. Many Iranians supported his strong stance against the West and in favor of Iran’s right to a civil nuclear program. In the countryside it was also easier for the regime to coerce voters—whether by increases in salaries just before the election, or by threats. But one should not go too far (as some have) in characterizing the election as a confrontation between an urbanized, westernized, vocal minority and a relatively silent, rural majority. The population of Iran in 2009 was more than sixty percent urban.

  Whatever one may believe about what happened, the reaction was immediate and strong. Thousands of Iranians turned out on the streets of Tehran and other cities to protest, wearing scarves or bandanas in green, the color of the Mousavi campaign. Within a few days, the number of protesters had grown to hundreds of thousands, with estimates saying a million or more on Monday, June 15. Their numbers and their diverse origins belied the thought that this was merely sour grapes from an isolated group. European and U.S. news media reported excitedly that these were the biggest demonstrations in Iran since the revolution. In the evenings, Iranians gathered on rooftops to shout Allahu Akbar, as they had in 1978–1979.

  Responding on the first weekend of the demonstrations, Ahmadinejad referred to the demonstrators as Khas o Khashak—dust and trash or flotsam and jetsam—that would be swept away. But they did not go away. Despite beatings and arrests and efforts by the regime to prevent any reporting of the protests, they continued, and Iranians found ways to get reporting out of Iran, including through new Internet channels like Facebook and Twitter.

  On the evening of June 20, a young woman called Neda Agha-Soltan got out of her car, which was obstructed by the protesting crowds on Kargar Avenue in central Tehran, to escape the heat. Soon afterward, she was shot in the chest and despite the efforts of those around her, including a doctor, to stanch the flow of blood, she was dead within a few minutes. Bystanders filmed the event on mobile telephones, and the images went around the world on YouTube. Neda became a symbol of the protests and of the brutality of the regime’s conduct (regime spokesmen later claimed that she had been shot by the CIA or other foreigners). Despite the dwindling of the street protests in later weeks, under pressure from the police and the Basij militia, demonstrators turned out again in large numbers on July 30, the fortieth day after her death, to protest against the shooting.2 There were demonstrations again on September 18, when the regime attempted to hold its usual event (Qods day—Jerusalem day) to show support for the Palestinians against Israel. Opposition demonstrators, making use of the fact that the color used to symbolize the Palestinian cause, like that of the Mousavi campaign, was green, appeared again en masse, took over the event and shouted d
own the official slogans.

  On November 4 the demonstrators did it again, taking over the official event to mark thirty years since the occupation of the U.S. embassy in 1979. Thousands of protesters appeared in Tehran, defying arrest by the police and the Basij, and there were similar manifestations in Isfahan, Rasht, Shiraz and Tabriz. Instead of the weary regime mantra of marg bar Amrika (death to America), some called instead marg bar hichkas—death to nobody.

  As the disturbances went on, so the number of arrests and prisoners in custody grew. Through the summer and autumn ugly stories spread of the torture and death of protesters in custody. Estimates of the number of deaths mounted to several hundred. At the end of July the Supreme Leader ordered the closure of the Kahrizak detention center after protests from opposition figures about torture, and the death of Mohsen Ruholamini, the son of a prominent conservative politician. In November a young doctor, Ramin Pourandarzjani, who had seen Ruholamini shortly before his death and had been pressured to say that he had died of meningitis, himself died in suspicious circumstances at Tehran police headquarters.