Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa

by Michael J. Totten

  Mohtadi, though, wasn’t made of Hezbollah material. Instead of railing against the United States and waging war on its allies in the region, he met with State Department officials and asked for help from the American government. “We are not asking for an invasion,” he told Eli Lake at the New York Sun. “We are saying that helping Iranian parties fight for democracy and regime change is good for us and good for America.”

  Mohtadi and Modarresi asked me to stay for dinner. Several other political bureau members joined us at the table. Servants brought us baked chicken, barbecued lamb, steamed rice, an enormous stuffed fish from one of Kurdistan’s lakes and four bottles of red wine from Lebanon.

  The 66 hostages seized at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 finally came up in conversation. “We were against that from the very beginning,” Mohtadi said. I half expected him to bang his fist on the table. Suddenly his soothing demeanor was gone. Mention of the hostage episode had riled him up. He may have been politically anti-American when the embassy workers were taken, but he said that act of anti-Americanism gravely violated his own standards of conduct.

  Besides, the United States was a potential if not actual ally in Mohtadi’s struggle against the Islamic Republic. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Mohtadi’s list of ideological foes changed over time. His enemies became precisely those with whom he aligned himself during the battle against the Shah: the totalitarian left and the Islamist right.

  * * *

  More encouraging than Komala’s moderation and political evolution was its plausible claim—backed up by most Iranian activists, expatriates and dissidents—that Iranian society as a whole is far more sensible and mature than it was in 1979, at least at the level below the state, on the street. The aftermath of an Iranian revolution, Mohtadi said, will not resemble the postwar occupation of Iraq with its civil war, insurgency, kidnappings and car bombs.

  “We have an internal opposition,” he said. “We have an internal movement against the regime. Women were warned not to celebrate 8 March, Women’s Day. They did. There are demonstrations in Iran. There are movements in Iran. You have the intellectuals, the political activists, the human-rights activists, then the Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, different nationalities. There is a movement in Iran, unlike in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, where you had Kurds and nobody else.” (Iraq’s Shias did rise up against Saddam in 1991, but they had been quiet since Baghdad’s brutal response to that insurrection.) “It’s not like that in Iran.”

  Iran’s opposition undoubtedly had more breadth and maturity than Iraq’s did under Saddam Hussein. And if Iran’s government were to fall to a mass revolution rooted in civil society instead of an outside invasion, postregime chaos seemed less likely—assuming the various ethnic groups could hold it together.

  Iran is commonly thought of as Persian, but ethnic Persians make up only 51 percent of the population. Twenty-five percent are Turkic Azeris, 10 percent are Kurds, and smaller numbers are Baluchis and Arabs. How are Iran’s relations among its various “nationalities”? “Much better than the relations between Kurds and Arabs” in Iraq and Syria, Mohtadi said. “Historically, Persians and Kurds have been, as people say, cousins. Culturally they are closer to each other than Kurds and Arabs, who have almost nothing in common.”

  “The Iranian people and the Iranian Kurds are more developed,” he continued. “They are more cultured; they are more organized. Even the Iraqi Kurds admit that culturally [Iranian Kurds] are higher and more developed economically. The credit doesn’t go to the Islamic Republic. For a long time Iran has been a civilization. Iraq’s tribal and medieval culture, the brutality, the lawlessness, revenge—Iraq was very primitive and still is, apart from Kurdistan. You look at it, and you become astonished at how undeveloped politically they are.”

  He had a point. Iraqi Kurds built the only safe, prosperous and politically moderate place in Iraq, yet they admire the Iranians (though not their government). The Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah is far more liberal and open, and noticeably less backward and tribal, than the Iraqi Kurdish cities of Erbil and Dohuk. This, according to people who live there, is partly due to Sulaymaniyah’s proximity to Iran and the centuries-long liberalizing effect that Iranian Persians and Kurds have had on their culture.

  Mohtadi could be wrong. Maybe he was talking about a minority that only appeared to him like a majority. Perhaps his analysis was slightly deceitful, a little self-serving. These things happen. We know how inaccurate Ahmed Chalabi’s rosy predictions about post-Saddam Iraq turned out to be. There is no way to know for certain until the Islamic Republic is gone. If Mohtadi turns out to be wrong, though, he won’t be alone. Most opposition groups inside and outside Iran claim the Iranian people—Persians, Kurds and Azeris alike—are far more prepared than Iraqis for civil, democratic politics.

  What they didn’t know—what no one could know and what may in the end matter most—is how much damage a fanatical minority can do in Iran after it’s thrown out of power. It may not matter if most Iranians want a normal life in a quiet country. Most Iraqis were not insurgents, but the insurgency raged on.

  We could look, though, at the behavior of the ruling fanatics. As oppressive as the Iranian government was, it was an enlightened model of restraint compared with Saddam’s regime in Iraq.

  Saddam destroyed the city of Halabja with air strikes, artillery, chemical weapons and napalm. He wiped out 95 percent of the villages in northern Iraq. He drained the marshes in southern Iraq and chopped down the forests of Kurdistan. He threw dissidents into industrial shredders and acid baths. The most mundane things were banned: cell phones, maps, even weather reports. The Mukhabarat, his secret police, arrested anyone who so much as looked at one of his palaces. Iraq was the North Korea of the Middle East.

  Iran was harsh, but it wasn’t that bad. Opposition to the regime was widespread, deep and open—unthinkable in Saddam’s Iraq. It was impossible for the Iranian government to crack down on everyone. The police hardly even tried anymore.

  “You can complain about the government,” Mohtadi said. “You can insult them. But America is a red line. Khomeini himself is a red line. The Israelis are a red line, absolutely.” Iranians couldn’t buck the party line on certain topics, but they were brave enough, or just barely free enough, to protest the government to its face. “When [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad spoke to students,” Mohtadi pointed out, “hundreds of students stood up and called him a fascist and burned his picture.”

  * * *

  Sealing the rugged Iran-Iraq border is all but impossible in the north, where like-minded Kurds live on both sides of it. People, as well as goods, cross every hour. Alcohol is smuggled into Iran. Gasoline and drugs are smuggled out. Komala’s location in the area made it the perfect place for a vast, sprawling safe house. Activists, underground party members and dissidents from Iran—from the Persian heartland as well as from Iranian Kurdistan—slipped through the mountains to visit every day.

  I’ve stood on the border myself and contemplated walking undetected into Iran. Komala leaders even offered to take me across and embed me. “We can get you inside Iran and leave you for weeks, if you want, among our supporters and among our people,” Mohtadi said. “It is very easy.”

  If I were caught in Iran without a visa or an entry stamp in my passport, I would almost surely be jailed as a spy. Tempting as the offer was, I had to pass. Anyway, I could speak to Iranian dissidents, if not necessarily ordinary Iranians, in the Komala camp just as easily as I could have inside Iran. As it happened, a famous Persian writer and dissident had arrived there just before I did.

  Kianoosh Sanjari was a member of the United Student Front in Tehran. At 23, he had been been imprisoned and tortured many times. His most recent arrest was on October 7, 2006, after he wrote about clashes between the Revolutionary Guards and supporters of the liberal cleric Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi. Charged with “acting against state security” and “propaganda against the system,” he was released on $100
,000 bail the previous December. Some months later, he fled to Iraq and moved to the Komala camp.

  Unlike most Iranian visitors who used Komala as a safe house, Sanjari didn’t bother to remain anonymous. He told me his real name and said I could publish his picture. “I’m just now coming out of Iran,” he said. “It’s a hell there. I know the sufferings. I am inclined to accept any tactic that helps overthrow this regime.”

  “Does that include an American invasion of Iran?” I asked.

  “Maybe intellectuals who just talk about things are not in favor of that kind of military attack,” he said. “But I have spoken to people in taxis, in public places. They are praying for an external outside power to do something for them and get rid of the mullahs. Personally, it’s not acceptable for me if the United States crosses the Iranian border. I like the independence of Iran and respect the independence of my country. But my generation doesn’t care about this.”

  Sanjari had fierce and intimidating eyes, the eyes not of a fanatic but of a dead-serious person who is not to be messed with. He spoke slowly and with great force. “They repress people in the name of religion,” he said. “They torture people in the name of religion. They kill people in the name of religion. The young generation now wants to distance themselves from religion itself.”

  Islamists seem to fail wherever they succeed. Perhaps Islamic law looks good on paper to Muslims who live in oppressive secular states, but few seem to think so after they actually have to put up with it.

  More than 100,000 Algerians were killed during the 1990s in a horrific civil war between religious insurgents and the secular Soviet-style police state. As a consequence, Islamists became more hated in Algeria than at any time since they rose up. Al-Qaeda tried to reignite the war there, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

  Iraqis turned against al-Qaeda faster and harder than Iranians turned against the Islamic Republic. Harsh as the Islamic Republic may be, al-Qaeda is worse by an order of magnitude. Its infamous warnings to street vendors in Iraq’s Anbar province not to place cucumbers next to tomatoes in the market because the vegetables are “different genders” is one of myriad reasons most Sunni Arab tribes in that region flipped to the side of the hated Americans.

  Islamist law became so widely detested and flouted in Iran that it’s a wonder the regime even bothered to keep up the pretense. In June 2005, Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair that every person he visited there, with the exception of one imam, offered him alcohol, which was banned.

  Everyone I met at the Komala compound said the Iranian regime wallowed deep in the postideological torpor that inevitably follows radical revolutions. Except for the most fanatic officials, the government cared only about money and power. “Followers of the regime are not ideological anymore,” Sanjari said. “They are bribed by the government. They will no longer support it in the case that it is overthrown. Even among the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guards, there are so many people dissatisfied with the policies of the regime. Fortunately there aren’t religious conflicts between Shias, Sunnis and different nationalities.”

  Mohtadi concurred. “The next revolution and government will be explicitly antireligious,” he said.

  The Iranian writer Reza Zarabi says the regime has all but destroyed religion itself. “The name Iran, which used to be equated with such things as luxury, fine wine, and the arts, has become synonymous with terrorism,” he wrote. “When the Islamic Republic government of Iran finally meets its demise, they will have many symbols and slogans as testaments of their rule, yet the most profound will be their genocide of Islam, the black stain that they have put on this faith for many generations to come.”

  It’s certainly possible to be overly optimistic. Iranian dissidents have been predicting an imminent revolution for several years running. Michael Hirsh wrote in Newsweek that women in Tehran have “gone defiantly chic” in style and that the men are looking “less and less menacing and more and more metrosexual,” which makes the place sound more like freewheeling Beirut than an Islamist theocracy. But the state, he added, could still endure for some time. “It is an old, familiar umbrella of oppression that now stays just distant enough to be tolerated, even if it is little loved,” he wrote. “The success of this oppressive but subtly effective system should give the regime-change advocates in Washington some pause.”

  Whom to believe? Hirsh’s analysis held up for years, but Iran is notoriously unpredictable even for those who are supposed to be experts. The 1979 revolution shocked even CIA agents who lived in Iran while it was brewing. They insisted the Shah was firmly entrenched and could not possibly fall.

  * * *

  The Middle East is so rife with conflict, factions, murky alliances, foreign interventions, multisided civil wars and wild-card variables that trying to predict its future is like trying to forecast the weather on a particular day three years in advance. There’s a reason the phrase shifting sands has become a cliché.

  If the Islamic Republic is overthrown, almost anything might happen. Iran could become a modern liberal democracy, as most East European states did after the fall of the Soviet Empire. It could revert to a milder form of authoritarian rule, as Russia has. It could, like Iraq, face chronic instability and insurgent attacks. Or its various “nationalities” could tear the country to pieces and go the way of the Yugoslavs. Optimists like Sanjari and Mohtadi may have a better sense of what to expect than those of us in the West, but they still do not know.

  The only thing that seems likely is that a showdown of some kind is coming, either among factions in Iran or between Iran and the rest of the world. Predictions of the regime’s imminent demise have been staples of Iranian expat and activist discourse for years, so it’s hard to take the latest ones seriously. But authoritarian regimes increasingly seem to have limited shelf lives. As Francis Fukuyama’s flawed but compelling book The End of History and the Last Man points out, there has been a worldwide explosion of liberal democracies since the 18th century, from three in 1790 to 36 in 1960 to 61 in 1990. (In 2006, Freedom House classified 148 nations as free or partly free.) History isn’t over and never will be, but it hasn’t been kind to dictatorships lately.

  The Iranian state is soft and vulnerable compared with the worst abusers out there, and it constantly faces resistance from citizens. Something will give.

  “Movements are taking shape in Iran,” Sanjari said. “The Iranian regime confronts the whole world with its policies. Political developments are very rapid now. Developments in Iran aren’t controllable. I hope the Iranian people overthrow this regime with no or few sacrifices. But that is a dream.”

  Chapter Four

  Between the Green Line and the Blue Line

  Jerusalem, 2011

  If you were to walk the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City while knowing nothing of the city’s history or politics, you would have no idea that Israelis and Palestinians are officially in their seventh decade of war with each other. Here, in this ancient square kilometer, is where Arabs, Jews and the three Abrahamic faiths come together. The Western Wall of King Solomon’s temple, the holiest site in all of Judaism, is mere feet from the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in all of Islam. Both are just minutes from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus was said to be buried beneath the hill where he was crucified.

  Arab shopkeepers in the Muslim and Christian quarters sell their merchandise not only to tourists from just about everywhere but also to their Jewish Israeli neighbors. You’re as likely to hear Hebrew spoken as Arabic, and most of the time you can’t tell by looking who is a Jew and who is an Arab. Most of the Old City’s Arabs return to their homes at the end of the day on the east side of the city, and most Jewish Israelis retreat to houses on the west side, but the two communities mix here every day and, at least superficially, get along as well as people in any other civilized city. There is little crime and even less political violence. It certainly isn’t a war zone, or at least it isn’t today.

  This f
ragile de facto peace may be the foundation for a genuine and lasting peace later, but most proponents of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would erect, for the first time, a real international border through the heart of Jerusalem. There’s a chance it might work, but if it doesn’t—and the odds are remote that it could work well anytime soon—the collapse of this delicate and hard-earned status quo could do serious damage to the city so close to the hearts of both peoples.

  * * *

  Israel has been at war since the day it was born. When the Jewish state declared independence from the British Mandate in 1948, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq invaded and vowed to destroy it. The war lasted until the following year, when separate armistice agreements were signed with each aggressor. The Jordanian-Israeli armistice line slashed right through the center of Jerusalem, with the Jordanians controlling eastern, northern and southern sectors and the Israelis controlling western Jerusalem and an enclave in the east on Mount Scopus. The line became known as the Green Line. Neither Israel nor Jordan ever declared it the border, because it was simply drawn where each army happened to be standing at the time of the cease-fire. Each side knew, or at least hoped, that it was only a temporary armistice line, that there was nothing holy about it, that the final status was still up for grabs and would be later decided by negotiation or conquest.

  Israel’s toehold in the western sector was surrounded on three sides and connected to the coastal plain by a narrow strip of land just a few kilometers wide. The Jordanians held the high ground overlooking that corridor, and they dug in on the tops of the hills surrounding it and the city. Despite the armistice agreement, Jordanian soldiers frequently used those positions to fire artillery shells, mortars and sniper rounds at Jewish civilians below.