A major world event such as the ‘coup d’etat’ in Tehran.is sure to provoke
a flood of commentary.  Iran’s prominence in America’s strategic field of
vision is the main reason.  In truth, so too is our lack of inhibition in
pronouncing on matters of which we know next to nothing and understand
less.  I suggest that the discourse on Iran, especially Washington’s
policy toward that benighted country, begin with a prudential recognition
of that uncomfortable truth – that is one.  After all, if Moussavi and
Rafsanjani themselves had only an inkling of what was afoot, and today
seem to be living in a state of confused suspension, is it not reasonable
for outsiders to observe a measure of modesty about our comprehension of
the inner workings of Iran’s corridors of power?  - that is two.  As for
official Washington, similarly ignorant, I see little value in Obama’s
nearly daily declarations about Iranian developments – that is three. Yes,
of course, some expression of a considered view on what was happening was
necessary, if for no other reason than the rest of the world expected it
and wanted it – the Iranian leadership apart.

But what is the purpose of a running White House commentary on the
thoughts – and feelings - circulating in Mr. Obama’s mind?  Our leaders
too often conducts themselves in accordance with the celebrity admonition:
since “I talk, therefore I am,” then I have to keep my mouth open lest the
world forget that I’m still around.  A statesman’s effectiveness depends
on keeping his mouth closed unless his words serve a dedicated policy
objective beyond that of playing the jejune, distracting game of domestic
image politics.  Above all, for the administration to speculate at this
point as to whether the hand supposedly opened to Tehran will remain
extended or not can be highly counter-productive.  Especially so, since
the White House has little information on which to base an assessment that
it does or does not make sense to pursue a serious diplomatic initiative.

So, while there is good reason for this disciplined discourse on Iran’s
political present and future, my advice to the White House would be: shut
up for a couple of weeks and do some sober thinking. – and, even more
radically, consulting.


 

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Iran has just gone through the first phase of a political earthquake, a regime change of sorts.  The rules have changed and so too the expectations.  In years past, electorally, Iran appeared to many to be a managed democracy.  It was possible within a narrow definition for "reformers" to win.  The latest election quashed that possibility.  Elections under this regime are likely to be a farce from here on out.  The government of Iran is today a partnership between the conservative clegry, typified by Khameini, the Revolutionary Guards and their supporters, esp. the Basij.

The options that exist are few.  The current regime  has effectively and ruthlessly clamped down on the resistance.  If the people want to "take back" their slim portion of the government, it will require a full and bloody revolution.  Many, many more people will have to die before the masses (and the middle class) will move effectively against the center.  

Another option would be a rupture at the top to force out the Supreme Leader.  This is unlikely.  Even an attempt  could bring about action by the Rev. Guard and its minions.  The corpses of the demonstrators and the "disappeared" will discipline the faux democrats among the top councils of the government.  Show trials and phony arrests will keep alcon on their prayer mats, begging for divine intervention.

A final option would be the creeping Brezhnevization of Iran.  Current leaders remain in place.  Iran remains a dysfunctional politiy and a suboptimal economy.  Its major foreign activities remain oil sales, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the production of nuclear weapons.  At home, a new conservative crackdown settles into a new and depressing norm.  

Sadly, the last option is the most likely to take place and is the option that raises the probability of international war.  The two key kinetic possibilities are Israel vs Iran, or Iran vs Iraq, either of which would be devastating.  Iran has once again produced more tragedy than it will be able to consume on its own. 

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The regime is unlikely to collapse now, but the protests in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere are fundamentally different from the student protests that took place some years ago.  Now, unlike then, the triggering factor, the election of Ahmadinejad, will, if he remains in office, and the "supreme" leadership of Khamenei, even if the president is removed, will constitute an ongoing reminder to people of all classes, and especially women, of why they protested. There will be another round, maybe two, of more protests and demonstration some time in the near future.  At some point, people will not cower before the Basij (some people already have fought back). Once that happens on a wide scale,  I am not cetrain that the Revolutionary Guard will be willing to shed great amounts of Iranian blood, or if, for that matter, the regular military would stand by and permit the RG to do so.

When might the regime fall? Who knows? It took the Soviet Union seven decades, and Romania about  four. This regime is into its fourth decade now. I consider it significant  that Iran had a functioning parliament in the early part of the twentieth century. In that regard there are indeed similarities to the overthrow of eastern European communism in 1989; Poland, for example, had a functoning Sejm until Hitelr's invasion in 1939. Recall too that  Mossadegh fell primarily because the bazaaris and the middle classes backed the Shah, as of course did the military; Kermit Roosevelt was not the primary reason for his departure (see Gary Sick's excellent <All Fall Down> for a brief summary of what really happened.) FInally, it is widely known that Khamenei is a "political" cleric; several ayatollahs have already spoken out against him.

These three factors--the legacy of representative government, the  restiveness of the bazaaris, and the growing uneasiness of some of Qom's leading scholars--do not bode well for the political ayatollahs and their thuggish henchmen, Their time is running out.  

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The Iranian regime has several options.  One is simply to repress dissent using as much force as it takes in the mode of North Korea or Iraq under Hussein.  While this might seem appealing, I doubt it can be done for a nation already linked to the global information network.  Hussein and Kim constructed their national prisons before the infiltration of information technology.

A second option might be to escalate attempts to diffuse internal dissent by external conflict.  This would be the most dangerous option both for Iran and the world since it could lead Teheran to provoke a war with a neighbor or regional state on the hope that this would lead Iran's youth to "rally 'round the flag."

A third option might be to attempt to split the causes of dissent in the way that the Chinese regime did. To quell demands for political opening, the Chinese regime engineered an economic opening.  Their thinking was that it was better to hold tightly to political power by surrendering some degree of control over the economy than to risk losing both. Potentially, the Iranian regime might do the same, concluding that economic growth could sidetrack some of anger and frustration among the youth, thus preventing it from becoming politicized.  The big challenge for such a strategy, though, is whether a theocratic system can be competitive in the global economy while retaining its religious strictness.

A fourth option might be to pursue genuine political reform.  For the Iranian regime, this is by far the riskiest.  And nothing in the regime's past suggest a propensity to take such risks when retention of power is on the line.

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There are moments in time when you can hear the proverbially ice breaking in a situation or country.  Poland in the early 1980's was one such place. 

The strikes at the Gdansk shipyards led by Lech Welesa were the event. They were put down with brutality by the Communist regime under General Jaruzelski and his Soviet backers.  But the existing social contract between the government and the governed was broken and never returned.  A decade later, and a few other social breakdowns in the Eastern Bloc, and Lech Walesa was president of Poland. 

While you can bend any analogy, I think this is a good one to consider for Iran.  First, make no mistake, the current government and system in Iran are going nowhere for the immediate term.  The initial mass public protests are being squelched quite effectively for the short run and "order" will be returned. Ayatollah Khamenei's regime is not about to let what happened in 1979 to the Shah happen to them -- they invented that playbook.

However, as many in the West are now realizing, and quoting my knowledgable Oxford friends, the "Ayatollah Khamenei's standing in the eyes of many Iranians has been damaged and the Islamic Republican system and ruling class have suffered a further loss of legitimacy and public respect. The gulf between rulers and citizens seems set to grow wider, with serious medium and long-term consequences, though there is little immediate threat to the survival of the system and Khamenei's authority."

In a nutshell, and Ayatollah Khamenei knows it, the social contract between the governors and the governed is now broken.  He is now in a game of balancing off centers of power to maintain control within the ruling structure of Iran -- from the IRGC to the ayatollahs to the various political elements of the current state.  He also knows that, quoting Louis XV, "apprez-moi, le deluge."

With the hindsight of history, Poland's fate seemed to be predestined.  That was not the case.  Many people were tortured and died to acheive the level of freedom Poland has today.  Many in Iran have already and are going to suffer as well.  And the governors know they must do this to maintain control and for the governed it will only strengthen their resolve.

Bottom line:  make no mistake, the ice has broken in Iran -- the current leadership knows it and so do the governed.  How peaceful or bloody or long is still anyones guess.

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Despite brazen denials on the part of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his hard-line conservative allies, the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a 2nd term almost certainly involved fraud on a systematic and massive scale, according to most all reliable indicators and sources. By now, however, meaningful public protests on the part of the opposition largely have been suppressed.

Because there remains a sizeable core of Iranians, albeit a minority, willing to stand by the dominant, more militant conservative ruling circle, and since the latter continues to control formidable security forces, the opposition had little chance of challenging seriously those in power over this corrupted election. Moreover, progressively shorn of their leadership and not at all organized (or entirely prepared psychologically) to face such forceful countermeasures, a major reverse for the opposition in the streets virtually was inevitable—at least this time around.

That said, the Islamic Republic will never be the same again. It is clear that the current ruling clique, dominated by regime ultra conservatives like Ahmadinejad, Guardian Council Chairman Jannati, and joined openly by Khamenei, henceforth will refuse to surrender any real power, regardless of the means required to do so. Elections in Iran will, therefore, have no further significance, effectively removing most all remaining aspects of a “republic” from the government’s true character. In the words of President Ahmadinejad, the new regime’s response to dissent, in the form of public demonstrations, press criticism, and other manifestations of dissatisfaction will be “crushing.” One can expect the waves of arrests and heavy-handed nocturnal harassment, including the elimination of many thousands of private satellite dishes, to continue for some time as the regime endeavors to reduce further the rebound capability of the opposition.

The evident theft of an election from moderate challenger Mir Hussein Moussavi, compounded by a sweeping crackdown on all visible and potential opposition, has, however, stripped the regime of much of its popular legitimacy. Conceding a relatively weak presidency to Moussavi, balanced off as it would have been by a heavily conservative Leader, Guardian Council, and a sizeable, loyal core of security cadres, should not have been viewed as much of a threat—especially following the highly successful neutralization over 8 years of reformist President Ahmad Khatami and his supporters. Yet, to head off even that limited challenge, the dominant ruling group was willing to precipitate a major national crisis.

This suggests at least two factors were very much in play. First off, recognizing the growing threat to the ultimate survival of the conservative character of the Islamic Republic on the part of a burgeoning moderate tendency driven, in part, by sheer demographics, regime hardliners probably now have less confidence in their ability to successfully sabotage reform through less forceful means. Also, a more ruthlessly militant conservative element, embodied by President Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard allies, clearly has grown significantly in influence within the regime.

In this harsher environment, previously influential and more pragmatic government regulars, such as Assembly of Experts Chairman Hashemi Rafsanjani (and possibly certain outspoken clerics in Qom), probably will be partially co-opted, marginalized, or worse. In the short term, this will reduce still more the likelihood of a significant challenge on the part of reformists, despite their rising support base in the general population and their seething anger.

Nonetheless, the new regime will remain unpopular and likely unable to benefit this time around from widespread reform-related cynicism that flowed from the relative ineffectiveness of President Khatami and his allies. With the blame for failure far clearer this time around (the application of brute force to hijack governance by a relatively narrow, intolerant, and utterly callous junta of sorts), the opposition should gain in legitimacy and grassroots strength over time in contrast to a likely gradual fall-off in overall support for those now in power. Iran’s militant conservatives have not crafted an enduring new order. They have bought themselves some time.

So, the key question will be: how long will it take the opposition to capitalize meaningfully on its popular base in terms of the robust, toughened organization on a national level required to mount a far more formidable political challenge?

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Anticipating what the recent unrest in Iran will foster in the medium and long-term is difficult if not impossible. No one predicted the election results and the chaotic aftermath, and there are simply too many variables in play today to have any confidence in forecasting. The Iranian people went to the streets with a genuine sense of anger and outrage. The fissures among the elite are real, but for now Ahmadinejad's opponents appear defeated. They have no true leader: Moussavi was a rallying point, but he hardly inspired. Rafsanjani offered savvy and resources, but his corruption was widely reviled. The younger conservatives who have been ascendant in the last five years are now even more entrenched. Twitter, for all its glories, does not substitute for a coherent opposition organization, which Iran lacks.

The election fraud and the protests do delegitimate the regime somewhat, but for Middle East watchers this phenomenon is nothing new. The clerical regime is simply relying less on popular legitimacy and more on guns and batons -- a choice made by Egypt, Syria, and other republics-turned-autocracies. The regime showed convincingly that it would crack down. Unfortunately, force works. The regime is already trying to restore popular legitimacy with the time-honored tactic of blaming foreigners for all the problems. And there will be other populist political plays to come. Much will depend on the performance of Iran's economy (where most forecasts are rather bleak); if the regime can deliver, it can more easily move pass the political crisis. If it cannot, then the Iranian people will have leaders who are both illegitimate and inept, an unstable combination. This may lead to a further reliance on repression.

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The Islamic Republic is not on the verge of collapse, repeat: The Islamic Republic is not on the verge of collapse.

There is no evidence that those who came out on the streets of Tehran and, intermittently, a small number of other Iranian cities after the June 12 election represent a majority of the Iranian population. Demonstrations against the election outcome were not, in any meaningful sense, a nationwide phenomenon. Protests were overwhelmingly concentrated in the city of Tehran, where the official results show that Mir Hossein Mousavi clearly beat incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Once Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared a week after the election that the Guardian Council would review allegations of irregularities but that street protests needed to stop-thereby making continued demonstrations a protest not about an election outcome, but against the Islamic Republic itself-the constituency for "regime change" in Iran proved itself very small indeed.

The June 12 presidential election does provide a powerful prism through which to refract the most important currents in the Islamic Republic's politics. In many ways, these seemingly disparate currents flow from the legacy of Mohammad Khatami's two terms as Iran's president (1997-2005). One of the most critical aspects of this legacy is the ongoing weakness of the reformist camp in Iranian politics. Another is the transformation of conservative political forces since the 1990s.

In many ways, Khatami's presidency is the high point of reformism in the Islamic Republic. After Khatami's surprise victory in the 1997 presidential election, reformists won big in the 2000 parliamentary elections, setting the stage for Khatami's landslide reelection the following year.

But, by 2004, conservative forces were poised for major gains in that year's parliamentary elections. By the time Khatami left office in 2005, his presidency was widely viewed in Iran as a disappointment, even among his core supporters. Reformists have been in disarray ever since. Recognizing this, most of them opted not to support the one true reformist on the ballot in this year's presidential election, Mehdi Karrubi. Instead, they made a strategic decision to back Mousavi, a far more conservative figure whom reformists hoped could attract votes from the "center" and even from "pragmatic" conservatives opposed to Ahmadinejad's reelection. But this meant that Mousavi's campaign rested on backing from two high-profile figures with enormous negative "baggage"-Khatami, who is anathema among Iranian conservatives, and former President Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is widely considered a deeply corrupt figure.

While Khatami's presidency ended up leaving the reformist camp in a weakened position, it also had a galvanizing effect on Iran's conservatives. It was precisely when Khatami and his reformist colleagues were riding high, in the wake of the 2000 parliamentary elections and the 2001 presidential election, that Iranian conservatives-with the blessing of the Supreme Leader-decided to remake themselves. They did so by moving away from conservative clerics as their most high-profile political candidates, turning instead to a younger generation of non-clerical political figures, including Larijani, Qalibaf, and-most spectacularly-Ahmadinejad. These figures represented the generation that had fought the Iran-Iraq war and believed in the revolution, but after returning home from the war were appalled at the extent of corruption and lack of devotion to the revolution's ideals-including among many clerical figures (like Rafasanjani). It is this new generation of conservative politicians who took back the parliament from reformists in 2004 and, with Ahmadinejad's election in 2005, took the presidency as well.

As I look at it, the coalition that Ahmadinejad assembled across Iran, in 2005 and again this year, was bigger than the coalition which Mousavi tried to put together to unseat him. But, just as Ahmadinejad inspires great enthusiasm among his supporters, he is an extremely polarizing figure who inspires great antipathy among his opponents. It is that antipathy which drove people to the streets in the aftermath of the June 12 election. But that antipathy to Ahmadinejad does not translate into a desire for the Islamic Republic to disappear-even among those who may want to see the Islamic Republic evolve, perhaps in very substantial ways. For my take on the Iranian elections, see, "Ahmadinejad Won. Get Over It"; for my take on U.S. policy and Iran, see, from two weeks before the Iranian elections, "Have We Already Lost Iran?"; and from last week, "Will Iran be Obama's Iraq?"

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