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The Revolution No One Predicted
Did you see that article back in February that predicted this Iranian revolution? No? Neither did I. As far as anyone can tell this revolution was unexpected. When millions of people in Iran take to the streets to shout “death to the dictator” – meaning President Ahmadinejad – and when hundreds of demonstrators are injured with many killed by roving militias, something of great significance is occurring. Too bad the world was unprepared for this.
In the United States it is easy to blame the press. After all, this trouble in Iran was brewing right during the middle of American Idol, when the US takes time out to vote for the least objectionable amateur singer. The UK was equally preoccupied this year what with all the fuss over Susan Boyle. It was only a week before the election in Iran than most people who follow the news in the US or Europe even heard about Moussavi vs. Ahmadinejad. But you had to search for the news – the main stream press coverage was spotty or non-existent.
But someone was prepared for this, and that someone was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As President of Iran, and as head of the government, he had the full apparatus of the state ready to swing into action when the vote result was announced. The Iranian military was called out and positioned around all key government buildings. Local police were instructed to man the most prominent protest spots, like public squares. The detested morals police – the basiji – were stationed at universities and other places where “liberal youth” were likely to respond in anger. Even Hezbollah, and organization founded by the Iranian regime and staffed in Iran by Lebanese who speak no Farsi, was called into action.
When the announcement was made that Ahmadinejad had won a landslide victory, the internet suddenly went down in Iran. This deprived Moussavi’s forces of their communication lines – social networks like Facebook and My Space and Twitter – and visual records such as YouTube that could record what was about to transpire.
At the same time, the Supreme Leader, Ali Khameni, hailed the Ahmadinejad victory as “divine intervention” in the affairs of man. The Supreme Leader is supposed to be impartial in elections, at least in public. Moreover, Khameni had a constitutional responsibility to wait three days while the votes were counted before formally declaring a winner of the election.
Why would Ali Khameni risk his neutrality, as well as violate his constitutional role, to place his authority so decisively behind Ahmadinejad? Because this election wasn’t about Ahmadinejad and Moussavi; it was a rehash of the last presidential election between Ahmadinejad and Hashemi Rafsanjani. That was an election Ahmadinejad won in a landslide with no doubt about his victory, because Rafsanjani is a very disliked figure in Iran.
People are highly suspicious about his multi-millionaire status. How does an ayatollah – even one as worldly as Rafsanjani – gain such a fortune without being corrupt? Then too, there is his record as president shortly after the 1979 revolution. Rafsanjani ordered hundreds of opposition figures to be arrested and tortured, and some of them executed. It was a purge that stood out as particularly brutal even in the annals of Iran under the Shah. It was for this reason that in the last election for president, the reform movement voters, the ones today who are marching in the streets, stayed home and let Ahmadinejad crush Rafsanjani at the polls.
No one who knows Ali Khameni is too surprised at his eager support this time around for Ahmadinejad. Khameni’s feud with Rafsanjani goes back thirty years, when Rafsanjani opposed Khameni’s bid for the position of Supreme Leader. Since then, Rafsanjani has maneuvered himself into the presidency of the clerical body which chooses the Supreme Leader – the Assembly of Experts. These 88 men have the power to depose Ali Khameni, so Rafsanjani holds a Sword of Damocles that theoretically at any time could get rid of Khameni. All Rafsanjani needs is enough votes, and some demonstrable failure on the part of Khameni that would force the Assembly of Experts to act to save clerical rule and the Islamic Republic itself. Something like a mass insurrection of the people, followed by a bloody, dictatorial response from the government, would do nicely.
Ali Khameni and Ahmadinejad no doubt saw the Moussavi campaign as nothing but a front for yet another assault by Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani threw millions of dollars into this campaign. His son ran a sophisticated polling and GOTV effort from the Islamic university that Rafsanjani founded. Their polling across the country just prior to the election showed Moussavi garnering nearly 55% of the vote with Ahmadinejad distantly behind in the low 40’s. The Moussavi campaign had very firm data to suggest that the announced Ahmadinejad landslide was voter fraud, pure and simple. It didn’t help that Ahmadinejad and Khameni went about their fraud so blatantly. They could have easily given Ahmadinejad 52% of the vote and acknowledged it was close. Instead, they gave him about the same landslide percentage he achieved when he defeated Rafsanjani in the previous election – they probably thought why not, he is really running against Rafsanjani anyway.
In fact, Ahmadinejad during the campaign debates shifted the attention away from Moussavi and directly to Rafsanjani, accusing him of being the mastermind behind Moussavi’s campaign, and charging Rafsanjani with outright corruption. Ahmadinejad makes it a point to live simply if not piously, and millions of people have voted for him in the past precisely because he represents a protest against the financial corruption endemic in Iranian society.
But there is another corruption that Ahmadinejad represents – he embraces it enthusiastically – that makes millions more despise him. That is the corruption of being the nation’s moral scold and enforcer of propriety, through his militia known as the basiji. These are mostly teenagers recruited outside of the big cities, and given billy clubs and a uniform and then set loose in the cities, at universities, and anywhere else young people gather. There they monitor behavior, looking for anti-Islamic activities such as fraternization between the sexes, improper clothing or hair styles, disrespectful talk about the clergy or government, possession or use of drugs, or homosexual tendencies. They issue citations, beat people, send them to prison to be tortured, and some of their victims are hanged by the government in public using industrial cranes that slowly lift the victim high into the air.
Of all the forces of repression in Iranian society, the basiji stand out as peculiarly insidious and loathed, their only counterpart elsewhere being the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For thirty years Iranians have lived with a repression that is ever-present, and in an ironical way inimical to the interests of Shi’ite Islam. Teenagers who might otherwise be devout in their religious beliefs and practices associate personal repression with Islam, so that over time the connection between religion and the people has dissipated. The more people turn away from Islam, the more frantic the Islamic Republic becomes to enforce its vision of an Islamic society, under the rule of the clergy.
Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranians have become more worldly, not less. Satellite dishes are everywhere, and the internet is the mode of choice for many young Iranians when they wish to communicate not only to others in Iran, but elsewhere in the world. Business and commerce also have thrived using modern technology, and the clerical overlords cannot afford to shut down completely these tools, at least not for long. There are therefore vast segments of Iranian society that understand the modern world (not just the West, but China, Japan and elsewhere), and want to be part of it.
This is indeed a volatile mix: a society of young people (most of the population is under 30) who have known nothing but personal repression all their lives; new means of communication within society that the government can censor but not completely control; a desire by many Iranians to join the rest of the world in a more open society where talk and travel are unlimited; a falling away of respect for religion and especially the ayatollahs and imams who run Iran; and a national election that features a candidate for reform (in the limited government-approved sense) vs. Ahmadinejad as the candidate for authoritarian and repressive rule.
It is obvious that Ahmadinejad and Ali Khameni anticipated trouble after the election announcement, because there had been “student protests” before that the regime had to put down. But they misread the depth of social distress that exists in Iran. They interpreted the election as a fight between the established order and Hashemi Rafsanjani, and they badly overplayed their hand by not even bothering to count the votes, giving Ahmadinejad a ridiculously large electoral mandate, and then calling out the government forces of repression to deal with any unrest that might result. In that respect, like us, they didn’t see this revolution coming.
A million people showed up in Tehran at Moussavi’s protest demonstration this Friday when the government told them not to. Young people are banding together in a dangerous game of “basiji hunting”, extracting revenge on the morals police if they can outnumber them and attack them. Many more are risking injury or death to make their views known, and as the revolution has advanced, the chants have turned from “death to the dictator” to “death to Khameni” – a much more dangerous and decisive game.
The regime in turn is invading the homes of those suspected of playing an active role in this insurrection, and hundreds of people are now in prison subject to who knows what forms of torture. Hospitals are forced to turn away the injured. The government is issuing disinformation, such as this weekend’s statement that the Assembly of Experts supports Ali Khameni’s Friday sermon that denounced the demonstrations and reasserted the claim that Ahmadinejad was elected fairly. This was completely untrue – only one member of the Assembly of Experts had made such a statement of support – and for all anyone knows this select body is waiting in the wings not yet sure how far it should go in supporting Khameni. There has been so many statements of disinformation sent out by the government that it has seriously eroded what little credibility it has left with the general public.
Knowledgeable observers of Iran have difficulty fathoming where this revolution will lead. Many say that the Islamic Republic is seriously wounded, having lost the support of the people, and that it can only hang on with increased authoritarianism. Some believe the regime is collapsing now, that Ahmadinejad may be sacrificed, or Khameni himself replaced. But unlike 1979, there is no Ayatollah Khomeini waiting in Paris to fly in and take over the reins of government. If Moussavi were somehow miraculously to take command of the presidency, it does not suggest major reform will take place. There already was a reform president in Mohammad Khatami, and he won in a landslide but got nowhere in office because the real power is with the ayatollahs.
For any real change to take place, the clergy have to be overthrown, and the idea of a theocracy rejected as unworkable or incompetent. This may in fact be the major lesson to be taken away from the Iranian revolution of 2009; millions of Iranians have it seems already concluded that their form of government is dysfunctional if not inimical to the interests of the people it professes to govern. There are, reportedly, a number of influential Shi’ite clergy – including interestingly Ayatollah Sistani of Najaf, Iraq, who is an Iranian and who is highly revered in Iran – who believe that Islam is harmed when it is aligned too closely with earthly power.
It may be that only these men – religious figures working inside the regime – can ultimately overthrow theocratic rule. Otherwise, it does not seem that the people themselves can accomplish an overthrow of their government, no matter how many protests are called and strikes undertaken, especially if the government is unstinting in its use of violence against its own people. But if the clergy are unwilling to reform from within, and the people cannot force the government to change, how long can theocratic government hold on?
A very long time, if we judge by the history of repressive regimes elsewhere. The Soviet Union held on for 70 years. Mao Tse-tung died in his bed, and it was only after his death that the Communist Party dictatorship began to unravel. Even in this case, reform came from within the party, not by revolution. Perhaps the only hope for change in Iran now rests, sadly, with Hashemi Rafsanjani. He has the money, he has the position of authority, and he has the ruthlessness necessary to topple Ali Khameni at the right time and with the right circumstances. These circumstances may be aligning at the moment in Rafsanjani’s favor – no one has seen him lately so no one can tell for sure.
Rafsanjani does not represent the flowering of democracy in Iran; there is no one on the public scene there who does. He represents authoritarianism of a different sort, perhaps more secular with far less of the basiji terrorizing the population, and with more openness to the outer world. He himself would not likely rule as Supreme Leader or president, but in the right situation as a l’eminence grise behind someone like Moussavi. For this situation to come about, the Assembly of Experts would have to turn away from Khameni, and that is perhaps the one thing we should be looking for if any real change is to come to Iran, short of the military having to take over if complete chaos reigned.
Which leaves us right back to where we were at the beginning. Nobody on the outside – and nobody in Iran other than perhaps 100 of the leading clerical figures – has any idea what is going to happen. We are left to contemplate a world which operates unpredictably, where big surprises erupt out of nowhere, where governments can squander billions on “intelligence” and still know nothing of what really will happen. As I’ve said, the only thing so far we can take away from this is that at some point people can only take so much repression. At some point they are willing to die rather than continue living under authoritarian rule. What is unpredictable is the trigger which lights the flame of insurrection and revolution. What is certain is that all of us, under certain conditions of repression, will respond to that trigger.
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