An Iranian's forecast that resonates

Steve Clemons of the Washington Note has posted a detailed narrative from a friend inside Iran recounting the July 30 protests marking the 40-day anniversary of the death of Neda Agha Soltan, the young woman shot in the street during the protests of June 20. Lucid and factual, this young woman protestor captures the ebb and flow of cat-and-mouse confrontations throughout the city between the protesters and the riot police and Basij -- while also chronicling the more sympathetic stance of the regular police and army (as opposed to the Revolutionary Guard.

This skilled young writer ends with a vignette that may prove to be worth volumes of well-informed scholarly speculation about the likely outcome of continued resistance to the riged election outcome in Iran:

One mother told a soldier who asked her to go back home "I'm not going anywhere. Don't you know that we brought you guys into power by doing just this: by being out on the streets for nights on end. We brought you to where you are today, and we're going to take you out by being on the streets. I'm not going anywhere."

Those who lived through or have studied the revolution of 1979 know that the toppling of the Shah played out over the course of a year of recurring and escalating protests. While more than half of Iran's population is under 25, the memory of that regime toppling is obviously still very much alive. The resilience of this battered populace that reveres martyrdom and remembers bringing about regime change should not be underestimated.

Wings beating against a web, III: Iran's frozen-out elite

Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has distinguished himself as one of the best-informed analysts of the post-election situation in Iran. His 7/16 q-and-a includes several crucial points about the coterie now in control, the opposition's prospects, the likely course of nuclear negotiations and the regime's vulnerabilities.

In sync with those who have detailed the militarist takeover that has progressed over the course of Ahmadinejad's four years in power, Sadjadpour stresses that not only the Iranian masses but large swaths of the country's elite, are now beating their wings against the tightly spun web of the current ruling coterie:

First of all, the idea of the Islamic Republic of Iran is now over. It has lost any claims of being a ‘republic.’ Past Iranian governments didn’t necessarily represent a wide swath of Iranian society, but they certainly encompassed a fairly wide swath of the Iranian political elite. Now the country is being run by a small cartel, which I would argue, reflects not only a very narrow swath of Iranian society, but also a narrow swath of Iran’s political elite. It’s a cartel of hardline clerics and Revolutionary Guardsmen who have benefitted tremendously from the oil bonanza of the last few years. They made nearly $300 billion in oil revenue the last four years and don’t want to share power. They are self-proclaimed ‘principlists’ but in reality their only real principles are power and money.

This duality runs throughout Sadjadpour's exposition: the regime lacks legitimacy, and the means to sustain the economy and social peace -- but as of now it has the guns. Some key points on both sides of this equation:

On who's really in control (after acknowledging opposition to regime among top-level clergy):

What we’ve seen in Iran over the last decade, however, is that the institution of the Revolutionary Guards has eclipsed the institution of the clergy, in terms of their political and economic clout. So while the cleavages amongst clerical elite is certainly significant, what would be a far more fatal blow to Ahmadinejad and Khamenei would be open dissent amongst the Revolutionary Guard elite, which we haven’t yet seen.

On the prospects for "cracking" the Revolutionary Guard:

The senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards were handpicked by Khamenei, they owe their positions to Khamenei, and at the moment at least I think they’re unlikely to challenge him. But there’s a lot of anecdotal and some empirical evidence to show that the rank and file of the Revolutionary Guards is more reflective of Iranian society at large. They are not simply 120,000 radicals who are ready to martyr themselves to retain Ahmadinejad’s presidency, as one of the senior commanders recently alluded.

On negotiating with the current regime:

...I understand the Obama administration has decided that the nuclear clock is too urgent an issue to delay negotiations. But we should be clear about something: The problem we have with Iran has far more to do with the character of the regime than their nuclear program. The reality is that as long as Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and company are in power, we’re never going to reach a nuclear accord which sufficiently allays our suspicions—and Israel’s suspicions—that Iran is pursuing a weapons program. Any such accord would not only require Tehran to significantly curtail enrichment and agree to an intrusive inspections regime, it will also require them to modify their hostility toward Israel and alter their relationship with groups like Hezbollah. The chances of this happening as long as Ahmadinejad is president and Khamenei is Supreme Leader are very slim

On oil as arbiter:

But the country that has the greatest potential to influence internal Iranian affairs in the short term is Saudi Arabia. The Iranian economy is heavily reliant on oil revenue, and each one dollar drop in oil prices is nearly one billion dollars of lost annual revenue for Iran. If Saudi Arabia—whose relations with Iran have deteriorated since Ahmadinejad became president—were to quietly increase output in order to provoke a price drop it could prove devastating to Iran, far more damaging than any sanctions that are now being deliberated.

That last point is pretty arresting. It lead me to dream of political impossibilities: suppose the Obama Administration and Congress could get its act together and impose a hefty tax on oil whenever it hit a given price floor - say, $60/barrel? That would cut consumption and keep the price of oil down, which also "would be more damaging than any sanctions that are now being deliberated."

Wings breaking through a web? Iranian persistence in resistance

In several posts (1, 2, 3) noting the well-documented rise of Revolutionary Guard influence during Ahmadinejad's presidency, I have wondered how disaffected masses in Iran can effect change when the elite and paramilitary military/police forces executing the crackdown seems so fanatically devoted. What tools are at the people's (and upper-level reformists') disposal when the guns are all on the other side?

There are several possible answers to that question, and many of them are in evidence in today's Green Brief (#25) - perhaps the most dispassionate and reliable regular roundup of news inside Iran. They include the following. Indented passages below are from Green Brief 25 unless otherwise noted.

1. Economic resistance:

Vast weekly protests and the heavy presence of Basiji’s have had a negative impact on Iranian bazaars; they are finding it harder and harder to stay open. As a result, commerce is slowly coming to a standstill. Reports indicate that the opposition is in the midst of planning more strikes and protests.

Also of note on this front: the Mousavi campaign's reported cooptation of the Islamic holiday Itikaf, a 3-day period of state-sanctioned reflection and prayer, for which people are encouraged to stay home from work, as cover for a stealth strike. Some suggested that the subsequent official shut-down of government offices, justified by an intense dust storm, may have been a kind of counter-strike.

2. Some wavering in the ranks:

Reports indicate that many Basijis are quitting their jobs and are being replaced by fresh recruits, many of them under 18.

A bit of anecdotal evidence that rank-and-file conservatives are divided by the election debacle: yesterday's WSJ portrait of a fanatically devoted young Basij ended with this tale of his recently busted engagement:

For Mr. Moradani, the biggest shock during the election turmoil came in his personal life. He had recently gotten engaged to a young woman from a devout, conservative family. A week into the protests, he says, his fiancée called him with an ultimatum. If he didn't leave the Basij and stop supporting Mr. Ahmadinejad, he recalls her saying, she wouldn't marry him.

He told her that was impossible. "I suffered a real emotional blow," he says. "She said to me, 'Go beat other people's children then,' and 'I don't want to have anything to do with you,' and hung up on me."

She returned the ring he gave her, and hasn't returned his phone calls. "The opposition has even fooled my fiancée," he says.

3. Protesters' persistence

While mass protests of the sort that culminated on June 20 may be effectively quelled for now, the Green Wave is proving persistent, resilient and innovative:

Delayed reports - just emerging - confirm that protests did indeed take place around the country on July 9th. We also have authentication of mass arrests during this time. Reports of black-outs during Ahmadinejad’s speech [allegedly caused by protestors' coordinated plug-ins of as many appliances as possible] are now being confirmed by mainstream media as well (this was confirmed on twitter three days ago). ..

People in Tehran are continuing to honk their horns at the sight of Basijis - and chanting anti-government slogans while speeding away. Many people drive with their headlights on.

4. Continued resistance from high-level clerics and "old Bolsheviks" of 1979:

Many of the same scholars and journalists who have recounted the tightening grip of the Ahmadinejad/Revolutionary Guard Khamenei-backed faction have also noted that powerful elements in Iran's clerical and political elite don't like it -- and in particular, don't like Ahmadinejad. Leading dissenters include the "defeated" presidential candidates; former President and current Chairman of the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; onetime Khomeini heir apparent Ayatollah Montazari; and the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum. That resistance is not going away:

In a letter to the Head of the Judiciary, Mahdi Karoubi – one of the candidates during the election and a key force behind the current protests – asked for the immediate release of all political prisoners as well as arrested protesters. In a letter addressed to Ayatollah Shahrodi, Karoubi claimed that, “People believed in the system, however, the system had been hijacked by a few.” He accused Tehran’s authorities of systematically eradicating opposition. He warned the government of “unimaginable consequences” if the current situation persisted.

Ayatollah Montazeri has released a Fatwa that is very supportive of protesters and their cause. In the Fatwa, Montazeri “condemned violence against protesters as un-Islamic.” He’s pleaded with the government to not play with the name of Shi’ism and Islam with their actions. He hinted that Khamenei’s leadership is standing against Islam, human rationale and National interests – and that he was clearly in the wrong. Reports of Ayatollah Ustadi - Qom's temporary Friday Prayer’s Imam - resigning his position and calling a strike could not be confirmed...

The spokesperson for Parliament's Imam’s Way Faction declared that the government’s legitimacy was “questionable” after what transpired post-election. Reports from Tehran indicate that many members within the Faction are thinking of not partaking in the “vote of confidence” that will be held in Parliament soon (the President selects a cabinet, and then a vote of confidence takes place). The spokesperson added that, “When a Cabinet Minister refuses to answer to the public, then it shouldn’t expect to get a vote of confidence”....

A number of prominent citizens in Tabriz have written a letter to Khamenei declaring that, “people were not satisfied with the election and that they will continue to voice their opposition to Ahmadinejad’s government.”

One would imagine that persistence on the part of rank-and-file Greens would be the life-blood sustaining those persisting in the upper-level power struggle. The statements released by powerful groups and individuals questioning the legitimacy of the elections are always made in the name of the people's right to a voice and the legitimacy of their protests.

The people's persistence may continue to be fueled, as in 1978-79, by that peculiar Shiite passion for and response to martyrdom, most obvious so far in the iconization of Neda, the young woman shot to death on the street after stepping out of a car into the midst of the protest of June 20. Today, twitterers are reporting a new martyr:

Sohrab, a high school senior, dies in Evin few days AFTER his mom put up bail 4 his release. #iranelection

StopAhmadiNew pictures of Sohrab Arabi (killed in Evin prison) http://bit.ly/JiTM7 #iranelection #neda #sohrab

Back on June 15, BooMan noted, "It's often said that the [1979] revolution advanced in 40-day stages, as forty days is the traditional period of mourning in Iran's culture."

What will happen on July 30, the 40th day following Neda's death?

Wings beating against a web?

As Roger Cohen movingly pointed out this past weekend, the uprising in Iran has doubtless humanized the country in many Americans' eyes: at the moment, "Iran" is likelier to evoke "Neda" than "mullah."

It's a sad irony that this humanization may be occurring at the precisely the moment that the current regime becomes most dangerous. The popular uprising, and the old-guard reformist movement to which it responded, may represent the beating of wings against a tightening web.

As Neil MacFarquhar and Gary Sick have both detailed, the advent of Ahmadinejad in the wake of the reformist Khatami was not just a swing of the political pendulum. Ahmadinejad has rather accelerated a militarist takeover, packing the bureacracy, state-run media, educational institutions, and state-controlled major economic enterprises with allies from the Revolutionary Guard; and pursuing an ultra hard-line foreign policy that includes full-throttle pursuit of nuclear fuel processing capability.

While it's generally been assumed that Khameini controls Ahmadinejad, both Sick and MacFarquhar suggest that the reverse may be closer to the truth. Sick:

Over the 20 years that Ayatollah Khamenei has been the rahbar, or leader, he has allied himself ever more closely with the Revolutionary Guards—to such an extent that it is no longer apparent to me who is leading and who is following. The Revolutionary Guards have been granted extraordinary influence over all functions of the Islamic republic—military, political, economic, and even Islamic. Technically, they take their orders from the leader, but has he ever dared to contradict them? On the contrary, he seems always to court them by granting them ever-greater influence and responsibilities.

If it's true, as Sick suggests, that Ahmadinejad's advent in 2005 marked the beginning of a quasi-fascist transformation of the Iranian theocracy, it's interesting to note that Ahmadinejad, like Hitler, led a coterie of extremist veterans of a long, brutal, ultimately losing war effort into positions of power approximately 15 years after the war's end.

After two years' overexposure to John McCain's fulminations, Americans should be skeptical of the propensity to compare every dictatorial regime that represses its own people and poses a security threat of some kind to the Nazis. Iranians have given the world reason to hope that the hardliners' days in power are numbered -- and no one should underestimate the staying power of the children of the people who ousted the Shah. The current system may also yet evolve from within, as faction within the power structure push to respond to public pressure. But the uprising has also thrown into sharp relief just what the Iranian people are up against.

Between the Basiji and the Green Wave

Can Mousavi win the hearts and minds of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji? Conversely, can he hold the hearts and minds of his most passionate followers? Two pieces highlighted in this morning's Daily Dish -- one by the New Yorker's Laura Secor and the other by "Simin Mesgari" (pseudonym?), a Green Waver writing in The Street, a samizdat newspaper circulating among the protesters -- pose each of these questions in turn.

Secor:

I think there is still a battle being waged for the hearts and minds of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij. Successful nonviolent movements in other countries have depended on the cooptation of the rank and file in the armed forces; one remembers the moving scenes of Serbian riot police embracing demonstrators...

Iran is not Serbia. The relationship between the people and the revolutionary shock troops is far older and deeper than anything that took root during Milosevic’s relatively brief tenure. By 2000, Milosevic’s fiefdom was rotten to the core; it survived on corruption, the fear of exposure on the part of many criminals and war profiteers, and hostility toward the world. The Islamic Republic, by contrast, was born in a people’s revolution and built on faith in a religion that is deeply held by most Iranians. The state’s ideology is not the hollow construct of political elites, as communism was by the time it collapsed in much of Eastern Europe. Rather, Iranian Islamism was forged over decades, in long struggle with the despotic regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, and from the potent raw materials of Iranian nationalism and Islam. Although the country’s constituency for democracy is vast and growing, the regime has a constituency, too, and it is passionately loyal and heavily armed.

The purpose of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij is the defense of the Islamic Revolution and the Supreme Leader. Rarely have the true believers in the militias been forced to consider the possibility that these two functions might come into conflict. Such a moment may have arrived...

Mesgari:

Mousavi knows too well how deep the wound is. He also knows that his green bandage is only a first aid cover for this wound and not a cure....

Mousavi knows that not all “this” is for him.

He knows very well, and we also know very well that had there been a “better” candidate than Mousavi with a “lesser evil past” which had chosen yellow colour for his campaign, the nation would have gone yellow and Mousavi would have demoted to Ahmadinejad’s position. …..

Velayat-e Faqih or the “Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists” is the red line which Mousavi has expressed he won’t cross – this red line is now being crossed by those wearing green....

It would seem that the more immediate problem -- with the longer odds -- is the one framed by Secor. But Mesgali's challenge raises the core longer term question. The 1979 revolution got past the Shah and then was hijacked by the most ruthless and autocratic among the contestants for power. Mousavi, as Karim Sadjapour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has pointed out, is no Khomeini -- he's the Gorbachev, the Kerensky, the reformist not the revolutionary. As Secor points out, though, Iran's current power structure is not "rotten to the core" in the sense of having lost all support; it still has the buy-in of at the very least a large minority. A reformer who professes passionate loyalty to the state apparatus he helped found may be the best hope for change Iranians can believe in.