The End of the Beginning

The End of the Beginning

By ROGER COHEN

TEHRAN - Iran's 1979 revolution took a full year to gestate. The uprising of 2009 has now ended its first phase. But the volatility ushered in by the June 12 ballot-box putsch of Iran's New Right is certain to endure over the coming year. The Islamic Republic has been weakened.

During one of the violent clashes here in recent days, I saw a member of the riot police confront a protester holding a cell phone. "Don't take a photograph of me!" he yelled at the young man.

"Why?" the man shouted back. "You're not naked."

But the Islamic Republic is. Everyone knows where everyone stands; it isn't pretty. All the fudge that allowed a modern society to coexist with a theocracy inspired by an imam occulted in the 9th century has been swept away, leaving two Irans at war.

One of those Irans, embodied in the 12-member Guardian Council, the highest legal body, ruled in a preliminary statement on Tuesday that "no major fraud" had occurred in the vote and that its annulment was therefore impossible. Not much surprise there, in that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, made clear last week that the recount was a waste of time.

Of course, the definition of "major" is up for debate. Khamenei himself said rigging one million votes might be feasible, and the council found irregularities with three million votes.

But numbers have ceased to mean anything here. All the evidence is that percentages were simply allotted to each candidate and the votes cast backward-engineered from there. The Interior Ministry took 10 days to divulge results for all provinces. Such engineering takes time.

Iran has squandered a huge opportunity to bridge the gulf between the regime and an increasingly sophisticated population thirsting for greater freedom. A vibrant election campaign opened a door. It has been slammed shut.

"The Islamic Republic is the flag-bearer of human rights," Khamenei declared in his Friday sermon. Over the past week, it has looked more like a flag-bearing police state.

True, the regime has not opened fire Tiananmen Square-style on the millions who have taken to the streets. I don't believe it has the unity to do that. Significant cracks have emerged within the establishment, certainly the largest since the bloody first couple of years after the revolution. Relentless official attacks on foreign agents as the instigators of unrest have not papered over these divisions.

As the Group of Combatant Clergy, which represents more liberal mullahs in Qom, said in a statement: "What sane mind believes that a peaceful movement of millions of informed people - including workers, shopkeepers, farmers, students, clergy and others - could be agents of a so-called enemy?"

I said the Islamic Republic has been weakened. Why? I see five principal factors. The first is that the supreme leader's post - the apex of the structure conceived by the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - has been undermined. The keystone of the arch is now loose.

Khamenei, far from an arbiter with a Prophet-like authority, has looked more like a ruthless infighter. His word has been defied. At night, from rooftops, I've even heard people call for his death. The unthinkable has occurred.

The second is that the hypocritical but effective contract that bound society has been broken. The regime never had active support from more than 20 percent of the population. But acquiescence was secured by using only highly targeted repression (leaving the majority free to go about its business), and by giving people a vote for the president every four years.

That's over. Repression will be broad and ferocious in the coming months. The acquiescent have already become the angry. You can't turn Iran into Burma: The resistance of a society this varied and savvy will be fierce.

The third is that a faction loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, fiercely nationalistic and mystically religious, has made a power grab so bold that fissures in the establishment have become canyons.

Members of this faction include Hassan Taeb, the leader of the Basiji militia; Saeed Jalili, the head of the National Security Council and chief nuclear negotiator; and Mojtaba Khamenei, the reclusive but influential son of the supreme leader.

They have their way for now, but the cost to Iran has been immense, and the rearguard action led by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a father of the revolution, and Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, will be intense.

The fourth is that Iran's international rhetoric, effective in Ahmadinejad's first term, will be far less so now. Every time he talks of justice and ethics, his two favorite words, video will roll of Neda Agha Soltan's murder and the regime's truncheon-wielding goons at work. The president may prove too much of a liability to preserve.

The fifth is that, at the very peak of its post-revolution population boom, the regime has lost a whole new generation - and particularly the women of that generation - by failing to adapt.

Thirty years from the revolution, the core question of this election was: Must Iran stand apart from the forces of economic and political globalization in order to preserve its Islamic theocracy?

Or is it confident enough of its Islamic identity, and its now firmly established independence from America, to trash the nest-of-spies vitriol and an ultimately self-defeating isolation?

The answer has been devastating.

http://www.nytimes.com

Iran rises up

Iran rises up

Jun 18th 2009

From The Economist print edition

It looks increasingly as though the government will have to crack down or back down

AP

THE sight of a million-odd demonstrators on the streets of Tehran, the like of which has not been seen since the revolution that unseated the shah in 1979, is bound to stir the hearts of freedom lovers the world over. That is especially true when the chief butt of popular anger, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Holocaust-denying bully who seems bent on getting his hands on a nuclear weapon. Yet outsiders tempted to shout their support for the protesters should tread carefully for fear of achieving the opposite of what they intend.

After holding the country in a tight grip for 30 years, Iran’s clerical rulers are in disarray. The presidential candidate who was supposed to have come second in last week’s ballot, Mir Hosein Mousavi, seems likely, judging by all the chicanery, to have won (see article). The establishment is divided, with some stalwarts of the revolution siding with the demonstrators. Even the supreme leader, too spiritual to submit himself to popular ballot for the near-omnipotent post he has held for the past two decades, has become embroiled in the squalid electoral fray. He may ultimately even face the question of his, and the regime’s, survival.


No one can see into the back rooms of the clerical establishment or into the bunkers of the Revolutionary Guard. No one knows the real results of the vote. No one can predict how long the street protests will last or how ready the regime is to use force and the price it would pay in its own people’s blood. Yet something momentous has happened in a pivotal country in the most combustible part of the world. Having fatally misread its own people, Iran’s government must now decide whether to back down or to crack down.

The judgment of history
Iran is the fulcrum of an unstable region. If it behaved responsibly, the world would naturally look to it as the local power. Instead it meddles, often malevolently, with its neighbours.

That is not surprising, for it has been the victim of much meddling. The country has been buffeted between imperial rivals—Russian, Turkish, British and American—for more than a century. The West once took Iran’s oil for itself. Britain and America sabotaged its brief experiment with democracy in 1953, as Barack Obama admitted in his admirable speech to Muslims in Cairo earlier this month. A generation ago Iran was assaulted by an Arab army headed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, leaving a million dead. Persian prickliness, even paranoia, is understandable. Iran feels ringed by the forces of what it sees as its main enemy—America. The eagerness of Iran’s rulers for a nuclear capability, which they swear is only for civilian use but which most outsiders reckon would lead inexorably to a bomb, is shared by nearly all Iranians, even those on the streets, as a national birthright in a hostile world.

But an external threat cannot justify the crass debauchery of the presidential poll. Iran is not a democracy, but its system, which combines unelected religious authority with a subordinate elected civilian one, was designed to give people a chance to let off steam from time to time within carefully set electoral limits. And today there is a head of steam to vent. The young are bored and rebellious and short of work, women are oppressed, bazaaris fed up with economic bungling. Even some clerics reject Mr Ahmadinejad for his populist brand of Islam.

For this election, the limits were set very narrow. The supreme leader, abetted by largely unelected councils, allowed just four out of more than 400 candidates to face the voters in the presumption that his populist incumbent protégé would stroll to victory. Instead those disparate groups of discontented Iranians united behind the main challenger, Mr Mousavi. The ballot-rigging turned that support into a mass protest against the system itself. Given that all four official candidates were sworn to keep the largely theocratic system going, the government’s performance was stupid as well as pernicious.

Iranian demonstrators are a determined lot. Before the shah’s fall, protests went on for months. But what happens now will be decided as much by the depth of divisions within the ruling clerical establishment as by the stamina of angry crowds. The clerics are faced with a desperate dilemma. By letting air into a system that has stifled even basic freedoms, yielding to the demonstrators could undo the regime; and yet to use force risks turning Iran into any other cheap dictatorship. A regime that has long sought to claim both legitimacy and a monopoly on power may soon have to choose which of the two it most desires.

The best of all possible worlds
Watching Iranians pour onto the streets to demand change, those in the outside world who wish Iran well must hope fervently that it comes. Iranians are too sophisticated to be ruled for ever by a clutch of old men in turbans. The regime has been illiberal and authoritarian. It is often vicious in its suppression of opponents and its disregard for human rights. Iran has the highest rate of judicial executions per head in the world. Women are second-class citizens. Even so, Iran is nothing like the totalitarian, mass-murdering regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. However many votes he rigged, Mr Ahmadinejad has a big constituency behind him.

The West must tread carefully—as Mr Obama has done (see article)—in its response to Iran’s unfolding crisis. It should condemn abuses of human rights and electoral malpractice, but it should avoid taking sides. Given Iranians’ understandable hostility to outside interference, endorsing Mr Mousavi would only strengthen Mr Ahmadinejad. And whoever ends up running Iran, the West will have to talk to its leaders about its nuclear programme.

A new president and a kinder regime in Iran would be a valuable prize. It would lower the regional temperature. In Iraq, where Iran meddles, blood is still being copiously spilt, albeit far less so than a few years ago. In Palestine and Lebanon, both zones of Iranian interference, it could help tilt the protagonists towards compromise. It could even improve Afghanistan. So, as Iran splutters and seethes, the world must watch and wait—and keep its offer of goodwill on the table.

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=13856262

Robert Fisk: Secret letter 'proves Mousavi won poll'

They were handing out the photocopies by the thousand under the plane trees in the centre of the boulevard, single sheets of paper grabbed by the opposition supporters who are now wearing black for the 15 Iranians who have been killed in Tehran – who knows how many more in the rest of the country? – since the election results gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad more than 24 million votes and a return to the presidency. But for the tens of thousands marking their fifth day of protests yesterday – and for their election campaign hero, Mirhossein Mousavi, who officially picked up just 13 million votes – those photocopies were irradiated.

For the photocopy appeared to be a genuine but confidential letter from the Iranian minister of interior, Sadeq Mahsuli, to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, written on Saturday 13 June, the day after the elections, and giving both Mr Mousavi and his ally, Mehdi Karroubi, big majorities in the final results. In a highly sophisticated society like Iran, forgery is as efficient as anywhere in the West and there are reasons for both distrusting and believing this document. But it divides the final vote between Mr Mousavi and Mr Karroubi in such a way that it would have forced a second run-off vote – scarcely something Mousavi's camp would have wanted.

Headed "For the Attention of the Supreme Leader" it notes "your concerns for the 10th presidential elections" and "and your orders for Mr Ahmadinejad to be elected president", and continues "for your information only, I am telling you the actual results". Mr Mousavi has 19,075,623, Mr Karroubi 13,387,104, and Mr Ahmadinejad a mere 5,698,417.

Could this letter be a fake? Even if Mr Mousavi won so many votes, could the colourless Mr Karroubi have followed only six million votes behind him? And however incredible Mr Ahmadinejad's officially declared 63 per cent of the vote may have been, could he really – as a man who has immense support among the poor of Iran – have picked up only five-and-a-half million votes? And would a letter of such immense importance be signed only "on behalf of the minister"?

The letter may well join the thousands of documents, real and forged, that have shaped Iran's recent history, the most memorable of which were the Irish passports upon which Messers Robert McFarlane and Oliver North travelled to Iran on behalf of the US government in 1986 to offer missiles for hostages. The passports were real – and stolen – but the identities written onto the document were fake. Mr Ahmadinejad's loyalists will undoubtedly blame "foreigners" for the "letter" to Ayatollah Khamenei. But its electrifying effect on the Mousavi camp will only help to transform suspicion into the absolute conviction that their leader was quite deliberately deprived of the presidency. Marjane Satrapi, the acclaimed author and the Oscar-winning director of the black and white cartoon Persepolis, was in Brussels brandishing the same document.

In Tehran, there must have been five or six thousand Iranians wearing black, many of them carrying this toxic document in their hands, although they were far fewer than Monday's million-strong march and scarcely a fifth of their number reached Azadi Square from the centre of Tehran. Their enthusiasm to maintain their protest – led yesterday by a cavalry of a hundred or more motorbike riders – was cruelly treated by the organisers, who clearly had little idea whether they were supposed to direct them to a central venue or all the way out to Azadi. At times, they stood in the heat for more than a quarter of an hour while organisers argued about the route. This was no way to overthrow a government.

What was significant, however, was that once more the security authorities chose not to confront the Mousavi demonstrators. Military conscripts wearing bright yellow jackets and standing with their hands clasped behind their back – rather than holding batons – lined the first mile of the road but then abandoned the marchers to their own devices. This followed less than 24 hours after the frightening confrontation between up to 20,000 Mousavi and Ahmadinejad supporters at Vanak Square on Tuesday night when Iranian special forces paramilitary police protected Mr Mousavi's men and women from the government "Basiji" militia. Although some civilians were later hurt in fist-fights on the street, the government cops brought in reinforcements and prevented the Basiji and thousands of other Ahmadinejad supporters from entering north Tehran.

Mousavi was clearly behind yesterday's half-hearted march, for he issued a statement to the participants, condemning those who killed seven men in the dormitories at Tehran University on Sunday night "and beat boy and girl students and killed people in Azadi Square". He sympathised, he said, with these "martyrs" and urged all Iranians to send their condolences to the families of those who had been killed.

The highly dubious election results, however, are arousing concern far outside Mr Mousavi's millions of voters. Fifty-two MPs have asked the interior minister why he could not prevent the post-election intimidation and violence. Parliament has asked for a fact-finding investigation into the vandalisation of Tehran University property. Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi, a member of the Combatant Clerics Assembly – an important figure who founded the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and sent them to Lebanon when he was Iran's ambassador to Damascus – has demanded a committee to investigate the election results, made up of senior clerics, MPs, members of the judiciary, the Council of Guardians and an official of the interior ministry.

But suppression of the free speech which Mr Mousavi's loyalists demand so insistently continues. Yesterday morning, a 26-year-old student doing his doctorate at Oxford, Mohamed Reza Jaleopour, son of a professor at Tehran University, was arrested without charge at Tehran airport. The pro-Mousavi paper Green Word was again closed down.

As for Mr Mousavi, it seems that, once broken, the "mind-forged manacles of fear" are difficult to re-attach. But revolutionary governments are tough, steely creatures with sharp claws, and the Ahmadinejad regime is not about to collapse.

Interior Ministry's letter to the Supreme Leader

Salaam Aleikum.

Regarding your concerns for the 10th presidential elections and due to your orders for Mr Ahmedinejad to be elected President, in this sensitive time, all matters have been organised in such a way that the results of the election will be in line with the revolution and the Islamic system. The following result will be declared to the people and all planning should be put in force to prevent any possible action from the opposition, and all party leaders and election candidates are under intense surveillance. Therefore, for your information only, I am telling you the actual results as follows:

Mirhossein Mousavi: 19,075,623

Mehdi Karroubi: 13,387,104

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 5,698,417

Mohsen Rezai: 38,716

(signed on behalf of the minister)

Day 5 of Iran crisis

Political football

Iran's World Cup qualifier against South Korea in Seoul yesterday took on a decidedly political flavour. At least five of the Iranian team sported green bands around their arms or wrists – the signature accessory of Mousavi supporters back on the streets of Tehran – in an apparent protest against the disputed election back home.

But after half-time, some had removed the impromptu additions to their kit, prompting speculation they had been ordered to do so by their coach. The captain Mehdi Mahdavikia seemed to defy the team edict, much to the delight of fans waving banners with the plea "Free Iran" and chanting "Go to Hell Dictator". The game ended 1-1.

Ambassadors berated

Diplomatic relations frayed as the government summoned an ensemble of Western ambassadors to complain about interference. According to Iranian state TV, Tehran accused Washington of "intolerable" meddling in its internal affairs, the first time it has blamed the US for playing a role in the post-election turmoil. Barack Obama took pains to note there was little difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. "Either way we are going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States," he said. Britain's ambassador was berated for the recent comments of Gordon Brown and David Miliband, as well as the BBC's news coverage of the crisis. France, Germany and Italy were also given a talking to.

Missing persons

The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reported that scores of notable figures had been arrested and their whereabouts unknown. These included Saeed Hajarian – a one-time adviser to the reformist president Mohammed Khatami – who sustained brain and spinal injuries in a failed assassination attempt nine years ago, and as such needs constant medical attention. Also arrested was Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a senior adviser to Mehdi Karroubi who came in third in Friday's presidential election, according to the official results. Mohamed Reza Jaleopour, the son of a reformist university professor, was also detained at Tehran airport as he prepared to fly to England where he is studying for a PhD at Oxford University.

Regime splits

It emerged that the daughter of Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the influential Assembly of Experts that has the right to dismiss the Supreme Leader, had attended Tuesday's opposition rally. Faezeh Rafsanjani's public display of support for Mousavi, in defiance of a ban on unauthorised marches from the interior ministry, was widely interpreted as another sign of high-level rifts in the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile Mousavi has declared today a day of mourning, urging Iranians to come together in mosques or congregate peacefully on the streets. "A number of our countrymen were wounded or martyred," he said on his website. "I ask the people to express their solidarity with the families."

Bloggers threatened

Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the country's most powerful military force, made its first pronouncement on the post-election crisis, warning that the country's bloggers must remove any materials that "create tension" or face legal action. It marked another escalation of the information crackdown. But graphic images and detailed updates continued to leak out over sites such as Twitter, although the traffic directly from Iran appeared fractionally lighter than in previous days.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-secret-letter-proves-mousavi-won-poll-1707896.html

The Cynical Case Arguing That Mousavi Doesn't Matter At All

Beneath the headline Iran's Brave Revolutionaries Can Change Nothing But the Faces Con Coughlin sighs, lights a cigar, pours himself another brandy and explains to those folk foolish enough to believe that anything can change for the better in Iran just why they're not much more than a bunch of naive, though charmingly well-intentioned, fools:

For the past 30 years, Mr Mousavi and his supporters have demonstrated their unswerving dedication to the cause of revolutionary Islam. Under his premiership in the late 1980s, Iran came close to all-out war with the US and its allies during the death throes of the Iran-Iraq war. The greatest advances in the country's nuclear programme, including the regime's attempts to build an atom bomb, were undertaken during the presidencies of Rafsanjani and Khatami.

Their primary aim in opposing Mr Ahmadinejad's election victory, therefore, is to reclaim some of the power and influence they once enjoyed, rather than to effect a radical change in the way Iran is run.

It is for this reason that the democratic hopes of all those brave Iranians who have taken to the streets will ultimately be in vain. Even if Mr Khatami were to sacrifice Mr Ahmadinejad in the interests of preserving the regime, the president would simply be replaced by another Iranian leader whose first priority would be to protect the ideological foundations of Khomeini's Islamic revolution.

There is, doubtless, something to this. I suspect that there are plenty of Mousavi's own supporters who hold no illusions about his past, nor, at least until now, about what a Mousavi Presidency might look like. And, for sure, I don't think anone is claiming that Mousavi would be the kind of liberal some folk dream of seeing come to power in Tehran. Iran is, in any case, going to want to be a regional power and, most probably, a nuclear-armed one regardless of who is President or, for that matter, Supreme Leader.

At the New Yorker, Laura Secor adds some more detail:

Who knows what sort of president Mousavi would have been, or could yet be? He is an entirely different kind of animal from reformist politicians of the past; he is identified not with students and intellectuals but with the hardscrabble war years and the defense of the poor. But as one analyst explained to me, the problem he faces is that he is perhaps the only person on the Iranian political scene whose public stature is equal to Khamenei’s. He was a favorite son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the nineteen-eighties. Many Khomeinists in the power structure respect and support him; within the Revolutionary Guards, as well as within the upper clergy, he has a constituency. Traditional, religious people are among his supporters, too. On the morning of June 12th, he may have been the uncharismatic compromise candidate for the anyone-but-Ahmadinejad crowd. But to other voters he was then, and he has increasingly become, something else: the vehicle both for the memory of the utopia that never came, and for the hopes of a younger generation that imagines he shares its vision of the future.

And this, surely is the key point: the Mir Hossein Mousavi who ran for election a week ago is not necessarily the same man we see this week. A lot has happened in just a few days. If - and, granted, it's a major if - the election were a) reheld and b) won by Mousavi, it seems likely that he would be compelled to move a little faster and a little further on reform than he might be comfortable with or have even thought desirable just a few weeks ago. Momentum matters.

Clearly we ought not to suppose that domestic reform would necessarily mean foreign policy reform. Iran is likely to remain a pretty nationalistic place. But that doesn't mean there cannot be progress nor that the Iranian people can't lead better, freer, more prosperous lives.

And people change. Few people thought David Trimble would be the man to lead Ulster Unionism to a peace agreement. Or, to take another example, Alexander Dubcek was pushed further and faster in the direction of reform than he had anticipated or necessarily found entirely comfortable. The same might be said of Mikhail Gorbachev. There are plenty of other examples, some encouraging and some less so.

Will Mousavi ever get the chance to prove any of this? Maybe not, though with the way matters are moving in Iran it seems reckless to offer any opinion with any real certainty. It's still too soon to say what's been happening, only that something has been happening. Still, the nature of the protests is such that the reform movement is, in some ways, surely now very much stronger than it would have been were Iran preparing for a Mousavi vs Ahmadinejad run-off in the second round of Presidential voting.

As we wait and see what happens next, however, it is the regime that, right now, seems to be on the back foot, not the reformers. This too, of course, may change.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/arts/3702481/the-cynical-case-arguing-that-mousavi-doesnt-matter-at-all.thtml