The Islamic Republic of Iran Will Not Fall

At any rate, it will not fall now during this so-called “crisis of democracy” as western media—the media with nearly zero access to the country—likes to put it. The history of the Islamic Republic is rooted not in the 1979 revolution, but rather in the overthrow of Mossadeqh in the 1950s and the subsequent U.S.-supported rule of the Shah for more than two decades. The Islamic Republic’s power drew from this wellspring of resentment over the Shah’s Western-supported autocratic power. When he was finally ridden out of town on a rail by the revolution in 1979, the will of the people was focused laser-like on an Islamic Republic.

That is, there was little to no chance that the typical confusion following a revolution would allow a milder, more tolerant form of government to take power. Iran’s history stretches back thousands of years and the chafing of this ancient culture and civilization is not a minor psychological niggle to be discounted when considering what motivates the Iranian people. The American tendency towards nationalism—or patriotism or jingoism, depending on which spin you’re willing to put on it—is only unique in the American willingness to express it aggressively with the most lopsided military power this planet has ever seen. Iranians are also a proud people who see them themselves[1] as a more-than-equal player on the world stage, culturally, scientifically and militarily.

Soon after the Islamic Republic was founded, the U.S. (with a lot of support from Britain) unleashed a proxy war against them, using the monstrous Saddam Hussein as a figurehead. Hussein was only too happy to satisfy his expansionist desires with the generous military and financial aid of the U.S., which provided all manner of hardware and weaponry including, notoriously, the chemical weapons that not only gassed the Kurds, but also were regularly used on Iranian troops throughout that war, which lasted over eight years. Both Iran and Iraq would lose an entire generation, but the loss of over a million of its soldiers defending its land only further cemented the already formidable grasp on power that the Islamic ruling council had in the Iranian government.

In the years following the war, the Irani people have voted for more moderate rulers, like Mohammad Khatami in 1997, but moderation and reform in this case do not mean that there will suddenly be a McDonalds on every corner or that we’ll see cheeky shorts in the streets of Tehran. Iranians, on the whole, seem to like being an Islamic Republic—they’d just like to be a slightly less harsh and severe one. The paramount fact about Iran’s political system is that the elected members do not wield the real power. The non-elected parts of Iran’s government—the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council and the military—can override any and all policies and decisions made by the president and parliament.

The article Guide: How Iran is ruled (BBC) is a very useful guide, noting that “[i]t is the Supreme Leader, not the president, who controls the armed forces and makes decisions on security, defense and major foreign policy issues.”. The Supreme Leader, together with a group called the “Guardian Council […which] consists of six theologians appointed by the Supreme Leader and six jurists nominated by the judiciary and approved by parliament”, is the final arbiter of policy in Iran, which is how Khatami, elected with “70% of the popular vote” managed to exert nearly no influence on policy in his four years as president. In a way, Iran’s system is more honest than the American one, where we continue to believe to this day that the elected officials are capable—or willing—to represent the wishes of the people.

The similarities to the U.S. are hard to ignore. Many Americans are just fine with the U.S. being essentially a Christian nation—though a vocal minority makes this seem not to be the case—and most Americans are just fine with voting for one of two parties, both of which essentially offer the same options, but in harsh and less-harsh varieties. Witness the recent vote for “change” that swept the nation last November, in which the ostensibly reform-minded candidate, Obama, trounced the establishment candidate, McCain, who was largely seen as the ideological successor to the incumbent Bush.

However, seen realistically, whereas the level of rhetoric has risen considerably, the policies have changed very little. The breathlessly predicted “sweeping changes” failed to materialize because their imminence were largely a product of wishful thinking. And, also, largely a product of bad statistics and reasoning about demographics. Being loud doesn’t make your vote count more; being numerous is what counts in truly democratic elections. Instead of having been a travesty of justice, it is entirely possible that the recent results in Iran were manipulated but that they simply unnecessarily exaggerated the result rather than actually changing it.

The point to remember is that the people in Iran using Twitter and Facebook—from whom Western media is nearly exclusively drawing its impressions of Iranian popular opinion—are those most likely to be reform-minded and liberal. The westernized youth in Iran’s cities are naturally going to be fighting like hell to get an Apple Store in Tehran and Qom, even if they have no inkling of how many ideological, political and probably military barriers stand in the way. They’re most likely just as naïve as their western counterparts, thinking that all they have to do is get their candidate elected, then they can go to www.apples.ir/itunes and hit “refresh” until they can buy Britney’s latest. Americans are six months ahead of Iran on this one, slowly coming to the conclusion that the waves of “change” they expected when electing Obama haven’t yet begun washing over them—nor are they likely to.

In a similar vein, the article Iran’s Cedar Show by Gary Brecher (the War Nerd) (Exiled Online) reminds us also to remember that “these people, whoever you’re looking at, don’t want what you want, don’t think like you do.” And those are just the vocal, visible ones with whom the western media is in love—as we all tend to be whenever we find anyone who agrees with our world-view. The silent majority not protesting in the streets are most likely not too dissatisfied with the election results.

“Some of them might be pissed off at the mullahs, but what if some of them like it? I don’t know, CNN doesn’t know—and, for every dissident blogger or tweeter they interview, there might be ten silent-majority types wanting those damn[ed] hippies in the streets of Tehran gassed.”

This is exactly the situation in the States with big-ticket issues like gay marriage: a very vocal minority[2] makes it appear that there is a groundswell of support for homosexuality as a natural way of life when, in fact, the vast majority either don’t care one way or the other or silently support the discriminatory status-quo. The tenuous approval of gay marriage in five (low-population) states in the union are seen by supporters as outweighing the extremely loud NO just as recently expressed by the people of California, one of the largest states in the union. People believe what they want to believe instead of opening their eyes to the facts on the ground.

Brecher proposes an interesting comparison with a hotly contested election in America:

“[I]magine Iranian Islamic TV covering, say, a classic culture-war US election like Nixon in 1972. You’d see Persians blanket-covering every demonstration, every love-in […] every draft-card burning…and then the U.S. government announces that Nixon just stomped McGovern in the biggest landslide ever. Who’d believe it? That is, unless you knew that for every loud camera-hog hippie you saw on TV, there were about a hundred fat nobodies wishing Kent State[3] was a daily event.”

It is this foolishness that leads to “surprises” and “paradoxes” like Ahmadinejad getting elected in an Iran that so clearly—when history and demographics are studiously ignored—”wants reform”. In all likelihood, Ahmadinejad did win—but just not as decisively as the Guardian Council perhaps expected. What we see as a clumsy attempt to steal an election amounts to them as simply fiddling numbers that don’t matter anyway. That millions of Iranians are protesting in the streets that their votes were stolen only goes to show how ignorant they are in thinking that their vote mattered in the first place. Perhaps many are protesting the unfairness of the system, but it will take much more than marching in the streets for a week or two to uproot a deeply entrenched power base like that of the Islamic Republic. It is, however, still dangerous for the leadership in Iran to let this much unrest get out of hand as it will take more overt shows of power to get the people back under control.

Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, is well aware of this as evidenced by his recent Address on the Presidential Elections (Informed Comment)[4], in which he commends his people for “[t]rus[ing] in the Islamic Republic” and that “[t]his trust is the biggest asset of the Islamic Republic”. He cautions his people against letting “the enemies […] create doubt about elections [and] cast[ing] doubt on the trust of the people.” With 85% participation, the trust in the power of the political system is still strong in Iran and Khamenei knows that when that belief is gone, the system atop of which he sits is more exposed. He instead spends a considerable amount of time explaining that the current demonstrations are purely comprised of people who’ve believed the evil propaganda of the enemy. He’s practically begging his people not to fall for the heckling of the child yelling that he’s wearing no clothes.

“The enemy wants to see the people come forward in such a move and participate so enthusiastically in elections and then get told that they have made a mistake in trusting the system, the system is not trustworthy. This is what the enemy wants.”

The parallels to the U.S. are truly interesting and suggest an alternative interpretation of the fact that Iranians protest by the millions when their votes are stolen whereas Americans stayed home in 2000 and 2004 when similarly shady goings-on occurred. Perhaps this was due not to stupidity or laziness—the favored explanations for American behavior in the rest of the world—but to a recognition that the vote—and, as a consequence, democracy in general—is a farce that has nothing to do with any real influence on policy in America.

So, just as the massive outpouring of support for a black president promising change in America hasn’t changed American foreign policy in any significant way—it is equally, if not more, draconian—the election of a moderate in Iran would not have changed the basic policy landscape there. Both candidates, Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, fully support Iran’s right to pursue nuclear enrichment which, as a signatory of the NPT and a regular subject of inspection by the IAEA, they have every right to do. Neither one is willing to recognize Israel’s right to be a Jewish state (which affords greater rights to its Jewish citizens than to its Arab citizens). Mousavi, the reform candidate, is a hard-liner with roots in government as far back as the Iran-Iraq war of the 80's and famously supported the fatwah against Salman Rushdie.[5] He retains close ties to Iran’s military and intelligence services. Again, Supreme Leader Khamenei doesn’t try to hide from this fact at all, re-affirming for his people that the election “it was not a race between the insiders and outsiders of the system. It was a race inside the system between the members affiliated to the system.”

But America likes its stories simple, with a good guy and a bad guy. The American media establishment—and, thus, its well-trained viewership—has no stomach or patience for shades of gray. Ahmadinejad is the bad guy, so anyone running against him, regardless of his platform, is the good guy. Even Rafsanjani, the guy Ahmadinejad defeated in the previous election is being touted as a reformer, even though he’s an even bigger hard-liner than Mousavi. Again, as Brecher puts it:

“The other reason this seems big is that a lot of people on our side of the world have been waiting a long, long time to see Ahmadinejad take a big fall. They’re hyperventilating just thinking about what a great movie this is, with the people rising up to send the loud-talking shrimp back to midget wrestling. They’re so desperate they’re putting cell-phone videos on the nightly news, desperate for some sign that Iran’s having its democracy rapture.”

But wishin’ it don’t make it so.

The election of a slightly-more–reform-minded presidential figurehead will not affect the basic structure of the Iranian government in any way. Just as the election of Obama and a democratic majority has not reduced the amount of influence wielded by America’s own religious ruling class—the capitalists. The oil, health-care and financial services lobbies are just as powerful under the purportedly more reform- and liberal-minded Democrats as they were under the Republicans. The facade has changed, but the essential power structure dictating the direction of policy remains the same.