Robin Wright

After Tahrir, Finishing the Revolution

2012-01-20T17:33:00.000-08:00

On the anniversary of Egypt's historic protests, a 49-year-old mother tries to hold the military accountable—one body at a time

Wall Street Journal Jan. 21, 2012

As Egypt's tumultuous uprising has deteriorated over the last year, Ghada Shahbender, a former soccer mom, has adopted a grim vocation.

"It's hospital after hospital, morgue after morgue," the divorced mother of four told me. "I started back in February, about the time that the camel drivers attacked us in Tahrir Square. I was trying to get a body count, but I was chased out. The government didn't want us to know how many people really died."

As clashes between protesters and security forces escalated in the fall, Ms. Shahbender and other volunteers learned to reach coroners quickly to prevent them from lying on death certificates under government pressure.

"There's often an awful battle over writing a report about what really happened—like when a body arrives with a gunshot wound in the forehead and a coroner tries to make it a car accident," said Ms. Shahbender, a secular voter (and former screenwriter) who sees the country's Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF) as the key remaining obstacle to democracy.

On Jan. 25, Egypt marks the one-year anniversary of epic protests that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in a mere 18 days. The Arab world's most populous country has just wrapped up the freest election in its 5,000-year history. By June, a committee from the new parliament is supposed to write a constitution, and then Egypt will elect a president.

Yet across teeming Cairo, there's a sense now that the revolution has only begun—and that the last body has yet to be counted. Egyptians increasingly frame the next five months as a third phase of their rebellion. The first was the ouster of Mr. Mubarak. The second played out in sporadic clashes from October to December. The third phase will be shaped as elected officials struggle to dismantle Egypt's military empire. Many here fear it could take years—and prove harder than ousting Mr. Mubarak.

Underneath its autocratic surface, modern Egypt was effectively a military state. Since the Free Officers Movement toppled the monarchy in 1952, all of the country's presidents have been military men. The SCAF, which holds power now, abandoned Mr. Mubarak partly because it wanted another general, not Mr. Mubarak's son, to succeed him, Egyptian analysts contend.

The military has long influenced everything from legislation to the media and foreign policy. And, according to reports, it may control up to 30% of the economy, including vast tracts of land.

The generals want four controversial guarantees before ceding power, according to Amr Hamzawy, who won a parliamentary seat as an independent. They seek immunity from prosecution for human rights violations, including hundreds of deaths, since taking over on Feb. 11 last year. They want to preserve their political leverage, including an effective veto over legislation. They want to retain their business interests. And they seek control over the military budget, which under Mr. Mubarak was kept secret even from parliament.

"These are not issues that will be decided once and for all in June," Mr. Hamzawy said. "Does that mean they will not hand over power? It means they will hand it over constitutionally and on paper. And the new parliament will draft limits and checks and balances that then will take time to enact."

"I don't know whether we will be successful," he added.

Meantime, the disparate array of protesters is demanding that SCAF allow elected civilians to rule Egypt for the first time. At Cairo's Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the yearlong uprising, graffiti that once carried anti-Mubarak slogans now target the generals. "Death to the rule of the military," declares one.

Tensions between protesters and SCAF have deepened particularly since a four-day crackdown in December killed dozens more activists. Over the past year, according to Human Rights Watch, more than 12,000 civilians have been tried by military courts, some simply for insulting the military.

Rival anniversary commemorations reflect the rising tensions. Protesters have called for massive demonstrations against SCAF on Jan. 25. SCAF responded by calling on Egyptians to turn out to honor the military's role in ousting Mr. Mubarak. The Islamist parties, on the eve of gaining power after winning almost 70% of the seats in the new parliament, want to avoid new turmoil, but they are also savvy about street sentiment. They have called on the public to turn out to celebrate "martyrs" who died in the uprising.

Whether or not the competing passions of Jan. 25 spark confrontations, Ms. Shahbender and her daughter Nazly Hussein, 28, are preparing to count more bodies. Ms. Hussein takes a video camera along to document death and injuries for the new group Mosireen, Arabic for "the determined," which posts them on the Web.

"I've been to the morgues so many times I lost count," Ms. Shahbender said. The hardest deaths to document, she said, were the bodies crushed by military vehicles.

Over the past year, Ms. Shahbender, 49, whose latest film was abruptly deferred after the uprising, has become a leading activist—a reflection of the fact that Egypt's protest leaders are not just young people. She smuggled supplies into Tahrir Square, created networks of activists and became a popular voice on Twitter. During the recent elections, she exposed thousands of discarded ballots in a Cairo district and forced a revote.

"This can't all have been for nothing," she told me while navigating Cairo's chaotic traffic en route to an open-air rally for Kazeboon, a group formed last month to counter the military's propaganda against the protesters. (Kazeboon means "liars.") On a frigid night, the demonstration packed Union Square with protesters to honor the "Eyes of Tahrir," the more than 1,500 activists who lost an eye from beatings or from pellet guns, according to human rights activists and doctors.

Among them was Ahmed Harara, a young dentist who lost an eye on Jan. 28 last year, the day protesters pushed security forces from Lovers' Bridge and occupied Tahrir Square. He lost his other eye during protests on Nov. 19. Ms. Shahbender is documenting his and other cases for the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights. At the rally, an ophthalmologist showed gruesome slides of bloodied corneas on a screen made from sheets.

Bassem Youssef is a cardiac surgeon who tended to the injured at a makeshift clinic at Tahrir Square during the uprising's first phase. He has gained fame since March as the Jon Stewart of Egypt after he launched a satirical news show. Mr. Youssef has now started ridiculing SCAF.

"It's not just how many tanks they own," he reflected after a recent taping. "How do you build a highway here? You go to the military as it has the resources. So the idea of turning over control—I just don't see it happening. After Mubarak stepped down, he went on trial. Will the generals go on trial? I don't think so." He started the show, he said, to expose "the hypocrisy and lying."

After a year of unrest, Ms. Shahbender says that she is inured to fear. "I can't get over the sight of the one-eyed and the blind. The more I look at the paraplegics who were shot in the back, the more I want justice. The dead actually may be in a better place," she said. "I can only pray that these generals pay the prices of these grievances with their own health."

—Ms. Wright, a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center, is the author of "Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion across the Islamic World."

The Islamists are Coming

2011-11-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

But democracy and piety are not always contradictions
Foreign Policy Nov. 7, 2011

Two decades ago, a portly Tunisian with a salt-and-pepper beard sat in my Georgetown living room and tried to convince me that blending tenets from Islam and democracy could create viable governments in the Middle East. The merger was inevitable -- and good for the West too, he insisted.

"Islam embraces diversity and pluralism as well as cultural coexistence," Rachid el-Ghannouchi, a former philosophy professor and leader of Tunisia's Islamist opposition, told me.

It was a hard sell back then. Most Islamist movements -- from Egypt's Islamic Group (Gamaa Islamiyya) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to Lebanon's Hezbollah -- had a sorry, unproductive, or violent record.

Today, however, Ghannouchi actually has a chance to prove his point. In Tunisia's first free election last month -- also the first poll of the Arab Spring -- his al-Nahda party beat 100 other parties to win 40 percent of the vote and the right to lead a government.

Islam is emerging as an equally potent force as democracy in defining the new order in the Middle East. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is also expected to do well in elections this month. Libya's interim leader recently called for laws compliant with Islamic sharia, including lifting restrictions on polygamy. Movements with various Islamic flavors are part of oppositions in Syria, Yemen, and beyond.

"The Islamists are coming, the Islamists are coming!" is the new refrain across Western capitals. In some quarters, the Islamists' electoral prospects have even unleashed a bit of wistfulness for the old secular dictators. But democratic politics and piety are not necessarily contradictions, even for the nonobservant.

No question, Islamist parties are more assertive and ambitious than ever. And yes, the next decade will be far more traumatic for both insiders and outsiders than the last one, though often due more to economic challenges than Islamist politics. Pity the inheritors of the Arab world's broken political and economic systems, whoever they are.

Yet the Islamic revival has evolved significantly since the 1970s. Islamist politics entered the mainstream after Israel's rout of the Arabs in the 1973 war and Iran's 1979 revolution, which overthrew 2,500 years of dynastic rule. The 1980s witnessed the rise of extremism and mass violence, first among Shiites and later Sunnis. But in the 1990s, the trend began to shift from the bullet to the ballot -- or a combination -- with Islamist parties running within political systems, not just trying to sabotage them from the outside. And in the early 21st century, especially as militancy took growing tolls on their societies, Mideast populations began challenging both autocrats and extremism in creative new ways. The Arab uprisings, which were launched by unprecedented displays of peaceful civil disobedience in the world's most volatile region, mark a fifth phase.

Political Islam is today defined by an increasingly wide spectrum. And no one vision dominates. Indeed, the Islamists' diversity -- when the strictly observant believe in only one true path to God -- is unprecedented.

The nonviolent parties fall in three main pivots on the spectrum. At one end, the Justice and Development parties (of the same name) in Turkey and Morocco reject the Islamist label -- and recognize Israel's right to exist, a barometer of coexistence or pluralism in practice. Tunisia's al-Nahda has the potential to be a model if it follows through in forming a coalition with two secular parties and honoring women's rights.

When I met with Ghannouchi, he spoke at length about aqlanah, which translates as "realism" or "logical reasoning." Aqlanah, he told me, is dynamic and constantly evolving -- and Muslims needed to better balance sacred texts and human realities.

In the middle of the spectrum are groups like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which has sired 86 branches across the Islamic world since the 1920s and renounced violence in the 1970s. It had 88 members of parliament during Hosni Mubarak's last government. Its positions on women and Coptic Christians in politics and Israel as a neighbor are archaic; so is the undemocratic selection of its own leadership. But those policies have also alienated its own members.

The factors that generated the uprisings -- the young bulge, literacy, and the tools of technology -- have spawned diverse ways of thinking among younger Islamists, too. Ibrahim Houdaiby's grandfather and great-grandfather were both supreme leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. He became its best-known blogger in 2005. But Ibrahim also advocated pragmatism, internal democracy, less secrecy, religious tolerance, and women's rights.

"I had lots of debates with my grandfather," he told me. "One was over which comes first: freedom or sharia. My grandfather said sharia leads to freedom. My argument came from the Quran, which says, 'Let there be no compulsion in religion.' I said freedom comes first." Ibrahim eventually resigned from the Brotherhood over practical political differences.

The wild cards at the far end of the spectrum are the Salafis, ultraconservative radicals inspired by Saudi Arabia's puritan Wahhabi sect. They are often a hybrid. In Egypt, the Islamic Group started to renounce violence in the late 1990s as part of a deal with the government to release its imprisoned members. Some have even crusaded against jihadi tactics they once endorsed. Their willingness to share power, however, is not convincing because of rigid positions on everything from Islamic law and women to Israel.

Abboud al-Zomor, for example, provided the bullets to kill Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Imprisoned for three decades, he was released after Mubarak's ouster. "There is no longer any need for me to use violence against those who gave us our freedom and allowed us to be part of political life," he told the New York Times this year. But Zomor's goal of creating a strict religious state has not changed -- and it does not inspire confidence about the movement's ability to compromise.

The new spectrum reflects the key bottom line: Over the next decade, the most dynamic debate will be among the diverse Islamists, not between Islamist and secular parties. These political tensions will play out as they vie to define Islam's role in new constitutions -- and then implement it in daily life.

These trends should not come as a surprise: Many Muslims share conservative values even as they push for freedoms. The right to human dignity, Muslims believe, is God-given -- a view shared by Thomas Jefferson and engraved on the walls of his memorial. The values of their religion are a starting point for all other aspects of life.

"Without Islam, we will not have any real progress," reflected Diaa Rashwan, an expert on political Islam at Cairo's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "When Western countries built their own progress, they didn't go out of their epistemological or cultural history. Japan is still living in the culture of the samurai, but in a modern way. The Chinese are still living the traditions created by Confucianism."

"So why," he mused, "do we have to go out of our history?"

The Hip Hop Rhythm of Arab Revolt

2011-07-22T19:09:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal
July 23, 2011

In November 2010, a young Tunisian rapper who called himself El General posted a song on his Facebook page and YouTube. He had no alternative.

The government of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali had virtually banned hip-hop. Its musicians were not on government-approved playlists for state-controlled television or radio. They were rarely able to get permits to perform in public. And most were barred from recording CDs.

El General—whose real name is Hamada Ben Amor—had no resources of his own. At age 21, he faced the problems of many young Tunisians. He was without reliable work and still living at home with his parents. For Tunisia's rappers, the only regular gigs were on the Internet. So he recorded the song underground.

"I had two friends," he later explained. "One filmed my songs on a small video camera, and the other edited the videos and put them up on YouTube." It raged against the problems of poverty, unemployment, hunger and injustice—and boldly blamed them all on Mr. Ben Ali.

The four-minute video was haunting and raw. It showed the young rapper sauntering through a dark, sewage-strewn alley on his way to a makeshift studio with graffiti spray-painted on the wall. He beat out the song in front of an old-fashioned mike, with no one else in sight, and then ambled back down the alley into the night.

His face was never in the light, his identity remained unclear. Going public was too dangerous.

El General's song was an instant sensation. Its outrage resonated, especially among the young. It broke through the climate of fear in a country where no politician had dared to criticize a president in power for almost a quarter-century. His incendiary rap registered hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and across other social networks. The amateur video was even picked up by Al Jazeera, the 24-hour Arabic news channel.

A few weeks after the song began circulating, a government inspector demanded a bribe from Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid. She confiscated his produce and his scales. When he could find no recourse, he set himself on fire over the same problems that echoed through the plaintive rap lyrics.

As protests over Mr. Bouazizi's plight spread across the country, El General's rap became the rallying cry. Verses were sung by tens of thousands of Tunisians in street demonstrations demanding the president's ouster.

For El General, the words proved personally prophetic. As the Jasmine Revolution gained momentum, he wrote another song entitled "Tunisia Our Country." Its blunt condemnation bordered on treason. At 5 a.m. on a cold winter day, government security forces showed up at his door in Sfax, a former commercial center on the Mediterranean coast.

"Some 30 plainclothes policemen came to our house and took him away without ever telling us where to," his brother told news agencies. "When we asked why they were arresting him, they said, 'He knows why.' "

The young rapper was taken to a prison in Tunis. He was put in solitary confinement and repeatedly interrogated about possible political connections, according to news reports at the time. But in the breathtaking speed of the first Arab revolt, the revolutionary anthem had already made him famous. Demonstrators began demanding his release as well as the president's resignation.

"They asked me, 'Please stop singing about the president and his family, and then we'll release you,' " he later recounted to Time magazine.

The government let him go after three days, as a concession to the demonstrators. Little known before his protest song, El General had become almost as famous as Mr. Bouazizi. "That's when I realized that my act was really huge, and really dangerous, because the police got so many calls about my incarceration," he said. "Once I stopped being scared, I had this huge pride."

Two weeks after the Tunisian president abruptly fled, El General performed in public for the first time. Wearing the Tunisian flag draped around his shoulders, he belted out his anthem for a crowd of thousands.

His appearance brought the Jasmine Revolution full circle. Mannoubia Bouazizi, the mother of the young street vendor whose self-immolation launched the uprising, had traveled to Tunis to share the stage. The two young men had transformed political activism in Tunisia—and in turn the entire Arab world.

El General's song became the anthem of revolutions across the region. It was sung in street demonstrations from mighty Egypt to tiny Bahrain. Through Facebook, he had many requests to join the protesters at Cairo's Liberation Square. He had no passport, so he opted to work instead on a rap ode to Arab revolution.

"Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Morocco," the chorus went, "all must be liberated too."

* * *

Across the Islamic world, hip-hop has now created an alternative subculture among the young. Rap is its voice in a 4/4 beat. Muslim rap is replete with beeps, bops and beatboxes, although without the materialism, misogyny, vulgarity and "gangsta" violence of much Western hip-hop.

The messages of Muslim rappers are just as bold and blunt, however, and the names they take are defiant. DAM and Rapperz were early Palestinian groups. Kla$h is a Saudi. Afrock and Da Sole are Tunisian rappers. Desert Heat came from the United Arab Emirates. Disso R Die and ThuGz Team are Kuwaitis. Rappers DJ Outlaw and Chillin came from little Bahrain. Hich Kas—which means "nobody" in Farsi—was among the first of many Iranian rappers. Boyz Got No Brain are Indonesian rappers. MC Kash is an Indian rapper in Kashmir.

"I have a lot of rage, but I express it with a microphone, not a weapon," the lead singer of DAM, Tamer Nafar, explained to a Jewish publication in 2007—in Hebrew. The DAM trio has repeatedly condemned extremism and violence—by both sides—even as their songs try to explain the context in which suicide bombing takes place. "Every village now has hip hop," Mr. Nafar told me. "Hip-hop is our CNN."

Embracing rap does not mean that young Muslims are mimicking the West or secular ways. Many rappers are, in fact, surprisingly observant. Islamic hip-hop is now a genre, like Christian hip-hop and Gospel rock. Morocco's sultry Soultana—whose sneakers sport pink shoelaces—often takes a break if the muezzin issues the call to prayer while she is performing.

"Hip-hop is now the battleground for Muslims," she told me, citing the young people across the Muslim world who are fighting back against both autocrats and religious extremists. As Soultana raps in one of her songs:

"They said we are terrorists because we are Muslims,

Because one criminal did it wrong in the name of Islam.

Our Islam is peace, love, respect.

We are the generation calling for peace."

During a performance in Rabat, three men told Soultana that female singers were haram, or forbidden, to perform in front of men. She simply countered, "I read the Koran." Then she went on singing.

Peaceful protests, not suicide bombs

2011-02-11T10:40:00.000-08:00

POLITICO

By Robin Wright

Feb. 11, 2011 -- Arab world’s old authoritarian order is being shattered, whatever happens next.

Egypt accounts for roughly one-quarter of the Arab world’s 300 million people, so the transition of political power in Cairo will likely have widespread effect across the 22-nation bloc. From Casablanca to Kuwait, Tripoli to Damascus, Egypt’s transition will affect every other Arab country in some way—small or large, direct or indirect.

In a region made famous for its suicide bombings, the use of civil disobedience to peacefully force Hosni Mubarak from the presidency changes the political dynamics, not only in Egypt.

In the end, Mubarak and his loyalists could no longer isolate or discredit the burgeoning opposition without enormous costs, and potentially not at all. The movement began to take its demonstrations beyond Liberation Square to parliament, state television and the presidential palace. Protests also spread throughout the country. And labor began to strike in sympathy with the opposition.

Already crippled economically over the past two weeks, Egypt could not afford to see strikes spread and the country paralyzed. The opposition could not be contained, politically or physically.

Despite the breathless pace of change in both Egypt and Tunisia—all since Dec. 17, a mere eight weeks—the political drama is likely to play out for a very long time.

So far, the model for Egypt is more Turkey than Iran. Ironically, Mubarak resigned on Feb. 11—the same day as the Iranian revolution. But Egypt’s uprising has taken a decidedly different form.

Now the hard part begins—organizing elections, amending or rewriting the constitution, developing new political parties, and getting the economy going again. The economy will be a key in ensuring a healthy transition for Egypt.

Robin Wright is a joint fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center.

Mubarak now controls only his exit

2011-01-31T10:33:00.000-08:00

POLITICO January 31, 2011

One way or another, the Mubarak dynasty is toast.

After three decades of absolute power, the only thing President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt now fully controls is when he goes. And the octogenarian may not be able to dictate the terms or timing of his exit for much longer — almost certainly not until the presidential elections due in September.

Global giddiness after a remarkable week of “people power” protests is likely to give way this week to anxious realities for Egypt, the region and its allies.

Three factors will influence what happens next.

First, Egypt literally may not have the luxury of waiting for a gradual or gentle transition. Cairo’s stock market began to drop even before the “Day of Rage” protests Friday forced the Egyptian leader to finally address his nation — with desperate-sounding platitudes. The sense of an uncertain future is likely to further undermine Egypt’s economy, as well as the weak reforms by Mubarak’s regime, which have already been hurt by the global economic crisis. The weekend looting will not help.

Tourists — a critical source of income in Egypt — are fleeing the turmoil. International airlines have canceled flights indefinitely. And forget badly needed foreign investment — governments are pulling out diplomats and dispatching special flights to withdraw their stranded citizens.

So the economic pressure is now on. In the end, that’s the key factor that often topples regimes.

Second, the entire region is now at stake. The abrupt ousting of a regime in Tunisia, a small country of 10 million people between Algeria and Libya, is one thing. In Egypt, the fall of a regime is quite another matter.

With 80 million people living along the fertile Nile River, Egypt accounts for roughly one-quarter of the total population of the 22 Arab countries. It is the Arab political and foreign policy trendsetter. Despite the nation’s pervasive malaise for more than a decade, it is still considered the intellectual center.

Arabs themselves want Egypt’s future resolved.

Third, the world cannot afford to let Egypt fester without risking a dangerous political vacuum, even worse turmoil and deepening resentment of foreign governments — especially the United States. Egyptian protesters are already challenging Washington’s role.

“USA: We hate your hypocrisy,” warned a big, handmade poster waved by a protester over the weekend.

Cairo has certainly been an essential ally. It played a pivotal role in the Arab-Israeli peace process, initiated under former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. It has taken a tough stand against extremism — though, in fairness, largely for the regime’s own survival because its draconian practices helped fuel militancy. But both national security priorities — shared by most of the world — are in jeopardy as long as Egypt is unstable and its future is uncertain.

§

The big challenge now for Egypt and Tunisia — and potentially others — is to fill the political vacuum with credible parties and talented people after decades of outlawing, isolating, exiling and even executing dissidents. This is a long-haul challenge, not something that can happen overnight. Three forces will play defining roles.

The first is the emerging body politic, and its role is far from over.

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New movements in Egypt and Tunisia and the bubbling unrest elsewhere in the Arab world are still evolving. Their goals, so far largely nonideological, are justice and job creation.

And they are shaped by the forces of modernization: Education is moving people beyond goals of daily subsistence. Demographics have created a dominant youth population, aware of change elsewhere in the world. Since the mid-1990s, satellite channels have provided a source of information outside the state’s control. And technology has offered a means of communicating and mobilizing.

Second are Muslim conservatives — not to be confused with extremists or radicals. In much of the Arab world, Islam today is less an end goal than a source of identity. Even as growing numbers of Muslims reject extremism, they are turning to their faith as a pillar to cling to during the tornado of political change — a role religion has played in many other upheavals in the past century.

Third is the military, which is made up of the people in many Arab countries. In Tunisia, the army leadership took the decision to fulfill its mandate — defending the nation, not the regime. During its initial deployment, Egypt’s military did, too. In fact, several soldiers were captured for chanting or singing along with protesters.

For all the euphoria about people power facing down dictatorial regimes, Egypt and Tunisia face even tougher challenges now because their populations have rising expectations and believe they deserve tangible improvements in their lives. Any regime — old or new — will find it almost impossible to deliver benefits soon enough.

Robin Wright, who has covered the Middle East since 1973, is a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The Challenge of Iran (From "The Iran Primer:Power, Politics and U.S. Policy")

2010-12-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

Iran, proud and passionate, has been a conundrum since its 1979 revolution. It stunned the world by introducing Islam as a form of modern governance, in turn altering the balance of power across the Middle East. It rattled the region by exporting its zealous ideology and siring or sponsoring militant allies elsewhere. And it unnerved both East and West by defiantly challenging international norms and charting its own course. All three factors complicated dealing with the Islamic Republic.

But Iran looms even larger today. The confluence of challenges—defiance over its nuclear program, rising repression, support for extremists, and menacing rhetoric—has created a sense of impending crisis both at home and abroad.

Political volatility at home was reflected in six months of tumultuous protests after the disputed 2009 presidential election. For millions of Iranians in many cities, the issue quickly escalated from alleged voter fraud to condemnation of the regime, its leadership and even the Islamic system. The regime, briefly, appeared on a precipice. Tehran eventually restored control. But its tactics indicated the regime’s insecurity. It had to militarize to survive.

Tensions with the international community have been reflected in a series of U.N. sanctions since 2006 over Iran’s refusal to convince the world it was not building a bomb. In the end, even Russia, which built Iran’s first nuclear reactor, voted for a series of punitive sanctions. So did China, which has become Iran’s most important big-power trading partner.

Iran now represents a far more complex challenge than other hotspots—Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea—for several reasons:
*Its revolution was one of the three transformative events in the Middle East in the 20th century. Iran’s actions will be pivotal to global events in the early 21st century because of its resources, ideology, weaponry, allies and location.
*Strategically, Iran’s frontiers and coastline have for millennia been central to political, military and commercial developments. Today, it spans three of the world’s most volatile regions and its most vital shipping lanes for oil. Iran has the potential to help stabilize or destabilize all four.
*Politically, Iran has been the most dynamic and controversial experiment in blending Islam and democracy—and the experiment is far from over. It continues to play out in the domestic political crisis. The outcome could affect the wider Islamic world as profoundly as the revolution.
*Militarily, Iran has the largest armed forces in the Middle East and, with the exception of Israel, Egypt and increasingly Saudi Arabia, the largest arsenal, although much of its weaponry is of low quality, aging or obsolete. It has also armed militant allies from Lebanon to Afghanistan.
*Economically, Iran is one of the world’s largest and most valuable properties, rich with oil and natural gas. Its assets in turn give it leverage and political leeway globally.

The revolution
The Islamic Republic still has to prove the long-term viability of its zealous ideology and hybrid political system, the issues at the heart of its domestic crisis. Yet Iran’s 1979 revolution was clearly one of the three most innovative revolutions of the Modern Age. Like two other upheavals, it introduced a new ideology and redefined the world’s political spectrum.

In toppling the Bourbon monarchy, the French revolution introduced equality and civil liberty as the basis of modern democracy. The Russian revolution overthrew the Romanov dynasty in the name of classless egalitarianism, the foundation of communism. By ousting the last in a string of dynasties dating back more than 2,000 years, the Iranian revolution sought to demonstrate that Islam was an effective idiom of political expression, opposition and governance.

For the Middle East, the revolution was one of the three most important turning points of the 20th century. The collapse of the five-century-old Ottoman Empire after World War I and Israel’s creation in 1948 were the other two. In many ways, Iran was a logical place for sweeping political innovation because of its own rich history, religious tenets, two earlier attempts at reform, and struggle to end foreign influence.

Historically, Iran has more independent political experience than virtually any other modern Muslim state. Most were created or gained independence from European colonial powers only in the 20th century. But Iran had a long, if somewhat varied, history of sovereignty. Persia also had long exposure to ideas from the outside world, as a crossroads between East and West and a target of invading armies from ancient Greece to contemporary Britain. And with more than five millennia of civilization, Iranians have a sense of historic importance and a role in shaping the world.

Political Islam
Shiite Islam was also a logical force for change. In Sunni Islam, clerics are advisers; a believer’s relationship with God is direct. In Shiite Islam, the clergy is empowered to interpret God’s word for the faithful. Their fatwas have absolute authority in telling a believer what is right or wrong, what to do or not do. Shiite clerics also have a leadership hierarchy. And central to the original schism, Shiite Islam demands that the faithful fight against injustice, even if it means certain death. In tapping into strong Shiite traditions, revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became the most credible authority to mobilize disparate Iranian factions against the last shah.

Islam also provided a framework for an alternative to the monarchy. The new Islamic Republic was the first grand experiment in blending Islam and democracy. Iran’s 1979 constitution borrowed heavily from French and Belgian law. It called for separation of powers between the three branches of government. It stipulated that the president and legislature, as well as provincial and local councils, should be popularly elected by men and women, originally as young as 15. It imposed a two-term limit on the presidency. And it continued the monarchy’s practice of allocating seats in parliament for Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians—at least token acknowledgement of individual or minority rights.

But the constitution then added a provision that all laws must be compatible with Islamic law, or Sharia. It also established a set of parallel Islamic institutions that mirrored each of the republican branches of government—and often had more power. And on top of it all, the constitution imposed a supreme leader, who had absolute powers. The supreme leader became the equivalent of an infallible political pope.

Revolution within Shiism
The Islamic Republic also represented a revolution within Shiism. More than any branch of Islam, Shiites historically were wary of political power. They viewed the state as imperfect, corruptible and a source of persecution. They deliberately distanced themselves from politics. After Iran’s revolution, however, they became the political power, changing the role of the clerics as well a central tenet of the “quietist” Shiite faith. Tehran’s Shiite theocracy is the only time Muslim clerics have ever ruled a state.

Iran has in turn put Shiism—Islam’s so-called second sect, making up between 10 percent and 12 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims—on the political map. In its first three decades, the Islamic Republic fostered a network of Shiite allies in neighboring states stretching from Lebanon to Afghanistan. Sunni governments began to fear the so-called Shiite crescent, anchored by Iran, that stretched west across Iraq, into Syria and Lebanon, and south through Shiite minorities in the oil-rich sheikhdoms.

Political phases
Iran’s revolution has passed through at least four phases:
Phase one: The first phase was the Khomeini decade from 1979 until the ayatollah’s death in 1989. It was a tumultuous period of revolutionary extremes that included killing off supporters of the ancien regime, taking foreigners hostage, and fostering its zealotry across the Islamic world. The turmoil was exacerbated by an eight-year war with Iraq that proved to be the Middle East’s bloodiest modern conflict. It produced more than one million casualties.

Phase two: The second phase coincided with the two terms of President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, from 1989 until 1997. The revolution’s early passions were replaced by a hard-earned pragmatism, produced in part by excesses that backfired against the clerics and exhausted the population. Under Rafsanjani, arrogance gave way to a conservative realism. The government of God increasingly ceded to secular statecraft.

Phase three: The third phase between 1997 and 2005 coincided with the reformist era of President Mohammad Khatami, a dark horse former cabinet minister who tapped into the groundswell of interest in political openings. The government soon improved relations with its own people as well as the outside world. Iran had, temporarily, a freer press, freer speech, wider debate, relaxed social restrictions and a burgeoning civil society. But parliament failed to legislate reforms. And by the end of Khatami’s two terms, a political schism had developed between the regime headed by the supreme leader and the government headed by the president.

Phase four: The fourth phase began in 2005 with the upset election of the little-known mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over Rafsanjani. The emergence of hardliners reflected three broader shifts: Disillusionment with politics led many, especially young Iranians and women, to boycott the poll. Public anger swelled against the clergy, especially Rafsanjani, for corruption and failing to improve the average Iranian’s life in a quarter century. And a second generation of revolutionaries hardened by the Iran-Iraq War, largely laymen, began to challenge the clerics who ended the monarchy.

Domestic crisis
Through each phase, Iranian politics increasingly splintered. In the early 1980s, Iran was a virtual one-party state. The Islamic Republic Party dominated all branches of government. But the infighting quickly became so serious that Khomeini publicly rebuked its officials, “Stop biting one another like scorpions.” The divisions became a chasm; the party was dissolved in 1987.

Three decades later, Iran had more than 200 parties, factions and political groups—many of them still squabbling. A common political axiom in Tehran joked: “Where there are five Iranian Shiites, there are six political factions.”

The depth of the divide among the original revolutionaries was witnessed after the 2009 presidential election. Mir Hossein Mousavi, the prime minister who led Iran throughout the Iran-Iraq War, charged the regime with massive fraud in his loss to Ahmadinejad. He also warned that it was turning into a dictatorship—the dictator being Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who as president had been his colleague in running the government during the 1980s.

The post-election protests were the biggest threat to the regime since the revolution. Beyond the immediate election issue, they reflected the degree of public daring, the diversity of political thought, and the growing unease about the system, even among those inside it. And the internal turmoil did not end with the regime’s crackdown. The splintering continued, as conservatives began to turn on Ahmadinejad’s core of hardliners for abuse of power.

People power
The more dynamic part of the domestic crisis, however, was the spontaneous display of people power. Since the mid-1990s, the Iranian public—rather than any specific politician—had spurred the movement for political change. It was always an amorphous, leaderless body in search of a head that tapped into the limited number of candidate choices allowed to run after vetting by the Guardian Council. The embryonic reform movement first put Mohammad Khatami into the presidency in 1997 and then turned to Mousavi in 2009. Both men were adopted by the movement; neither was the original inspiration for reform.

The demonstrations were in some ways a logical next step in a longstanding debate over Iran’s political system. After the shah’s ouster, the revolutionaries were divided between ideologues and realists on the shape of a new government. Ideologues argued that the first modern theocracy should be a “redeemer state” championing the cause of the world’s oppressed; restoring Islamic purity and rule in the 57-nation Islamic world; and creating a new Islamic bloc to defy both East and West. Realists argued that Iran should seek legitimacy by creating a capable Islamic state and institutionalizing the revolution. They, too, wanted a new political and social order independent of the outside world, but they also wanted to be realistic about Iran’s need to interact economically and diplomatically with the world.

For 30 years, the bottom line issue had been variations on the same theme: whether to give priority to the revolution or to the state. Put another way: whether the Islamic Republic is first and foremost Islamic or a republic. The same theme had played out in the 2009 election. Ahmadinejad championed the revolutionary clerics’ original vision of helping the oppressed, while Mousavi campaigned on the need for a viable and practical state. The same issues were also central to the post-election turmoil. Mousavi warned that the alleged vote-rigging was killing the idea that Islam and republicanism were compatible.

In 2009, the public became immersed in the debate too—first by turning out to vote and then in protesting alleged fraud. The newly named Green Movement also launched the most imaginative civil disobedience campaign in the Islamic world. It included a commercial boycott of goods advertised on state-controlled television. It featured anti-regime slogans and caricatures printed on the national currency—from a green V to signify the Green Movement’s election victory to a stamped picture of Ahmadinejad with the caption “people’s enemy.”And it painted imaginative graffiti—usually in green—on public walls, the back of buses, bridge underpasses, university buildings and fences.

The public political energy was admired among reformers in other Muslim countries, including Sunni societies that had disdained the revolution or distanced themselves from Shiite Iran. Despite the government crackdown, the sheer magnitude of participation assured that the debate started shortly after the revolution was still far from over.

Fear of foreigners
Historically, many of Iran’s most tumultuous times have been caused by foreign invasions, meddling or influence. From the Persian prism, the showdown with the outside world in the 21st century is only the latest round. Long experience has bred deep suspicion and xenophobia.

Ancient Persia was pivotal to Alexander the Great’s drive into India in the 4th century B.C. Its conquest by Arab armies in the 7th century gave the then new Islamic Empire access to central and eastern Asia. Persia was invaded by Turks in the 11th, 16th and 18th centuries. It was conquered by Genghis Khan’s Mongol army in the 13th century and by Tamerlane in the 14th century. The Safavid dynasty actually converted to Shiism in the 16th century—some 900 years after Shiism’s birth in Islam’s great schism—to create a separate identity and prevent the encroachment of Sunnis in the neighboring Ottoman Empire. Persia was then challenged by the Afghans in the 18th century.

In the 20th century, Iran was occupied by Britain and the Soviet Union. The Persian Corridor was also the most viable supply route for U.S. Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union during World War II. Some 40,000 American soldiers were deployed in Iran to keep the train link open. After the war, Iran was the first crisis of the new United Nations when the Soviets refused to leave. In 1946, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution calling on Moscow to pull-out its forces from northern Iran. President Harry Truman’s ultimatum to Joseph Stalin on Iran spawned a new U.S.-Iran friendship that steadily deepened until the revolution. But the subsequent Cold War arguably also had its origins in this confrontation.

Rejecting encroachment
The fight against foreign influence has also been central to the Iranian campaign for empowerment over the past century. The 1905-1911 Constitutional Revolution erupted after the monarchy doled out political and economic concessions to Britain and Russia. The backlash sparked prolonged instability and forced the Qajar dynasty in 1906 to accept demands for a constitution and parliament, both of which limited the king’s powers. Iran had only the second constitution and parliament in Asia, after the Ottoman Empire. The first round of political reforms ended when an army colonel seized power in 1925, crowned himself Persia’s new king, took the name Pahlavi, changed the country’s name to Iran, and launched rapid modernization. He was forced to abdicate for pro-Nazi sentiments in 1941.

In 1953, Iran went through a second burst of democratic activism. An elected government led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh challenged the second and last Pahlavi shah, who was also heavily influenced by foreign powers. Mossadegh’s four-party coalition advocated constitutional democracy and limited powers for the monarchy. It also wanted to nationalize Iranian oil after the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company refused a 50-50 profit-sharing deal. The shah’s attempt to have Mossadegh dismissed backfired; the backlash forced the monarch to flee to Rome. Foreign powers restored the monarchy. The CIA and British intelligence orchestrated riots that forced Mossadegh from power and allowed the young king to return to the Peacock Throne for another quarter century.

In many ways, the 1979 revolution was an extension of the two earlier challenges. In the 21st century, the struggle against foreign influence still defines Iran’s current stand-off with the world. When the outside world today calls for cooperation, many Iranians see it as an attempt to co-opt or coerce them into conformity—to Western ways, morals and influence.

U.S. relations
Since the revolution, Iran’s showdown with the world has pivoted most of all on the United States. The shah’s ouster transformed a country that for three decades had been one of two pillars —along with Israel—of U.S. policy in the Middle East. After the United States took in the ailing shah, Tehran began to view Washington as the ultimate enemy. The revolutionaries suspected another CIA plot to put the monarch back on the throne.

Defying international law, Iranian students responded by seizing the U.S. Embassy in a drama that dragged out for 444 days. The ordeal of 52 American hostages was largely responsible for ending the presidency of Jimmy Carter after one term. In the mid-1980s, Iran’s double-dealing during the covert arms-for-hostage swap—in which Iran helped free three American hostages in Lebanon, only to have three more picked up—was the biggest scandal for the Reagan administration. Iran has been a consistent thorn for all six American presidents who tried to figure out how to deal with Tehran.

The two sides shouted at each other. In 1979, Iran dubbed the United States the “Great Satan.” In 2002, the Bush administration called Iran part of an “axis of evil.” Both countries occasionally tried outreach, although they were never on the same page at the same time. Their counterparts often suspected that the other would not or could not deliver; opportunities to at least explore rapprochement were missed. The most significant effort by Iran was President Khatami’s call to bring down “the wall of mistrust.” But it went largely unheeded in Washington until it was too late to salvage the effort.

American presidents also singled out Iran for mention in important speeches. In his 1989 inaugural address, President George H.W. Bush offered “new engagement” to the world, but made a special offer to Iran. “There are today Americans who are held against their will in foreign lands, and Americans who are unaccounted for. Assistance can be shown here, and will be long remembered. Good will begets good will. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly moves on.”

After the announcement of his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said it had to be “shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity — for the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard even in the face of beatings and bullets.” He did not name her, but Iranians knew he was referring to Neda Agha Soltan, the aspiring 26-year-old musician who was shot on a Tehran street during the 2009 election protests. The cell phone video capturing her bloodied death was transmitted around the world.

By the end of 2010, tensions between Washington and Tehran had reached new heights because of suspicions about Iran’s long-term nuclear intentions, support for Iraqi and Afghan militias targeting U.S. troops, Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust and Israel’s right to exist, and human rights abuses.

Nationalism
Tehran’s policies and world perspective today are also rooted in a past rich with accomplishments. Iranians are notoriously proud, as is their right. Persia produced some of history’s greatest scientists, physicians, astronomers, mathematicians, philosophers, architects, artists and poets. Iranians believe their contributions are not over—if only the outside world will give them a chance.

Zoroaster founded the first monotheistic religion, which introduced the ideas of good and evil and a day of judgment even before Judaism. Avicenna, or Ibn Sina, was an 11th century philosopher and physician whose medical texts were taught in Europe until the 17th century. A crater on the moon is named after him. In the 11th century, Omar Khayyam was one of the world’s leading mathematicians and astronomers as well as a poet famed for more than 1,000 quatrain verses. Rumi, a 13th century philosopher, is the world’s most popular poet in the 21st century. Hafez, Saadi, and Ferdowsi were other great medieval poets whose works are still admired today. The list goes on and on.

Iran’s intellectual culture has been evident even in the current political infighting. Some of the most modern and democratic ideas in the Islamic world today have emerged among Iranian philosophers, reformers and dissidents. Iranian philosopher Abdulkarim Soroush was the intellectual father of the reform movement. A former revolutionary, he turned on the regime. In the mid-1990s, he began to challenge the theological justification for a supreme leader and called for separation of mosque and state. He also declared that freedom always had precedence over religion, because Muslims could only be true believers if they embraced the faith with their own free will.

Given their past, Iranians see only greatness in their future; they view their current status as only a blip on the screen of history. The quest for nuclear energy, which dates back to the shah, is viewed as a key to modern development. For many ordinary Iranians, the right to enrich uranium to fuel nuclear reactors is first and foremost an issue of sovereignty. As they modernize, they want to avoid any further dependence on the outside world. To understand Iranian nationalism, think of a proud, chauvinistic Texan—then add 5,000 years.

Strategic value
The outside world has always valued Iran because of its location. Today, no nation can afford to ignore Iran, regardless of who is in power, for several reasons:
*It holds some 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Iran is OPEC’s second largest oil producer. It also has the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas.
Iran’s vast resources provide enormous leverage in an oil-hungry world. Since World War II, petroleum has been essential to the movement of modern armies and for development of modern industry. Free access to oil has also been essential to both political and economic power.

*Iran’s geo-strategic location bridges the world’s most volatile blocs of countries—the Middle East to the west, the Asian subcontinent to the east, and the Caucuses and Central Asia to the north. Peaceful relations with Iran are pivotal to the stability of more than one dozen countries.

*Iran’s position and the traditions of its Aryan people, the Indo-European race whence Iran gets its name, have long made Iran the crossroads of culture and geography.

*Iran’s population is now among the world’s top twenty. In the first decade after the revolution, it almost doubled from 34 to 62 million when the clerics called on Iranian women to breed an Islamic generation.

Neighborhood geography
Iran stands apart geographically because of two great mountain ranges, the Alborz and the Zagros, and three great bodies of water, the Capsian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. In terms of territory,
Iran is roughly one-fifth the size of the United States.
It ranks 18th among the world’s nations in geographic mass. Neighboring Afghanistan, by comparison, is 41st. Neighboring Iraq is 58th.
Iran is more than twice as large and twice as populated as both countries.
Iran’s nine other frontiers are important for more than trade and transit.
Iraq: To the West, Iran’s 910-mile border with Iraq is an entry point into the Arab world’s Fertile Crescent.
Turkey: To the northwest, Iran shares a 312-mile border with Turkey, a vital member of NATO.
Afghanistan: To the east, Iran shares a 585-mile border with Afghanistan; the two countries share one of the world’s most active routes for trafficking narcotics.
Pakistan: To the southeast is the 570-mile border with Pakistan. The father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb provided pivotal equipment to Tehran.
Gulf states: Iran’s frontier along the Persian Gulf, through which more than 40 percent of the West’s oil passes daily, is the longest of the six countries that rim the strategic waterway. Iran effectively controls the Strait of Hormuz, the so-called chokepoint for Gulf oil exports.
Turkmenistan: To the north, Iran has a 620-mile border with the former Soviet republic, the most autocratic of the Central Asian nations.
Azerbaijan: To the north, Iran shares a 270-mile border with Azerbaijan. About one quarter of Iran’s population is ethnic Azeri.
Armenia: To the north, Iran’s smallest frontier is the 22-mile border with Armenia. Armenians are among the Christian minorities represented by specially allocated seats for Christians in Iran’s parliament.
Azerbaijan-Nakhchivan exclave: To the north, Iran shares a 112-mile border.

Ethnically, Iran is also a geographic crossroad mirroring most of its neighbors. Only 51 percent of Iranians are pure Persians. The rest are Azeris in the northwest and Turkoman in the northeast. Kurds live along the western border with Iraq. Baluchis (or “wanderers”) straddle the arid and unruly southeast border with Pakistan. Arabs live on the southern coast. The Lors, an Arab-Persian mix, live mainly in the mountains, while nomadic herding tribes live in the south.

The future
In the 21st century, Iran’s unique version of God’s government must prove its viability on earth —and that it can deliver what its people want—or risk the same fate as other utopian ideologies.

No Islamic country is likely to replicate the Iranian experience. The costs are too high, the results too controversial. The Shiite character of the revolution also makes it unlikely to be repeated among Sunni-dominated societies.

Yet Iran’s Shiite alliance remains a major power bloc capable of heavily influencing the outcome of elections and conflicts—and sparking tensions with Sunni communities.
Iran’s resources create a huge cushion against punitive actions such as economic sanctions. In an oil-hungry world, they also undermine international cooperation.
Iran’s labyrinthine political system—and competing sources of power—complicate all forms of diplomacy. Engagement, especially with the United States, has become a domestic political issue—unrelated to the merits of rapprochement.

Interview with Abdolkarim Soroush: The Goals of Iran's Green Movement

2010-01-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

Global Viewpoint Media

By Robin Wright

Five major figures in Iran's reform movement issued a manifesto Sunday, Jan. 3, calling for the resignation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the abolition of clerical control of the voting system and candidate selection. Journalist Robin Wright interviewed one of the signatories, reform-movement founder and scholar Abdolkarim Soroush, about the manifesto, which calls for the recognition of law-abiding political, student, non-governmental and women’s groups; labor unions; freedom for all means of mass communication; and an independent judiciary, including popular election of the judicial chief.

The signatories, all Iranians living outside the country, also include dissident cleric Mohsen Kadivar; former parliamentarian and Islamic Guidance Minister Ataollah Mohajerani; investigative journalist Akbar Ganji; and Abdolali Bazargan, an Islamic thinker and son of a former prime minister.

Q: Why did you decide to issue a manifesto now?

A: The Green Movement is into its seventh month now, and I and my friends have been following events very closely and have been in touch with some of our friends in Iran. After [the protests on] Ashura on Dec 27, we came to realize that it was a real turning point. It was at that time that the regime decided to crack down on the Green Movement. In one instance, the regime rolled over a protester and killed him. It was a very severe message to all the protesters and defenders and supporters of the Green Movement that it intends to crush the movement harshly.

On the other hand, we have also individually been frequently asked by our friends: What are the real demands of the Green Movement, because the Green Movement was something that jumped on the scene? There was no planning for it. The election was the beginning, and it just evolved and evolved. As it evolved, some demands had emerged, but there was nothing that showed what was in the minds of the leaders of the movement.

The five of us thought that because we are close enough to the leaders of the movement -- Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohammad Khatami -- and know their demands, we should start drafting a manifesto or statement about the Green Movement. So we started drafting, and then Mousavi’s statement [that he would die for the movement if necessary] was issued [on Jan 1]. Since we are living outside the country, don’t have to fear [the government] and know what is in the mind of the people, we decided to publish our own statement to make clear what Mousavi’s intentions and goals of the Green Movement are.

Q: Whose views does this manifesto reflect -- just the leadership or the wider range of followers?

A: This is a pluralistic movement, including believers and non-believers, socialists and liberals. There are all walks of life in the Green Movement. We tried to come up with the common points for all.

We know there are many more demands, many more than these. Maybe in the next stage, they may demand redrafting the constitution. But for now, they would like to work within the framework of the constitution, and we were careful not to trespass those limits.

One of the suggestions we made was on the border [of going beyond the basic demands], which was the suggestion that the head of the judiciary should be elected rather than appointed by the supreme leader. I suggested that point -- if we have changes in the constitution, we have to make the head of the judiciary elected. But the majority of the points reflect the mind of the leadership.

Q: What difference will this manifesto make?

A: It will make the goals and objectives clearer and better defined and articulated. At this stage, we need it. I’ve said for years that the revolution was theory-less. It was a revolt against the shah -- a negative rather than a positive theory. I insisted that if there is going to be another movement, it has to have a theory. People should know what they want, not just what they don’t want. So we are trying -- in a modest way -- to put forward a theory for this movement.

Goals and objectives are based on theories and foundations. And we do have theories about liberty. We have not brought those theories into these points, but they underlie the points. They are invisible to the armed eyes, meaning the regime.

Q: What’s next for the Green Movement?

A: Nobody knows. There are all sorts of cries that the leaders of the Green Movement should submit themselves to the supreme leader, but that won’t take place. Both sides have to be prepared for a serious negotiation. That could be the next stage. [Former President] Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani might step in to start a negotiation for national reconciliation.

Q: Can the regime crack down to the point of eliminating the Green Movement?

A: I don’t think so. It is a product of the reform movement, which was suppressed. Ahmadinejad did his best to remove all sort of reform movements and to start a new era. But the regime could not put out the fire. And now we have the Green Movement, which is a culmination of the reform movement, a new stage.

I hope the government recognizes it has to have negotiations with the Green Movement and will have to sacrifice something for them to be productive. Heaven forbid that it turns into violence, which would be bad for the Green Movement and the country.

Q: Will compromise satisfy the new generation of reformers?

A: Compromise has a negative connotation. But if even one of these demands is fulfilled -- such as freedom of press -- that will be enough to change drastically the political scene and atmosphere of the country.

If they accept one of these 10 demands -- and not the rest -- it will revolutionize the whole country. Maybe release the prisoners; so many competent people are in prison. Any one of these would revolutionize the atmosphere.

An opposition manifesto in Iran

2010-01-06T05:54:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles Times

Groups protesting against the current regime reveal what they want a new Iranian government to look like.

By Robin Wright

January 6, 2010

Iran's so-called green movement is not yet a counterrevolution, but recent developments make clear it is heading in that direction. Seven months after the uprising began, an opposition manifesto is finally taking shape, and its sweeping demands would change the face of Iran.

Three bold statements calling for reform have been issued since Friday, one by opposition presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, one by a group of exiled religious intellectuals and the third by university professors. Taken together, they suggest that the movement will not settle for anything short of radical change.

The statements set tough preconditions for a political truce: resignation of the current leadership, introduction of broad democratic freedoms, prosecution of security forces engaged in violence against the opposition and an end to politics in the military, universities and the clergy.

The proposed reforms would amount to a total overhaul of the system. But they also reflect a common desire to prevent an all-out confrontation by engaging the regime in compromise and ending the escalating violence. The three sets of demands all accept that Iran will remain an Islamic republic, if largely in name only.

The three statements offer the outside world the first concrete indication of what the opposition wants and what Iran might look like if the opposition prevails. Just as striking is the fact that several branches of the opposition are developing a voice despite the increasingly brutal crackdown by an increasingly militarized regime.

The boldest statement was issued Sunday by five exiled religious intellectuals who founded diverse parts of the reform movement in the 1990s. Many of today's opposition activists are their progeny as students, colleagues, political allies and friends.

Their 10-point manifesto begins by calling for the resignation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose reelection in June sparked an outpouring of public rage over alleged fraud. It calls for the abolishment of clerical control of the voting system and candidate selection, replacing it with an independent voting commission that includes the opposition and protesters. The authors also demand the release of all political prisoners and recognition of law-abiding political, student, nongovernmental and women's groups as well as labor unions. They call for an independent judiciary, including popular election of the judicial chief, and freedom for all means of mass communication. They even demand term limits for elected officials.

The five authors include philosopher Abdulkarim Soroush, the father of the reform movement; dissident cleric Mohsen Kadivar; former parliamentarian and Islamic Guidance Minister Ataollah Mohajerani; investigative journalist Akbar Ganji, who was imprisoned for six years for reporting on regime corruption; and Abdolali Bazargan, an Islamic thinker and son of a former prime minister.

They issued the manifesto on a website run by Kadivar and Mohajerani to mark the green movement's growing maturity, Soroush explained in an interview Monday. "The green movement is known only for its demonstrations and protests, not its ideas, so it was time to explain its political demands," he said.

The manifesto also carries a message to the green movement's widely diverse followers. "Some people expected the green movement to do miracles, to do the impossible. We wanted to make it clear that it's a democratic movement, and if it has a godfather, it is Gandhi," Soroush said. "We are insisting adamantly that democratic, nonviolent change is at the heart of this movement. That will minimize the violence from the other side, which is ready to engage in any kind of violence."

All five of the manifesto's exiled authors, most of them titans of Iran's 1979 revolution and major figures in earlier governments, remain connected to the opposition at home.

In a separate statement, opposition leader Mousavi, whose defeat by Ahmadinejad in the June 12 presidential election sparked the current uprising, made some of the same demands in more general terms. "What we want is a government and system that is honest and supportive, and is based on votes of people, one that looks at variety in the votes and ideas of people as an opportunity instead of a threat," he wrote Friday in a long statement on his website.

In Iran, Mousavi called for the government both to be held accountable "for the troubles it has caused" and to establish wide freedoms of press, speech, assembly, protest and independent political activity. Acknowledging new calls for his arrest and execution, he added that he was willing to die for the cause.

In another statement Monday, 88 professors at Tehran University -- the country's largest and most prestigious education center -- called on Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to end violence against the opposition, which they described as a sign of the regime's weakness. They also daringly demanded that the supreme leader order the release of detained students and called for the prosecution of those who harassed, beat, detained or tortured in prison the protesters.

All three statements reflected an increase in defiance on the part of the opposition. "The hatred and resentment that has built up against the regime in the past three decades has deep roots," warned the manifesto from the five exiled leaders, who claim to speak for the opposition and have written the most extensive and combative of the statements. "The discontent has a great destructive power and can unleash a vast wave of violence throughout society."

In blunt terms, they also warned Iran's supreme leader -- who has the powers of an infallible political pope -- that ignoring the escalating demands of the opposition will only "deepen the crisis with painful consequences" for which he would ultimately be accountable.

Robin Wright, the author of four books on Iran, is a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington. A former Times diplomatic correspondent, she has been covering Iran since 1973.

Iran's Regime and Opposition Brace for the Next Round

2010-01-04T05:53:00.001-08:00

Monday, Jan. 04, 2010

By Robin Wright

Faced with escalating turmoil, Iran's newly militarized regime now appears to be turning to the Tiananmen model to ensure its survival. The theocracy has signaled over the past week that it will exercise extraordinary military and judicial powers against opposition leaders, dissidents, street protesters and even sympathizers to end the growing turmoil. The regime's most urgent goal is to prevent opposition activists from turning next month's 11-day celebration marking the Shah's ouster in 1979 into a counterrevolution against his successors.

But the Chinese model of using all-out force against a budding opposition movement, as used in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, may not be as effective in the Islamic Republic of 2010. The two country's systems and societies have more differences than similarities. Yet the regime nonetheless appears intent on employing tactics normally reserved for foreign threats. On Dec. 28, the security forces for the first time fired directly into crowds of protesters as the Shi'ite Ashura religious commemoration turned into the biggest nationwide demonstration since unrest erupted after the disputed June 12 election. Hundreds of activists, students, intellectuals and relatives of top opposition officials have since been detained. Judicial officials and members of parliament are now calling for opposition leaders to be prosecuted for crimes against the state including treason. (See the long shadow of Ayatullah Khomeini in Iran.)

On Dec. 30, participants at a government-orchestrated rally chanted slogans calling for the death of former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi and former parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karroubi. Both ran against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and charged that his re-election was fraudulent. The government gave civil servants the day off to attend the rally, and thousands were bused to Tehran for the event.

The regime also recently took delivery of new Chinese armored antiriot vehicles equipped with cannons that can spray water, tear gas and chemical irritants against crowds, according to pictures on opposition websites.

China's 1989 democracy movement and the current Iranian uprising share some common threads. Both were youth-driven popular movements demanding change, led by loose coalitions of disparate factions that lacked strong leadership. And in both cases, the protesters' demands grew as the regimes clamped down. (See pictures of the Tiananmen Square protests.)

But there are important differences between the two that may result in different outcomes. In Iran, the catalyst was the charge that the authorities had stolen an election that the opposition believes Mousavi won; the Chinese protestors had no history of voting in competitive elections and were mobilized by the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist member of the communist leadership. China used maximum force relatively early; it contained the challenge within seven weeks. Iran's regime is losing momentum after seven months; demonstrations late last month spread to at least 10 major cities. China banned the foreign press and tightly controlled state media; Iran has been unable to prevent eyewitness accounts of citizen journalists from reaching the Internet, Facebook and Twitter.

The biggest difference may be that Iran is historically more democratic than China, where public participation in politics has been restricted for centuries. Iranians have had a growing role in politics since the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution produced Asia's first parliament; they've voted for decades under both a monarchy and a theocracy. Also, China has long been a closed society; Iran's Indo-European population has long had exposure to Western ideas and education.

Rather than Tiananmen, Iran's opposition is hoping to repeat a different event from 1989 — the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Eastern Europe's communist regimes. Despite the regime's growing threats, opposition leaders remain defiant. Mousavi warned over the weekend that the crackdown will not succeed. "I say openly that orders to execute, kill or imprison Karroubi and Mousavi will not solve the problem," said a statement on his website. Mousavi's nephew was among those killed during the Ashura protests; opposition accounts claim he was assassinated.

Iran's uprising appears to have entered a new phase after the Dec. 19 death of dissident cleric Grand Ayatullah Hossein Ali Montazeri, and the Ashura protests a week later. The so-called Green Movement has proven both resolute and resilient, and appears to be gaining wider support from traditional and religious sectors of society once loyal to the regime.

The next key test for both sides will be the so-called 11 Days of Dawn commemoration of the 1979 revolution that begins on Feb. 1, marking the day revolutionary leader Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran from 14 years in exile. The public celebrations, the most important political holiday of the year, end on the anniversary of the fall of the government installed by the monarchy, which paved the way for creation of the world's only modern theocracy.

Understanding Iran's Protest Movement

2010-01-04T05:48:00.000-08:00

Interview with Council on Foreign Relations

December 28, 2009

A longtime correspondent on Iran, Robin Wright, who covered the 1979 Iranian Revolution, says the resiliency of Iran's opposition movement, despite a harsh crackdown, is motivated by broad-based desire for change in leadership and governance. Although the origin of the movement last June was to protest the results of the elections, Wright says the goals of the movement have since broadened. Now, she says, there is discussion about whether the Islamic Republic should be changed to the "Iranian" Republic. At the same time, the opposition coalition remains a disparate collection of forces that lacks a unifying concept for regime change and could fall apart if it succeeds in bringing about change, she says.

Given the outpouring of fresh anti-regime demonstrations in Iranian cities on Sunday and the efforts by the regime to crack down, what do you make of the situation in Iran? Can the opposition succeed?

The opposition has now proven it has the resolve and resilience to continue its rather daring challenge of the regime despite the repression, the arrests, the reports of torture and rape in prisons, the show trials, and the militarization of the regime. Nothing has so far been able to stop the movement.

This is a movement that doesn't have any single figure behind it, does it?

The Green Movement is a coalition of disparate forces who reflect many sectors of society and many different visions of the future. It includes former presidents [Rafsanjani, Khatami] as well as people who've never voted at all. We should have no illusion that they speak with one voice or they want one thing beyond the ouster of this particular president who commands a dictatorial rule. If they succeed in bringing about change, this coalition is almost certain to fall apart as traumatically as the revolutionary coalition did in 1979.

In other words, you're saying the only thing the opposition really agrees on is to overthrow Ahmadinejad, who they believe was wrongfully reelected, right?

We have not yet seen a unified call that would amount to a counterrevolution. That's not what this is about so far.

The original goal was to protest the June 12 election because of a widespread belief of fraud and a rigged election. Since then, the demands have grown, and the focus is now increasingly on the supreme leader, [Ayatollah] Ali Khamenei, as well as the type of rule, if not the system itself. But what happened really since December 7, National Student Day, is a growing call for something bigger that hasn't taken formal shape. It includes the idea of an Iranian Republic rather than an Islamic Republic. The greatest difference among the many factions that have coalesced around the Green Movement is over what they want to see in terms of government. Is it just changes in individuals or changes in the system? We have not yet seen a unified call that would amount to a counterrevolution. That's not what this is about so far. It may become that, but it isn't there yet. The issue is more along the lines of, "Should the current system be more of a republic than an Islamic state? Should the people have primary power and the clerics, particularly the supreme leader, have more of an advisory role rather than absolute power?" The current setup allows the supreme leader to be effectively an infallible political pope who has total control over legislation, judicial decisions, and presidential decisions.

So the goals of the protesters differ. Women's groups, particularly, want greater women's rights and gender equality. Some young people are concerned about the economy and the prospect of jobs and the future. Intellectuals are challenging the idea of, "What is an Islamic republic in the twenty-first century?" So a lot of these issues have yet to be sorted out. At the moment, the movement is opposition against this particular president, this particular supreme leader, and a demand for greater freedom.

So you think the opposition groups really want Khamenei to step down as well?

Over the past six months, we've increasingly heard chants from the protesters, which have to serve as our guide: "Death to the dictator" or "Down with the dictator." And the issue is not only the fraudulent June elections or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's power, it's the very powers of the supreme leader.

What about the role of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij? Clearly there's become a much more militaristic rule here.

The regime has been effectively militarized. The supreme leader's role as commander-in-chief is today as important as his political title. He needs to have the Revolutionary Guards and the paramilitary Basij force behind him. At the same time, in the last few days, we've seen many stories of police, and of some Basij, in encounters with protesters backing away, apologizing, saying they didn't want this confrontation. That's an important turning point. Those are isolated cases, but the mere fact it started is important. One important thing to remember about the Revolutionary Guards is that the regime relies on the officer corps, but all young men have to do military service. Many young men opt to go to the Revolutionary Guards because it may be better for their resume if they want to go to university, or it has better training in some fields and better equipment. But also they get off early in the afternoon, which allows young men to then get a second job, and in this economy that's important. In 1997, in the election of President Mohammed Khatami, the government did a survey and found that 84% of the Revolutionary Guards voted for the first reform president. We have to understand that not all bodies are monolithic in terms of their own views.

[T]he issue is not only the fraudulent June elections or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's power, it's the very powers of the supreme leader.

You wrote an article in the Times of London in which you talked about this being a moment as dramatic as the opening up of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Could you expound on that?

I wrote that it's now time to begin wondering out loud whether this is one of those Berlin Wall "moments." I mean that in two ways. First, does it signal the beginning of some kind of broader change inside Iran because the opposition movement has increased its activities for six months and has grown in terms of the cross section of population that stands behind it, willing to take to the streets or engage in civil disobedience. But it also plays out throughout the region in the way the Berlin Wall symbolized change in a greater region. Thirty years ago, Iran's revolution redefined politics throughout the Middle East, introducing Iran as an idiom of modern political expression and opposition. Today, the emergence of "people power" again is redefining the kind of activity. We haven't seen people power in play very often throughout the region, with the exception of Lebanon after the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. The idea of people power--the demanding of respect for the individual vote, freedom of press, freedom of speech--is a very important development in a bloc of countries that has totalitarian leadership.

You don't think there's a chance that if the regime brings enough repression the whole movement might peter out?

The Green Movement has ups and downs. What many people aren't as familiar with is the civil disobedience that plays out on a daily basis. There are sporadic outpourings on the street, but there is a much broader movement inside the country on a daily basis. People are boycotting goods advertised on state-controlled television. They see the government media as the propagator of the regime's hardline stance. There's a currency campaign, where people are writing anti-regime slogans on bank notes, sending pictures or caricatures of President Ahmadinejad with "people's enemy" written underneath it. Others reprint pictures of Neda Agha Sultan, the young women who was killed by a sniper's bullet in the June protests.

There are all kinds of slogans against the regime and against individuals through resistance on foreign policy. In one case, people are charging that the regime is taking Iran's oil money and giving it to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, or that Khamenei, the supreme leader, is a puppet of the Russians. [There's] the graffiti that is showing up on walls and fences and buildings that berates the regime or calls for a new public demonstration; posters that go up in the dead of night with pictures of political detainees demanding their freedom; and shouts at the subway stations [and] in soccer matches that erupt spontaneously, shouting, "Death to the dictator," or "Down with Khamenei." These things are playing out on a daily basis. There is a lot of energy behind this movement, not just on the days that people turn out on the street. It is arguably the most vibrant and imaginative civil disobedience campaign anywhere in the world today.

Is this Iran's Berlin Wall moment?

2009-12-27T16:21:00.000-08:00

The Times (of London)

Dec. 28, 2009

By Robin Wright

It is time to start wondering out loud whether Iran’s uprising could become one of those Berlin Wall moments.

This is not yet a counter-revolution. And the new “green movement” is a coalition of disparate factions — from former presidents to people who have never voted at all — who view the issues through vastly different prisms. Yet the pattern of public outpourings since the disputed election six months ago is setting historic precedents.

The opposition has proven it has the resolve and resilience to sustain its risky challenge, despite the regime’s ruthless use of force, mass arrests, show trials and reports of torture and rape in prison. In the escalating political showdown the opposition has the momentum.

Just as important, the emergence of people power is also setting a new precedent in the last bloc of countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. Thirty years ago, Iran’s revolution redefined politics throughout the Middle East by ending dynastic rule and introducing Islam as a modern political idiom. Iran’s uprising is doing it again — this time by taking to the streets to demand an end to dictatorship as well as calling for fundamental rights such as free speech, a free press and respect for the individual vote.

But the green movement is far more than simply sporadic eruptions. This is the most vibrant and imaginative civil disobedience campaign in the world.

There’s the currency campaign, for starters. Thousands of rial notes have been stamped with a simple green “V” for victory. Others bear handwritten slogans that echo the public chants denouncing the regime. Some have even been reprinted with pictures: one is a cartoon of President Ahmadinejad with “people’s enemy” written underneath. Another carries a picture from the mobile phone images of Neda Agha Soltan as she lay dying on the street from a sniper’s bullet. Underneath is written “death to the dictator” — a common public chant against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The currency campaign even denounces the regime’s foreign policy. “Khamenei the non-believer is the servant of [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin,” declares one slogan, written in green, on a 20,000-rial note. Another chastises: “They stole money and give it to [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez.” Some messages simply appeal for others to join the campaign to write anti-regime messages on one billion banknotes. The Government reportedly tried to take the marked notes out of circulation, but found there were too many to replace.

Then there is the boycott of goods advertised on state-controlled television. People in line at markets whisper to other shoppers not to buy certain products that help to subsidise the Government’s broadcasting monopoly — and its version of events. The opposition has also called for boycotts on mobile phone companies that provide technology to the Government. It is impossible to assess the impact but it adds a critical economic component to the political confrontation.

Civil disobedience is often brazen. Graffiti is increasingly showing up on public walls — in green spray paint — to berate the authorities or to announce a new demonstration. Large posters of arrested protesters and dissidents demanding their freedom have appeared on campuses, often timed for the appearance of a pro-regime event or speech.

At football matches and in subway tunnels, mobile phone videos record spontaneous outbursts of the two key opposition chants: “death to the dictator” and “God is great”. The latter was the pivotal revolutionary chant against the monarchy that has been usurped to denounce the revolution’s hardliners. The implication is that God has abandoned the revolution to side with and protect the green movement.

Participation in civil disobedience is far more widespread than the protests. It includes individual, uncoordinated acts, such as a challenge to the Supreme Leader by Mahmoud Vahidnia, an unassuming maths student with no record of dissent. At a meeting with Iran’s academic elite Ayatollah Khamenei warned that the “biggest crime” was questioning the June 12 election. Mr Vahidnia then went to the microphone and criticised the government crackdown, asking about alleged prison abuses and why no one was allowed to criticise the leader. He also told him that he lived in a bubble.

So far the green movement has insisted on non-violence. Perhaps the ultimate irony in the Islamic Republic today is that a brutal revolutionary regime suspected of secretly working on a nuclear weapon faces its biggest challenge from peaceful civil disobedience. And even such a militarised regime has been unable to put it down.

Robin Wright is a senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace in Washington. The author of five books on the Middle East, she has visited Iran regularly since 1973

The real stakes in Afghanistan

2009-12-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

By Robin Wright
Thursday, December 10, 2009

Oddly, President Obama's West Point speech never probed the critical long-term stakes for the United States in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Three issues central to the outcome should enter the public debate as his strategy is launched.

The first is America's place in the world in the 21st century. Officials from Moscow to Beijing, from Iran's revolutionaries to Somalia's pirates, will scrutinize this last-ditch U.S. effort -- and weigh their actions, reactions and interactions with the United States on how Obama's effort fares.

Failure by the world's mightiest military power, backed by the largest military alliance, to uproot the Taliban -- a force without an air force, armored corps, long-range artillery, satellite intelligence or powerful foreign backer -- would vividly illustrate the limits of U.S. power. The consequences could dwarf those of the defeat in Vietnam, even if the loss of life was smaller.

The era of a unipolar or uni-power world is effectively over, but a U.S. failure in Afghanistan and Pakistan could mark its formal end, just as it did for the bipolar world when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. Indeed, the period from Vietnam to Afghanistan -- with withdrawals under pressure from Hezbollah extremists in Lebanon and warlords in Somalia along the way -- could come to be seen as the period marking the demise of American power.

And not just "gun" power. At its core, American power is also supposed to be about moral power -- using might to confront, contain or prevent fascist, totalitarian or unjust regimes from unacceptable aggression, repression or injustice. American power has been abused. Neither party has clean hands. But few other nations have been willing or able to assume that role.

U.S. standing in the Islamic world is also at stake. The historic rule of thumb is that winners have influence; losers don't. Winners get to set standards. Their ideas get more attention. Their leaders gain greater authority.

And the outcome of the U.S. confrontation with various branches of al-Qaeda and the Taliban is pivotal to the future of the Islamic world. Almost a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Muslim world is at a crossroads. Polls show key Muslim societies are increasingly rejecting extremism -- even if respondents are still not enamored of the United States. Vast numbers of Muslims now recognize that Bin Ladenism can't provide answers to everyday challenges such as education, housing, jobs and health care. There's an air of fatigue about al-Qaeda; it's becoming somewhat passé. The search is on for something better.

U.S. strategy in South Asia is now based not only on defeat of the forces behind the Sept. 11 attacks; it's also designed to help build credible alternatives to extremist ideologies and governance. Winning on this front in Pakistan and Afghanistan is as important -- and potentially harder -- than the military campaign. The winner is likely to have greater sway among the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. And "winner" means not so much the United States as the principles, such as more accountable government, modern education and economic opportunity from legitimate trades.

Finally, U.S. interests in the wider region are also at stake, notably on two fronts.

Obama's strategy will deeply affect India, the world's largest democracy. Long-standing tensions between Pakistan and India have taken the world closer to the brink of nuclear war than any conflict has since World War II -- and still could, since Pakistan has failed to contain extremists responsible for terrorist atrocities in India, including the Mumbai attacks last year. U.S. failure to help nuclear Pakistan expand or shift its military focus from India to the more immediate threat from its internal extremists risks allowing those tensions to deepen.

Just as worrisome are the stakes with Iran, which borders both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Afghanistan has become for Iran what Iraq once was: a surrogate battlefield with the United States. Once Afghanistan's rival, Shiite-dominated Iran has reportedly supplied the same weapons and explosives to Sunni Taliban fighters that it provided Shiite militias in Iraq, on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend -- at least for now.

Iran manipulated (and often fueled) the problems that ensued after the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In the process, it has become a regional superpower rivaled only by Israel. U.S. failures in Afghanistan and Pakistan would further strengthen Iran's position as its increasingly authoritarian government cracks down on a legitimate opposition movement and threatens to expand its nuclear program.

Many Americans are tired of the war in Afghanistan. We're alarmed at the cost in human life to all sides, the drain on our national treasury and armed forces -- not to mention on the Afghan people -- and the length of this conflict. We have doubts that the fast-paced initiative Obama has proposed will work. But as U.S. actions are evaluated over the next 18 months, we should remember that the outcome will determine America's goals and standing far beyond the South Asian theater for years to come.

Robin Wright is a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the author of "Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East." A former diplomatic correspondent for The Post, she has reported on Afghanistan since the 1980s.

Latest Iran Protests Show a Resilient Opposition

2009-12-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

Dec. 07, 2009

By Robin Wright

A new round of campus protests in Iran on Monday served up a sharp reminder that there's plenty of life left in the opposition Green Movement. Six months after the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad set off an unprecedented wave of political turmoil in the Islamic Republic, the regime was clearly taking no chances: Thousands of police, Revolutionary Guards troops and religious vigilantes closed off universities and fired tear gas at student marchers in Tehran, as the government cut off cell phone and internet access and forbade reporters from covering opposition demonstrations timed to coincide with the official observance of National Students Day.

Students Day commemorates the death of three students in protests against the Tehran visit of Vice President Richard Nixon in 1953, following the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew a democratically elected government and restored the monarchy. And the protests reflect the now-familiar Green Movement tactic of using the Islamic Republic's established calendar of official protest days as opportunities to mobilize displays of opposition to the regime. On Monday, that included once-taboo slogans demanding the ouster of Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei and challenging the very principle of an Islamic state. (See pictures of the latest Iran student protests.)

The latest street demonstrations are a reminder that the Green Movement is a diverse, even unlikely coalition that operates in three different layers. Its leading figures include pillars of the Revolution such as two former presidents and a prime minister, as well as longtime dissidents and opponents of the very idea of an Islamic republic.

The protest face of the movement is dominated by younger activists who are waging a wider civil disobedience campaign that includes dozens of less visible tactics, from commercial boycotts to wearing green en masse at televised sports events and graffitiing slogans on surfaces ranging from buses to banknotes.

On the eve of Monday's demonstrations, security forces arrested more than 20 members of the so-called Mourning Mothers, an informal group of women whose children were killed in the post-election turmoil. The Mothers had launched weekly demonstrations in Tehran's Laleh Park, according to human rights groups.

"The Green Movement belongs to the youth," says Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an exiled filmmaker who claims to speak for the opposition. "When the revolution took place, Iran's population was 30 million; now it's 70 million and most are young. They want freedom. They want to fall in love. They want the opposition. They want a normal life. " Anti-regime activities are often not coordinated; many initiatives emerge from small groups or individuals — "ordinary people who invite others to go to the streets, little people with charisma, like artists or writers who invite people to go to the streets," Makhmalbaf says.

The second layer of opposition comprises traditional politicians who've fallen out with the present leadership, among them three of the movement's key leaders: Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the former prime minister whose defeat in the presidential election by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June prompted cries of electoral fraud and widespread unrest; former parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karroubi, who also ran in the June 12 election; and reformist former President Mohammad Khatami.

Of the three, Karroubi has proven the most daring in his willingness to challenge those in power, especially when he went public with accusations that political prisoners were being raped and torture. Mousavi also remains defiant, vowing over the weekend that Iranians would continue to challenge those who "confiscate" their vote. Yet none of these three luminaries has provided a plan of action for the opposition. "The reformist leaders have not yet measured up," says Shaul Bakhash, George Mason University Iran expert and author ofThe Reign of the Ayatollahs. "They haven't shown adequate dynamism, courage or the ability to think strategically."

The third layer of opposition consists of feisty clerics who challenge the actions of the current regime. An increasingly hostile public debate among mullahs who support and oppose the regime reflects deep divisions in the world's only modern theocracy. The debate includes questions about the role of a Supreme Leader granted the absolute powers (and implied infallibility) of a political pope, and even the very principle of theocratic rule. The fact that the clergy, deemed guardians of the Islamic Revolution, are engaging in this debate also provides cover and legitimacy for the wider public to challenge the regime.

Iran's Green Movement Reaches Out to U.S.

2009-11-23T12:57:00.000-08:00

Nov. 23, 2009

By Robin Wright

After more than five months of going it alone, Iran's opposition Green Movement is reaching out to the United States for help. Via public and private channels, the Obama Administration has received several appeals in recent weeks to take a stronger stand against human-rights abuses in Iran, avoid military action and impose more aggressive and rapid-fire sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards and its vast business interests.

The opposition's outreach comes as the Administration weighs the next move in its diplomatic effort to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran. Tehran has effectively rebuffed a confidence-building deal that would ship out the bulk of Iran's enriched-uranium stockpile to be converted into fuel rods for a medical-research reactor — which would also have added about a year to the time frame within which Iran could weaponize nuclear material. The deal would have offered more time for longer-term diplomatic negotiations. As a result, President Obama has begun trying to rally international support for a new round of sanctions. (See pictures of people around the world protesting Iran's election.)

Washington has struggled since the disputed June 12 presidential election to figure out how to engage the regime without undermining the opposition. Now it has begun to hear answers from the Green Movement itself.

The most public message has come from Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the exiled revolutionary filmmaker turned dissident who claims to speak on behalf of the Green Movement, during a Washington visit last week. He told U.S. officials and Iran experts Thursday that the military action would only strengthen the hard-line regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. "Dialogue is definitely better than war," said Makhmalbaf. (See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle.)

At the same time, Makhmalbaf warned that the West should not "trample" on the Green Movement by fully embracing Iran's regime if it eventually reverses course on nuclear talks. He and other prominent opposition members are also urging the White House to more actively condemn the brutal crackdown since the election that gave Ahmadinejad a second term despite opposition claims of widespread fraud. The limited reaction has allowed the regime to believe the outside world is indifferent to what is happening inside Iran, he said.

Makhmalbaf said even modest steps are important, such as publicly mentioning opposition victims like Neda Agha-Soltan, the student shot dead during the June uprising who became an opposition symbol. (Obama mentioned her death, but not by name, the day he won the Nobel Peace Prize.) Washington also needs to recognize and respond to opposition statements, like the apology from Iran's leading dissident cleric, Ayatullah Ali Montazeri, for the 1979 U.S. embassy takeover. Montazeri was once heir-apparent to the revolution's founder, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his gesture on the 30th anniversary of the seizure was a risky step that passed largely ignored by Washington.

As the Administration begins lobbying its international partners for punitive new measures against Iran, Makhmalbaf and other opposition figures have urged the U.S. to focus primarily on the Revolutionary Guards. The élite unit is a growing political and economic behemoth, and its leadership is critical in propping up the troubled regime. They are not supporting other measures under consideration, like curbs on gasoline imports Iran relies on for domestic consumption, because these would mainly hurt the Iranian public, opposition figures have told U.S. officials.

"We need certain sanctions to hurt the regime, but not the people," said Makhmalbaf, who urged Washington to quickly impose a series of sanctions on the Guards since incremental steps allow them time to develop alternatives. The award-winning filmmaker, who now lives in Europe, said he was sent to Washington by the opposition; his talk at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was attended by senior officials from the National Security Council and the State Department.

Iran's refusal to accept the deal that required shipping out nuclear material for reprocessing in Russia and France, say Iranian analysts, is partly linked to the divide between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. The President, they say, is more interested than the Supreme Leader is in improving relations with Washington, a major coup that could earn Ahmadinejad badly needed international legitimacy. But he refuses to compromise on Iran's right to enrich uranium, a position with strong support from across the Iranian political spectrum.

Khamenei, meanwhile, is said to reject improving relations with the United States as anathema to essence of the Islamic Revolution. At the same time, analysts say he was initially more open to a compromise on a short-term deal.

Ironically, however, one reason among others for Iran's reversal after initially approving the deal was that Green Movement leaders had criticized it. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the opposition candidate who claims to have won the disputed election, criticized the proposal negotiated by Ahmadinejad's team at Vienna, warning that if implemented, it would negate the work of thousands of Iranian scientists. Opposition figures and analysts say his response was merely an attempt to play spoiler and prevent the regime from benefiting politically from a deal with the West. Still, nuclear diplomacy with the West has effectively become a political football in Tehran, complicating President Obama's quest for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff.

Tehran Braces for a New Political Showdown

2009-11-02T07:51:00.000-08:00

Nov. 2, 2009

By Robin Wright

A new showdown looms in Iran this week, as the regime and its intrepid opposition gear up for what may be their biggest street confrontation since the protests that followed the disputed June 12 presidential election. The latest face-off is scheduled for Wednesday, when Iran commemorates the 30th anniversary of the U.S. embassy takeover by radical students. In an ironic twist, however, instead of the traditional festival of America-bashing, students across the country are being summoned to mark the event with a protest against their own government.

For three decades, students have massed every Nov. 4 at the sprawling former U.S. embassy — now a Revolutionary Guards training center and museum — that occupies several blocks in downtown Tehran to commemorate the young revolution's confrontation with the world's mightiest power. On that day in 1979, revolutionary students stormed the compound and seized 52 U.S. diplomats, holding them hostage for 444 days. The regime has long supported the event, officially dubbing it Pupils' Day and giving students the day off from school to attend.

Last year students paraded down the streets shouting anti-American slogans and burning an effigy of President George W. Bush. Now, for many Iranian students, the real issue is no longer the U.S. This year opposition leaders are calling on Iranians young and old to parade in front of the graffiti-covered embassy walls against their controversial President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei.

The world's only modern theocracy is clearly nervous. The regime announced last week that it would mobilize 3 million of its supporters to prevent the normally raucous festival from turning into a sustained anti-regime protest. The paramilitary Basij vigilantes will be deployed to keep the commemoration on message and to silence protesters. And, escalating the stakes, Ayatullah Khamenei warned last week that questioning the election results will now be treated as a crime.

An Iranian opposition website has published what it claims is a top-secret letter from the Islamic Guidance Ministry to the press urging censorship. "Given the possibility that groups opposed to the regime may engage in actions on the eve of Nov. 4, the anniversary of the seizure of America's den of spies, and may deviate public opinion from the ceremonies on the national day of struggle against world arrogance," the letter reads, "I request that you refrain from disseminating any news, photo or topic which can lead to tension in the society or breach public order."

The opposition has so far refused to back down. In a statement on Oct. 31 on his website, opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi called the Nov. 4 anniversary the greenest day of the year — in reference to the color adopted by his movement. The commemoration, he said, should be a "rendezvous so we would remember anew that among us it is the people who are the leaders."

In the wake of the ruthless crackdown that ended last summer's mass protests, the opposition has begun converting national holidays — when the public is expected to turn out on the streets — into opportunities for political protests. But the Nov. 4 commemoration is particularly sensitive because it symbolizes the power of the regime's biggest long-term problem — Iran's youth.

Young people were in the vanguard of the 1979 overthrow of the U.S.-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and in the embassy siege, they were way out in front of Ayatullah Khomeini and the revolutionary leadership. Students from three Tehran campuses plotted to seize the American diplomatic mission after the Carter Administration admitted the ailing, exiled Shah for medical treatment, suspecting that Washington wanted to restore Pahlavi to power, as it had in the coup of 1953. The student action only won the support of the new Islamic regime days after the fact.

The only other major challenge to the regime in 30 years was the 1999 campus protest that led to bloody clashes. Some 70% of Iran's population is now under age 30 due to a post-revolution baby boom spurred in part by clerics calling on Iranian women to breed an Islamic generation. But the first generation of children born under the revolution has come back to haunt the regime. Their political apathy in 2005 may have helped put Ahmadinejad in office, but their current activism in myriad forms has fueled a vibrant civil disobedience campaign that the authorities have failed to suppress.

In an unprecedented public rebuke, mathematics student Mahmoud Vahidnia last week criticized Iran's Supreme Leader to his face for living in a bubble, limiting freedom of speech and press and allowing élites to get a stranglehold on power through institutions like the Council of Guardians. State-controlled television terminated the broadcast of the meeting between Khamenei and Iran's academic élite, but thousands have since seen parts of Vahidnia's bold criticism on YouTube. Sporadic applause can be heard in the background.

The Nov. 4 anniversary previously had a unique role in Iran's foreign policy, often serving as a barometer of public opinion. During the past eight years, the rallies were intensely anti-American because of fears that Bush would launch a military attack. But in 1998, under reformist President Mohammed Khatami, one of the three masterminds of the embassy takeover offered an olive branch: Our dealings with the hostages were not directed against the American people and not even against the hostages themselves, Ibrahim Asgharzadeh told that year's commemoration. Although Iranians still felt wronged by U.S. policy, he said the time had come to invite all the hostages to return to Iran as guests. Regarding relations with America, Iranians must look to the future and not to the past. He received thunderous applause.

Many involved in the embassy siege later became leaders of the reform movement. Asgharzadeh went on to become a member of Tehran's city council. Mohsen Mirdamadi, another of the three masterminds, became a member of parliament and leader of Iran's largest reform party. As chairman of Iran's foreign affairs committee, he called for improving relations with the U.S. And as Iran prepares to commemorate the event that he helped plan, Mirdamadi today is among the more than 100 political prisoners who are awaiting the outcome of a mass show trial on charges of trying to subvert the revolution.

From Power to Chaos — Tracking Iran's Four-Month Slide

2009-09-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

Sept 28, 2009

By Robin Wright

What a difference a few months can make.

In early June, Iran was at the apex of its power on the world stage. Aid to insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon had helped convert Tehran into a regional superpower rivaled only by Israel. At home, hard-liners led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had consolidated control of parliament, the judiciary and the military and marginalized reform parties.

This week, however, Iran heads into talks in Geneva with the U.S. and five other world powers more vulnerable at home and abroad than at any time since the revolution's chaotic early days. Despite defiant talk and a weekend display of military force, the world's only theocracy begins its most important diplomatic engagement in three decades in real trouble. (See international protests of Iran's election.)

Over the past four months, the Islamic Republic has faced two game changers. First, the June 12 presidential election spawned a vibrant new opposition movement, a political schism among the theocrats and popular protests that deeply undermined the hard-line regime's legitimacy among its constituents. Second, the gotcha revelation on Sept. 25 about a secret nuclear plant put Tehran on the defensive with both its enemies and allies — and undermined Ahmadinejad's U.N. media blitz, which had been designed to boost his post-election image. (See the top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms.)

Now those challenges are converging, tightening the squeeze on the regime. Over the weekend, Iran's new opposition chose sides in the nuclear debate — and sided with the world. "The Iranian Green Movement does not want a nuclear bomb, but instead desires peace for the world and democracy for Iran," said a statement issued by filmmaker and opposition spokesman Mohsen Makhmalbouf. "The Green Movement in Iran furthermore understands the world's concerns and in fact has similar concerns itself."

That's a first. In the past, Iranians rallied around even unpopular governments when confronted by the outside world. Iraq's 1980 invasion of Iran helped a young revolution already running out of steam consolidate its hold on power and survive eight years of the Middle East's deadliest modern conflict. Tehran's quest for nuclear energy, widely embraced as a key to development in the 21st century, has also long been a potent unifier of Iran's disparate political factions. Persian national pride has been a powerful force for millennia.

But the revelation of a hidden nuclear facility near the holy city of Qum that is run by Iran's élite Revolutionary Guards — and the threat of more sanctions if Tehran does not cooperate with the new U.S.-sponsored diplomatic initiative — appear to have deepened the political fissures rather than led Iranians to close ranks.

The critical unknown is whether the escalating pressures will lead the theocracy to compromise or make it even more obstinate once it reaches the negotiating table.

The regime's response on Sunday was to flex its military muscle. To shouts of "Allahu akbar," the Revolutionary Guards test-fired short-range missiles to demonstrate that Iran has the necessary arsenal to defend itself. "We are going to respond to any military action in a crushing manner, and it doesn't make any difference which country or regime has launched the aggression," said General Hossein Salami, head of the Revolutionary Guard Air Force, according to Iran's state media. The tests were successful, with the short-range missiles hitting their targets, he said. (Read "Iran Standoff: Is a Nuclear-Free Middle East a Pipe Dream?")

Further tests of longer-range missiles are expected in the days running up to the historic meeting between American, French, British, Russian, Chinese and German diplomats and their Iranian counterparts.

Thumbing its nose at the world may not help, since even the skeptical Russians suggested last week that further sanctions may be in order if Iran does not come clean about the secret facility and other older questions about Tehran's nuclear program. "The Iranians are in a very bad spot now because of this deception, in terms of all of the great powers," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told ABC News on Sunday.

Just how bad will be determined after talks begin on Oct. 1 in Geneva's historic Hotel de Ville. "If we don't get the answers that we are expecting and the changes in behavior that we are looking for, then we will work with our partners to move for sanctions," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CBS on Sunday. "The burden has now shifted ... They have to come to this meeting on Oct. 1 and present convincing evidence as to the purpose of their nuclear program. We don't believe that they can present convincing evidence that it's only for peaceful purposes. But we are going to put them to the test."

Rethinking our Iran strategy: The Islamic Republic's revolution may be at a crossroads. It's a possible opening for the U.S.

2009-09-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times

By Robin Wright and Robert Litwak

September 13, 2009

Three decades of assumptions about Iran -- including the premises behind Washington's recent outreach to Tehran -- have been transformed by its stunning uprising. It's time for a policy rethink.

The Obama administration's offer to engage was the right idea. But the theocracy's brutal crackdown on the opposition since the June 12 presidential election, followed by the purge of senior politicians in show trials and an alarming increase in general executions, marks a turning point for Iran's revolution. U.S. policy now needs a broader approach. Recent history offers relevant guidelines.

The three most important revolutions of the 20th century -- for their political innovation and impact -- happened in the Soviet Union, China and Iran. At the peak of revolutionary paranoia, the Soviet Union and China witnessed turmoil similar to what is happening today in Iran. Soon afterward, however, Moscow and Beijing altered course. Both began the move from defiant revolutionary regime to a normal state willing to work within the international order and mended relations with the United States.

The shift in both the Soviet Union and China was partly tied to the maturation of revolutions, as Crane Brinton outlined in "The Anatomy of Revolution," which leads to the final stage of "convalescence" that plays out over years, even decades. The Islamic Republic is on the same trajectory. Its current uprising pits those trying to transform Iran into a normal state against unrelenting revolutionaries. The men and women now on trial have made the transition, in varying degrees, in their political thinking.

In their civil disobedience since June, millions of Iranians also have indicated that they're ready for normalcy. The U.S. should now factor them into policy.

The pattern of revolutions suggests, however, that a catalyst is required to trigger the critical transition. The spark has traditionally been one of three factors: a geo-strategic challenge, economic necessity or political exigency. In other words, a revolution needing to convert an enemy into an ally to survive.

In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin launched show trials of Communist Party officials from 1936 to 1938, when vast numbers were dispatched to gulags or executed. Yet pressure from the Nazi threat combined with the costs of war spawned a U.S.-Soviet alliance and Stalin's meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Stalin was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who started de-Stalinization. The revolution's later undoing began after Mikhail Gorbachev concluded that the Soviet system of political control was no longer viable in the information-based global economy and that basic changes were essential to survive.

In the 1960s, China had all the trappings of a rogue state. It defied the international order. It detonated an atomic bomb in 1964. And in 1966, it launched the Cultural Revolution, a period of chaotic political and social upheaval when Mao Tse-tung ruthlessly purged alleged "bourgeois liberals" in the Communist Party. Yet in 1969, the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance followed by troop buildups along their mutual border led Mao to consider the realpolitik of normalizing relations with Washington. Henry Kissinger's secret 1971 trip led to President Nixon's historic visit in 1972.

Neither Stalin nor Mao became America's friends. But those encounters -- under conditions of strategic need -- did pave the way for meaningful engagement.

Iran's three most specific overtures to the U.S. fit the same pattern. In 1986, at a desperate juncture in its war with Iraq, Tehran was willing to deal secretly with both the United States and Israel to acquire weaponry, namely TOW anti-tank missiles. Even after this arms-for-hostages swap was revealed, the regime still sent a secret emissary to the White House to probe further potential.

In the early 1990s, Iran offered the most lucrative petroleum deal in its history to Conoco, to develop offshore oil and gas fields to help pay for postwar reconstruction and modernization demanded by a war-weary population.

In 2001, after the U.S. toppled Afghanistan's Taliban, Iran cooperated with Washington in crafting a new government. After the U.S. invasion toppled Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 2003, Tehran put out feelers, prodded partly by the Swiss, about resolving differences with Washington. Flanked by U.S. troops on key borders, Tehran wanted to ensure it was not next.

Three U.S. administrations did not exploit opportunities when Iran needed to play and reached out. The challenge now is to create a confluence of factors that will make Tehran again feel that a real deal with Washington is in its interest. Then engagement has a real shot.

Under the current circumstances, it doesn't.

Diplomacy centered primarily on Iran's nuclear program is unlikely to work. The regime as well as many protesters view pressure to end uranium enrichment -- a process to provide fuel for peaceful nuclear energy that can be subverted to develop a nuclear weapon -- as a challenge to Iran's sovereignty and a denial of its economic development. Under the current circumstances, the regime is more likely to engage in a process -- largely to get the world off its back -- that would not produce enduring substance or real resolution.

And if that diplomatic tactic doesn't work, simply slapping on more international sanctions (given stonewalling by Russia and China on anything tough) also seems unlikely to alone squeeze Iran into cooperation.

Yet a military strike is also likely to backfire, instead rallying Persian nationalism around the regime, just as Saddam Hussein's 1980 invasion mobilized support for the revolution at a time it was running out of steam.

The Obama administration would be well-advised to step back and recalculate what conditions would lead Iran to feel that the benefits of beginning the transition to a normal state outweigh the costs of sticking to the revolutionary zealotry increasingly rejected by its own people.

Robin Wright, author of "Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East," has covered Iran since 1973. Robert Litwak is the former director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council. Both are at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Will Iran's 'Kennedys' Challenge Ahmadinejad?

2009-08-17T06:27:00.000-07:00

Monday, Aug. 17, 2009
By Robin Wright

The brothers Larijani — often referred to as the Kennedys of Iran — are emerging as a powerful counterweight to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from within the conservative camp. And unlike other Ahmadinejad rivals, the Larijanis are fully endorsed by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei.

The Aug. 15 appointment of Sadegh Larijani as head of Iran's judiciary puts Larijanis at the head two of the three branches of Iran's government. Older brother Ali Larijani is speaker of parliament.

Over the past 30 years, the five sons of a senior cleric have been a major force in Iran's power structure, either serving in or running for positions including the presidency and various diplomatic roles as well as posts in Cabinet ministries, the Council of Guardians, the legislature, the powerful National Security Council, the judiciary, Iran's top broadcasting authority and even the Revolutionary Guards. Over the past year, they have consolidated their power.

Mohammad Javad Larijani, a Berkeley-educated mathematician, has been a member of parliament, Deputy Foreign Minister and adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Bagher Larijani, a physician, has served as Deputy Minister of Health. And Fazel Larijani, a diplomat, spent years posted in Ottawa. All five are bearded and bespectacled.

Sadegh Larijani takes over Iran's judiciary at a critical moment, as the government mounts mass trials of opposition supporters who stand accused of fomenting a foreign-backed velvet revolution against the regime. The third such trial opened Aug. 16. A comparatively junior cleric for such a high-profile job (he was born in 1960, month unknown), Sadegh served for eight years on the 12-member Council of Guardians, the powerful body that vets legislation, political candidates and election results.

His appointment to a five-year term reflects the Supreme Leader's trust in the Larijanis amid unprecedented public anger over the disputed June 12 presidential election, and the alleged torture and rape of protesters arrested in a brutal crackdown.

"Sadegh Larijani's ties to the Revolutionary Guards and intelligence agencies provide ample reason to believe that he will use his new powers to crack down even further on human rights and civil liberties than did his predecessor," Mehdi Khalaji wrote in an analysis for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

His skepticism may be based on the fact that the Larijanis were powerful critics of Iran's reform movement during the presidency of Mohammed Khatami. But the Larijanis also reflect a nuanced but significant difference from the hard-line principlist movement of President Ahmadinejad. In Iran's ever shifting political spectrum, the brothers are today considered pragmatic conservatives.

"Ten years ago, the Larijanis would have been considered arch hard-liners," said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "But the spectrum has moved so far right in recent years that now, compared with Ahmadinejad, they appear somewhat moderate."

The differences between the Larijanis and Ahmadinejad are both political and personal. Ali Larijani ran for President against Ahmadinejad in 2005; he came in sixth with less than 6% of the vote. Khamenei then appointed him head of the National Security Council, a body that reports to the Supreme Leader rather than the President, who has just one seat on the council.

In that capacity, Larijani was the lead negotiator with the international community on Iran's disputed nuclear program. Although he took a tough line on Iran's right to enrich uranium as part of its energy program, he was also interested in a deal that would prevent deepening Iran's isolation, according to diplomats involved in the talks.

But Ali Larijani often found himself at odds with Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric, and finally quit in 2007, underscoring the political divide even among the conservatives. "They were ideological differences," Larijani told an Iranian news agency. "I thought that the differences would be damaging and thus I resigned." Larijani ran for parliament last year, and was elected speaker.

After the June election protests erupted, Ali Larijani was also one of the few regime officials to publicly warn that many Iranians questioned Ahmadinejad's victory. "The opinion of this majority should be respected and a line should be drawn between them and rioters and miscreants," Larijani said in comments posted on an Iranian website.

In a further jab at Ahmadinejad, the speaker warned last week that government ministers should have the qualifications necessary for their positions. Cabinet picks require parliamentary approval, and the legislature has previously rejected Ahmadinejad's picks for being unqualified. The vote on his Cabinet nominations will be the first major test for Ahmadinejad as he begins his second and final term.

Thus far, however, all the Larijanis have heeded political boundaries. Ali Larijani last week announced that a parliamentary investigation proved that some detainee claims of torture were false. "On the basis of precise and comprehensive investigations conducted about the detainees at Kahrizak and Evin prisons, no cases of rape and sexual abuse were found," he told parliament. The probe lasted less than a week.

"Larijani has been a very ineffective speaker," says Iran scholar Shaul Bakhash. "[Parliament] has been a virtual no-show on all issues during his leadership ... And his investigation of allegations of mistreatment of prisoners was clearly slapdash."

The ill will between the Larijanis and Ahmadinejad is also rooted in a social class divide, according to Sadjadpour. The Larijani brothers are the progeny of the late Grand Ayatullah Mirza Hashem Amoli, a marja whose interpretations of Islam are considered binding by a following of devout Shi'ite Muslims. Some of his sons have also married into prominent clerical families, giving them status beyond politics. Ali Larijani represents Qum, the center of Islamic scholarship in Iran, in parliament. Ahmadinejad, by contrast, is the son of a blacksmith.

Over the years, the Larijani brothers have expressed realist positions on Iran's relations with the United States. Mohammad Javad Larijani, who did doctoral work in mathematics at the University of California, has often urged an end to tensions. "Our country's relations with America are important in terms of our national interests," he said in a public debate a decade ago. "We should regard our relations with America realistically and without extremism, and weigh them with the criteria of our national interests."

But critics also charge that the Larijani brothers have risen so far as much from opportunism as political savvy. Many analysts believe Ali Larijani may be positioning himself to run for the presidency again after Ahmadinejad's term ends in 2013. "They are nakedly ambitious. Their overarching principle seems to be to position themselves wherever power lies," said Sadjadpour. "If the Shah were still in power they'd be coveting him. And if Iran evolves into a democracy they'll try and reinvent themselves as progressive democrats."

In Iran, a Hostage-Taker Is Now Hostage

2009-08-09T09:07:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post

August 9, 2009

By Robin Wright

Last week Iran's theocracy widened its crackdown from suppressing an opposition movement to putting on trial the very revolutionaries who launched the Islamic republic. This new purge may be more profound politically than the campaign against the followers of Mir Hossein Mousavi: The Iranian revolution is eating its children.

Mohsen Mirdamadi saw it all coming. He warned me about it five years ago. The only thing he didn't foresee was his own role. Last week, he sat in a revolutionary court, dressed in gray prison pajamas, as one of its victims.

I've followed Mirdamadi since the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover. In 1981, I stood below the plane that brought 52 American diplomats to freedom in Algeria and wondered about the type of people who seized, interrogated and brutalized hostages for 444 days. Mirdamadi was one of three ringleaders. Former hostage John Limbert remembers him as "particularly nasty." I met him a decade ago.

Like many early revolutionaries, Mirdamadi had evolved over the intervening two decades from a scruffy student radical into a balding, pinstripe-suited realist. In 2000, he ran for parliament as a reformer.

"Our emphasis originally was on winning independence from foreign influence and creating an Islamic state," he explained at the spartan headquarters of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, just two blocks from the old U.S. Embassy. "But today our emphasis is on freedoms. . . . Our tactics have shifted, too. Before, we carried out a revolution. Today, we're trying evolution."

A surprisingly small man, Mirdamadi took the powerful chairmanship of parliament's national security and foreign relations committee, a platform he used to advocate political openings, freedom of assembly and speech, women's rights, and an independent press, albeit within the boundaries of Islamic propriety. He launched the newspaper Norouz -- or New Year -- which advocated the rule of law and challenged authority. Ultimately, the authorities charged him with libel, subversion, "encouraging hooligans to undermine public order" and propagating "moral decadence." The paper was banned.

Unrepentant about the hostage drama, he nevertheless urged better relations with Washington. "Once enmity with America was in line with our interests," he said in 2002, "but it is not like that today. Our interests today lie in detente with America."

Mirdamadi came to represent the forces that carry revolutions into their final phase, what Crane Brinton in his classic "The Anatomy of Revolution" called "the convalescence." But he apparently went too far. When he registered to run for reelection in 2004, he was disqualified by the clerical Council of Guardians despite his fame. Dozens of incumbents and some 2,500 others were also disqualified. Mirdamadi led a mass resignation of 124 parliamentarians, almost half the total, in protest. It was the beginning, he told me a few months later, of what he feared would become a "bloodless coup."

In 2006, he became leader of his party, the largest reform faction. In 2008, he backed Mousavi for president. And in June, he was among the first arrested when Iran's uprising erupted. While Mirdamadi was in parliament, Amnesty International issued 13 "urgent action" appeals asking supporters to write him demanding the release of political prisoners. Last month, it issued an appeal about him -- as a political prisoner.

Mirdamadi sat in court last week with 100 others, including a former vice president, cabinet members, presidential advisers and spokesmen. An Iranian news agency said some may face charges of being "mohareb," or God's enemy, which can carry the death penalty. The best-case scenario is that, after more "confessions," they are pardoned but banned from politics and their parties dissolved.

The irony -- one of many in the current crisis -- is that the purge taking place to prevent an allegedly foreign-backed "velvet revolution" may in fact spur one. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's inaugural speech Wednesday was full of inane bluster. "We must play a key role in the management of the world," he told parliament.

But the regime only looks more desperate with each passing week. Tens of thousands of security forces had to be deployed in Tehran to preserve order on inauguration day, yet YouTube snippets still showed Iranians on crowded subway escalators shouting "death to the dictator" for all to hear. The widening polarization of society will make it difficult for Ahmadinejad to rule during his second term.

"The goals of the revolution are being forgotten as this government becomes more of a dictatorship," Mirdamadi said, predicting the current turmoil. "But people still want change."

Iran's Protesters: Phase 2 of Their Feisty Campaign

2009-07-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

Monday, Jul. 27, 2009

By Robin Wright

Phase 2 has begun. Six weeks after millions took to the streets to protest Iran's presidential election, their uprising has morphed into a feistier, more imaginative and potentially enduring campaign.

The second phase plays out in a boycott of goods advertised on state-controlled television. Just try buying a certain brand of dairy product, an Iranian human-rights activist told me, and the person behind you in line is likely to whisper, "Don't buy that. It's from an advertiser." It includes calls to switch on every electric appliance in the house just before the evening TV news to trip up Tehran's grid. It features quickie "blitz" street demonstrations, lasting just long enough to chant "Death to the dictator!" several times but short enough to evade security forces. It involves identifying paramilitary Basij vigilantes linked to the crackdown and putting marks in green — the opposition color — or pictures of protest victims in front of their homes. It is scribbled antiregime slogans on money. And it is defiant drivers honking horns, flashing headlights and waving V signs at security forces. (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath.)

The tactics are unorganized, largely leaderless and only just beginning. They spread by e-mail, websites and word of mouth. But their variety and scope indicate that Iran's uprising is not a passing phenomenon like the student protests of 1999, which were quickly quashed. This time, Iranians are rising above their fears. Although embryonic, today's public resolve is reminiscent of civil disobedience in colonial India before independence or in the American Deep South in the 1960s. Mohandas Gandhi once mused that "even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled." That quotation is now popular on Iranian websites.

Its impact varies, but Phase 2 has begun to exact a price from those who ignore the popular will. Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former member of parliament, told me that some companies have cut back on TV advertising, and some stores have dropped advertised brands. A new boycott of text messaging could be costing a state company more than $1 million a day. "There is optimism that protests will continue one way or another," says Farideh Farhi, an Iranian analyst at the University of Hawaii, "because people who are normally not rabblerousers are finding ways to counter the government crackdown."

The new camaraderie of resistance was visible at the July 17 Friday prayer sermon given by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani at Tehran University. Nonreligious Iranians turned up for political reasons. The devout showed them how to carry out the rituals, with strangers handing out newspapers as substitute prayer mats for overflow crowds. Men and women prayed together, a regime taboo. When Rafsanjani referred to detainees, the crowd interrupted by roaring, "Political prisoners must be freed!" Calling for support of Iran's Supreme Leader, who backed the crackdown, another prayer official intoned, "We are all your soldiers, Khamenei! We await your orders!" But supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi shouted back, "We are your soldiers, Mousavi! We await your orders!" And when told to shout "Down with America!" the crowd instead chanted "Down with Russia!" — whose leaders had congratulated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election and hosted him four days later. (See pictures of people around the world protesting Iran's election.)

The protests tap into a long Iranian tradition. The seeds of the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution — which produced Iran's first parliament and constitution — were planted in the Tobacco Protest of the 19th century, when even women in the royal harem stopped smoking their water pipes to protest an exclusive concession given by the Shah to a British company. Protests, strikes and boycotts prevented Iran from becoming a British protectorate in 1920, secured the reappointment of reformist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1952 and — most significant of all — ended 2,500 years of dynastic rule in 1979 and ushered in the Islamic Republic.

The current uprising is nowhere near as widespread as that of 1979. Yet the activism is creating a new political space in Iran. The public is defining its own agenda, with Rafsanjani, Mousavi and other opposition figures responding to sentiment on the street rather than directing it. After meeting on July 20 with the families of people detained following the election, Mousavi warned the power structure, "You are facing something new: an awakened nation, a nation that has been born again and is here to defend its achievements."

As Iran's second phase of protests takes shape, the regime's future may depend on whether it heeds that warning.

Tipping Point in Tehran

2009-07-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post
A Gathering Opposition Faces a Weakened Regime
July 14, 2009

By Robin Wright
How much has changed for Iran in one occasionally breathtaking month. The erratic uprising is becoming as important as the Islamic revolution 30 years ago -- and not only for Iran. Both redefined political action throughout the Middle East.

The costs are steadily mounting for the regime. Just one day before the June 12 presidential election, the Islamic republic had never been so powerful. Tehran had not only survived three decades of diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions but had emerged a regional superpower, rivaled only by Israel. Its influence shaped conflicts and politics from Afghanistan to Lebanon.

But the day after the election, the Islamic republic had never appeared so vulnerable. The virtual militarization of the state has failed to contain the uprising, and its tactics have further alienated and polarized society. It has also shifted the focus from the election to Iran's leadership.

Just a day before the election, Iran also had the best opportunity in 30 years to end its pariah status. Since the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy, Tehran has sparred with five U.S. administrations. President Obama's offer of direct engagement is the most generous to date. He had the world's major powers and a growing number of Americans on board.

The tide has turned. At its summit in Italy last week, the Group of Eight industrialized nations "deplored" the post-election crackdown and urged "democratic dialogue" with the opposition. At his news conference there, Obama noted the G-8's "strong condemnation about the appalling treatment of peaceful protesters post-election in Iran" and "behavior that just violates basic international norms."

Given its advancing nuclear technology and regional influence, Iran believed before the election that it held the trump cards in any negotiations. Now, politically disgraced, it is the needy one. Yet Washington might also pay a price for engaging with a government that brutalizes its people. Any involvement could effectively bestow legitimacy on a disputed election and reject the transparency and justice that protesters are seeking.

The uprising has transformed Iran's political landscape. Over the past month, dozens of disparate political factions have coalesced into two rival camps: the New Right and the New Left.

The core of the New Right is a second generation of revolutionaries, called principlists, who have wrested control of the security instruments and increasingly pushed their elders aside -- at least for now. It includes Mojtaba Khamenei, the supreme leader's son and chief of staff; Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi, a presidential adviser and campaign manager; Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehei; Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsouli; Major Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari of the Revolutionary Guards; Basij commander Hasan Taeb; influential commentators such as Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the newspaper Kayhan; and industry titans like Mehrbad Bazrpash, the former cabinet minister for youth affairs who now heads Saipa, the automobile manufacturer.

The New Left is a de facto coalition of disparate interest groups that found common cause in anger after the election. The name comes from opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was considered leftist as prime minister in the 1980s, and the opposition's goal is to open up the rigid theocracy.

Its organization, tools and strategy are weak, but it is the most extensive coalition since the 1979 revolution. The New Left includes former presidents, cabinet ministers and members of parliament as well as vast numbers of young people (the dominant demographic), the most politically active women in the Islamic world, white-collar professionals and inflation-sapped laborers.

What was a political divide has become a schism. Many Iranian leaders served time together in the shah's jails; today, their visions of the Islamic republic differ so sharply that reconciliation would be almost impossible.

What happens next will be determined by three factors: leadership, unity and momentum.

The opposition is most vulnerable on leadership. The big unanswered question is whether Mousavi, a distinctly uncharismatic politician, can lead the new opposition over the long term. He was an accidental leader of the reform movement, more the product of public sentiment than the creator of it. Without dynamic direction, the opposition may look elsewhere.

The regime is most vulnerable on unity. Many government employees, including civil servants and members of the military, have long grumbled about the strict theocracy. In 1997, a government poll found that 84 percent of the Revolutionary Guards, which include many young men merely fulfilling national service, voted for Mohammad Khatami, the first reform president.

Momentum may be the decisive factor. The regime will need to shift public attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's second-term agenda. Though Ahmadinejad blames the outside world for the protests, he may focus on regional or international goals to win the legitimacy that his presidency is unable to get at home.

For the opposition, the calendar of Shiite rites, Persian commemorations and revolutionary markers is rich with occasions to spark demonstrations. The opposition also has supporters in Iran's parliament who are likely to challenge Ahmadinejad's cabinet choices and economic proposals. Further arrests and future trials could also spark new tension. With each flash point, the regime's image is further tainted, its legitimacy undermined.

Robin Wright, a former Post reporter, is the author of "Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East" and is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

U.S. Citizen in Tehran Arrested

2009-07-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

Friday, Jul. 10, 2009
By Robin Wright
Iran's political upheaval has claimed its first American, with the arrest on July 9 of Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American living in Tehran, according to an Iranian human-rights group and family friends.

As part of the latest security sweep designed to end nationwide protests against the disputed June 12 presidential election, Tajbakhsh was picked up from his home late Thursday following a day of renewed demonstrations, according to Hadi Ghaemi of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. His computer equipment was confiscated and his home ransacked, Ghaemi said.

Tajbakhsh, 47, was not involved in the protests, the sources said, but the Columbia University graduate had been among four dual citizens arrested in 2007 on charges of trying to foment a "velvet revolution" against the Islamic regime. He spent four months in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison before his release. Tajbakhsh, an urban-planning expert, taught urban policy at the New School for Social Research in New York City from 1994 until 2001. Before his arrest in 2007, he had served as an adviser to the Iranian Ministry of Health and been a consultant for George Soros' Open Society Institute.

The regime has repeatedly charged that the recent unrest is a plot by foreign powers, particularly Britain, to orchestrate an uprising against the theocracy. On the eve of the pivotal vote, Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei expressed concern about a "soft" or "velvet" revolution, the term originally used to describe the 1989 overthrow of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. (See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle.)

The head of the country's Revolutionary Guards political division also charged that supporters of opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi were part of the plot. "Any kind of velvet revolution will not be successful in Iran," he warned in a comment on the website of the Guards, the élite wing of Iran's military created to protect the revolution.

The detention is being widely condemned. In Washington, Haleh Esfandiari, who also was detained in Iran in 2007, said the regime's "paranoia regarding a so-called velvet revolution planned from the outside and assisted from the inside has gotten out of control."

Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said Iran's Intelligence Ministry "keeps trying to prove the unprovable." Esfandiari was released after a show of public pressure by then Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as well as a letter to Khamenei from former Congressman Lee Hamilton, the president of the Wilson Center and co-chair of both the Iraq Study Group and the 9/11 Commission. (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath.)

After his release from prison, Tajbakhsh opted to stay and work in Iran, where his family lives, and deliberately avoided politics, friends say. "Kian knew his activities were being closely monitored by the government ever since his release from prison in 2007, so he was very careful not to give them any pretext to re-arrest him," said Karim Sadjadpour, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and a close friend who has talked with his family.

The regime may be trying to implicate the U.S. in the unrest, analysts say. "What's significant is the fact that he was taken by the Revolutionary Guards and that he is, as far as we know, the first U.S. citizen to be detained. I think it's very plausible that Iran's hard-liners are trying to draw the United States into this," Sadjadpour said.

Iran's Embattled Supreme Leader: A Test for Khamenei

2009-06-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

Thursday, Jun. 25, 2009
By Robin Wright

The fate of Iran's Islamic revolution now rests in the hands of an enigmatic cleric who is little understood at home, let alone by the outside world. For the past 20 years, pictures of Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, with his oversize glasses, black turban and untrimmed white beard, have adorned shops, government offices and living-room walls throughout Iran. His modest childhood home in Mashhad has become a virtual shrine, his edicts are binding and his powers absolute.

Yet protesters forced from the streets this week have taken to shouting "Death to the dictator" and "Death to Khamenei" from their rooftops. Endowed with the infallible powers of a political pope, Iran's leader has suddenly discovered that his authority has also made him vulnerable.

Since June 19, Khamenei's controversial decision to dismiss all allegations of vote rigging and throw his weight behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has produced the most serious challenge to his rule — and ultimately to the very concept of a Supreme Leader — since the 1979 revolution. Protesters have spurned his claim that foreign powers are behind the demonstrations, while opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi continues to demand that the disputed election be annulled.

Khamenei once again warned on June 24 that "neither the establishment nor the nation will yield to pressure at any cost." Demonstrations have abated under the unprecedented show of force by riot police and the paramilitary Basij vigilantes, but amid signs that the cost is a growing crisis of confidence in the Supreme Leader. (See pictures of the Iranian election and its turbulent aftermath.)

Despite his powers to overturn parliamentary laws, judicial decisions or presidential decrees, Khamenei has never been a very public figure, either as President between 1981 and 1989 or as Supreme Leader since then.

"There is perhaps no leader in the world more important to current world affairs but less known and understood than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei," writes Karim Sadjadpour in Reading Khamenei, a publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Neither a dictator nor a democrat — but with traits of both — Khamenei is the single most important individual in a highly factionalized, autocratic regime."(See pictures of people protesting Iran's election around the world.)

Khamenei first emerged in politics as the Islamic republic's third President in 1981, during a period of violent political turmoil that saw a President, a Prime Minister, 10 Cabinet officials and 27 members of parliament killed in massive bomb attacks. He was among the victims. He has walked with a cane, his right hand dangling uselessly at his side, ever since a small bomb inside a tape recorder went off as he was giving a Friday prayer sermon in 1981. He depends on aides or family to cut up his food.

Khamenei's election marked the consolidation of clerical control over the state. Revolutionary leader Imam Khomeini originally banned the clergy from running for the presidency, but as he lost confidence in squabbling technocrats, he urged his protégé to run for office. The result was Iran's first "government of God." Tensions with Mousavi, who at the time held the more powerful position, of Prime Minister, date back to this period. Throughout the 1980s, Khamenei and Mousavi clashed repeatedly on key political and economic issues.

It was also during those early years that Iran's political spectrum began to take shape. At one end were ideologues like Khamenei, who wanted Iran to play the role of a revolutionary "redeemer state," championing the cause of the world's downtrodden, pursuing Islamic political rule throughout the Muslim world and creating a new Islamic geopolitical bloc capable of challenging both East and West.

At the other end were realists and leftists, like Mousavi, who favored institutionalizing the revolution and creating a model Islamic government. Although they supported an Islamist political system and social order as well as independence from the great powers, they also called for a pragmatic foreign policy. The difference boiled down to whether the Islamic republic's top priority was the revolution or the state. That debate remains at the heart of the current crisis.
See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle.

Khamenei became Iran's second Supreme Leader after Imam Khomeini died in 1989. As a midlevel cleric with little theological standing among his peers, he was in many ways an unlikely choice. Because he inherited the Imam's political powers but little of the religious authority, Khamenei tried to compensate by forging alliances with the security establishment, particularly among the commanders of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia. That relationship has been central to the attempts to put down the uprising since June 20.

Khamenei has also exerted his influence on Iranian society through thousands of fatwas aimed at regulating everyday life. Although he is widely reported to like poetry and play an instrument, Khamenei ruled that music can cause deviant behavior and moral corruption among the young. Foreign news, he ruled, should be outlawed if it in any way "lessens trust in Islamic government," while he deemed neckties part of a "cultural assault" on Muslims. When riding bicycles or motorcycles, Khamenei ruled, women must avoid actions that lead to the wrong kind of attention. He sanctioned clapping on "joyful occasions" but forbade it where religion is involved. Nose piercings, while not forbidden, would have to be covered. (See pictures of the lasting influence of Ayatullah Khameini.)

Some of Khamenei's micromanaging of the everyday was very practical: he condoned oral contraception for women and vasectomies for men to help bring down Iran's high birthrate. And he allowed stem-cell research and cloning, which led to the birth of Iran's first cloned sheep in 2006.

The Supreme Leader's traditional role has been to balance rival factions. Having aligned himself so closely with one political faction in a fiercely contested election, however, Khamenei's greatest challenge may now also come from some of his fellow clerics who have long questioned both the principle of a Supreme Leader as well as the role for the clergy in government.

In the current crisis, most of the senior Ayatullahs in the theological city of Qum have refrained from either endorsing Ahmadinejad's re-election or publicly supporting Khamenei's handling of the crisis. The diversity of opinion among Iran's clerics is reflected in Khamenei's younger brother Hadi, a cleric and former member of parliament who has long advocated cutting back the powers of the Supreme Leader. (See pictures of Ahmadinejad's supporters on LIFE.com.)

"The most important thing we're looking for today in Iran is the rule of law," Hadi Khamenei said in 1999. "And that means no one, whatever his position, is above it. Unfortunately for the rest of us, there are still people at the top who don't accept that basic right."

Despite the challenge to his rule, Khamenei appears prepared to take an increasingly tough stand, leaving little room for retreat or political compromise and forcing him to rely even more heavily on both hard-line allies and Iran's security forces. The outcome of Iran's crisis is likely to affect his political standing as well as whoever ends up as President.
See the top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms.

Lessons for the U.S. As Iran Unravels

2009-06-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

By Robin Wright

Monday, Jun. 22, 2009

Who would have thought that Iran, a country that has been the nemesis of the past five American Presidents, might actually become a model for what Washington wants to see happen politically in the Middle East?

Who would have thought that a Berlin Wall moment for the region might happen in the strict Islamic republic, where a revolution 30 years ago unleashed Islam as a modern political idiom and extremism as a tool to confront the West? (See pictures of violence used as intimidation in Iran.)

Unlikely as it seems, the rise of a popular movement relying on civil disobedience to confront authoritarian rule — in the last bloc of countries to hold out against the tide of change that has swept the rest of the world over the past quarter century — is almost a diplomatic dream for the Obama Administration.

I’m not talking about the regime's obstinate reaction or the brutality it unleashed on the streets of Tehran this past weekend. Even in his terse comments since the beginning of the electoral chaos in Iran, Barack Obama has made it clear the violence upsets him greatly. But in his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo on June 4, Obama spoke about the same principles that just eight days later galvanized millions of people throughout Iran to take to the streets.

"All people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose," Obama said. (Read "Dennis Ross, Iran Adviser, Moves to White House.")

With what now looks like uncanny prescience, he added, "There is no straight line to realize this promise ... Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away."

Yet in the midst of a debate over the U.S. role in Iran — recent past, present and future — Washington can take almost no credit for what is happening. The $400 million allocated by the Bush Administration for intelligence operations and the $75 million the State Department budgeted to promote democracy in Iran had little if any impact in changing the regime's ways or empowering Iranians. Many Iranian NGOs even publicly said they did not want, need or dare to be tainted by U.S. financial assistance.

This is a revolution that has been unraveling steadily over decades, beginning in its early years. Indeed, Iran's social transformation — educating, energizing and empowering a stronger and more demanding society, part of which has now turned on the regime — may offer Washington important lessons about what does lead to change in the Islamic world.

The symbol of Iran's uprising is a young woman named Neda Agha Soltan, reportedly a philosophy student whose death during the first clashes on June 20 was gruesomely captured on an already famous cell-phone video sent round the world on YouTube. A new generation of feisty women has been at the forefront of the protests. And the female factor is at the heart of Iran's reform movement. See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

But the ruling clerics probably did not understand how it happened until it was too late. During the monarchy, many traditional families were reluctant to send their girls beyond elementary school — or to school at all — for fear of exposure to miniskirts, makeup and westernizing ways during the Shah's rapid modernization programs.

But after the 1979 upheaval, traditional families began sending girls to school — and beyond. Today, the majority of university students in Iran are female — at Tehran University, they make up 65% of the student population — and they have places in virtually every profession. Iran has even had a female Vice President. And women want a bigger say still. (See pictures of people protesting the Iran election around the world.)

The other engine of change is the boomeranging of a policy by the revolutionary regime that in 1979 called on Iran's women to breed an Islamic generation. They complied. Within a decade, Iran's population almost doubled, from 34 million to 62 million.

The theocracy soon realized that it did not have the resources to feed, educate, provide social services for and eventually employ twice the population — and the next generation of children that it in turn would produce. It was the moment the government of God plummeted to earth — because all those young people would also have the vote.

As Iran's baby boomers have grown up, the government has gradually raised the voting age – from 15 to 16, and more recently to 18. Otherwise, the young would be the only sector of society that really counts in an election. Both better educated and savvier about the world, in large part because of access to technology, many young Iranians want something more than what the system has been willing to provide — politically, economically and socially. (Read "White House on Iran Election: A Diplomatic Plus.")

In an attempt to slow the swelling demographics, in the early 1990s the regime introduced a sweeping family-planning program. It dispatched 35,000 women door-to-door to preach the benefits of limiting the number of children to two or less. It provided widespread and often free access to birth control — the Pill, condoms, IUDs, Norplant, tubal ligation and vasectomies — and made the U.N.'s World Population Day a time for clerics to preach the benefits of small families.

An innovative program also required couples to attend a graphically descriptive sex-education and family-planning class before they could get a marriage license. (I attended one class with several couples — and learned a lot.) Iran has brought down the size of the average family from more than seven children to closer to two, winning a U.N. award for family planning in the process.

The overall impact, however, of each of these issues and many others has been to shift the focus from rigid religious ideology to earthly realities, with solutions based on 21st century ideas like sustainable development — and, gradually, even shades of greater democracy.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See TIME's Iran Covers.

The evolution of Iran's revolution

2009-06-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

The current confrontation is another phase of the country's century-long political journey. And this one, like the others, will bring lasting changes.

By Robin Wright
June 21, 2009

How ironic. A regime that came to power through a brutal revolution, in a country suspected of secretly developing a nuclear weapon, is now facing its biggest challenge from peaceful civil disobedience.

The largely silent street demonstrations by day and haunting chants echoing across rooftops by night are not -- so far -- a counterrevolution.That's not even their intention.

What they are doing, however, is forcing Iran's Islamic regime to face the same ideals that have swept across five continents over the last quarter of a century -- the supremacy of popular will, justice, accountability and the transparency of power.

The demonstrators may not succeed. Iran's "New Right" -- the war-hardened second generation of leaders, who wear hats instead of turbans -- still has the political power and the physical tools to contain the current confrontation. That could well mean a second (and final) term for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and if it does, the theocracy may increasingly evolve into a thugocracy during the next four years.

But long term, the feisty election campaign and the postelection protests have given legitimacy to the core ideas of political change. It's all so central to what the United States wants to see happen throughout the Middle East. Yet it's also so Iranian.

For 14 centuries, Shiism has been about passionate belief, about sacrifices in the name of perceived injustice and challenges to leadership. These are the principles that stirred people to action when questionable election results were announced just two hours after the polls closed.

For a century, Iranians have been political trailblazers in the 57-nation Islamic bloc. During the 1905-1911 Constitutional Revolution, a powerful coalition of intelligentsia, bazaar merchants and clergy forced the Qajar dynasty to accept a constitution and Iran's first parliament. In 1953, the democratically elected National Front coalition of four parties led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh pushed constitutional democracy and forced the last Pahlavi shah to flee to Rome -- until U.S. and British intelligence orchestrated a coup that put him back on the Peacock Throne. And in 1979, yet another coalition of bazaaris, clergy and intellectuals mobilized the streets to end dynastic rule that had prevailed for about 2,500 years.

So the angry energy unleashed this week from the northern Caspian coast to southern Shiraz is the natural sequel, spurred on by 21st century technology and the Internet. Each of the first three phases left indelible imprints on Iranian politics. The fourth will too.

The 1999 student protests failed because they involved only one sector of society; it was a body without a head or a strategy. But the current green-swathed uprising involves an emerging coalition that includes students and sanctions-strapped businessmen, taxi drivers and former presidents, civil servants and members of the national soccer team.

Key clergy have thrown in their turbans too. Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri -- the designated heir to the revolution's founder until his criticism of the regime's injustices in 1989 -- issued a virtual fatwa dismissing the election results and urging Iranians to continue "reclaiming their dues" in calm protests.

He also warned security forces not to follow orders that would eventually condemn them "before God.""Today, censorship and cutting telecommunication lines cannot hide the truth," Montazeri wrote.

Senior clerics in the holy city of Qom, many of whom never favored an Islamic republic for fear its flaws would taint Islam, have also failed to embrace the election outcome.

Even the brother of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hadi Khamenei, himself a cleric and former member of parliament, urged that an impartial committee probe the election results and provide a full public accounting.

As the coalition expands, the stakes are also widening well beyond who ends up as president. The two faces of the Islamic Republic -- Ali Khamenei and former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi -- are now pitted against each other. The religious ideologue against the lay technocrat.

The two men embody the central debate that has increasingly obsessed Tehran over the last three decades: Is the Islamic Republic first and foremost Islamic or a republic? In other words, does God's law or man's law have the last word?The debate was once beyond public reach. No longer.

Unless Khamenei can satisfy the protesters, all the brutal tools of 150,000 Revolutionary Guards and 300,000 paramilitary Basij will be unable to sustain his legitimacy. At the same time, however, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have not taken to the streets to reject the current constitution but rather to demand that the individual rights it guarantees are enforced.

Past international crises are now being invoked to forecast Iran's fate: Mousavi supporters fear Iran's security forces will reenact China's crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Regime supporters compare Mousavi to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, fearing the undoing of their own revolution if he prevails.

But whatever happens in Iran will be distinctly Iranian in style and outcome.

The movement has already invoked Shiite symbolism. Mourning is traditionally marked in commemorations on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, a cycle also used to galvanize greater public outrage when the shah's forces killed protesters in 1978. The commemorations often led to new clashes and more deaths -- and then volatile new cycles of mourning. It was no accident that Mousavi called for the mass demonstration Thursday to mourn the dead killed on Monday.

And the cycle is only beginning. The 40th-day commemorations are traditionally most important. The stunning protests in this fourth phase of Iran's century-long political journey will change the country further. The only question is how long it will take.

Robin Wright, the author of "Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East," has been covering Iran since 1973. She is a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

In Iran, One Woman's Death May Have Many Consequences

2009-06-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Sunday, Jun. 21, 2009
By Robin Wright

Iran's revolution has now run through a full cycle. A gruesomely captivating video of a young woman — laid out on a Tehran street after apparently being shot, blood pouring from her mouth and then across her face — swept Twitter, Facebook and other websites this weekend. The woman rapidly became a symbol of Iran's escalating crisis, from a political confrontation to far more ominous physical clashes. Some sites refer to the woman as Neda, Farsi for "the voice" or "the call." Tributes that incorporate startlingly up-close footage of her dying have started to spring up on YouTube.

Although it is not yet clear who shot Neda (a soldier? a pro-government militant? an accidental misfiring?), her death may have changed everything. The cycles of mourning in Shi'ite Islam actually provide a schedule for political combat — a way to generate or revive momentum. Shi'ite Muslims mourn their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, and these commemorations are a pivotal part of Iran's rich history. During the revolution, the pattern of confrontations between the Shah's security forces and the revolutionaries often played out in 40-day cycles. (See pictures of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death has rallied the opposition.)

The first clashes in January 1978 produced two deaths that were then commemorated on the 40th day in mass gatherings, which in turn produced new confrontations with security forces — and new deaths. Those deaths then generated another 40-day period of mourning, new clashes and further deaths. The cycle continued throughout most of the year until the Shah's ouster in January 1979.

The same cycle has already become an undercurrent in Iran's current crisis. The largest demonstration, on June 18, was called by opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi to commemorate the deaths of protesters three days after they were killed.

Shi'ite mourning is not simply a time to react with sadness. Particularly in times of conflict, it is also an opportunity for renewal. The commemorations for Neda and the others killed this weekend are still to come. And the 40th-day events are usually the largest and most important.
Neda is already being hailed as a martyr, a second important concept in Shi'ism. With the reported deaths of 19 people on June 20, martyrdom provides a potent force that could further deepen public anger at Iran's regime. (See the top 10 players in Iran's power struggle.)

The belief in martyrdom is central to modern politics as well as Shi'ite tradition dating back centuries in Iran. It, too, helped propel the 1979 revolution. It sustained Iran during the eight-year war with Iraq, when more than 120,000 Iranians died in the bloodiest modern Middle East conflict. Most major Iranian cities have a martyrs' museum or a martyrs' cemetery.

The first Shi'ite martyr was Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson. He believed it was better to die fighting injustice than to live with injustice under what he believed was illegitimate rule.

In the 7th century, Hussein and a band of fewer than 100 people, including women and children, took on the mighty Umayyad dynasty in Karbala, an ancient city in Mesopotamia now in modern-day Iraq. They knew they would be massacred.

Fourteen centuries later, Hussein's tomb in Karbala is one of the two holiest Shi'ite shrines — millions of Iranians make pilgrimages there every year. Just as Christians re-enact Jesus' procession bearing the cross past the 14 stops to Calvary before his crucifixion, so, too, do Shi'ites every year re-enact Hussein's martyrdom in an Islamic passion play during the holy period of Ashura.

Because of Hussein, revolt against tyranny became part of Shi'ite tradition. Indeed, protest and martyrdom are widely considered duties to God. And nowhere is the practice more honored than in Iran, the world's largest Shi'ite country.

The revolutionaries exploited the deep passion of martyrdom as well as the timetable of Shi'ite mourning in whipping up greater opposition to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. With the deaths of Neda and others, they may now find the same phenomena used against them.

See pictures of Iran's presidential elections and their turbulent aftermath.

The Supreme Leader's Gamble: Iran's Crisis Deepens

2009-06-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

The Huffington Post

By Robin Wright
Posted: June 19, 2009

Iran's political crisis is no longer only about the disputed presidential election. In taking an unyielding stand behind the results of the contested vote, Iran's supreme leader put his own position and powers on the line too.

The unusual speech by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at Friday prayers was the most important in his 20 years in power. It was also a huge gamble. By endorsing President Ahmadinejad's relection, rejecting compromise with the opposition, and condemning the protests, he has now set the stage for an even bigger confrontation.

The test of whether the opposition that has galvanized around former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi has real legs will now be determined by whether it defies Khamenei's authority this weekend and turns out in the same stunning numbers it did during the first week of Iran's crisis.
If they do, the focus will now be a challenge to the supreme leader as much as of the questionable election results. Whether Ahmadinejad really won a landslide over the widely popular Mousavi becomes almost a secondary issue.

The crisis has been building in that direction all week. The undercurrent of the defiant protests, which have now spread to cities across Iran, have increasingly become a rebuff of Khamenei.
In Iran's unique blend of religion and state, Khamenei is effectively an infallible political pope. The position was originally designed to be the sage providing oversight on government leaders and guidance in blending the laws of man and God. But over the past three decades, the velayet-e faqih, or rule of the jurist, has steadily become more authoritative about all functions of state, the judiciary and the military -- and more authoritarian. His word is, literally, final.
His message Friday was that he is willing to condone whatever it takes to end the turmoil -- and the opposition has now been warned.

"Some may imagine that street action will create leverage against the system and force the authorities to give in to threats," he said at Friday Prayers in Tehran.

"No, this is wrong... "It must be determined at the ballot box what the people want and what they don't want, not in the streets," he warned. "I call on all top put an end to this method...If they don't, they will be held responsible for the chaos and the consequences.

The position of supreme leader has been controversial since it was created in the chaotic early days of the revolution to deal with internal squabbling. After his return from exile, revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini had originally returned to the religious center of Qom, but was forced to move back to Tehran as disputes among the fractious coalition that ousted the last shah began to fall apart.

Many of the Shiite clerics in Qom never embraced the idea of either a supreme leader or a central role for clerics in the new Islamic republic. Iran's revolution represented not just a political upheaval. It was also a revolution within Shiism, which for 14 centuries had prohibited a clerical role in politics. With clerics taking over government, many senior Shiite clerics feared that Islam would end up being tainted by the human flaws of the state.

The current crisis has effectively revived that debate -- and deepened the divide between the government and the Shiite clergy as well as with the public. The government includes many clerical institutions, including the 12-member Council of Guardians, the 86-member Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council. But not even all of its members are happy with the election.

More importantly, senior clerics in Qom have noticeably failed to either endorse the election results or embrace Ahmadinejad, while long-time critics within the clergy used the crisis to encourage resistance to the supreme leader's dictates.

Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, who was originally designated to become supreme leader until he criticized the regime's excesses in 1989, dismissed the election results and called on "everyone" to continue "reclaiming their dues" in calm protests. He also issued a warning to Iran's security forces not to accept government orders that might eventually condemn them "before God."
"Today censorship and cutting telecommunication lines can not hide the truth," said Montazeri. "I pray for the greatness of the Iranian people."

Others have also bestowed legitimacy on the protests. Grand Ayatollah Saanei -- one of only about a dozen who hold that position -- pronounced Ahmadinejad's presidency illegitimate.
If Ahmadinejad's election is upheld at the end of Iran's deepest crisis since the 1979 revolution, the legitimacy of the supreme leader -- and potentially his ability to exert his powers--will almost certainly be diminished. Millions who have taken to the streets of Iran have already made that clear.

A Quiet Revolution Grows in the Muslim World

2009-03-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

March 19, 2009
By Robin Wright
Three decades after Iran's upheaval established Islamic clerical rule for the first time in 14 centuries, a quieter and more profound revolution is transforming the Muslim world. Dalia Ziada is a part of it.

When Ziada was 8, her mother told her to don a white party dress for a surprise celebration. It turned out to be a painful circumcision. But Ziada decided to fight back. The young Egyptian spent years arguing with her father and uncles against the genital mutilation of her sister and cousins, a campaign she eventually developed into a wider movement. She now champions everything from freedom of speech to women's rights and political prisoners. To promote civil disobedience, Ziada last year translated into Arabic a comic-book history about Martin Luther King Jr. and distributed 2,000 copies from Morocco to Yemen. (See pictures of Islam's revolution.)

Now 26, Ziada organized Cairo's first human-rights film festival in November. The censorship board did not approve the films, so Ziada doorstopped its chairman at the elevator and rode up with him to plead her case. When the theater was suspiciously closed at the last minute, she rented a tourist boat on the Nile for opening night--waiting until it was offshore and beyond the arm of the law to start the movie.

Ziada shies away from little, including the grisly intimate details of her life. But she also wears a veil, a sign that her religious faith remains undimmed. "My ultimate interest," she wrote in her first blog entry, "is to please Allah with all I am doing in my own life."

That sentiment is echoed around the Muslim world. In many of the scores of countries that are predominantly Muslim, the latest generation of activists is redefining society in novel ways. This new soft revolution is distinct from three earlier waves of change--the Islamic revival of the 1970s, the rise of extremism in the 1980s and the growth of Muslim political parties in the 1990s.

Today's revolution is more vibrantly Islamic than ever. Yet it is also decidedly antijihadist and ambivalent about Islamist political parties. Culturally, it is deeply conservative, but its goal is to adapt to the 21st century. Politically, it rejects secularism and Westernization but craves changes compatible with modern global trends. The soft revolution is more about groping for identity and direction than expressing piety. The new revolutionaries are synthesizing Koranic values with the ways of life spawned by the Internet, satellite television and Facebook. For them, Islam, you might say, is the path to change rather than the goal itself. "It's a nonviolent revolution trying to mix modernity and religion," Ziada says, honking as she makes her way through Cairo's horrendous traffic for a meeting of one of the rights groups she works with.

The new Muslim activists, who take on diverse causes from one country to another, have emerged in reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and all that has happened since. Navtej Dhillon, director of the Brookings Institution's Middle East Youth Initiative, says, "There's a generation between the ages of 15 and 35 driving this soft revolution--like the baby boomers in the U.S.--who are defined by a common experience. It should have been a generation outward looking in a positive way, with more education, access to technology and aspirations for economic mobility." Instead, he says, "it's become hostage to post-9/11 politics."

Disillusioned with extremists who can destroy but who fail to construct alternatives that improve daily life, members of the post-9/11 generation are increasingly relying on Islamic values rather than on a religion-based ideology to advance their aims. And importantly, the soft revolution has generated a new self-confidence among Muslims and a sense that the answers to their problems lie within their own faith and community rather than in the outside world. The revolution is about reform in a conservative package.

Text-Messaging The Koran

The soft revolution is made concrete in hundreds of new schools from Turkey to Pakistan. Its themes echo in Palestinian hip-hop, Egyptian Facebook pages and the flurry of Koranic verses text-messaged between students. It is reflected in Bosnian streets honoring Muslim heroes and central Asian girls named after the holy city of Medina. Its role models are portrayed by action figures, each with one of the 99 attributes of God, in Kuwaiti comic books.

It has even changed slang. Young Egyptians often now answer the telephone by saying "Salaam alaikum"--"Peace be upon you"--instead of "Hello." Many add the tagline "bi izn Allah"--"if God permits"--when discussing everything from the weather to politics. "They think they're getting a bonus with God," muses Ziada.

Even in Saudi Arabia, the most rigid Muslim state, the soft revolution is transforming public discourse. Consider Ahmad al-Shugairi, who worked in his family business until a friend recruited him in 2002 for a television program called Yallah Shabab (Hey, Young People). Al-Shugairi ended up as the host. Although he never had formal religious training, al-Shugairi quickly became one of the most popular TV preachers, broadcast by satellite to an audience across the Middle East and watched on YouTube. "The show explained that you could be a good Muslim and yet enjoy life," says Kaswara al-Khatib, a former producer of Yallah Shabab. "It used to be that you could be either devout or liberal, with no middle ground. The focus had been only on God's punishment. We focused on God's mercy."

In 2005, al-Shugairi began a TV series called Thoughts during the holy month of Ramadan, focusing on the practical problems of contemporary Muslim life, from cleanliness to charity. Sometimes clad in jeans and at other times a white Saudi robe and headdress, he often speaks informally from a couch. "I'm not reinventing the wheel or the faith," al-Shugairi explains in Jidda's Andalus Café, which he opened for the young. "But there is a need for someone to talk common sense."

Al-Shugairi's own life mirrors the experimentation and evolution of many young Muslims. In the 1990s, he says, he bounced from "extreme pleasure" as a college student in California to "extreme belief." The shock of Sept. 11, an attack whose perpetrators were mostly Saudi, steered him to the middle.

Traditional clerics deride al-Shugairi, 35, and other televangelists for preaching "easy Islam," "yuppie Islam," even "Western Islam." But his message actually reflects a deepening conservatism in the Islamic world, even as activists use contemporary examples and modern technology to make their case. One of al-Shugairi's programs on happiness focused on Elvis Presley, a man with fame, talent and fortune but who died young. Life without deep spirituality, al-Shugairi preaches, is empty.

The soft revolution's voices are widening the Islamic political spectrum. Mostafa Nagar, 28, an Egyptian dentist, runs a blog called Waves in the Sea of Change, which is part of an Internet-based call for a renaissance in Islamic thinking. Yet Nagar belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamist movement in the Middle East. His blog launched a wave of challenges from within the Brotherhood to its proposed manifesto, which limits the political rights of women and Christians. Nagar called for dividing the religious and political wings of the movement, a nod to the separation of mosque and state, and pressed the party to run technocrats rather than clerics for positions of party leadership and public office.

When Nagar and his colleagues were urged to leave the Brotherhood, they decided to stay. "As a public party," he says, "its decisions are relevant to the destiny of all Egyptians, so their thoughts should be open to all people." And indeed, his blog--and other criticism from the movement's youth wing--has caused the manifesto to be put on ice.

The flap underscores an emerging political trend. Since 9/11, polls have consistently shown that most Muslims do not want either an Iranian-style theocracy or a Western-style democracy. They want a blend, with clerics playing an advisory role in societies, not ruling them. As a consequence, Islamist parties are now under intense scrutiny. "Islamists, far from winning sweeping victories, are struggling to maintain even the modest gains they made earlier," says a recent survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In Iraq's recent elections, for example, secular parties solidly trumped the religious parties that had fared well four years ago.

Rethinking Tradition

Politics is not the only focus of the soft revolution. Its most fundamental impact, indeed, may be on the faith itself. In the shadows of Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, Turkey, a team of 80 Turkish scholars has been meeting for the past three years to ponder Muslim traditions dating back 14 centuries. Known as the hadith, the traditions are based on the actions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and dictate behavior on everything from the conduct of war to personal hygiene.

Later this year, the Turkish scholars are expected to publish six volumes that reject thousands of Islam's most controversial practices, from stoning adulterers to honor killings. Some hadith, the scholars contend, are unsubstantiated; others were just invented to manipulate society.

"There is one tradition which says ladies are religiously and rationally not complete and of lesser mind," says Ismail Hakki Unal of Ankara University's divinity school, a member of the commission. "We think this does not conform with the soul of the Koran. And when we look at the Prophet's behavior toward ladies, we don't think those insulting messages belong to him." Another hadith insists that women be obedient to their husbands if they are to enter paradise. "Again, this is incompatible with the Prophet," Unal says. "We think these are sentences put forth by men who were trying to impose their power over the ladies."

The Hadith Project is only one of many such investigations into Islam's role in the 21st century. This is perhaps the most intellectually active period for the faith since the height of Islamic scholarship in the Middle Ages. "There is more self-confidence in the Islamic world about dealing with reason, constitutionalism, science and other big issues that define modern society," says Ibrahim Kalin of the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research in Ankara. "The West is no longer the only worldview to look up to. There are other ways of sharing the world and negotiating your place in it."

Crucially, this latest wave of Islamic thought is not led only by men. Eman el-Marsafy is challenging one of the strictest male domains in the Muslim world--the mosque. For 14 centuries, women have largely been relegated to small side rooms for prayer and excluded from leadership. But el-Marsafy is one of hundreds of professional women who are memorizing the Koran and is even teaching at Cairo's al-Sadiq Mosque. "We're taking Islam to the new world," el-Marsafy says. "We can do everything everyone else does. We want to move forward too."

The young are in the vanguard. A graduate in business administration and a former banker, el-Marsafy donned the hijab when she was 26, despite fierce objections from her parents. (Her father was an Egyptian diplomat, her mother a society figure.) But last year, el-Marsafy's mother, now in her 60s, began wearing the veil too. That is a common story. Forty years ago, Islamic dress was rare in Egypt. Today, more than 80% of women are estimated to wear the hijab, and many put it on only after their daughters did.

Piety alone is not the explanation for the change in dress. "The veil is the mask of Egyptian woman in a power struggle against the dictatorship of men," says Nabil Abdel Fattah of Cairo's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and author of The Politics of Religion. "The veil gives women more power in a man's world." Ziada, the human-rights activist, says the hijab--her headscarves are in pinks, pastels, floral prints and plaids, not drab black--provides protective cover and legitimacy for her campaigns.

Waiting for ObamaThe ferment in the Muslim world has a range of implications for President Barack Obama's outreach to Islam. Gallup polls in Islamic societies show that large majorities both reject militants and have serious reservations about the West. "They're saying, 'There's a plague on both your houses,'" says Richard Burkholder Jr., director of Gallup's international polls. Many young Muslims are angry at the outside world's support of corrupt and autocratic regimes despite pledges to push for democracy after 9/11.

"Most of the young feel the West betrayed its promises," says Dhillon, of the Brookings Institution. Muslims fume that a few perpetrators of violence have led the outside world to suspect a whole generation of supporting terrorism. "The only source of identity they have is being attacked," Dhillon says. The post-9/11 generation has been further shaped by wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza, all of which Washington played a direct or indirect role in.

Although he is the first U.S. President to have lived in the Muslim world and to have Muslim relatives and a Muslim middle name, Obama is likely to face skepticism even among those who welcomed his election. In an open letter on the day of his Inauguration, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference appealed for a "new partnership" with the Obama Administration. "Throughout the globe, Muslims hunger for a new era of peace, concordance and tranquility," wrote Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the conference. He then pointedly added, "We firmly believe that America, with your guidance, can help foster that peace, though real peace can only be shared--never imposed."

That is the key. Gallup polls show that by huge margins, Muslims reject the notion that the U.S. genuinely wants to help them. The new Administration, with a fresh eye on the world, wants to bolster the position of the U.S. But "Obama will have a narrow window to act," says Burkholder, "because the U.S. has failed so often in the past."

Ask Naif al-Mutawa, a clinical psychologist from Kuwait. Al-Mutawa is the publisher of The 99, glossy comic books popular from Morocco to Indonesia, with 99 male and female superheroes, each imbued with godly qualities such as mercy, wisdom and tolerance. In a recent article for the Chicago Tribune, Obama's hometown paper, al-Mutawa recounted a conversation with his father about his newborn son. Al-Mutawa's grandfather had recently died, and he expected his father to ask him to keep the name in the family. Instead, his father suggested the child be named after Obama. "I was stunned," al-Mutawa wrote. "Instead of asking me to hold on to the past, my conservative Arab Muslim father was asking me to make a bet on the future."

But al-Mutawa opted against it. "I want to see results, not just hope, before naming my children after a leader," he wrote. Such pragmatism is typical of the Muslim world's soft revolutionaries. They believe that their own governments, the Islamist extremists and the outside world alike have all failed to provide a satisfying narrative that synthesizes Islam and modernity. So they are taking on the task themselves. The soft revolution's combination of conservative symbols, like Islamic dress, with contemporary practices, like blogging, may confuse outsiders. But there are few social movements in the world today that are more important to understand.

Wright's most recent book is Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

Stuart Levey’s War

2008-11-02T09:21:00.000-08:00

By ROBIN WRIGHT
November 2, 2008
It has been almost 30 years since the last shah, with a small jar of Iranian soil in his hand and the empress by his side, flew into exile, ending 2,500 years of dynastic rule and a valuable American alliance. The United States vowed to “honor the will” of Iran’s people, and its ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, mused that Ayatollah Khomeini might be hailed as “somewhat of a saint, when we get over the panic.” Over the next nine months, however, young zealots twice seized the American Embassy and its diplomats, a harbinger of tensions to come. Washington has struggled to figure out what to do about Tehran ever since. Fear still defines policy.

Iran will be perhaps the most daunting strategic challenge for a new American president. There is no shortage of problems elsewhere: America is overextended in Iraq, underdeployed in Afghanistan, constrained on Pakistan and stymied on the Arab-Israeli conflict. But Iran is different. It has become the superpower in the region where the United States has invested the most manpower, money, blood and prestige. Washington can’t make enduring progress in the Middle East or South Asia without a denouement in the long showdown with Iran.

But what tools does Washington have? Since 1979, five presidents have failed to influence, engage or outwit Iran. The Carter administration accepted the revolution — then took in the shah, which led Iranians to suspect that Washington wanted to restore the monarchy, as it had in 1953. When radicals took the embassy, Washington froze Iran’s assets and broke off relations. The Reagan administration put Iran on the terrorism list after Lebanese Shiite suicide bombers struck two American diplomatic offices and a Marine barracks in Beirut — then sent envoys to Tehran to swap arms for hostages abducted in Lebanon. The first Bush administration promised “good will begets good will,” then isolated Tehran once it helped free the last hostages in Beirut. When Iran offered a lucrative petroleum deal to an American company, the Clinton administration banned the import of Iranian oil, but it later lifted an embargo on Iranian caviar, carpets and pistachios to signal a potential opening. The current Bush administration worked closely with Iran on Afghanistan after 9/11, then labeled it part of the “axis of evil.” It orchestrated four United Nations sanctions resolutions, then offered talks and trade if Tehran stopped enriching uranium that could be used in a nuclear weapon.

In short, each American administration since 1979 has been driven to such distraction by Iran that it has had to continually revise its own policies. Can a new president do better?

He will inherit few effective tools. Diplomacy is, at the moment, going nowhere. Efforts in the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency have done little to prevent Iran from growing ever closer to acquiring the capacity to manufacture nuclear fuel. At the same time, there is very little genuine enthusiasm in Washington today for a military option in Iran. Other endeavors have had limited impact. Last year, Congress approved an astonishing $400 million for intelligence operations against Iran, but senior officials acknowledge that covert actions — primarily aid to ethnic proxies and broadcasts into Iran — are only an irritant to its security services. American officers have actually had trouble finding effective ways to spend much of the money. In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. Special Forces have focused on the Quds Force, Iran’s covert military wing, and its local agents. Dozens have been detained; truckloads of Iranian arms have been uncovered. Tehran has been forced to adapt its tactics, alter routes, pull back some of its people. But again, U.S. officials concede, the United States is unlikely to fully curb Iran’s involvement in its two neighbors, parts of which once belonged to Persia and share either a language or a religion.

What remains, in one form or another, is the idea of sanctions. Over the decades, Washington has embargoed imports from Iran, forbidden visas for officials and even sanctioned the entire Revolutionary Guard Corps — the first time the United States has ever sanctioned a section of another country’s military. But each effort has fallen short. Energy-hungry China now buys Iran’s oil in huge quantities. Tehran has found other outlets for trade and travel. And sanctions are slow to take effect.

One new concept, however, has begun to get Tehran’s attention. In January 2006, Stuart Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the Treasury Department, was having breakfast in Bahrain when he noted a local newspaper article about a big Swiss bank that cut off business with Tehran. He clipped the article. It gave him an idea.
Governments traditionally focus on actions they can enforce themselves. Reading about the Swiss bank, Levey decided it was time to mobilize the private sector, starting with the world’s banks, to join the effort to sanction Iran. His idea was to prevent a country reliant on global trade — as an ancient empire, a station on the Silk Road across Asia and a modern petroleum powerhouse — from being able to do business outside its borders. “That could spark the right internal debate in Iran,” Levey told me when we met in his spacious Washington office, which was painted hunter green and decorated with collections of vintage American currency. Since that breakfast in Bahrain, he has managed to persuade the U.S. government to back his project; he has also made a lot of enemies in Tehran and created a policy legacy that the next president will have to deal with.

The best place to get a feeling for the challenge Iran poses to any sanctions program is Dubai, where Levey spent a great deal of time refining his approach. The cosmopolitan emirate, situated near the mouth of the Persian Gulf, is famed for an indoor ski slope and a man-made island in the shape of a palm tree, with villas for the superrich on each frond. But Dubai has also become the latest battleground for Iran and the United States, so in the late summer heat, I walked the concrete path along Dubai Creek, a grimy inlet that winds through a section of town long predating today’s slick skyscrapers. Old wooden dhows, each painted the traditional baby blue and white, were moored four and five abreast for more than a mile along the wharf. Crews using carts were hustling to load televisions and appliances, food and toys, tires and even cars to ferry to Iran.

Dubai’s citizens, unlike Iranians, are mostly Sunni and Arab. Yet trade across the gulf has gone on so long that many of Dubai’s elite, including members of the emir’s inner circle, are of Iranian descent. Each major change in Iran creates a new wave of migrants: merchants left in the 19th century to avoid Persia’s new tariffs; traditional families fled in the 1930s after the modernizing monarchy banned the chador; modern-minded Iranians left after the 1979 Islamic revolution forced women back into the chador.

The biggest migration, however, began five years ago, in anticipation of sanctions and other U.S. pressures. Thousands of Iranian businesses simply set up local offices, opened bank accounts and imported goods from abroad to Dubai. When wares arrived, they were turned around and sent to Iran by dhow, container ship or air. “The best place to do business in Iran,” an Iranian businessman quipped, “is in Dubai.” Dubai now has as many Iranians as it does its own citizens. Trade has steadily grown; according to Nasser Hashempour, vice president of the Iranian Business Council in Dubai, it topped $14 billion last year.

On my first day in Dubai, I had lunch at the Iranian Club, a compound with a sports facility, stadium, theater and hotel. The stadium is where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke last year. The hotel’s lobby had separate clocks for Tehran and Dubai, a half-hour apart. A manager’s office was decorated with pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader.

I later stopped at the Iranian mosque, now being expanded, across from the Iranian Hospital, which has tended to many of Dubai’s royals. I visited the Spice Market and chatted with Iranian merchants. At American University, I was told, Iranians are the second-largest group in the student body. They’re also among the biggest buyers and flippers of Dubai real estate. My hotel overlooking Dubai Creek had an Iranian clientele, an Iranian sports channel available in the rooms and an annex with Iranian-run businesses. It was within two blocks of Tehran Restaurant, Iranian shops where Farsi was more common than Arabic and several Iranian banks.

“There are so many Iranians here,” Hashempour said with a chuckle, “that we tell a joke: When people in Dubai are asked to pray for rain, it ends up raining in Iran.” Since 2003, the number of Iranians in the United Arab Emirates has doubled to more than 450,000, he told me, and the number of Iranian businesses quadrupled to almost 10,000. Most are in Dubai, giving it the world’s second-largest concentration of Iranian expatriates (after California).

Because Dubai has no oil, unlike the United Arab Emirates’ other sheikdoms, it has survived on trade — from its old wharf on the creek to the high-tech Jebel Ali, one of the world’s largest ports. Most traffic — including Israeli cargo — is for re-export elsewhere. At least 20 percent goes to Iran. So, despite sanctions, Iran’s shelves are well stocked, even with American goods. Maytag refrigerators, Diesel clothing and Victoria’s Secret lingerie are quite popular. Legal American exports to Iran — from clothing and cigarettes to musical instruments and bull semen, all considered agricultural, educational or humanitarian goods and thus exempt from sanctions — increased tenfold during the Bush administration.

“The easiest thing to do in the world today is trade,” the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told me over the summer when I met him in New York City. “Economic advantages attract partners. Right now, a number of American companies are working with Iran. But because of their conditions, I can’t give their names.”

Iranians now have an estimated $300 billion in assets in tiny Dubai alone. Emiratis profit handsomely from these ties: outside Dubai’s new free-trade zone, entrepreneurial foreigners need local partners, who must hold 51 percent of any business. Citizens of Dubai can earn up to $100,000 annually just by putting their names on a license, leaving the work to the Iranians. Iranian money is not alone in driving Dubai’s growth, one U.S. official told me, but there’s so much Iranian money in property, investment and trade that it’s hard to cut off. “Dubai,” he said, “is not going to shoot itself in the foot financially” for the sake of sanctions. Dubai and Iran are now so economically interdependent, local analysts told me, that the city-state has become to Iran something like what Hong Kong is to China. Sanctions seem only to strengthen such ties.

Stuart Levey says he thought his new sanctions could succeed where so many had failed. But he knew his idea might be a tough sell. He was not part of the Bush administration’s inner circle. Some officials still mispronounce his name. (It rhymes with “Chevy,” a Treasury official advised me.) In February 2006, his colleagues in the Treasury Department persuaded Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to let him travel with her to the Middle East, and he hoped to make his pitch at some point along the way. He waited, stop after stop; he spent most flights chatting with his seatmate, Gen. Raymond Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq who was then the Pentagon liaison with the State Department. “I did, often, feel like a fifth wheel,” Levey recalled. Finally, on the way home, he was summoned to Rice’s private cabin to lay out his seven-point proposal.

Levey’s pitch was simple: Banks were only as reputable as their clients’ practices. And the reputations of banks that did business with Iran were at risk as long as Iran financed extremists and pursued missile and nuclear technology. More basically, he argued, Iran had bad banking habits, with little oversight to prevent money laundering. It had even begun asking foreign banks to remove traces of a transaction’s ties to Iran, a practice known as “stripping.”
Levey’s idea was to press banks not to do business with Iran until it complied with international standards. Rice bought in. “She was thrilled,” Levey wrote in an e-mail message to his staff from the plane. “She especially liked options 1, 2, 6 and, if necessary, 7. . . . Truly, this one hour made the whole trip worthwhile.”

“It gave us a new lever,” Rice later told me. “It’s not sanctions in the traditional sense.” Levey has since made more than 80 foreign visits of his own to talk to more than five dozen banks. Several countries required multiple trips to reassure suspicious (or just annoyed) governments about American intentions — and then to persuade the banks. Levey offered specifics. U.S. intelligence, he told them, had traced $50 million transmitted by Iran’s Bank Saderat through a London subsidiary to a charity affiliated with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Saderat, which has 3,400 offices worldwide, is Iran’s equivalent of Citibank. Its Lebanon branch, Levey said, also supposedly sent millions of dollars to Palestinian extremists.

The Treasury Department then started blacklisting Iran’s biggest banks, urging other nations to follow suit. In 2006, Saderat was barred from direct or indirect business with U.S. banks. In early 2007, the department sanctioned Bank Sepah for financing projects to develop missiles that could carry nuclear weapons. (Sepah, meaning “army,” was established with money from Iran’s military pension fund and is now associated with Revolutionary Guard projects.) The Treasury Department then blacklisted Bank Melli, Iran’s largest bank, for supposedly helping to finance defense industries under U.N. sanctions.

Iran has angrily denied illicit activity. Its banks pledged compliance with international practices. Tehran complained to the International Monetary Fund. Some banks even wrote to the Treasury Department to protest. Iran’s Central Bank governor spoke of “financial terrorism.” Yet the innovative efforts have spread. Actions against Iranian banks became a feature of Security Council sanctions resolutions, beginning in 2006. Last June, the European Union blacklisted Melli and froze its assets. Last month, Australia sanctioned Melli and Saderat, while the U.S. blacklisted the Export Development Bank of Iran, which it claimed had taken over many of Sepah’s accounts and provided services for missile programs. The Treasury Department is also scrutinizing Iran’s Central Bank and considering blacklisting it too, which could undermine not only the country’s banking system but also international support for the U.S. campaign.

The momentum has surprised even Levey, a Harvard-educated lawyer who once specialized in white-collar criminal defense. Big banks in Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Italy curbed business with Iran, even with longstanding clients. Only a few would admit it; most prefer to silently go along and keep their options open. “They’re not happy with what’s happening,” a European diplomat told me. “They complain about U.S. pressure, but accept it. They hope it will pass soon.”

Even banks in Muslim countries, from Bahrain to Malaysia, have cut back their Iran business, bankers told me. Most surprising has been the shift by several Chinese banks. “We haven’t had Chinese banks tell me that they won’t do deals with Iran,” Levey told me. “They just stop.”
So far, more than 80 banks have curtailed business with Iran. A European bank official told me its business dropped from hundreds of millions of dollars annually to zero. A Middle East banker said his institution no longer did business with the sanctioned banks. Gulf bankers said medium- and long-term credit for development and trade was drying up. Banks Saderat, Melli and Sepah — which together serviced 80 percent of Iran’s international trade — were losing customers and struggling to find new banking relationships, despite many offices abroad. (None of these sources wanted to be identified as cooperating with the U.S. Treasury Department.) The private sector has proved “quicker to respond” than governments, Rice said. “This really relies on the kind of self-interest — to protect their reputation and protect their investment.”

“Stuart Levey’s war is like ‘Charlie Wilson’s War,’ ” a U.S. official said over coffee in the State Department cafeteria, referring to a former Texas congressman’s campaign to change policy on Afghanistan, a saga made into a movie. “It’s the most direct and aggressive stuff we’ve got going. It delivers.”

The Treasury Department also galvanized global groups. The Financial Action Task Force — the world’s financial watchdog representing the 34 biggest economies — warned that Iran poses a “significant vulnerability” for the world’s financial system. And the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including 30 of the world’s richest nations, has twice lowered Iran’s credit risk — to a 6 on a 7-point scale.
Iran has noticed. On his final day in office, last April, the ousted finance minister, Davoud Danesh Jaffari, complained bitterly about Levey. “We had embarked on a serious and breathtaking game of chess with America’s Treasury Department,” he told his staff. “They had assigned one of their Zionist deputies to halt the Iranian economy. This person would personally travel to many countries around the world. He would use incentives and encouragement to request cooperation against Iran, and if he failed to get any results he would use threats to pursue his goal.”

Treasury officials deny foreign banks were warned that their access to the U.S. financial system was in peril if they didn’t cooperate on Iran. “We never threaten,” Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. told me. “We talk about how important it is not to violate the rules and engage in illicit transactions.” Foreign bankers, however, insisted that threats were always implicit.

The financial squeeze on Iran has had a ripple effect. Iran has the world’s second-largest natural-gas reserves, after Russia. The world’s largest natural-gas field is shared by Iran and Qatar. Development of Iran’s share has been dragging on for years. “Qatar cut a deal quickly and was on its merry way,” said Fareed Mohamedi, an executive in the Washington offices of PFC Energy. “But Tehran never had the funding or technology to develop the gas field independently.” Iran played hardball with foreign firms over development contracts. It wanted to pay them in oil rather than cash. Then came banking pullouts. “We’ve been extremely effective at dissuading multinational oil companies from going into Iran,” said Cliff Kupchan, a former State Department official now at the Eurasia Group who has visited Iran. “Like with the international banks, we’ve invoked reputation risks. That really cramped the Iranian energy sector and could, more or less, impair the gas sector for the foreseeable future. They say they will do a lot of it themselves, but their technological capabilities are uncertain, at best.’

Ordinary businesses have been hard hit, too, according to Western officials and Iranians. Big companies and small bazaaris — as traditional merchants are called in Iran — are increasingly forced to pay for imports in advance, in cash. Exporters are losing clients; raw materials for nonoil industries are harder to pay for. Boutique banks in Europe and Asia have filled some of the vacuum, at hefty costs, although U.S. officials suggest the global economic crisis may scare them away from Iran, too.

Levey’s campaign has coincided with Iran’s own crisis. In his 2005 presidential campaign, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed to put Iran’s oil wealth on every dinner table. But his populist policies have flopped. Calling interest rates “the root cause of injustice,” Ahmadinejad twice ordered banks to lower them, first to 12 percent and then to 10 percent — while inflation has gone as high as 30 percent. The dollar, worth 70 rials at the revolution, is today worth 9,600. Iranians gripe that produce prices have tripled over the past two years while housing prices have doubled.

Ahmadinejad has faced unusual public criticism from senior clerics, former chief nuclear negotiators, former speakers of Parliament and several economists. The finance minister who called Levey a Zionist deputy chastised his own leadership in the same speech for having “no plan for the future.” The president retorted that Iran needed a “culture of martyrdom” to solve its economic problems. He has fired six cabinet ministers with economic portfolios and two Central Bank governors. Since June, his government has temporarily banned two newspapers for publishing articles “harmful to the economy.” And last month, Iran’s bazaaris shuttered their shops to protest against new tariffs, forcing the regime to back down.

For the first time in 30 years, U.S. officials contend, Washington has found a tangible way to pressure Iran. Whatever happens with the Bush administration’s diplomatic or intelligence efforts, this is the program most likely to be continued by the next administration because it has bipartisan support.

And Levey is continuing to pick new battlefronts. In September, the Treasury Department sanctioned Iran’s national shipping company and affiliates in 10 countries for falsifying documents and for transporting cargo on behalf of entities tied to weapons of mass destruction by the United Nations. Treasury officials say the insurance industry is next. “This is one of the most powerful actions that can be taken, short of military action,” Paulson told me. “It’s not a knockout punch, but it is effective.”

It’s no coincidence that Levey has visited Dubai eight times, or that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have both stopped there over the past 18 months, or that Bush hosted Dubai’s emir, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, at Camp David this summer. The ultimate success of Levey’s scheme — and the precedent it could set — depend heavily on Dubai.
In its quest to be a global financial center, Dubai has pledged to honor U.N. sanctions. It’s trying to shed the image of a way station for arms merchants and extremists. A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, ran a black market through Dubai, funneling sensitive technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Dubai was a money-transfer center for Al Qaeda, and 11 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers traveled via Dubai.

Despite the strong Iranian presence in Dubai, new restrictions are taking a toll. Of the 48 international, local and family banks in Dubai, all but a handful have cut off new business with Iranian banks cited in U.N. resolutions, said Hamad Buamim, director general of the Dubai Chamber of Commerce. Potential risks are too high. “It’s psychological,” he told me. The emirates have also set up a joint task force with the United States to sift through Iranian-run businesses in Dubai to uncover front companies for Iranian military, government or business entities sanctioned in U.N. resolutions, officials said. At least 30 have been shut down and dozens put on a watch list.

Visas and work permits for Iranians have dried up. “Registering a new company with an Iranian partnership is almost impossible,” said Hashempour, the Iranian Business Council vice president. When Iranian-run companies import goods, the wait in customs has gone from hours to days, even weeks. Passengers on hundreds of weekly flights between Iran and Dubai go through Terminal 2, where iris scans are taken — a practice not used at Terminal 1 for flights from Europe and the United States. Iran formally complained recently that its citizens were being mistreated, “obstructed” and detained in Dubai.

The emirates do not, however, want to be the pioneer in a new “sanctions of the willing,” I was often told. They have not adopted Washington’s blacklist. Several officials expressed frustration with American strong-arming. “Sometimes, yes, we feel that the United States is asking too much,” said Sultan bin Nasser al-Suwaidi, governor of the Central Bank. “They want results to happen immediately, yesterday instead of today or tomorrow. They are demanding. This is what I said to Stuart Levey: ‘You shouldn’t expect it can produce miracles in a short time.’ ”
The Achilles’ heel of U.S. strategy, of course, is oil. It has provided Iran with a huge cushion to absorb financial shocks. Iran’s budget is pegged to a per-barrel oil price of about $60 (though actual spending is somewhat higher), at a time when oil has gone as high as $147. Gary Hufbauer, co-author of “Economic Sanctions Reconsidered” and a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told me that banking sanctions are effective, but the odds are still against current sanctions convincing Tehran to change its behavior or cooperate on its nuclear program. The Peterson report concluded: “It is hard to bully a bully with economic measures,” especially against “large targets that are strong, stable, hostile and autocratic.”

It is also possible that the Levey strategy could backfire. Iranians carp at their government over the economy, but such is the Iranian way. “If the Prophet Muhammad were to govern Iran, people would be critical,” said an Iranian businessman who commutes to Dubai. “We are a very demanding people.” The clampdown is uniting many disaffected Iranians around their government, just as they rallied when Saddam Hussein invaded in 1980, said Hashempour. Small-businesses owners have been hit hardest. Meanwhile the state, the Revolutionary Guard’s growing business empire and quasi-government foundations dominate up to 80 percent of business in Iran and are most able to weather the financial storm.

“Yes, they can stop a guy in the Spice Market from getting a letter of credit,” said an Iranian-American investment banker in Dubai who met with Levey. “That’s not fomenting opposition. The guys who are hurting are in the business community. Yes, they hate Ahmadinejad, but they hated him from the beginning. The basic flaw is [the idea] that people who are unhappy with the government can do anything. If the goal is to stop Iran from developing a nuclear capability, nothing that has happened here will achieve that objective.”

Tradition also provides alternatives for those pressed by the lack of access to international credit. Hawala, Arabic for “transfer,” is an informal version of Western Union dating back to the eighth century; it was used initially to avoid bandits. The system is based on trust. To get money to a relative in another city or country, one person gives money to a local hawala. For a small fee, he gets a code word or password to give the relative. The hawala then contacts a trusted friend or agent in the other city. The relative picks up the money upon providing the correct code word. At year’s end, hawalas settle their own accounts. Hawalas are making a big comeback among traders doing business with Iran.

On two scorched mornings in August, I wandered Dubai Creek to talk to dhow crews and check their cargo to Iran. I was on the creek in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, when the world was trying to squeeze Iran into a cease-fire. Dhows then carried vast amounts of American goods. Many still do, but the biggest share of cargo now is Chinese. Economists and dhow captains told me Iranian trade is increasingly looking East.

Dhows thrive off sanctions. But the sun-wizened seafarers thought Washington was making a political mistake. “I may look dirty, but I watch TV and read,” said an engineer on the Ramseh Shams. He was a burly man with disheveled hair, a sweat-stained T-shirt and shorts with an image of Bozo the Clown on them. “The Yankees don’t know who we are,” he declared, as crewmates listened. “Ahmadinejad is not Iran. We are people who love our country even if we’re against our government. It’s the soil we love. Ahmadinejad will be gone in four years. We will not. The United States has lost its sanity in the Middle East. The bully who strong-arms in this region does not last.”

Levey’s campaign may have had a broader punitive impact than any other action against Iran. But sanctions take time. International sanctions on the illegal white-minority government in Rhodesia took 15 years to really bite; and only when South Africa cut Rhodesia off, in its own political self-interest, did the regime begin to collapse.
There is probably not that much time in the case of Iran. The clock on Iran’s nuclear program is ticking faster. Rival projections suggest Tehran might be able to develop a nuclear capacity between 2010 and 2015. The clock on sanctions is moving much more slowly. Levey acknowledged huge hurdles. “But sitting in my place, we have an obligation to use every tool available to us to solve this problem peacefully, and that’s what we’re doing,” he told me.
A senior U.S. official acknowledged as much. “This is not a two- or three- or four-year plan,” he said. “If people are realistic, it’s a 10- or 15-year plan. Of all available options, it seems to me the most sensible thing to do. In the meantime you try to do other things and just hope you can head them off at the pass.”

The ultimate glitch in Levey’s campaign, however, may be that the hard-liners now in power flourish under siege. “I call them weeds who grow in the dark because they thrive in isolation,” reflected Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “You want to send a signal to the Iranians that belligerence only isolates them and reaps no rewards. But they’re like Fidel Castro; they don’t want a U.S. presence or to open up to the world. It would open up the floodgates against them.”

Because Stuart Levey’s war may result in only limited victories, a growing array of voices — from a former general in the U.S. military’s Central Command to former Bush administration staff members — is calling on the next president to reach out to Iran in direct dialogue. Some support the so-called “grand bargain”: negotiating over all diplomatic, economic and security issues and eventually re-establishing U.S.-Iran ties. A robust rapprochement with Iran still seems unlikely any time soon. But to advance American interests in the region, the next president will have to think more imaginatively than the five presidents whose policies have fallen short for three decades.

Why I Have New Hope for The Mideast

2008-03-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

March 2, 2008

By Robin Wright

In 2006, three years after the Iraq invasion, I got so tired of the divisive debate in Washington about the future of the Middle East that I went back to the region I've covered since 1973 and listened instead to the people who live there. After traveling for the better part of a year from Rabat to Tehran, I came away surprisingly buoyed.

Oh sure, the Middle East is more volatile than it was at the beginning of the Bush administration: The Arab-Israeli peace process isn't going anywhere. Iraq remains mired in ethnic tensions, religious rivalries and Islamic extremism -- and still has only limited electricity. Iran is angrily defiant toward the United Nations over its nuclear program. Lebanon teeters again.

Yet in the early 21st century, a budding culture of change is creatively challenging the status quo -- and the extremists. New public voices, daring publications and noisy protests across two dozen countries are giving shape to a vigorous, if disjointed, search for alternatives to the autocratic regimes and imperious monarchies that have proved they're out of sync with their people. Dissident judges in Cairo, rebel clerics in Tehran, satellite television station owners in Dubai, the first female parliamentary candidates in Kuwait, young techies in Jeddah, intrepid journalists in Beirut, and bold businessmen in Damascus are carving out new space for political action.

It's a hard slog for them all. Obstinate governments are ruthlessly repressing them; extremists are targeting them. Together, those forces cut short the Arab Spring three years ago, when millions of Iraqis voted in free elections, Lebanese protesters ended Syria's 29-year occupation and democracy movements such as Egypt's "Enough" challenged autocrats across the region. The Bush administration's bungling and backtracking on democracy hasn't helped much, either.
But societies have not gone back to square one. The issue in the Middle East is no longer whether to seek political change. It's how to make it happen.

"In the Arab world, the status quo is not sustainable," reflected Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister. "What worked 40 years ago -- when the state could decide things and expect people to follow -- does not work now. Unless the state is responsive and aware, it is in for major trouble."

That, I found, is only one of many lessons of the new Middle East.

* * *

Two decades ago when I roamed the region, I sought out clandestine cells as the barometer of opposition. Now I look for computer nerds -- the pajamahedeen, or pajama warriors, who wield computers instead of roadside bombs. They personify Lesson 1 in the changing Middle East: The opposition is more open, ambitious, imaginative and stubborn than ever. And the YouTube generation has become a whole new political class.

"Governments have a new kind of opponent," reflected 33-year-old Egyptian Wael Abbas. His blog has posted cellphone videos of police brutality -- including one of a detainee writhing in pain as police sodomized him with a broomstick -- to hold President Hosni Mubarak's government accountable for abuse. Started in 2004, Abbas's blog was garnering up to 30,000 hits a day, jumping to 45,000 daily during a crisis, by 2007.

"We are not bound by government rules, like political parties. We can use the language of freedom," he told me. "We offer an alternative voice, especially for the young." Abbas and his brethren in Iran, Lebanon, Morocco and elsewhere are forcing governments to respond to their complaints, even as they try to silence them. In Egypt, two police officers were prosecuted for abusing the detainee with the broomstick.

* * *

In countries long ruled by a single party or single family, I picked up Lesson 2: There is no longer a single truth, in either ideology or religion, and challenges to the status quo are coming from unlikely quarters.

Hadi Khamenei, a Shiite cleric, campaigned across Iran and in his newspaper against the idea of a supreme leader who has veto power over legislation, presidential decrees and judicial decisions and who can even run for office. "The most important thing we're looking for today in Iran is the rule of law," he told me. "And that means no one, whatever his position, is above it."

Because of his activism, Khamenei has been barred from running for office, his paper has been banned, and he was hospitalized after being attacked by religious vigilantes. "Unfortunately for the rest of us," he said, "there are still people at the top who don't accept that basic right."
Khamenei should know. His older brother just happens to be Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

* * *

In countries where pro-Western activists were once the most outspoken, I found Lesson 3: Old Cold War enemies have become unexpected allies -- and the pluckiest agitators for change.

Decades ago, when the Middle East was a battlefield between U.S. and Soviet interests, the West encouraged Islamic movements to foil Moscow's influence. But with Islamic parties on the rise, the ultimate irony is that many of the secular activists now taking the biggest risks, organizing the boldest protests and penning the most scathing criticisms are reformed Marxists.

Riad al-Turk is the Nelson Mandela of Syria. He was locked in a windowless underground cell about the length of his body without furniture or a toilet for 18 years. He kept from going mad by using uncooked grains of rice from his evening soup to etch geometric designs on the floor. "You must accept hell as a price to pay for remaining faithful to your convictions," he later reflected.

After his release in 1998, Turk went at it again, lashing out at the Assad dynasty in Damascus for "relying on terror" and demanding that it move "from despotism to democracy." In 2001, he was arrested a fourth time. Freed in 2005 at age 75, the reformed Marxist refused to be silent, even while acknowledging that he was only a starting point.

"The regime will eventually collapse on its own, due to isolation internally and internationally," he told me. "That's what happened in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. That's what will happen here."

* * *

To understand political trends, I once turned to intellectuals and elites. Now I look to ordinary people galvanized out of apathy to fight for change. Lesson 4: Watch out for the soccer moms.

That's how I'd describe Ghada Shahbender in Egypt. A middle-aged mother of four athletic teenagers who was in the throes of a divorce, Shahbender had never joined a party or voted -- until May 2005, when she became infuriated by televised pictures of police watching as thugs beat women, old and young, on referendum day. A week later, she went to her first protest.

"An elderly woman turned to me and said she thought I was new and did I have 100 [Egyptian] pounds," Shahbender recalled. " 'Why 100 pounds?' I asked. She told me, 'That's what you need for bail.' "

Shahbender didn't flinch. With friends, she formed We're Watching You to monitor elections for president and parliament in 2005. The group chronicled more than 1,000 violations, complete with video of police firing tear gas and live ammunition at voters. With international observers barred, We're Watching You became the leading source for the media and foreign governments on the fraud in the contests, which were won, again, by Mubarak and his ruling party.

Shahbender has since been invited to monitor elections elsewhere in the region, has sued the government for not complying with an international treaty on corruption, and has started Kid-mocracy, a competition to help teenagers learn about constitutions. Last year she brought the winners to Washington.

* * *

While it's conventional wisdom to view political Islam as part of the problem in the Middle East, it may actually be part of the solution. Lesson 5: Pay attention to the moderate Islamists; many are seeking compromise.

Saadeddine Othmani, a psychiatrist-turned-politician, heads Morocco's Justice and Development Party, a movement he compares to Europe's Christian Democrats. Since it began competing in parliamentary elections in 1997, the party has adopted the earthly challenges of poverty, corruption and constitutional reform as its prime causes. There's no talk of imposing sharia, or Islamic law, or of overthrowing the government. Indeed, the only picture in its Rabat headquarters is of King Mohammed VI.

"Islam has no fixed form of governance. Instead this has been left for human creativity. . . . The people's will is the decisive factor," Othmani told me. "Our approach is to have gradual progress and avoid haste and shortcuts, which is the major mistake committed by many leftists, nationalists and Islamist movements." In elections last fall, amid a field of 33 parties, the Justice and Development Party officially became Morocco's second most popular party.

* * *

Not all of the Middle East's new actors will succeed. For all the signs of promise, the region is still full of shadows.

Democracy is about differences, which are bound to explode once disparate sides of society are free to speak and make demands. Opening new space also does not guarantee who or what will fill it. And all the factors contributing to change make the region susceptible to greater turmoil.

Yet what I found most inspiring in my travels was not the dreams that the outside world has for the people of the Middle East. It was the lofty goals they have set for themselves, and begun -- only begun -- to act on.

U.S. vs. Iran: Cold War, Too

2007-07-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

July 29, 2007

By Robin Wright

After three decades of festering tensions, the United States and Iran are now facing off in a full-fledged cold war.

When the first Cold War began, in 1946, Winston Churchill famously spoke of an Iron Curtain that had divided Europe. As Cold War II begins half a century later, the Bush administration is trying to drape a kind of Green Curtain dividing the Middle East between Iran's friends and foes. The new showdown may well prove to be the most enduring legacy of the Iraq conflict. The outcome will certainly shape the future of the Middle East -- not least because the administration's strategy seems so unlikely to work.

The new Cold War will take center stage this week, as President Bush dispatches Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to the Middle East for a last-ditch appeal to recalcitrant U.S. allies on Iraq. Their pitch to Sunni Arab regimes spooked by the bloc of countries and movements led by Shiite Persian Iran will be simple: Support Iraq as a buffer against Iran or face living under Tehran's growing shadow.

Although the United States and Iran have been adversaries since the 1979 Iranian revolution replaced a monarchy with a rigid theocracy, Washington has felt compelled to isolate Iran more aggressively over the past 18 months, as the Middle East's strategic balance has begun to tilt in Tehran's favor.

In the Palestinian territories, the Iranian-backed radicals of Hamas won the most democratic election ever held in the Arab world in January 2006, then militarily routed their secular, U.S.-backed rivals in Fatah to seize control of the Gaza Strip. In Lebanon last summer, the extremist Shiite militia Hezbollah used Iranian weaponry to engage Israel in the longest war since the Jewish state's creation -- and fought to a draw, despite Israel's vastly superior U.S. weaponry. In Syria, Iran's closest ally lets foreign jihadists cross into neighboring Iraq, funnels Iranian arms to Hezbollah and supports radical Palestinian groups opposed to peace -- undermining Washington's top strategic goals in the region. And in Iraq, Shiite militias armed and trained by Iran have made Baghdad's streets and the fortified Green Zone unsafe, even for the U.S. military.

"The difference now is that Iran is feeling its oats because of the increase in oil prices, Iraq's weakness since the fall of Saddam, and the successes of Hezbollah and Hamas," noted Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who ran the State Department's policy planning shop during Bush's first term. "In contrast, the U.S. is feeling stretched by the very same high oil prices and its difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The roots of Cold War II lie in the Bush administration's decision to remove regimes it considered enemies after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The first two targets were the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- coincidentally, both foes of Iran that had served as important checks on Tehran's power. The United States has now taken on the role traditionally played by Iraq as the regional counterweight to Iran.

"The Iranian coalition has gotten immeasurably stronger in the last five years as its traditional enemies -- Saddam Hussein and the Taliban -- have been taken off the playing field," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and National Security Council official who is now at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center. "With no buffer either east or west, Tehran's influence has naturally grown -- more because of the mistakes of the Americans than any brilliant strategy of the Iranians." Iranians, he noted, now believe that the tide of history is in their favor. "There's a cockiness there," he said.

And that's all before the question of Iran's nuclear intentions -- whether it is using a legal and peaceful nuclear-energy program as cover to develop the world's deadliest weapon -- is factored in.

The Bush administration is now adapting the tactics of the last Cold War to the new one. In the 1940s, the Soviet Union lowered its Iron Curtain to shore up communism in Eastern Europe and prevent penetration from the West. The former Kremlinologists now running U.S. foreign policy, such as Rice and Gates, are trying their own version, with a Green Curtain designed to cut off the bloc of Iranian-linked radicals and protect U.S. allies in the Middle East.

In the new Cold War, the United States and Iran are using eerily familiar tools to undermine each other. Over the past 18 months, Washington has deployed a second carrier battleship group off Iran's coast; orchestrated two U.N. Security Council resolutions sanctioning Iranian financial institutions and military officials; arrested Iranian operatives in Iraq; allocated $75 million for this year and $108 million for next year to promote democracy in Iran; and reportedly begun covert operations that included disinformation campaigns and currency manipulation.

Tehran, in turn, has allegedly increased supplies of roadside bombs, mortars and even 240-mm rockets to Iraqi militias; resupplied Hezbollah after its war with Israel; given Hamas tens of millions of dollars when international aid was cut off after its election; arrested Americans in Iran on charges of undermining Iran's national security; and reportedly provided small arms to its old Taliban enemies to use against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

But the new Cold War won't be as clear-cut as the last one. This time, the issues are not so straightforward, and the proxies don't easily line up. "Unlike the Cold War, when there was a common frame of reference, when we and the Soviets and the residents of the Third World saw the lines drawn in the same way, we don't see the divide today in the same way as many in the Middle East," said Paul Pillar, a former senior Middle East analyst at the National Intelligence Council who is now at Georgetown University.

Added Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: "Where that Green Curtain goes is at the heart of the problem."

In the Palestinian territories, Washington hopes to bolster President Mahmoud Abbas and isolate the Iranian-backed Hamas. Pro-U.S. Arab regimes also want to bolster Abbas -- but so that he can reconcile with Hamas.

In Lebanon, the United States wants to see Hezbollah defanged so that it can no longer threaten Israel or pro-U.S. factions in the Lebanese government. But public opinion polls show that most Lebanese see Hezbollah as a legitimate force defending their country from Israel.

On Iraq, Rice and Gates will have a hard sell, particularly with Saudi Arabia. "Iranophobia will not be enough to get the Saudis to back Iraq," said Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service. "We're saying they need to support Iraq's unity government as a brake on Iran," but the Saudis think the U.S.-backed government of Nouri al-Maliki is helping Iran's fellow Shiites in Iraq while hurting the Saudis' Sunni brethren.

The basic U.S. premise -- isolating regional foes behind the Green Curtain -- is in trouble even among Washington's closest allies. "The United States is trying to define the main line of confrontation as the extremist camp versus the camp of moderation, a division which does not exist," Pillar said. "It may be reflective of our rhetoric and the way Americans see the world, but it is not reflective of the realities in the Middle East."

The geography of Cold War II is also not as neat as that of Cold War I. Some of Iran's proxies (such as Hezbollah) operate in pockets within countries (such as Lebanon) whose governments are aligned with the United States. "The problem with the administration's portrait," Riedel said, "is that it would take multiple Green Curtains."

Those differences aside, there may be at least one striking similarity between Cold War I and Cold War II: the long-haul time frame required to get results. "The idea that it's a Cold War means that the U.S. can't and won't win anytime soon," reflected Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Beirut office. "It involves a long-term policy of containing or undermining enemies -- the model that held between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for 40 years."

After Grief, The Fear We Won't Admit

2004-09-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

By Robin Wright

September 12, 2004

Psychologists say the most intense period of mourning lasts three years. Since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have indeed passed through several stages of grief, from disbelief to anger to a degree of acceptance. Yet, there's still a gnawing fear in our bellies that prevents full recovery. It's a fear that extends, I believe, well beyond Osama bin Laden and the prospects of another attack, and centers instead on our relationship with Islam itself.

Once familiar to most Americans mainly from seventh grade social studies, Islam has now become synonymous in the minds of many with the biggest post-Cold War threat. Even as we struggle to understand it, we're afraid of it. And because of that fear, we're drawing a Green Curtain around the Muslim world, creating an enduring divide.

Figuring out Islam's role in the 21st century is an existential challenge, but one many of us are emotionally unprepared to face. We pretend that we're not prejudiced, that we understand that most Muslims don't support the horrific bloodshed of bin Ladenism. Yet we still view 1.2 billion Muslim people spread throughout 53 countries as a threatening monolith. As long as we make that mistake, America and its allies won't feel safe, no matter how many billions of dollars are poured into security precautions.

Aside from the vital mission of tracking down bin Ladenists, military muscle is not always an effective instrument for moving forward. Nor are tepid diplomatic initiatives aimed at coaxing authoritarian governments into adopting change at a pace and in a manner that they control. There's another strategy that's gaining favor among Mideast experts: Bring Islamic movements and groups into the political process. Give Islamist parties new political space -- wide open space -- to absorb passions and sap anger.

That means accepting, even embracing, the idea that Islam is not the problem, but the way out of a political predicament that has been building quietly for decades. It means not only supporting nationalists, liberals and nascent democrats already on our side in the quest to transform the Middle East but also encouraging Islamists and their parties to participate. Basically, it means differentiating between Islamists and jihadists, and accepting anyone willing to work within a system to change it rather than work from outside to destroy it.

"It's hard to imagine political evolution in the next 20 years that does not include the Islamists," says Ellen Laipson, president of the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank that studies international security issues. "They have established legitimacy and a following and you won't make them disappear overnight by supporting the activities of a small elite of secular modernists. . . . You have to imagine a political space that has both."

Mideast scholars say it's too late to do anything less. The alternative is alienating even more Muslims by excluding them. And alienation -- from closed political systems and corrupt economies -- is what originally drove many Muslims to seek refuge in their mosques.

Including Islamists in government is an uncomfortable idea for those of us in secular societies. It summons up haunting images of Iranian clerics and American hostages, oppressed women and antiquated laws. That's why for years, U.S. governments have accepted Algeria's military, which voided free elections won by Islamic parties, and Hosni Mubarak's suppression of Egypt's Muslim groups. That's shortsighted because perpetuating the status quo will be worse. Now that Islamists have moved from the fringe to the center of political activity, a trend that has accelerated since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they can no longer be excluded.

We have to think outside the prism of the war on terrorism. "Even as it wages a resolute campaign against international terrorism, America should not believe that it is engaged in a fight to the finish with radical Islam," Robert Hutchings, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, wrote in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine. "This conflict is not a clash of civilizations, but rather a defense of our shared humanity and a search for common ground, however implausible that may seem now."

One of the hopeful signs on this third anniversary of 9/11 is the way Americans are emerging from their grief to discuss a more creative course for the future and to more effectively answer the lingering question: What can America do? A growing number of voices on both the right and the left have been emboldened to shape proposals in a broader context.

The United States has tipped its hat to political change with initiatives to promote democracy. As President Bush said in a June speech in Istanbul, "Democratic societies should welcome, not fear, the participation of the faithful."

Yet in practice, the United States still veers away from Islamists. In Iraq, which Washington seeks to turn into a model for the region, U.N. and U.S. envoys deliberately picked politicians mainly from secular parties to assume power after the formal end of the U.S.-led occupation. Despite strong support in opinion polls, Islamist parties were marginalized. Analysts now predict they'll make a comeback in next year's elections and the United States would be wise not to try to prevent it.

"Political debate must encompass Islam if the debate is to be meaningful. Exclusion of the Islamic factor in Arab politics will simply be one-sided and unrealistic in its exclusion of the single greatest force within politics," writes Graham Fuller, a former senior intelligence analyst, in a paper released this month by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The same applies to the wider Islamic world that constitutes 18 percent of the world's people.

In the race to capture the imagination of the vast, alienated middle, hard-line groups need to be operating under the same legal umbrella as more moderate groups -- or they will try to lure the faithful through other means. "It's hard to hand over individual authority to people who are illiberal. What you have to realize is that the objective is to defeat bin Ladenism and you have to start the evolution. Moderate Muslims are not the answer. Shiite clerics and Sunni fundamentalists are our salvation from future 9/11s," says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a Middle East expert and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Transitions away from authoritarian regimes may be messier and more volatile than political transformations elsewhere over the past quarter century. But "Let it roll," Gerecht advises. "Don't walk away. It's part of the process. It's trying to ensure the system is sufficiently open that fundamentalists burn themselves out. You have to rob bin Ladenism of that virulent elixir. If we don't go in that direction, we know all other roads go back to 9/11."

"You want in a Machiavellian way to have fundamentalists do the dirty work," he says. "You want them to take care of the people who slaughtered the children [in Beslan, Russia]. The only way to do that is to have them compete in the political system. It may come off the rails for a while in some places, but even if it does, you will be better off. You don't want fundamentalists to take states by coups d'etat."

The premise behind the new ideas is that activists inspired or protected by religion have stood in for jailed or exiled secular opposition figures in many societies. "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God," Benjamin Franklin once said. And more recently, liberation theologians in Latin America, Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, South Africa's Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Catholic priests in Poland and the Philippines have played pivotal roles in political transformations.

"Conservative and even fundamentalist views of religion are manageable in a plural environment, as shown by a host of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish cases," wrote French scholar Olivier Roy in the new anthology "A Practical Guide to Winning the War on Terrorism." "A pluralist approach allows civil society to reach the cadres of youth who could be ideal targets for radicals and neo-fundamentalist groups."

Attempts to control the pace of change or choose the participants in the political process could invite an even deeper backlash than we face now. America cannot want less for Muslim countries than it wants for the rest of the world. And Muslims must not feel they are bystanders. "In the end, you have to treat Muslims as adults. They have to become responsible for their own fate," says Gerecht.

Based on conversations with Mideast experts, it appears that in the meantime, the United States could do three things. First, hold a genuine two-way dialogue. For all the hand-wringing about ending hatreds, that essential element is missing.

In a speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace last month, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said that the United States must do more with the Islamic world to dispel "destructive myths" about America and to support "voices of moderation." The most striking thing about the speech was that she gave it to an American audience. Asked why no senior U.S. official had given a similar speech in any of the five largest Muslim countries in the three years since Sept. 11, she replied, "That's a good question. Maybe we should."

Dialogue must not just engage people listed in the local U.S. embassy's Rolodex. We need to listen to the bad guys too to understand where the fissures -- and opportunities -- might be.

"Even the hard-core jihadis are having big debates about who exactly the enemy is and . . . about their tactics," says Princeton University Mideast expert Michael Doran, who gets up early each morning to research Islamist and jihadi Web sites. When U.S. contractor Paul Johnson was beheaded in Saudi Arabia "some said it was wrong. Others said, 'Our violence makes us look bad.' One of the most important ideologues, Abu Baseer, a cleric who was an Afghan jihadist, said 'Westerners in our society have protection.' The radicals countered that an apostate state -- Saudi Arabia -- can't grant immunity. But Baseer said, 'That's not right, we haven't thrown traditions out.' Three years after Sept. 11 . . . the debate among them is totally unknown."

A second course of U.S. action would be to use economic tools. Several Muslim countries, including Algeria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Iran and Iraq, are seeking membership in the World Trade Organization. The United States could use WTO membership to induce change and force countries to embrace the rule of law.

Finally, we can embrace our own Islamic identity. Islam, the fastest-growing religion in the United States, is expected to become the second-largest faith in six years. Yet Muslims remain on the fringe. Just ask women who cover their heads or men with beards waiting in the boarding areas of airports.

Immediately after 9/11, Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington and said Islam was not the enemy. This is a noble sentiment, but Muslims must also become part of the mainstream -- a challenge faced throughout the West. For Europeans, the most important battle for Muslim hearts and minds over the next decade will not be fought in the Middle East but in European cities where the numbers of Muslims are growing, as Giles Kepel, a French expert on Islam, says in his new book "The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West." "If European societies are able to integrate these Muslim populations . . . this new generation of Muslims may become the Islamic vanguard of the next decade," he writes.

The unspoken undercurrent behind our failure to do more over the past three years is what former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski calls "a fear that periodically verges on panic that is in itself blind." As we look beyond our grief, we must also get beyond our prejudice and fear.

Iran’s New Revolution

2000-01-01T06:14:00.000-08:00

FOREIGN AFFAIRS
January/February 2000

PROMISES, PROMISES
By Robin Wright

A GENERATION after it seized power, Iran's revolutionary regime is deeply troubled: fractured by intense political divisions, endangered by economic disorder, discredited by rampant corruption, and smothered in social restrictions no longer acceptable to large sectors of its changing population. To the outside world the Islamic Republic of Iran often appears to be at a precipice, its unique theocratic government on the verge of imploding from internal tensions.

Over the past year, its domestic drama has played out visibly, and sometimes violently, in killings by a rogue death squad, newspaper closures, student unrest, political trials, local elections, charges of espionage against the Jewish minority, and as always, relations with the United States.

Yet Iran, often in spite of the theocrats, has begun to achieve one of the revolution's original goals: empowering the people. New social and political movements are blossoming defiantly in ways that put Iran on the cutting edge of the Islamic world on issues ranging from religious reform and cultural expression to women's rights. So, although the theocratic regime that seized power in 1979 is unlikely to survive in its current, austere form because of profound internal problems, the driving force behind the revolution has proven durable and, in the end, adaptable enough to allow Iranians to go out and get for themselves what the theocracy has failed to provide.

DARK HORSES

IRAN'S REVOLUTION was about more than getting rid of an unpopular king or ending 2,500 years of dynastic rule. In the quest for empowerment, the upheaval of 1979 was an extension of earlier challenges to the state's central power: the 1905-11 Constitutional
Revolution that diminished the monarchy's authority, and the nationalist rule between 1951 and 1953 that briefly forced the shah into exile. Both earlier attempts at evolutionary change were ultimately aborted. Thus the coalition of parties seeking a greater say in public life resorted to revolution. Iranians were not alone in trying to end autocratic rule. Iran’s upheaval was part of global change, including the demise of communism in Europe, white rule in Africa, and military dictatorships in Latin America.

But the process of empowerment was hijacked in the early days of the revolt by a clique of Shiite clerics who used their networks, legitimacy, and leadership to unite the disjointed opposition. After the shah's ouster, the coterie around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gradually purged its partners and crafted a theocracy instead of a democracy. Human rights were virtually ignored during the decade-long "First Republic," which lasted from 1979 until Khomeini’s death in 1989. With typical revolutionary excess, the regime's zealots became obsessed with deconstructing the past and winning converts to their cause, both at home and in the region. The fragile new state was also nearly overwhelmed by plummeting oil prices, economic sanctions, international isolation, and the region's bloodiest war in a century. It survived only by crushing dissent, spending its foreign exchange reserves, and tapping into fierce, age-old Persian nationalism.

Nonetheless, seeds of public empowerment were planted and grew. The Construction Jihad (teams of development experts and builders) brought progress in the form of schools, social services, clinics, electricity, television, and roads to the countryside. The revolution particularly excelled in education, in quantity if not always in quality. In the late 1970s, only half of Iran's youth between the ages of six and twenty-four were literate; two decades later, the number had grown to 93 percent—even though the population itself had doubled. Iran succeeded in part because traditional families trusted an Islamic government to educate their children, especially girls. Students also remained in school longer. The number of university graduates soared from 430,000 in the late 1970s to more than 4 million in the late 1990s. This success spurred expectations of a greater role in the system and access to new instruments of progress.

In the "Second Republic," from 1989 to 1997, Iran graduated from reacting against the past to realistically dealing with the present. During President Hashemi Rafsanjani's tenure, the government of God plummeted back to earth—with a thud. The new leadership initially promoted physical reconstruction, economic reform, and a diplomatic thaw. But without the ayatollah*s authority, longstanding political divisions deepened and paralysis set in. Despite a brief try at privatization, including reviving the monarchy's stock market, promises of change remained largely unfulfilled. In the end, the regime's blatantly manipulative tactics kept it from achieving its goals, instead spawning corruption, deepening debt, and social turmoil.

Paradoxically, the very policies that Rafsanjani introduced to win back the support of a war-weary public inadvertently jump-started the empowerment process. The regime sporadically tolerated cultural freedoms and relaxed some of its social restrictions. It also facilitated a consumer spending spree on imports by making credit available.
The outside world soon flooded back in, through satellite dishes, videos, computers, and even textbooks full of ideas. From that point on, the tide of information could no longer be controlled, however hard conservatives and clerics tried.

The Second Republic also overlapped with the end of the Cold War, which Iranians felt deeply because of their shared border with the Soviet Union. The collapse of Soviet rule—in a country with superpower resources—sent a powerful warning about the vulnerability of revolutionary regimes. Finally, Iran's return to peacetime pursuits, its flirtation with pragmatism, and the pressure of social problems all unleashed unusual initiatives, largely outside the government but also within the circles of power and even the clergy.

Iran's theocracy slowly came to recognize that it was endangering its own agenda by ignoring the state's real problems, such as its population policy. In the 1980s, millions of women complied with the theocrats' dictate to breed a new Islamic generation that would defend the revolution. Within seven years, Iran's population jumped from 34 million to more than 50 million; it is now 70 million. The clerics soon realized that soaring numbers were more likely to undo the revolution than to save it, and they introduced one of the world's most extensive family-planning programs. Every form of birth control, from condoms and pills to sterilization, became free. All couples now have to pass a family-planning course before obtaining a marriage license. Thousands of women mobilized by the Health Ministry have gone door-to-door to explain the necessity of birth control. Clerics, preaching the benefits of small family size, have issued fatwas approving everything from intrauterine devices to vasectomies.

Sensing a reluctant realism within the regime, Iran's increasingly savvy population began taking stands, making demands, and even defying the theocrats. In the 1997 presidential election, which had the highest turnout since the Iranian people endorsed revolution a generation earlier, 70 percent of Iran's voters spurned the theocrats' candidate of choice and instead elected a dark-horse cleric named Mohammad Khatami, a former minister of culture and Islamic guidance who was purged in 1992 for "liberalism" and "negligence." The election marked the onset of the "Third Republic" and the burgeoning of what is now a very public fight for empowerment. Its outcome will be determined partly by Khatami s success in restoring the rule of law, fostering a civil society (two of his campaign pledges), and wresting power from the religious superstructure—the theocratic part of Iran's system— that limits the government's powers. But more likely, Iran's future will be decided by the newly energized popular forces that made Khatami's election possible in the first place. Three movements reflect how the revolution is being redefined: daring Islamic reformers, an adventurous film industry, and spirited women’s groups.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

THE MOST INNOVATIVE MOVEMENT in Iran today is the Islamic reformation. Iranian thinkers have injected energy and ideas into a disparate movement, spreading from Egypt to India, that has been struggling for more than a century to reconcile a seventh-century religion with modernity. By using Islam as a popular political idiom, by weaving Islamic tenets into a modern. Western-style constitution, and by putting clerics in charge of the state, Iran became a live test and a venue for debate on the proper relationship between Islam and the modern world. Ironically, the failure of the world's only theocracy to empower its populace provided the biggest boost for new, progressive formulations about the modern Islamic state. Much of the most profound discourse within Islam today is taking place in Iran's newspapers, courtrooms, and classrooms. Even clerics who once held high office and intellectuals who were Khomeini's protégés are now challenging the religion's basic precepts as well as the specifics of theocratic rule.

Tehran was engrossed last autumn in the trial of Abdollah Nouri, a cleric, former Khomeini aide, and editor of the newspaper Khordad who served during the Third Republic as vice president, interior minister, and Tehran city councilor. The Special Court for the Clergy, which operates as an independent agency, charged him with multiple counts of "insulting" Islam, the prophet Muhammad, and Khomeini. Nouri's specific offense was running articles in Khordad that questioned everything from the Islamic concept of eye-for-eye justice to the clergy's automatic right to hold power. At his trial, Nouri, dressed in a white turban and clerical robes, astonished Iranians by taking the stand and denying the court's right to judge him: "I totally reject the court, its membership, and its competence to conduct this trial, and any verdict you reach will have no legitimacy." After his conviction he refused to appeal, on the same grounds. In late November, Nouri was sentenced to five years in prison and was also barred from political activity for five years, a punishment tacitly designed to prevent Khatami's closest ally from running for speaker of the parliament. And Nouri's newspaper was banned, although his staff defiantly pledged to launch another publication—the new way of getting around forced closures.

Six months earlier, Tehran had been absorbed in a similar trial— that of Mohsen Kadivar, a popular young cleric and seminary professor whose sister was an adviser to Khatami and another Tehran city councilor; his brother-in-law was Khatami's minister of culture and Islamic guidance. The Special Court for the Clergy charged him with "disseminating lies and disturbing public opinion" for writing articles advocating the separation of political and religious institutions. Kadivar also dared to compare practices in the Islamic republic with the shah's repressive controls on the freedom of expression and questioned the powers and righteousness of the theocracy. "From both a legal and religious point of view, it's quite permissible to criticize the Supreme Leader or the ruling establishment," he argued. Like Nouri, Kadivar rejected the clergy's right to judge: "Investigation into political and press offenses must be carried out in the presence of a jury and by a qualified court of the judiciary," he told the court. He was convicted and received an eighteen-month sentence.

Kadivar's case gained him celebrity status. Posters of the young cleric, who came from a noted religious family in the city of Shiraz, were plastered all over Tehran. Students held a candlelight vigil in the hills near Evin prison, where he was being held without bail. Chanting "freedom of thought, forever, forever," they released doves as a symbol of liberty. More than 200 journalists also signed a petition that condemned Kadivar's arrest as unconstitutional and called it an "offense" against Iran's writers and intellectuals. These responses to Kadivar's imprisonment reflected a newly emboldened population.

Both trials involved an issue more fundamental than the freedom of expression: the separation of religion and government. In an Islamic society, who has the ultimate power—the elected officials or the clergy? Since Islam is a monotheistic religion that offers not only spiritual values but also a set of rules to govern society, sorting out the allocation of power is critical to any genuine reform. Hence political change and religious reform are often intertwined in Muslim societies.

Over the past five years, Iran's leading philosopher, Abdul Karim Soroush, has fueled public debate by offering a framework—on the basis of faith—to blend Islam and democracy. He argues that to be a true believer, one must come to the faith without coercion or pressure— in other words, freely. That principle is the origin of all other freedoms. He never abandoned the tenets of his faith; he believes that sharia (Islamic law) can be a basis for modern legislation. But he breaks from Iran's theocrats in his declaration that Islamic law is not static, but is flexible and adaptable because it has only begun to be understood by imperfect human beings.

Soroush was a long-time follower of Khomeini, who appointed him to the Committee of the Cultural Revolution to conform university curricula to Islam. But a decade after the revolution, Soroush began to see the Ayatollahs as an instrument of transition, not as the goal. In books, magazine columns, and lectures at the three universities where he taught, Soroush warned that Islam, like any other religion, should never be used to rule a state, because it opens the door to totalitarianism. Often called the Martin Luther of Islam by students, Soroush is also widely popular among intellectuals, reformers, and the clergy. Many of his former students and followers launched new, reformist newspapers—most notably Jameh, Tous, Neshat, and Asr-e Azadegan, or "Era of the emancipators"—all of which were closed down by the judiciary.

The goal of Soroush, Kadivar, Nouri, and other reformers is to be Muslim without being fundamentalist, to be reverent but free, and to find a world-view that is both Islamic and modern. As the only Shiite ruled country, Iran is unique in the Muslim world. Yet the work of Iran's reformers is nonetheless spreading throughout the 53-nation Islamic bloc, the last group of countries to hold out against the wave of democratization that has swept the rest of the world.

CINEMA VERITE

THE FRONTLINE in the conflict over Iran's identity and its future is between artistic freedom and Islamic correctness. Some of the earliest and boldest challenges to the Second Republic came from artists. In a 1994 open letter titled "We Are Writers," 134 writers, poets, journalists, and scholars, including many who had once rallied around the regime, demanded the freedom to associate in a writers' union, noninterference in their personal lives, and an end to censorship. Within months, more than 200 film directors and actors petitioned for an end to the "straitjacket regulations and complicated methods of supervision" of Iran's movie industry, including everything from script approval to the distribution of raw film stock.

Iranian cinema has led a major countercultural revolution since the early 1990s. Despite often ridiculous restrictions, filmmakers have been able to exploit the subtleties of their medium to make bold statements about sensitive political and social issues. Characters are challenging the status quo; plots focus on the shortcomings of the Islamic system; dialogue is extending the boundaries of public discussion. Indeed, few subjects are now off-limits. The White Balloon, one of Iran's most famous post revolution films, jabs at the country's failures to address poverty, racial bias, and child exploitation. Dariush Mehrjui, the father of modern Iranian cinema, wrote a quartet of films—Banoo (1992), Sara (1993), Pari (1995), and Leila (1997)— about the professional and personal plight of women in Islamic society. Each ended with the lead female character defying convention or leaving her husband to head out on her own—a radical move in a society where women must get written permission to leave the country. Mehrjui's Hamoon, ranked the best movie in Iranian history in a 1997 poll of Iranian film critics and audiences, was a dark comedy about modern Iranian life that examined people's fixations with Islamic religious figures. Today's increasingly independent film industry is thoroughly undermining the theocrats' draconian effort to create a new society centered around the devout Shiite. Indeed, the change in the social climate is stark.

In the 1980s, the regime had forced artists and writers into silence or exile. Bookstore shelves were emptied and state-controlled television and radio were limited to religious programs, children's shows, sports, news programs, and staid documentaries. In the 1990s, a bookstore was firebombed for publishing an "un-Islamic" book. Theaters were attacked for showing films accused of religious insensitivity. One leading writer died mysteriously in prison; three others were murdered by a death squad tied to the intelligence ministry. Nothing was too trivial: the theocrats even endorsed new, Islamically correct dolls— Sara and her brother Dara—to supplant the influence of Mattel's Barbie and her boyfriend Ken.

But Iran's isolation proved to be a boon to the movie industry. The theocrats' ban on most foreign films in public theaters created a captive audience for Iranian cinema at a time when other countries were dominated by American movies. For the first time, Iran developed its own artistic Today, few subjects mm busmess. And like religious reformers, film directors with reformist views enjoyed a certain legitimacy, since many of them were once the regime's closest allies. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who spent five years in the shah's jails, was known in the 1980s for ardently religious and pro-revolution films. But in the 1990s, his films shifted to secular stories that coyly challenged revolutionary truths. Makhmalbaf's fifth film was blatantly antiwar, and two were banned by the government. His seventh film, A Time to Love, was a controversial tale—with three endings based on three perspectives—about a married woman who pursues a younger man. But critics were concerned less with the illicit affair than with the films message: Perception varies, and so can the truth.

In 1998, Makhmalbaf's teenage daughter Samira made her film debut with The Apple, the true story of an illiterate man who had locked his twelve-year-old twin daughters at home since infancy, for fear that the girls' purity would be spoiled by strange men's gazes. The movie revolved around the gradual exposure of the girls—almost mute, unschooled, and both physically and mentally disabled—to the outside world. "I wanted the film to make this point: All it takes to imprison many, many women is one man," Samira told reporters when the film opened in New York in 1999. "What I noticed ahout those two girls is that the more they came into contact wdth society, the more complete they became as human beings. For me, that became a metaphor for all women. Women in Iran are like springs. If they want to be free, and if they try, they burst out with a lot of energy."

Iran's countercultural revolution has had a major boost since Khatami took office. During his 1997 confirmation hearings. Minister of Culture Aytollah Mohajerani described his ministry as the "laughing stock" of the government. "Islam is not a dark alley. Everyone can walk freely in the path of Islam," he told parliament. "We must create an atmosphere of peace and tranquility in all centers of culture, where all citizens can express their ideas and where the seeds of creativity can blossom." Iran's filmmakers are several steps ahead of the bureaucrats-—and are gaining international attention. Children of Heaven was one of five films nominated for the 1999 Academy Award for best foreign film. The White Balloon won the 1995 Cannes Camera d'Or prize for best first feature film and the 1997 New York Film Critics award for best foreign film. Taste of Cherry won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997. Other films have won festival prizes in six continents for best picture, best foreign film, best director, best script, best actor, best documentary, best short film, and best jury. In defining the modern Islamic agenda, Iran's cinema is proving to be more appealing—and effective—than the theocrats' campaign to export religious militancy.

FROM UNDER THE CHADOR

THE MOST ENERGETIC MOVEMENT to emerge since 1979 is the women's movement, which is shattering the starkest stereotype of the Islamic republic: the chador-clad female. A generation after the revolution, Iranian women are by far the most politically active in the Persian Gulf and are among the most empowered in the Islamic world. In 1996, 200 women ran for the 270-seat parliament, and 14 won. In 1997, four women registered to run for the presidency. Although all were disqualified by the Council of Guardians that vets candidates, the decision was not based on gender. Five months later, Khatami appointed a female vice president. And in 1999, 5,000 women ran in local elections, and 300 won.

Today, more than 40 percent of university students are female, as are one-third of faculty members. Thousands of women educated after the revolution work as engineers, doctors, scientists, lawyers, and even clerics. More than 340 directors-general in government ministries are female. Iran has 140 female publishers, enough to hold an exhibition of books and magazines published by women only. Women have become painters, authors, designers, photographers, movie producers, directors, stars, and sculptors crafting "anatomically correct" female figures (otherwise known as nudes).

A fierce women's movement was not what the theocrats intended. Their original goal was more akin to gender apartheid. After the revolution, the regime dismissed almost all women who had risen to positions of importance. A former female education minister was executed for promoting "prostitution" among girls. The revolution's severe intentions were reflected in the new Islamic dress code and the lowering of the minimum age at which women could be married to
nine. The new constitution also removed critical women's rights in divorce and child custody battles.

A generation later, restrictions still border on the bizarre. A woman may have an equal vote in parliament or equal powers among the vice presidents, but her testimony in court carries only half the weight of a man's. Women can head universities and publish newspapers but cannot leave the country without their husbands' written permission. They can act in plays and movies alongside men, but they cannot sing in public or ride in the same section of a public bus.

Iranian women, however, have proven irrepressible. In defiance of the theocracy, they are putting their imprints on diverse aspects of Iranian life. Beginning in the mid-1990s, pressure from women changed laws on employment, divorce, and maternity leave. Women packed a courtroom to protest child-custody laws after the brutal death of an eight-year-old girl—weighing only 35 pounds, with a fractured skull, two broken arms, and burn marks covering her body—at the hands of her father, a drug addict with a criminal record and a documented history of child abuse. Islamic tradition allows a mother to keep a daughter until the age of seven and a son until the age of two; full custody then switches to the father. Parliament subsequently revised the law in 1998 to stipulate that a child could no longer be awarded to an unfit father, defining the custody qualifications in a way that could often disqualify men.

Women have challenged other male bastions as well. Thousands of women broke a long-time barrier preventing females from attending male sporting events when they poured into Tehran's stadium to greet the Iranian soccer team after it qualified for the 1998 World Cup.
Women are also playing sports. Tehran alone has eighty-five women's basketball teams in five leagues. Only ten thousand women engaged in intramural sports on the eve of the revolution; today, two million participate in soccer, basketball, swimming, tennis, handball, skiing, aerobics, fencing, judo, shooting, volleyball, rowing, horseback riding, gymnastics, golf, table tennis, karate, tae kwon do, and even waterskiing— despite the slightly absurd waterproof coats and scarves women must wear to demonstrate modesty. And women have forced the theocrats to acknowledge their participation officially; at the 1996 Olympics, for the first time, a female athlete led the Iranian team onto the field.

The new activists are as distinct as their political environment. The most outspoken women are no longer Westernized or upper-class elites, but have emerged from within the revolution. Many are from traditional families, clerical circles, and rural areas—none of which had previously produced female activists. Some women would continue wearing conservative dress, even if it were not required. But all dare to challenge the regime on far more critical issues, from centuries-old Islamic traditions to recent clerical interpretations of Islam.

Women's publications have been brazen on reform issues. Zan (Woman), the newspaper published by Faezeh Hashemi, a member of parliament and the daughter of former President Rafsanjani, editorialized against child-custody laws, the use of stoning as a punishment, and "temporary marriage"—the practice of contracting a short-term wife. It ran an expose on the return of prostitution and reported on a New Year's message sent to Iran by the former empress. The theocrats banned Zan in 1999. Another publication, Farzanehj is trying to reconcile more robust women's rights with the Islamic faith; its articles have included "Human Rights of Women in Islam," "A History of Silence and Debates Today," "How to Proceed," and "The Long Way Ahead."

Iran's women still face serious discrimination. But their participation in society has already helped to reshape the political scene. In a country where women have the franchise from the age of 15, Khatami's stunning upset victory would not have happened without the female vote.

Like the world around it, Iran is still undergoing a profound transformation. More internal turmoil lies ahead, as the revolution's early passions are replaced by hard-earned pragmatism, and as arrogance gives way to realism among many sectors of Iranian society. Gradually, the government of God is being forced to cede to secular statecraft—and to empower Iranians. In the process, Iran has begun contributing to the spread of public empowerment around
the world.

WE INVITE THEHOSTAGES TO RETURN

1999-11-08T06:57:00.000-08:00

THE NEW YORKER
November 8 1999

The extraordinary changing voices of Iran's revolution.
BY ROBIN WRIGHT

TEHRAN is a busy place on Thursday nights, the eve of the Muslim Sabbath, On Africa Boulevard, a street lined with boutiques and fast-food joints, teen-agers and twenty-somethings in colorful Japanese and Korean compacts drive slowly back and Barth for hours. Car radios blare the Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin, and a rhapsodic Iranian version of New Age. A young man in a Nissan sport-utility vehicle entertains two male passengers by repeatedly gunning the engine, only to squeal to a halt after a few feet, because of bumper-to-bumper traffic. And everyone seems to be talking, if not to other passengers, then on cell phones, and often—to judge by sonic of the glances exchanged across the lanes—to other motorists cruising the strip. Around the city, ads for Cartier watches and Nokia mobile phones flank billboards heralding the hundredth birthday of Ayatollah Khomeini. In movie theatres, boys dare to put their arms around their girlfriends. "Bay-watch" and American soap operas come in over illegal satellite. Chicago Bulls T-shirts are a commonplace. Leonardo DiCaprio is a heartthrob.

THE REVOLUTIONARY

IBRAHLM ASGHARZADEH is, at forty-four, a man with a sense of style—something rare since the 1979 revolution covered women from head to toe in mournful black, condemned the neck-- tie as a symbol of Western cultural dominance, and, because centuries ago some clerics discouraged shaving, made beards a statement of support for the world's only modern theocracy. At a recent dinner party, given by husband-and-wife professors at Teheran University, Asgharzadeh was discordantly fashionable. Fie wore a blue checked shirt, a sports coat of muted cream‑and-brown checks, and deep-brown trousers and deep-brown socks. (Shoes had been left at the door—the practice in traditional Iranian homes.) His thick silver hair was impeccably cut, and his designer eyeglasses shone like crystal. He didn't wear a tie—only doctors, and waiters at certain new restaurants, wear ties—but he was clean-shaven.

I'd wanted to meet Asgharzadeh since 1981, when I stood on the tarmac of the Algiers international airport and watched fifty-two exhausted American hostages disembark from an Air Al-Ole plane. Throughout the hostage crisis—which lasted more than four hundred days, introduced the yellow ribbon as a national symbol, cost eight American lives in a failed rescue attempt, ostracized one of the world's largest oil producers, redefined both diplomacy and terrorism, ended an American Presidency, and gave us "Nightline"—Asgharzadeh had been the primary spokesman for Students Following the Imam's Line. Twenty years ago, the once obscure group became the world's most famous student body when four hundred of its young members scrambled over a brick wall and stormed the American Embassy in Teheran. At the time, Asgharzadeh was a scruffy student of industrial engineering at Iran's top technical university--his most distinguishing feature was a heavy beard—and he was full of fury. "This takeover is not a game!" he told reporters massed outside the Embassy on the day of the takeover. "This is a den of spies." The term stuck. For years, the American Embassy was popularly known as the "den of spies."

A couple of Iranian papers once hinted that it was Asgharzadeh who had actually conceived the notion of taking over the Embassy, so at the dinner I asked him if it was true that he was the mastermind. He paused, and confessed that he’d been on of three students, all engineering majors at Teheran universi• ties, who'd originally made the decision to attack the Embassy. "But we promised each other that we'd never publicly disclose which one of us first proposed it," he said. "Probably it's better not to say too much." Then a smile broke across his face.

Asgharzadeh did admit to coining the name Students Following the Imam's Line. "We were trying to catch the Imam's attention," he explained, referring to Ayatollah Khomeini, the religious leader who guided the revolution. Asgharzadeh was also candid about the planning. "The critical phase was getting three pieces of information," he recalled. "The most important was an inside plan of the Embassy. Two student apartments were across the street, so we used different rooms to draw maps."

The sprawling American compound, occupying twenty-seven acres of prime property on Taleghani Street, in downtown Teheran, included an imposing brick diplomatic chancery, a separate consulate to process the thousands of visas that were issued to Iranians each year, the Ambassador's residence, several staff homes, and a massive warehouse, whose dark, windowless cellar was later nicknamed the Mushroom Inn by hostages who were confined there. The Embassy symbolized not only the American presence but also Iran's importance to the United States—as a buffer to the Soviet Union, a pillar of Mideast policy, a frontier on both Turkey and turbulent South Asia, and the longest coast on the Persian Gulf, through which forty per cent of the West's oil was shipped.

"We also had to find out about the staff, so we kept a log on the personnel," Asgharzadeh continued. "Students were posted around the clock to watch how many there were and who went in and out. We wanted all the Americans inside when we took it.

"Finally, we had to know the security situation inside. We had to do this all ourselves, and we were just students. But, in the end, we had really good information on the Marine guards."

Looking back, Asgharzadeh recalled that little had gone as the students had expected. "We didn't intend to keep the Americans for a long time—maybe three to five days," he told me. "We went inside the compound just as a protest. Then we did get the Imam's attention—and his blessing. The masses demanded that we continue, something we didn't anticipate. It became a very complicated situation, one that was out of our hands."

The impact of the Embassy takeover was, in fact, more profound on Iran than on the United States, for it forced a denouement in a debate over the revolution's future; namely; the role of the clergy. The first provisional government that had been set up after the Shah fled was led by secular technocrats who favored a strong President as the ultimate power, the revolutionary, mullahs wanted a religious Supreme Leader. Angered by the clergy's endorsement of the takeover, the members of the provisional government resigned, and the clerics took their place and engineered a constitution that created a theocracy. Today, all branches of the Islamic Republic of Iran's government are shadowed, and sometimes superseded, by religious institutions. The two-hundred-and-seventy-person Parliament is shadowed by the twelve-man Council of Guardians, which has veto power over legislation and over political. candidates. The civil and criminal courts are shadowed by Revolutionary Courts, which can summon any person or institution for "un-Islamic activities," and which hold in-camera trials and admit no appeal. And the President is shadowed by the Supreme Leader, who is commander-in-chief, and who appoints the three critical chiefs—of intelligence, the judiciary, and the military and has the last word on any subject. Khomeini was Iran's first unchallenged Supreme Leader. Since his death, in 1989, the job has been held by Ali Khamenei, a staunch traditionalist who lacks Khomeini's stature and influence. The President is limited to two four-year terms, but the Supreme Leader, who is chosen by an assembly of clerics, rules for life.

The dual power structure has lately led to increasingly raucous political turmoil. It pits a new generation of democratic reformers, who want elected officials to have primary power, against the theocrats, who want the clerics to remain guardians of the state—and, in some cases, above the state. This fall, that rivalry is playing out over issues ranging from the closure of four newspapers to the fate of thirteen Iranian Jews charged with espionage, and, especially, over the question of who will be allowed to run in next February's Parliamentary elections—a contest that will he pivotal in determining the outcome of the power struggle.

Asgharzadeh is now making something of a political comeback. Earlier this year, Iran held its first city-council elections. The first four Presidents had never got around to them, despite a constitutional mandate, because the clerics and the conservative elite objected. But the upset election of President Mohammad Khatami, in 1997, opened a new chapter in Iran’s political life. Khatami wewars the black turban of descendants of the Prophet, and he is the son and grandson of ayatollahs, but he is a reformer. He was named Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance in 1982, but resigned a decade later, after being acused of “negligence” and “liberalism.” In 1997, he ran as a dark horse, and the conservative theocrats who controlled the main levers of power openly opposed him, but seventy percent of the voters endorsed his agenda of reform. Since Khatami took office, the local elections have been his biggest accomplishment – again in defiance of the theocrats. Overnight, Iran went from having fewer than four hundred elected officials, all concentrated in the capital, to having almost two hundred thousand, dispersed throughout the country. Asgharzadeh won a seat on Teheran’s fifteen-member city council. Conservatives fought to have him disqualified, for “unrevolutionary behavior.” At a rally last year at the American Embassy, which has been used as a vocational school for the Revolutionary Guards since the hostages were freed, Asgharzadeh told the crowd, “Our dealings with the hostages were not directed against the American people, and not even against the hostages themselves. Today, we invite all the hostages to return to Iran, as our guests. We have a new language for the the new world. We defend human rights. And we’ll try to make Islam such that it won’t contradict democracy.”

Asgharzadch has paid a price for his change in rhetoric. Throughout his speech, a vigilante group of young conservatives calling themselves the Helpers of the Party of God taunted him by shouting "Mary beer Amrika," or "Death to America," the slogan that he had shouted twenty years before. Last December, he was so badly beaten that he was hospitalized.

Because of his new position, Asgharzadeh thinks the Council of Guardians will disqualify him from numing in the February Parliamentary elections. With another coy smile, however, he told me that he still hoped to have influence. His wife, Tahereh Rezazadeh, who is also a reformer, will run instead. The couple met during the hostage crisis. She was one of the female students who stormed the Embassy.

“Asgharzadeh looks quite Presidential, doesn't he?" Hadi Semati, an American-educated political-science professor, remarked to me at the dinner party "You know, it could he. Someday,. Strange things happen here."

Since his election to the city council, though, the former revolutionary has been preoccupied with other matters. Over dinner, he dutifully recounted the hostage history as a courtesy to a curious guest, but he became animated only when the conversation turned to his recent municipal duties, which he attends to with the diligence of a burgher. "The first issue that attracted me was traffic," he said. "This city put a lot of money into highways, but they didn't turn out to be all that helpful, because most people don't use them. For example, when young couples want to get married, there's a tradition that they have two candelabra and a mirror. Well, people believe they have to go to the bazaar downtown to get them, even though candelabras and mirrors are now available all over the city. The new chain stores haven't solved this problem—simply because of habit. Iran is full of traditions like this. So we have to understand and deal with these traditions in order to make people change. Another example—the military barracks!"

Asgharzadeh was clearly excited, and his fists punched the air for emphasis. "The Shah thought he'd protect himself by putting the barracks all around him. But the barracks are in the city center and in the way of construction. Plus, they don't pay taxes! One of my campaign slogans was to get rid of them and put them outside the city. I'm now more worried about the impact of high-rises that might replace them, which would bring more traffic and more pollution to the city."
Both are already almost unmanageable. Pollution produced by traffic and local industries has recently forced the government to close schools and urge old people and the ailing to leave the capital, for days at a time. As a public service, new billboards around Teheran provide hourly readings on six different pollutant gases.

"Traffic, pollution, sewage—ninety-five per cent of my time is now spent trying to solve the issues of ordinary people's lives," Asgharzadeh said. "I've learned that people's world view is changed more by dealing with the small problems of life—the issues they care about. And, unfortunately, ideology can't solve them."

THE KIDS

IN the revolution's early years, the clerics called on Iranian women to breed an Islamic generation. They did. The theocracy's decision, early on, to lower the age of maturity for females, from fifteen to nine, contributed mightily. Between 1980 and 1985, the average Iranian woman had more than six pregnancies. By 1999, Iran's population had soared to seventy million--more than double the thirty-four million at the time of the revolution.

Eventually, however, the mullahs recognized the staggering costs of their dictates, and in the early nineties they launched one of the most extensive birth-control programs in the world.

Today, no one can get a marriage license in Iran without passing a family-planning course, and everything from condoms to Norplant to vasectomies is free—no questions asked about marital status.

Yet Iran is stuck with a massive demographic bulge: sixty per cent of the population is under twenty-five. With the voting age at fifteen, the revolution's second generation is transforming Iranian society—in potentially more dramatic ways than the impact of the first generation. The youth vote was the biggest single factor in President Khatami's election, and in the birth of a reform movement. Within a decade, voters under thirty will be the majority.

The revolution's successes have added to the challenge. Over the past twenty years, the Islamic Republic has produced the largest educated class of young people in Iranian history. Despite shortcomings, such as double-shift schools, literacy has shot up from fifty-eight per cent to eighty-two per cent, according to government statistics. The number of university graduates has soared from four hundred and thirty thousand to more than four million. All of them feel entitled to good jobs and material comforts.

The result is overwhelming the system. Eight hundred thousand young people are entering the job market every year—in an economy that can produce fewer than three hundred thousand jobs. This fall, a staggering seventy per cent of Iran's unemployed were between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. And those lucky enough to find employment face the prospect of a per-capita income that is only a quarter of what it was on the eve of the revolution. Not surprisingly, unrest among today's generation of students is growing.

The Office to Foster Islamic Unity, a coalition representing Iranian university students that is the descendant of Students Following the Imam's Line, has its headquarters in a rundown house on Shahid Rajab Begi Street. Shahid means "martyr," and, like everything front highways to health clinics in Iran, the street was named for a soldier killed in the 1980-88 war with Iraq, in which more than -a hundred thousand Iranian lives were lost. The office is furnished with desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and other equipment, all now somewhat worn, from the American Embassy.

"They're still quite serviceable," said Farhad, a slightly built, amiable student in his twenties who gave me a brief tour of the American inventory one afternoon this fall, and, like most students I spoke with, asked that I not use his surname. "The file cabinets are particularly good," he told me. The Embassy must have been well stocked, because the students are still using its stationery, with a bald-eagle watermark, in their copier.
The house was donated by Ayatollah Ali Fdlamenei, Khomeini's successor, in order to revive a student movement that had been dormant during the war years. In the nineties, the new Supreme Leader apparently viewed students as a way to widen his power base and keep the original vision of the revolution on course. He seems to have miscalculated.
"Students today are pressing hard for individual rights, an open press, freedom to form parties and run for office, and a civil society," Farhad explained. "We're now on the front line of the struggle for democracy These are critical times for Iran."

Last July, the worst unrest since the revolution erupted. Thousands of students, Farhad among them, started demonstrating at Teheran University after a Revolutionary Court banned a reformist newspaper, on charges of "attempting to create turmoil and instability." Over the next five days, the protests escalated into violent clashes with police and, more important to the theocrats, a humiliating public heckling of the system. "The demonstrations let people say things that they didn't dare say for twenty years," Farhad recalled, smiling with excitement. "And it was real democracy! No one was exempt from criticism."

The students even dared to taunt the Supreme Leader. An attempt to read a statement from his office was greeted by shouts of "Down with the religious dictator!" and "Commanderin-chief, resign!" By the time the trouble was over, students reported that five youths had been killed and hundreds injured. Police said that more than fourteen hundred had been arrested. Four have since been sentenced to death by Revolutionary Courts. Further trials are pending.

This fall, Iran had a bad case of the jitters when school resumed. But on the day that I visited the university's downtown campus the only rumblings were beneath the surface. Like the revolution's first generation of young activists, including many of the hostage-takers, the most politically engaged students today are engineers. They're also the most fashionable. A noticeable number at the Engineering College either were clean-shaven or had neatly trimmed mustaches and goatees.

"Everything in Iran is political," explained a senior named Mehdi, who wore a goatee and chuckled when I asked him why the young are shaving again. "Beards were the way of the revolution. Shaving is the way of the reformers. We're showing that we've moved on—and that we don't follow limitations imposed on society."

The new generation's challenge to the regime had a particular claim to legitimacy, because many of the protesters were the offspring of the original revolutionaries. Iran's higher-education system gives preference to applicants with Islamic credentials—the children of revolutionaries, civil servants, clerics, and the poor. These students don't necessarily want to abandon the Islamic system; they just want Iran to be more of a republic.

Outside the Amirabad dormitories, where the July unrest began, I met a muscular third-year premed student named Mohammad, who was wearing jeans. "1 come from a traditional religious family," he told me. "My father demonstrated during the revolution, and he worked for the government, in the Agriculture Ministry, for many years. But students on this campus are familiar with George Orwell's 'Animal Farm,' and we know revolutions don't give you everything you want. So I demonstrated in July to demand reforms. So did all my friends."

The new generation sees the challenge not from beyond Iran's borders but from within. The previous generation attacked the American Embassy; as an outpost of the Great Satan; this one feels that it is a victim of its own system. Nowhere is that more conspicuous than at the Office to Foster Islamic Unity, where I asked the students how they felt about the United States and about its critics.

"These people abuse the anti-American slogans of the past," Behrooz, a twentyfive-year-old industrial-management major with an unusually square face and a short haircut, told me. "They're hypocrites. Most of them are like everyone else. They're ready for relations with America again. America may have created some of our problems in the past. But dealing with America again is one way to get out of our problems today On different terms than before, of course—this time as equals. But if a candidate says something against America, he won't get the students' voter

THE PHILOSOPHER

ADULKARLM SOROOSH is a diminutive, almost meek, man. He speaks in a slow, deliberate whisper, and in a land of raven-haired people his most distinguishing feature is a neat, soft-brown beard. Often, just before embarking on an important point, he pulls off his wire-rimmed glasses and cleans them with a handkerchief, or pushes them up on his forehead and rubs his eyes.

"I'm just a writer and a thinker," he told me five years ago, with a self-deprecating laugh. "I'm not such an important man." Soroosh has emerged, however, as Iran's boldest contemporary philosopher, a man increasingly described, by both supporters and critics, as the Martin Luther of Islam. I visited him this fall at the Serat Institute, an adjunct of the Institute for Epistemological Research, a think tank that Soroosh directs. The Serat occupies a few small whitewashed rooms near a dusty back alley not far from Teheran University; and it publishes most of his work.

For a long time, Soroosh was one of the revolution's own. lie was born Hossein Dabbagh, in 1945. A follower of Ayatollah Khomeini from childhood—since an uncle took him to see the Imam on the day of his release from the Shah's jail, in 1963—Soroosh was horn to the kind of family that formed the revolution's backbone. His mother, Batoul, who was named after one of the Prophet's daughters, never abandoned the chador, even when the monarchy banned it. His father, a grocer, refused to buy a radio to listen to the Shah's state-controlled news. Soroosh and his three siblings grew up in the old part of Teheran, where the mud-brick homes usually had one or two large rooms, little furniture, and no bathroom. Soroosh was the first in his family to go to the university and live in the West. When he was a student in London, he visited Khomeini in Paris during the last phase of the Ayatollah's exile. After the revolution, the Imam appointed him to the Committee of the Cultural Revolution, whose purpose was to make university curriculums consistent with the teachings of Islam. Soroosh still comes under bitter criticism today from exiles and others who were purged during those years. But in the late eighties Soroosh began to view the Imam as an instrument of transition rather than as the personification of the revolution's ultimate goal.

Of the many challenges Iran's theocrats face on the revolution's twentieth anniversary; Soroosh may well represent the most profound. At a critical juncture for Iran's unique political system, he has provided a philosophical framework for reconciling Islam with democracy. In the broader Islamic world, he has helped popularize an Islamic Reformation—with repercussions as sweeping as the Christian Reformation. Soroosh's achievements may be the Islamic Republic's most enduring legacies—far more so than its theocratic form of government, which is now struggling to survive.

"There are two pillars," Soroosh once explained to me. "First, in order to be a true believer one must be free. To become a believer under pressure or coercion isn't true belief. This basic freedom to believe is also the basis of democracy. It's the seed from which all other freedoms grow."

The second pillar, he said, is based on human imperfection. "The essence of religion will always be sacred, but its interpretation by fallible human beings is not sacred—and therefore it can be criticized, modified, refined, and redefined. What single person can say what God meant? Any fixed version would effectively smother religion. It would block the rich exploration of the sacred texts. Interpretations are also influenced by the age you live in, by the conditions and mores of the era, and by other branches of knowledge. So there's no single, inflexible, infallible, or absolute interpretation of Islam for all time.” In other words, it's O.K. to alter, or even abandon, practices that have prevailed for centuries.

"Islam is organic and dynamic, and can easily be adapted to present conditions," Soroosh said, with a trace of excitement in his voice. `And Islamic law is expandable. You can't imagine the extent of its flexibility! In an Islamic democracy, you can realize all its potential."

Soroosh had originally been something of a recluse, shying away from the press and allowing other intellectuals and clergymen sympathetic to his ideas to apply them to the specifics of Iran's labyrinthine political scene. Eventually, to protect his family from sporadic physical attacks and anonymous death threats, he permanently adopted a pseudonym that he once used only for writing poetry "Soroosh" means "angel of revelation."

Today, Soroosh has a huge following among Iran's students. When we first met, he taught at three universities, and he invited me to attend one of his classes. Students acted starstruck when he showed up for a seminar at Teheran University's School of Theology: they stood in the hallway just to watch him walk to class. The theocrats have since forced him out of all three posts, but his influence has only increased. This fall, students at the Office to Foster Islamic Unity told me that they looked to two leaders as their models—President Klatami and Soroosh. Many of the reformist newspapers and magazines are published or edited by Soroosh followers. Then-agers, businessmen, and housewives pack the Wednesday-evening lectures he now gives in a private home. And in the theological center of (.29m, an hour and a half's drive from Teheran, Soroosh's work is one of the hottest topics among young clerics. His influence, Iranians tell me, has only begun to be felt.

Since the mid-nineties, Iran's clerical establishment has made Soroosh a target. In 1995, during a speech commemorating the American Embassy seizure, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned, "Interpreting religion isn't something that can be carried out by just anyone. If someone confronts the clergy, he gladdens the Zionists and the Americans more than anything else… because they’ve set their heart on destruction of the clergy. Well, the Islamic system will slap these people hard in the face!"

Over the past year, however, Soroosh has become bolder, as if he senses that the Islamic Republic has reached a precipice. "This is totalitarian rule," he said to me this fall. "And they are totalitarian rulers. That is a harsh thing to say, but it's the truth. The regime can't survive the way it is."

Soroosh paused. "You know," he said a moment later, "our revolution was a haphazard, chaotic, and theoryless revolution, in the sense that it really wasn't well thought out—not by the Leader, not by the people. For the Imam, Islam was everything. He wanted everyone to topple the Shah in order to apply Islam. But he didn't elaborate on any of these points. So now it's the intellectuals' job to provide a theory for the revolution, to rethink it and to offer a new logic for it. And the outcome will be not another revolution but reform. Because—two revolutions in one generation? Well, really! It's too much!" He laughed softly.

Soroosh's most recent views have a potentially far-reaching impact on. Iran's place in the world—even on its relations with the United States. Soroosh selected the name Serat for his institute because it means "path," and he believes that there is more than one path.

"Every day, Muslims recite a prayer ten times entreating God to guide us to the right path," he explained. "Some say the only right path is Islam, and the rest stray or are on a deviant path. But I argue that there are many right paths. I try to justify a pluralistic view of religions—the internal sects of Sunni, Shia, and others, and also the great religions, like Christianity, Judaism, and the rest.

"We think they go to Hell, and they think we go to Hell," he said, a smile crossing his face, as if the idea were amusing in its smallness. "But I'm trying to say that Christians and members of other religions are well guided and good servants of God. All are equally rightful in what they believe. To some, this sounds like heresy," he said, the smile widening. "But this, too, has found listening cars in our society."

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