A friend asked me about the significance of the new Iranian nuclear facility whose existence the US president revealed.  In light of this developing new story line in the soap opera known as Iran, I thought it might be worthwhile to elucidate how important this revelation is and why it matters.  The announcement of a hitherto unacknowledged nuclear facility in Iran is not good for the Islamic Republic and its supporters. Both domestically and internationally, it will provide a major shot in the arm for the opposition, not just to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons programme, but to the Islamic Republic itself.  

Iran’s nuclear programme has always benefited from plausible deniability about its aim to weaponise its nuclear technology.  The existence of a facility that the Iranian government tried to keep secret casts suspicions on the government’s purported peaceful intent.  In early 2006, when I researched the Iranian nuclear facilities for a private company, the task was laughably simple in that the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency had a very nice website explaining what all the facilities were and provided as much information as various intelligence agencies had been able to come up with.  The devil was always in the details of access to and inspection of their nuclear facilities.  Because of the United State’s childish and inappropriate behaviour towards Iran since the 1978-79 revolution, Iran’s stances always seemed plausible on the grounds of reasonable suspicion.

The uprising that started in June of this year did much to eliminate plausible deniability about other areas in the Iranian polity.  Domestically, the major outcomes were the appearance of a vocal and broad-based coalition and the near total disaffection of the clergy with the state.  The internal discourse on Iran’s nuclear programme has had two important parameters.  One was that everyone agreed Iran had the right to nuclear energy and its own programme to develop it, but the second was that most everyone also agreed that weaponisation was bad.  This consensus on weaponisation came from a wide variety of political and moral perspectives but that the clergy was very vocal against it was very important.  None other than Khomeini himself railed against nuclear weapons.  My analysis had been that some people, probably the Revolutionary Guards, did indeed want to weaponise, and that someday it would lead to a standoff between conservatives and the clergy.  What I didn’t realise was how effectively the Islamic Republic had been able to marginalise the clergy.  This became apparent in the first week after the elections, when that most grand ayatollahs’ movements were circumscribed to a high degree, stopping just short of house arrest.  With only a few exceptions, almost all of the clergy sided with the opposition, morally casting out the Islamic Republic as un-Islamic in increasingly strong language.  The Islamic Republic had previously governed with a complimentary combination of legitimacy and a strong security state.  The outcome of the elections took away the legitimacy factor by alienating a broad spectrum of the population and the clerical establishment.  The loss of legitimacy has been noticeably effective in decreasing the regime’s scope of action.  It was forced to back down on accusations that the protests were incited by foreigners, chose to stop televising the trials of political detainees after they became a lightning rod for popular anti-government sentiment, and was deprived of the opportunity to use the annual Qods Day celebrations as a means to deflect attention to problems abroad.  The fear of foreign intervention has always been a strong rallying force in Iranian politics and its apparent ineffectiveness underlines the government’s inability to stir such sentiments.  Meanwhile, the opposition has been taking the lead on numerous moral issues.  Coalitions of rich and poor, urban and rural, and pious and secular have thrived on the ensuing government abuses of brutality, political imprisonment, and so forth.  The effort to hide another nuclear facility will add to the domestic drumbeat of reasons to oppose the government.  The nuclear issue could change from defending the nation’s rights to betraying them.

Internationally, the question of further sanctions will likely shift from ‘whether’ to ‘how much.’  The Islamic Republic will face a choice between an unequivocal back-down or burning yet more bridges.  Having burnt so many domestic bridges for reconciliation, it is possible that Khamenei and company will continue on their current course and try to appear strong by holding firm and not compromising.  The choice of backing down is unlikely to win much sympathy from the opposition while standing firm is unlikely to attract many more supporters.  China and Russia will certainly have noticed how their perceived support for the Islamic Republic has won them repudiation from protesters who have been having a good time burning their flags and crying death unto them.  The announcement of a new nuclear facility could well give those nations the space to back down in their support whilst still saving face.  The internal Iranian opposition to weaponisation will also pull the Iranian citizenry into closer alignment with the longstanding American policy of halting Iranian nuclear ambitions with regard to weaponisation.

The main problem for opponents of the Islamic Republic, particularly the US, is that Israeli paranoia will appear to have been vindicated and hence an Israeli attack cannot be ruled out.  The longstanding problem with the Israeli attack option is that Turkey and Saudi Arabia block air routes to Iran on two sides and that the US, which controls Iraqi airspace, blocks the most direct path.  In a very belated realisation, Zbigniew Brzezinsky has surmised that this could very well require the US to shoot down Israeli jets or become an accessory to an attack on Iran.  The United States could make much of halting Israel politically, but the fact that certain people in the political establishment are just now coming around to the possibility that military force might be required is a tribute to American naïveté with regards to Israel.  In any event, Israel rattling its sabres and playing the role of the caged insane bear (we just don’t know what they’ll do) could be beneficial in rallying the support of the international community and the Iranian opposition to put maximum pressure on their government now, as an Israeli attack is possibly the last thing that could keep the Islamic Republic in power. 

The Qom nuclear facility weakens the Islamic Republic in three ways.  It strengthens the arguments of its international opponents, weakens the arguments of its allies (or gives them space to distance themselves), and adds another focal point for domestic political opposition, all while forcing the Iranian regime into a tighter corner.  Moreover, it brings the three groups of opinions into closer political alignment, increasing the probability of substantive pressure being placed on the regime and of that pressure achieving the desired outcome.

For the last few days, much of the world’s attention has been rightly focused on the political coup that has recently occurred in Iran.  Having returned from Iran a few weeks ago, I wanted to take the opportunity to offer some of my insights into what is going on at the moment.  Shortly, I will write another post giving a more global picture of what I learned in Iran so for the sake of speed I’ll just stick to matters as they relate to the political situation in this post.

Whether it’s one week or five years from now, the significance of the events of the last week will be  a critical loss of confidence in the Islamic Republic of Iran by its citizens.  There are four key factors contributing to the changes  taking place in the Iranian political landscape: the rigging of the elections in itself, the blatancy of the rigging, the outcome of both of those events amongst the political elite and the clergy, and the loss of trust.

Rigging the election

The massive voter turnout seen on Friday in Iran (and around the world) was not fake; it was an expression of hopes for peaceful change and reform.  People were not simply naïve about holding such hopes.  Previous elections had not been rigged, and, even if the candidate selection had been limited, there was  enough difference of opinions that it was worthwhile and certainly comparable to what most Americans enjoy during their perfectly open process.  Moreover, different presidents had produced changes in policy and the legislature had not been a rubber stamp, even if the power of both of these was uncomfortably and unpredictably circumscribed by the Supreme Leader Khamenei.  Yes, there always was the possibility that this election would be stolen, but there was also reason to give the process a try before giving into cynicism.  Although many voters were born after the great terror of the early days of the revolution, their parents and Iranian society as a whole still carry the memory that  violent change is hard to control and produces unpredictable results.

Voting, then, was not just a matter of supporting the regime but also of supporting Iran and making sure that the progress it has made since the revolution, in areas such as infrastructure and human development, was not lost.  Iran is no third-world country and the Islamic Republic is  no tin pot dictatorship.  For many years, it has cleverly balanced a set of uneasy demands from various sectors of society and focused its energies rather narrowly on keeping the current system going and avoiding a violent crack up.  Iranians, for their part, are generally politically astute enough to realize that not everybody agrees with one individual's point of view.  The urban elites knew that the poor rural masses could be satisfied by the government sanction of public piety and those same rural masses knew that the urban elites  would continue to enjoy alcohol and such in their gardens, which was fine as long as they didn’t have to see it.

The system was an equilibrium of bullshit but as one interlocutor put it to me, “This is a necessary and comfortable amount of bullshit, so we go with it.”  Intrinsic to the situation, and often pointed out ot me, was also  that the revolution systematically de-conservatised the most conservative elements of society by making a comfortable public space for them and giving them access to all sorts of information they had not previously had, from literacy to political philosophy.  There’s few people too uninformed to understand what’s going on now as compared to  1978/79 (1357/58), and thus, many of the people who would otherwise have blown with the wind now have their own forceful opinions.  The attempt to restrict information to a politically savvy society only served the function of arousing people’s suspicion in the late hours on Friday.

The slip up: blatant fraud

That the election was rigged should be beyond any doubt (see Juan Cole’s comments for a basic explanation of how), but the obviousness of that rigging has played a large part in making the situation irredeemable for the coup plotters and politically pushing them into a corner.  It has also put outside politicians and the press in a quandary about how to report and how to proceed.

On Saturday morning, after the “results” had been released, people I talked to were just devastated.  One friend told me that she thought maybe she got it wrong, that the  Iranian masses were really insane and that this was the result.  But something was wrong and we both realized that even in a large, conservative country like the US only 51%-52% of the people “get it wrong” on this magnitude.  The next emotion was shock at the insult, i.e.; how dumb did the plotters think Iranians are, especially when spectacularly quickly assembled polling data were released.  One of the great historical debates about this day will center on the extent of premeditation of election fraud.  Did Khamenei freak out when he realized that Ahmadinezhad had lost so badly?  Or were the veiled threats made by Rafsanjani and other political leaders in the run-up to the polling indicative of precooked plans for how to steal an election?

At this point the plotters had a few options, either rescind the results immediately and make someone take the fall or keep marching ahead with their plans.  They kept marching into the corner, now reliant on the significant chunk of the security forces under Khamenei’s remit while politicians were placed in the difficult position of whether to support or speak out.  The authorities who had previously been so adept at suspending disbelief or applying acute unseen pressure at key nodes suddenly made a gaffe  so large there was no turning back.

Lack of support for Ahmadinezhad was not something that could have been  missed by hidebound Western media standing behind interpreters in North Tehran cafes asit was truly massive in scope.  As a foreigner traveling around Iran during the campaign without the need for an interpreter, I was hard-pressed to find any support for Ahmadinezhad (I did once from a cab-driver in North Tehran!) and people were not in the least shy or hesitant about expressing their political beliefs.  What really struck me, though, was the utter dismissiveness from  people towards the president.  Sitting at freeway truck stops, I could eavesdrop on conversations by Arab truckers and lower class farmers making fun of the “national pet monkey.”  It is true that Western powers have frequently shaped the Middle East in ways that they should not have and that people did not want, and it’s equally clear that countries like the US further their goals with terrorism and refuse to accept election outcomes they don’t like.  But Iran today is a separate issue.  One of the results of being relatively isolated and insulated from international politics for so long is that Iranians had come to view this state as their own and from what I heard, few people were directly concerned with the reactions of other countries in their choice of candidates.

The Iranian political consensus shattered

By alienating such a large section of the political elite, the coup plotters seem to have created in a few days what 30 years of painstakingly built consensus had obviated--a weighty opposition.  The 1999 (1378) demonstrations posited students against a unified government and as a result, never gained much traction.  What we see now is a breakdown amongst the political elite that has more or less held together since the revolution congealed in the early 80s (60s).  This schism has exposed other areas vulnerable to opposition, such as the bazaris and clergy, but, hearkening back to the trust issue, it has eliminated the element of trust that kept the security forces working.

The bazaris are an important and significant, if somewhat anachronistic, fixture in Iran's political order.  Commanding many key nodes in the national economy, they were instrumental in the collapse of the previous regime with a succession of general strikes that brought the economy to a halt throughout much of 1978 (1357).  Last month, before the campaign even got into full swing, they were vocal in support of Mousavi, hanging posters in the bazaars and in store windows.  The reason was simple, while not all bazaris are rich or even adverse to redistributionary justice, Ahmadinezhad’s policies were making their economic position untenable.

The clergy has long been unsatisfied with the current state of affairs and is both a very close-knit and argumentative group. The clerical consensus was never behind Khomeini’s odd fusion of church and state (velayate faqih), but most clerics were willing to give it a try.  From the mid-nineties(late seventies), a growing number of clerics have voiced their opinions against the base of the Islamic Republic.  Because these were politely and densely worded statements within risalas (collections of fatwas) in Persian, they were generally not picked up by observers in the West.  And they were meant to be mostly for internal debate, anyhow; being a cleric in a cleric regime might suggest that one doesn’t want to rock the boat too much.  Some figures did come out loudly however.  Ayatollah Montazeri, widely acclaimed to be one of the most followed and respected leaders in Twelver Shiism (marja’e taqlid) was originally Khomeini’s chosen successor but eventually, his criticism led to his being put under house arrest.  Montazeri might issue a statement soon that will have dramatic implications, whatever its content.  Similarly, I noticed in Iran the passing of Ayatollah Behjat, whose portrait was hung far and wide by the government during and after the official three-day mourning period.  I asked a number of people what they thought about Behjat, whose work I was not familiar with myself.  The two responses I received were that “‘the government needs to take care of one of its own in mourning him” and that ”they’re happy to see him off” because of his simple lifestyle and widely perceived opposition to velayate faqih.

Now that the political establishment is split, clerics have to decide which side of the fence to get on.  Inevitably, many have political views and the minute they get out on the streets, the government is faced with the grim prospect of shooting a member of the group it claims to represent.  Preliminary reports (once again, this may turn out to be true…I won’t claim to have perfect information) indicate that this is happening already.  Such accounts coexist alongside reports that Rafsanjani has gone to Qom to gather support, assuming he’s not under house-arrest.  The telling and retelling of such rumours is important because it both reflects and lends credit to a belief that at least some of the clergy are willing and capable of a revolt.  Additionally the deaths of protesters who will certainly be hailed as martyrs, will be mourned forty days after their passing which has historically always proved a venue for reigniting protests.

Breaching the social contract

The most important remaining logistical asset for coup plotters are the security services, which are necessary for controlling popular discontent.  The long hand of the Iranian security state was in evidence everywhere I traveled with a mix of carrots, sticks, and controls at key nodes in the network of the state.  What made it so effective was the lack of direct security presence, e.g.; big thugs with guns.  One the one hand, I had to stay every night more or less where I had told the foreign ministry, and by extension, the information ministry, where I would be, but on the other I could buy and top up a mobile simcard without showing the slightest bit of identification.  As brutal as it could be to those who crossed it, the Iranian security state ran on trust.  The trust was between its own members, it and Iranian citizens, and between itself and outsiders.  Security forces ran the gamut of organization from highly trained elite special forces to the police officer who decided not to issue my guide a ticket because he was so happy to have a chat with an American.  I was keen to accommodate them and let them do their job for my part. After all, the Iranian state was seriously vulnerable to external threats and we could all agree that, wherever we stood politically, outside interference was not of help.  Now that’s all gone.  The bystander who might have reported something is much less likely now to tell “them.”  The lowpaid policeman or riot cop has to decide how strictly to carry out orders and whether it’s worth it at all.  The notion that, despite obvious faults, the state is somehow on my side is much less tenable.

 Obama's Nawroz message to Iran marked a serious shift in American policy and attitude towards Iran but also showed the structural weaknesses in the American state that could prevent it  from achieving those goals.   Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, gave an excellent and well-thought-out reply to that speech the following day, which has been analysed by Juan Cole and Farideh Farhi.  When discussing countries like Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, commentators often mention the existence of a 'deep state', a coterie of officials somewhere within the state apparatus who have ultimate control over policy.  I don't think this is much the case with Iran, and I'll explain below, but it definitely is a factor with the US, and in a lot of ways it gets to the heart of constraints on nation-states' abilities to act and react.