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.

This post is far too long in coming. In the weeks between my return from Iran and the fateful elections,  I sat down to write out my experiences, as usual with an eye towards transmitting them to other people rather than just as an exposition of what I did.  I’ve always been uncomfortable with photography as a medium, at least with my personal grasp of it, as the act of taking pictures disrupts the event I’m seeking to capture and  the resulting images have a way of escaping their context and relevancy.  As such, my written accounts are much truer to my experiences.  Of course, just as I was about to send it out to my editor, everything changed.  The order that I had seen in Iran changed fundamentally with a single decision to falsify an election and the entire polity and society catalyzed into a revolution that is still unfolding.

Most of what I saw, of course, was not the Islamic Republic but was Iran, an Iran that continued through the first revolution and will continue through this one.  In retrospect, I’m glad that so many people voted and I maintained no illusions, but the voting process ended up being crucial when the moment came for people to call out their government on its bullshit.  My initial stance regarding the Islamic Republic was wait-and-see, for the simple reason that an electoral process was unfolding and because the alternative was a revolution, and revolutions have almost always eaten their children. The 1979 collapse was extreme in this regard in that organs of government were built anew almost from scratch, forfeiting knowhow and institutional memory in the process.  I remember the frantic email exchanges where my friends debated the legitimacy of voting and then finally went out and did it.  Now that it has so demonstrably failed, I  find myself completely opposed to the same system, but I still hold out the hope that all those quiet years of subtle agitation will eventually produce a stable Iran.  Were it not for people really believing the system and having the experience of their votes counting, the broad and peaceful opposition which we currently see would also not have been possible.

So rather than try to resolve my initial impressions with new interpretations, I finally decided to simply present my thoughts as I had originally set them out, one afternoon at the Cinema Museum café at Bagh-e Ferdous, interspersed with lattes and a lot of conversation with the ever garrulous and open locals.

Why Iran?  Iran, and its flagship city Tehran, far exceeded my expectations.  I had set off on my vacation with two purposes.  One was the practical goal of filling in my mental map of the area of the world where I have focused most of my travels, the odd and incongruous expanse between Delhi, Istanbul, and Cairo.  The other was simply curiosity to see a country that has both shaped and influenced, to a great extent, my life and the culture of my homeland, California.  I got far more than I bargained for.  It's  a country that's  far more advanced than I had seen or expected and far more inspirational than I thought possible. And I don’t mean advanced in a linear or teleological sense, but rather in the sense of social and cultural complexity. 

Tours are weird.  I got into Iran through a tour company, which made the process of getting a visa much easier.  If anyone’s interested, I can provide more information about the process, though I can say I highly recommend the company I worked with, Thundertour, as they were highly professional and did an excellent job.  With a tour, you get a guide, a programme, and prearranged accommodations.  Even though the service was great, the tour was a bit of an odd fit with my personality, especially given that the country is quite navigable and affordable on its own.  Iran is not the Middle East, it’s Europe, as you will see, and the services and attitudes reflect that.

For me, a tour felt like having a job.  Every day, I had to be up and going by nine and there was a schedule to stick to.  That was hard as Iran is a place prone to hangovers and not to keeping a schedule.   On the plus side, having a schedule got me out of Tehran, where I could have easily spent the entirety of my trip shifting between brunching and partying.  On the other hand, I could have used another day in Yazd and I had to kick and scream a bit to get a day in Esfahan shifted to Tehran because I had so much to do there.  But even if you’re not a tour person, like me, go ahead and sign up if you’re an American and it’s your only way to get in.  Iran is a completely different experience than anything else I’ve seen and did much to broaden my views.

Iran has produced results.  I expected another Middle Eastern country, and something to fill in the mental gap between Turkey and Afghanistan.  No.  It is a modern Western country in the good sense.  Along with great infrastructure and drinkable tap water,   the people themselves are extremely open and forward-looking.  Iran is qualitatively leaps and bounds ahead of neighbors such as Turkey and that is something I’m not willing to dismiss just because I disagree with certain policies.

Iran heavily challenged a lot of my previous political assumptions, showing me that social and technological development is possible and that popular participation produces more benefits than I expected in determining the development of a country’s political structures.  In the run-up to election, I’ve been engaged in a number of debates with friends about whether or not Iranians should participate in the election.  My answer is now a definite yes.  The political system in Iran is proscribed within certain limits, but it’s also obvious that voting reflects changes in policy.  Myself, I compare this attitude  to American elections where the political discourse is circumscribed not by a supreme leader but by the overwhelming conservatism of the electorate.

Iran doesn’t always offer people a fair trial and doesn’t offer full religious freedom as you can’t convert to whatever you want.  It has huge and unaccountable state enterprises and unaccountable governance institutions.  However, most other states in the area  many of them allies of the US, are far worse offenders on these grounds.  Iran has a system whereby results are not predetermined and people have the expectation that their participation matters.  The government also serves the people and is responsive to a degree I have never seen regionally, actively investing in infrastructure everywhere in the form of roads, universities, metros, and sanitation.

None of this means that we should shut up and stop supporting change where we see fit, but it does argue against fomenting another revolution that would simply set back the enormous social progress that Iran has made.  Had the revolution played out differently, we could be looking at a secular or socialist dictatorship in Iran that could have more internationally acceptable policies but be far more oppressive.

The interplay of revolution and culture.  The revolution produced change both because of and despite of it.  Confidence and independence seem to inform a lot of the attitudes that I encountered.  The mentality of independence wipes away a lot of the most tiring experiences of Middle Eastern travel, which can often consist of rather juvenile notions of political philosophy (hello Israel and Afghanistan!).

I thought I would find a confused and lost Iranian generation of youth but found this was far from the case, and in the process discovered just how big the gap is between Iranian culture in the diaspora and in Iran.  People have certainly found ways to rebel against the powers that be, as young people do everywhere, but such behavior in Iran is not blind and directionless rebellion but rather, a moving on.   Today’s generation knows that a secular dictatorship didn’t save them nor did an Islamic state.  Because they’re not beholden to the promise of utopian philosophies, they’re instead focusing on the real incremental changes that produce results.

The revolution is everywhere in iconography and political art and I think this affects the discourse as well.  Imagine if the radical left-wing students at your university took over the campus.  You know whom I’m talking about.  The guys that shouted about a whole slate of causes from workers’ to indigenous peoples’ rights.  It all seems tired and washed out 20 years after the collapse of communism, but in many ways the radicalism of the post-war period coalesced and reached its height in the Iranian revolution.  So posters and billboards everywhere glorify protesting and populist slogans, and whether you agree or not, theyfeel incredibly juvenile thirty years on.  The revolution was a simpler time for humanity and politics, both for the Iranian protesters and bewildered American observers.  Those of us fortunate enough to have survived it all or to have been born after have a much larger base of experience, knowledge, and wisdom to build on.  The practical effect of all the reminders of revolution, I think, is that it makes protesting look uncool.  I’m generally not a fan of protesting and rarely participate myself but I suspect the average Iranian at some level has also decided “let’s do things rather than just protest about them.”

The effect of all of this was that I could have conversations with people about what they thought and not some random ideology.  No one needed to align a given view with Islam or being Iranian as so often preoccupies people in Afghanistan.  They could just have an opinion and express it.  This also gets to the kernel of what I think is different about Iranians in Iran versus those on the outside.  Iranians on the outside often haven’t worked through all of the deep social issues of Pahlavi society that were uncovered by the revolution because they haven’t had to.  Iranians in Iran have reached their own understanding and society seems very relaxed and at ease with itself, setting aside the underlying antsy-ness I also found growing up in Southern California.  In short, ideology in Iran is uncool and I can  picture people getting up off their asses when the ideology gets too loud.

The revolution brought together a developing country deeply riven by the internal divisions inherent in such shifts.  Like in many other places, these differences were often forcefully expressed in the religious/secular divide.  The revolution effectively secularized religion by removing it from the private space and putting it firmly in the public space as a universal baseline.  The secular and religious classes now found themselves in the same room.  The secular classes were circumscribed in public but could still compete on their accumulated wealth, education, and experience.  The religious classes now found all places in society open to them and a helping hand from the government encouraging them to get up.  The government subsidized courses of study like philosophy and theology that encourage nuance and made them attractive options for people that would previously have walked away with the black-and-white worldview conferred by an engineering degree.

Gender equality in action.   One of the revolution’s most tangible benefits is the education of women and their increased involvement in society.  This is no shock but seeing the results in practice was refreshing.  What happened was that the most traditional members of society, who would have previously stayed at home or not fully participate, suddenly got full license to leave the house and do their own thing (relative to before).  Education is transformative and rarely in the ways that educators anticipate.  The secular middle classes retain the same values that they had before the revolution but women in small towns went out and learned and saw themselves as full and equal partners in society.  The result is not the sort of liberalization that applies to liberals but a broader equality that cuts across classes and, in comparison to everything else I’ve seen in the area, has altered gender roles.  I did have discussions about “traditional gender roles” with Iranians, but while identification with such roles is very alive and even part of a set of political beliefs in many areas of the States,, nobody in Iran seemed to have any concept of returning.  No “the woman should stay home to take care of the kids” or “you have to wait till your married for sex.”  I just didn’t hear it.  From my perspective, I also found interaction with women to be a lot more relaxed, equitable, and straightforward than any other place I had been to.  There’s no doubt that the massive inclusion of women in society has produced a glaring contrast in a place where the government doesn’t give them full political rights.  That contradiction will continue to be important in Iran’s development, but at the social and cultural level, the discourse of gender equality seems to have been deeply and conscientiously internalized.

Haute couture reaches new heights. In a lot of ways, Iran felt like the future, and not the cheesy Tomorrowland or Dubai version.  The key to this is the combination of grandeur and style.  Tehran is a stunning city for its geographical locale alone, set against a backdrop of enormous mountains and climbing over 1,000m from bottom to top.  When you’re driving along in Tehran, occasionally you get a glimpse through the trees that reveals how high you’ve gotten with a stunning view of the city and skyline.  Amongst all the stores, restaurants, and very stylish locals you also get the sense that you are ascending culturally, as if you’re looking down on places like Paris that once had their day and glory but have now faded along with the twentieth century.

And this sensation is by no means limited to Tehran.  Other cities also mix the modern and traditional with exceptional ease.  The food everywhere, even though it entirely lacks heat, is almost always exquisite.  In every place, I noticed the soaring public architecture and graceful freeway interchanges, but the details were great too, such as the perfectly manicured and radiantly green parks, and the tastefully placed cobblestones and landscaping in the street-side gutters (joobs) that distribute rivers  (yes literally) and drainage through cities.

Amazing pop culture.  Pop culture is another thing that strangely benefits from the imposed adversity of government sanctions, both the Iranian government’s  on culture and the economic ones from other countries.  Iran definitely has the most vibrant pop music scene I’ve ever seen, and none of it is heard on the radio.  Music tastes  are mediated through satellite networks such as Persian Music Channel based in Dubai or Los Angeles and of course the tastes of individual consumers.  I used the opportunity to load up on Iranian music.  My friend brought me to a store where the owner asked me what kind of songs I would like and then burned me as many mp3 CDs as I wanted for $1.50 each (apparently I can also download them free online).  Some music is the boring old love music that wouldn’t be out of place on the Turkish, Israeli, or Arab pop charts, but a lot of it is simply excellent.  I’m still listening to and organizing the 500+ tracks I brought back with me.  The techno and electronic compositions are first-rate and make for gripping listening.  Rap is the real standout however.  Persian has always had a poetry fetish and this carries over well into rap music, with stunning beats combined with hilarious, clever, and/or penetrating rhymes that mean you can’t do anything else, you just get engrossed in the song.  Topics range from  clever expositions on sex to some excellent pieces ridiculing Zionism and the Iranian government all in one breath.

Confidence.  As a Westerner, I usually face an uncomfortable power dynamic as the one with education, opportunities, and little to prove, while my interlocutor lacks all of the above.  For better and worse, Iran has been as isolated for 30 years as almost any state can be and the habit of blaming outsiders has far exceeded the limits of credibility.  As such, I was treated remarkably equitably and few encounters contained any more expectation than their face value would suggest.  Frequently, it was expected that I would speak Farsi and people would just come up to me and ask for directions to things, and no one was surprised that I could communicate back to them.  People didn’t ask me to help them with migration visas but instead expressed interest in tourists visas out of a desire to travel and see other countries.  Also when people asked me about the West or my opinions about Iran it was out of genuine curiosity and without the need to prove something.  Likewise, I found discussing politics very easy.  People were not shy nor did they seem to have any notion that their political beliefs would get them in trouble, though of course, none go so far as to say “down with the Islamic Republic”—the lack of such sentiment is both the result of the state not crossing too many people’s red lines and security services being deployed very quietly in the background for those few people who would challenge the order.  People really think that their vote counts and they're excited about voting even if their selection is not what it should be in this election.

The security state.  The Iranian security state is clever.  Rather than minders getting in your face all the time, security is enforced at key nodes and in a way that most people neither see nor realize.  Visas for many foreigners, especially ”high-risk” ones like Americans, are not mediated individually but through tour companies, which in turn have trust-based relationships with key ministry workers.  The tour company then hires a guide, all of whom must have licenses and are only certified to guide people from certain countries.  My guide told me that only about 50 people can be guides for Americans.  As the tourist, I have a relationship of implicit trust and respect with my guide and company that provides a strong deterrent for not getting any of the above in trouble.  And because the government is not overly intrusive in verifying all of my movements, compliance is fairly easy on my end.  In Israel, I felt a very much adversarial relationship with the security services because of the reality of the situation.  In Iran, I was definitely annoyed but the reality of external threats and the reality of internal development made me decide to be cooperative if an issue would ever arise.  Ultimately, the security forces are based on trust.  In every city, on every avenue, there are pictures of people protesting against tyranny and real martyrs who gave up their lives.  On the one hand, these strengthen solidarity for the government in Iran, but they are also a powerful constraint on it looking too much like the previous one.  If the government were confronted by a broad group of protesters, no doubt the hard security apparatus, consisting of the revolutionary guards and basij, would be called upon but ultimately could not be relied on for very long to quell domestic unrest.

My feelings toward Afghanistan.  Ultimately, I will return to Afghanistan with a heavy heart.  It’s depressing that a line was drawn in the sand by some British guy 150 years ago and on one side you get a modern country and on the other people struggle with the concepts of restaurants, literacy, and pavement.  The irony is that the sheer amount of foreign intervention, no matter how well intended or efficiently implemented, simply ingrains the wrong attitude into Afghans and creates a culture of dependence.  It also obviates the very necessary internal political discussions that Afghans need to be having amongst themselves regarding their own political future.  On the other hand, Iran shows that a place can grow and “catch up” with any country in the world it desires.  Iran may have a lot to learn still but there’s a lot that we can learn from it.

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.