By Patricia H. Kushlis
In 2005, a student of mine began his report to the class on the relationship between politics and Islam in Iran with the title “Iran is not Iraq.” Most, if not all of the students in that upper division Islam and Politics class already knew it but his was a particularly effective opening, and as he told me later, far too few Americans knew the difference between the two countries at the time of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and fewer still could differentiate between these two large Middle Eastern countries on the map.
Presumably, after the events in Iran over the past couple of weeks and the heavy news coverage here far more Americans may – hopefully - now recognize some of the major differences between the two countries. These include the facts that the majority of Iranians speak Farsi or a Farsi dialect while most Iraqis speak either Arabic or Kurdish; that almost all Iranians are Shiite Muslims while Iraqis are either Sunni or Shiite; that Iraq was an artificial entity patched together from three former Ottoman provinces by the British during the colonial period while Iran traces its origins to the Persian Empire; and finally that Iraq has been governed as a secular state since its independence in 1932 whereas Iran has been controlled by a Shiite theocracy since 1979. There are more differences, but enough for now.
Hopefully Americans also realize that there is a huge internal political struggle underway in Iran that burst into the open in the streets in reaction to the Iranian regime’s mangling the aftermath of the country’s recent presidential election.
Iranian hardliners have apparently won this round thanks to the decision by the conservative Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to let loose chain-bearing, pipe-swinging thugs otherwise known as the Basij in support of his anointed civil representative Ahmadinejad who may or may not have won the election. It’s pretty clear now that no one will ever know for sure. A fairly monitored recount of the first round would have settled the matter and given the winner legitimacy – but for whatever reason, the hard line clerical powers-that-be refused to permit it.
In 2005, according to an excellent2008 Rand study, the results of the first round were also challenged by a reformist candidate and that challenge was likewise ignored. But, at least a second round run-off was held. Victory went to Tehran mayor Ahmadinejad – then seen as an uncorrupt “man of the people.” He won by 61 to 35. That result was not disputed. Since then and now, however, political lines have hardened and Ahmadinejad – playing to his anti-Western populist base with rhetoric and policies that have hurt the country economically and internationally – has created enemies among the middle classes and in the provinces that he would not have had four years ago.
Yet it is unlikely that the imposition of harsh-clerical rule enforced by what amounts to a "beck and call" private militia will end the discontent in the long run. There are just too many cross currents in play – major sociological and demographic changes and challenges as well as an increasingly dysfunctional economy - that suggest otherwise.
2009 is not 1979
In 1979, a popular revolt that lasted a year evicted Shah Reza Pahlavi who had been installed on the throne through a coup d’etat instigated by the British with American CIA support 25 years before. The Shah replaced Mossadegh, a popularly elected president. Pahlavi ruled through fear, the balm of rising oil prices on world markets and support from the US. As market prices declined in the late 1970s so too did his political fortunes. This also happened in other countries whose economies floated on petroleum sales abroad - including the Soviet Union.
Given American support for the Shah, the US – as we too well know - became a favorite target of the Iranian opposition – an assortment of political parties and movements from the Communists to the theocrats. A well developed sense of Iranian nationalism and a deteriorating economy turned the tide against the Shah and his foreign supporters.
In 2009, however, the Iranian opposition’s target is its own domestic leadership that has ruled the country since 1979 and despite Ahmadinejad’s determined attempt to blame the US, the British and the Europeans for the current unrest in the streets and on rooftops, the mantra has changed from “death to the Americans” to “death to the dictator.”
“Death to America” and especially “Death to Britain” may still rally the hard line faithful in the regime’s attempts to paper over its own mistakes but the opposition demonstrators on the street did not protest a foreign “evil” but something they considered stolen from themselves by their own leaders – fair elections in which they had been asked to and did participate.
What had changed?
Iran now faces high unemployment especially among a bulging youth population and an educational system that fails to provide the practical skills needed for those 90 percent of Iranians who do not go beyond high school. Its inflation rate ranges between 10 and 25 percent and its nationalized oil industry produces less now than it did years ago – not because the supply is running out – to the contrary - but because of various inefficiencies in this over-bureaucratized industry.
Iran has also a post Iraq-Iran War baby-boom bulge that has increased the numbers of youth well beyond other cohorts in the population so that a very high percentage is under the age of 25. They have no memory of the 1979 revolution and little, if any, of the Iran-Iraq War that defined an earlier generation and spawned the security apparatus now employed by the conservative clerics and Ahmadinejad to keep themselves in power through brutal means.
Iran now has a better educated population in which nearly 80% of the population is literate. In 1996, for instance, the figure was just 48 percent. This is particularly true for women: over 60 percent of university students are now female. Yet women are discriminated against by the conservative clerical establishment most visibly in terms of dress and employment. It should come as no surprise then that women supported opposition candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi more heavily than men did and participated in the rallies leading up to the elections and the protest demonstrations thereafter in large numbers.
Iran is no longer predominately rural. In 1970, 42 percent of the population lived in urban areas, by 2000, the percentage had risen to 62 percent. Furthermore the population has been growing rapidly in most major cities not just Tehran and over time urban immigrants become urbanized. They have smaller families, are better educated and less religious than their rural peers although contrary to some conventional wisdom, rural Iranians apparently did not support Ahmadinejad in 2005 – his support came primarily from the urban working class especially in Tehran. Statistics also show that provincial cities – especially Tabriz – Mousavi’s home – have demonstrated strong support for opposition reformers especially when the candidate comes from there. In fact, Tabriz (the chief city in Iranian Azerbaijan) is long known for its reformist tendencies and Tabriz University was the birthplace of the anti-Shah protests in 1978.
Moreover, polling data suggest that many Iranians are not anti-American: in fact, the youth in particular like America.
Nearly 35 percent of Iranians are connected to the Internet – about on a par with Turkey. The figure for Iraq, in comparison, is .9 percent. Cell phone usage is likely higher than Internet so despite the regime’s suppression of the opposition press and control over domestic broadcasting, Iranians have had access to other information sources including private satellite television stations run by émigrés situated abroad. The regime is now jamming these communications as a way of suppressing the opposition but for how long? And what are likely ramifications when the jamming is eased?
Barack Obama is not George W. Bush
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has a far more sophisticated understanding of the Muslim world – including special sensitivities involved in dealing with Iran - than did George W. Bush. Bush’s inexplicable classification of Iran as one of two "axis of evil" just after the Iranians had been helpful to the US in Afghanistan was seen not only as a slap in the face of the Iranian reformers but also Iranians in general. No wonder US-Iranian relations went downhill from there.
Instead, Bush’s brassy anti-Iranian verbiage fanned the anti-foreign rhetoric of the Iranian hardliners bolstering Ahmadinejad’s popularity at home thus making the country more, rather than less, difficult for the US to deal with.
In comparison, Obama’s measured speeches in Ankara and Cairo and his administration’s careful responses to the post-presidential election events in Iran may, in themselves, be far more effective in helping to undermine Kamenei and Ahmadinejad’s anti-foreign – anti-American - jingoism in ways that have yet to play out. Khameni and Ahmadinejad are not out of the woods yet.