No Power to the People

June 24, 2009

By The Diplomat

And so Obama is in the worst of all possible worlds here, because if he throws his weight behind the regime like he has before, and the regime does fall, it really disadvantages the US in interacting with Iran in the future. But if he supports the opposition and the regime consolidates power, they are much less likely to talk to him. And that’s why you’re seeing a lot of policy inertia coming from Washington.

Frankly, there’s a lot more we could say. The smart thing to do is always to follow the will of the people, and the will of the people here clearly has diverged from that of the clerical regime. The US government has a responsibility to make clear to the Iranian regime that where it stands in the international community – and in its relations with the United States – has a great deal to do with the way it responds to the current crisis. If it responds humanely, pluralistically and transparently, then things can be worked on in terms of bilateral relations. But if it responds the way it is now, with riot squads, shock troops, in a typically totalitarian fashion, then it is going to be very difficult to move beyond this, even with a president who’s predisposed to do so.

You mentioned the possibility of the regime falling. How likely is that in the short to medium term?

Any answer on this clearly has to be predicated on the understanding that revolutions are notoriously hard to predict. Almost nobody saw the fall of the Soviet Union, and I think we run a similar risk with Iran – not giving it enough weight, or maybe giving it too much weight.

There are two drivers in terms of any prerevolutionary stirrings. The first is leadership. At the moment there’s no real leadership for the movement; these are just people coming out as individuals to rally on behalf of political change – incremental political change, not fundamental political change. But there’s no one leader who’s pulling together these factions and bringing them together in terms of a coherent ideology. If that does not happen it’s hard to see how Iran can change, even incrementally, in terms of government, because even if Iran’s ayatollahs wanted to hand over power, it is not clear who they would hand over power to. So that is one metric to watch.

The other is the security forces: the Revolutionary Guard, which is Iran’s clerical army, and their domestic counterpart, the Basij. These are the guys with the guns, and in authoritarian regimes the guys with the guns matter a great deal. If you start to see a fragmentation of the political base in those organisations, if they are no longer willing to go out and enforce the edicts of the regime and beat and shoot the protesters, then you may have something. But if these agents of the clerical regime remain loyal, then it is unclear to me how decisively the current groundswell of public opinion is going to impact the political scene.

Assuming Ahmadinejad does manage to retain and consolidate power, will this week’s events have given him any pause for thought on some of his harder line policies?

Ahmadinejad has said he will be even ‘more solid’ in his second term. This suggests he is not at all chastened by this experience – he has a sense of entitlement, he has gotten the endorsement of the Supreme Leader, and feels he is not accountable to the Iranian people. When it comes to Ahmadinejad, his focus has always been on national security issues – the nuclear issue, for example. And I don’t see that changing.

What is happening today has very little to do with the nuclear programme, which still remains a popular initiative on the part of the regime. So in terms of things that matter to the West – support for terrorism, nuclear weapons – there is very little sign the current unrest is going to change very much, unless it ends up creating a fundamental transformation of the government from the ground up.