It is obviously very difficult for those outside Iran, and probably even for many of those inside it, to make coherent sense out of the dramatic political developments rocking that country since the presidential election nine days ago. The essential facts are well known. What is opaque is how they are operating politically within the country and what direction Iran is moving in. However, it seems increasingly clear that the regime in Tehran and Qom has doubled-down on everything from the election results to the legitimacy of the supreme leader, and has left the opposition and the protesters no choice but to view their relationship with the government as a zero-sum confrontation that has, perforce and by the deliberate choice of the government, become a revolutionary situation. Iranians are being told by their government: choose between us and the unknown, between us and chaos, between us and revolution.
The broadest outline of the facts is that following a disputed presidential election that appears to have been the subject of a rather crude falsification, thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets in daily protests that have grown in size and intensity over the days, culminating in significant violence yesterday. The question everyone had to consider and calculate has been, what is the fundamental aim of these protests? Are they essentially efforts to roll back one specific election result and a popular outpouring of support for Mir Hossein Mousavi, or even a broader effort to reclaim the authority of the ballot box? Or, more significantly, are they wittingly or unwittingly part of an effort by an old-guard revolutionary elite to push back what it perceives as a “coup” by upstarts from the military and intelligence services, especially the Revolutionary guard, using Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a puppet for their assertion of new power within the Islamic Republic? Or, most dramatically, are the protests essentially, or inevitably becoming, a rejection not of an election, or of a faction within the regime, but rather the rejection of the regime itself, of the Islamic Republic as such? In other words, how much is at stake for the government, and what is the extent of the ambitions of the protesters? Obviously, there are many organizations and motivations at work in the protests, but the question has been (and remains) what is the political direction this uprising is taking, in what direction is it shifting the Iranian state?
The government appears to believe that the protests are increasingly moving from more limited concerns regarding the election to encompassing a broader and completely unacceptable challenge to the system itself, and more significantly, and that they are making this a self-fulfilling prophecy. The regime has consequently become increasingly united in its response to the protesters. After initially suggesting that a recount was necessary or possible, the regime appears to have fallen back on the position that the election was above-board and must be defended at all costs. At this stage, the actual election and the political future of Mousavi appears to be almost beside the point. The violence yesterday suggests that we have moved beyond the phase in which some sort of climbdown from the government regarding the election would seriously address the dynamics fueling the protests, particularly since the government has taken the election results essentially off the table.
The more significant sign of a circling of the government wagons is the reported show of support for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by the so-called “Assembly of Experts,” an 86-member clerical committee in the “holy” city of Qom that has some degree of oversight on the activities of, and essentially appoints, the supreme leader of the vilayyat e-faqih. There were strong indications that former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — widely considered to be the most influential figure in what might be called a “moderate” wing of the regime, or alternatively the “old-guard” of revolutionary elites as opposed to the new class of Pasdaran, military and intelligence elites supposedly tied to Khamenei and represented politically by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — was attempting to use the civil unrest to try to undermine Khamenei?s position in the Assembly of Experts and essentially remove the supreme leader. Indeed, it’s entirely possible to read the Mousavi-Ahmadinejad election as a proxy battle between an odd coalition of old-line conservatives and reformists cobbled together by Rafsanjani versus Khamenei?s increasingly entrenched and military-centered power base. Their personal and political rivalry has been a subtext of a great deal of Iranian political maneuvering for at least 15 years, but appears to have reached something of a decisive turning point.
If it’s true that the Assembly has issued a statement of support for Khamenei, it would appear that Rafsanjani, if there was any truth to the speculation about his intentions, has essentially been (again, and perhaps finally and decisively) defeated, and, for whatever reason, the highest level of the regime has rallied around the conservative ultra-right led by the supreme leader and his agent, the president. This scenario fits rather nicely with the news today that Rafsanjani’s daughter and at least three other members of his family have been arrested for taking part in “illegal demonstrations.” It would strongly appear that Rafsanjani’s efforts to use the election, and now the protests, to unseat his long-time rival have not only failed, but that they have exhausted themselves, and that, for the time being, efforts to undermine the authority of the supreme leader from within the regime are all but crushed.
Whatever details are confirmed when the full facts are revealed in time, it now seems clear that not only have events overtaken the issue of the election, but that any sense that one faction in the regime can successfully use the momentum and dynamic of the protests to force a change in leadership, especially at the supreme leader and Assembly of Experts level, is also now, it would seem moot (a report to the contrary from al-Arabiyya notwithstanding). It would seem, from the outside and in a (possibly vain) effort to cut through the fog of confusion and the overdetermined nature of these extremely dramatic developments that are almost certainly unfolding outside of anyone’s control, that we have now entered what can only be seen as at least potentially a revolutionary situation in Iran. I wouldn’t have said this until the bloodshed yesterday and the reported political developments regarding the upper echelons of the elite, but it strikes me that the regime is now united around upholding the election results, and therefore also around the power of the supreme leader and the legitimacy of President Ahmadinejad. It has made it clear that it regards the protests as a direct challenge to the regime itself, and the political system of the Islamic Republic, and not a challenge to one, isolated fraudulent election, or to a single, grasping political faction. The difference is all-important, for it means that either the protesters give up, and go home and accept the election results and Ahmadinejad?s victory, or they press forward on the terms now outline by the government itself, which has in effect declared the situation to be a conflict between the system itself and the protesters.
Having opted for an all-or-nothing approach to this outpouring of dissatisfaction, it seems to me that the regime has given popular discontent and all parties involved in the process little choice but to view the matter in the same light. It is becoming increasingly unlikely that an electoral recount or other half-measures would suffice to address this dissatisfaction, or that the regime can manage a shakeup at the highest levels on its own terms. The regime of the Islamic Republic has recoiled into its shell like a snail in the rain, and this simply hoping that it all stops as soon as possible. The Eastern European, “velvet revolution,” internal regime reform in the face of public outrage option seems to have been foreclosed, at least for the time being. It seems extremely unlikely that the Iranian people are going to be put off by police brutality or other forms of violence.
Two crucial questions remain to be answered in the coming days and weeks:
1) Is there a stomach among the population for a confrontation with the system itself, and a revolutionary spirit to match the revolutionary situation that has unfolded? Are Iranians really ready for another major domestic political upheaval? Can the regime simply tough it out until the protesters become exhausted, dispirited or too internally divided to press on?
2) If there is sufficient revolutionary sentiment to realize the potential of what is plainly a revolutionary situation, is the opposition too fragmented and contradictory to take advantage of it and unseat the regime once and for all? Or, will the regime have sufficient support to fend off a challenge from a fragmented and fractious opposition that will undoubtedly include many organizations and individuals with conflicting motivations?
If the regime is going to collapse, both Iranian history and other analogous situations such as the fall of communism in Poland (and elsewhere), suggests that this is likely to be a slow, spiraling process in which centers of opposition beyond street demonstrations spring up in unexpected and unanticipated locations, ebb and flow, and eventually coalesce around a central set of themes and personalities as yet probably unpredictable. Factors such as general strikes, non-cooperation with the government at various levels, defections of officials and clerics, and a unifying rhetoric uniting a very disparate set of opposition forces would all be indispensable features of such a process. The regime is hunkered down for the long haul, and the opposition should be thinking in similar terms.
As for the Obama administration, hands-off is the best policy. After a somewhat shaky start, the President seems to have his foreign policy approach well in hand, applying subtle pressure on the Iranian government and limited support for the protesters (or at least their right to protest and not be killed), without giving the regime in a credible basis for claiming US (or even more ludicrously, British) interference in domestic Iranian affairs. Conservatives always love to blame “outside agitators” for the consequences of their own transgressions. It’s important that the United States doesn’t do anything to provide a credible basis for such claims, as they may be one of the last, best hopes for a regime and the leadership that is massacring its own legitimacy, credibility, and, quite possibly, future.