SENSIBLE COMMENTS ON IRAN FROM ANALYST TO THE WESTERN ELITES

Western Misconceptions Meet Iranian Reality

By George Friedman
Stratfor
June 15, 2009

In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a
revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what
would happen, they divided into two camps.

The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of
Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a
cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that
the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s
modernization program. These experts developed this view by
talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they
had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown
wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English,
since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that
well.

The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a
repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at
liberalizing the country. Their sources were the
professionals and academics who supported the uprising —
Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much
popular support. They thought the revolution would result
in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in
this group spoke even less Farsi than the those in the
first group. Misreading Sentiment in Iran

Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking
opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a
very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading
— because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by
the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in
city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people
Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This
demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and
not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the
time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam,
and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.

Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30
years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that
a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization —
a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would
form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook
“iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock
‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means
to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western
liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to
recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in
Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the
whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.

There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the
Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional
classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak
English, making them accessible to the touring journalists,
diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They
are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the
ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give
Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create
the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand —
but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are
not exactly the majority in Iran.

Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was
re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of
his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A
poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir
Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course,
interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in
a country where phones are not universal, and making a call
once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll
therefore would probably reach people who had phones and
lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi
probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons
easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is
certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he
could have stolen the election by such a large margin.
Doing so would have required the involvement of an
incredible number of people, and would have risked creating
numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in
each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad
manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the
vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly
have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi
still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the
possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the
mechanics of this. Ahmadinejad’s Popularity

It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys
widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that
matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and
liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental
issues that accord with the rest of the country.

First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of
Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly
about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for
Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the
world to whom economic progress is not of the essence;
people who want to maintain their communities as they are
and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people
who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi —
as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic
failures.

Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense
in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous
wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect
this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad
is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely
because he has systematically raised the corruption issue,
which resonates in the countryside.

Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national
security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be
remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s
that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering,
and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly
the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They
fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in
other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily
delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes
for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made
in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing
that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he
speaks to the veterans and their families, who want
something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in
the war.

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that
Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran —
something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a
spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a
base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud
or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he
won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought
he wouldn’t win.

For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able
to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed
when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles
intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case
scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.

Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals
who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more
complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone
who came to power constitutionally, and then preceded to
gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a
triumph of both democracy and repression. The Road Ahead:
More of the Same

The question now is what will happen next. Internally, we
can expect Ahmadinejad to consolidate his position under
the cover of anti-corruption. He wants to clean up the
ayatollahs, many of whom are his enemies. He will need the
support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president,
perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution.
Ahmadinejad does not want to challenge Khamenei, and we
suspect that Khamenei will not want to challenge
Ahmadinejad. A forced marriage is emerging, one which may
place many other religious leaders in a difficult position.

Certainly, hopes that a new political leadership would cut
back on Iran’s nuclear program have been dashed. The
champion of that program has won, in part because he
championed the program. We still see Iran as far from
developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, but certainly the
Obama administration’s hopes that Ahmadinejad would either
be replaced — or at least weakened and forced to be more
conciliatory — have been crushed. Interestingly,
Ahmadinejad sent congratulations to U.S. President Barack
Obama on his inauguration. We would expect Obama to
reciprocate under his opening policy, which U.S. Vice
President Joe Biden appears to have affirmed, assuming he
was speaking for Obama. Once the vote fraud issue settles,
we will have a better idea of whether Obama’s policies will
continue. (We expect they will.)

What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure
position, something that normally forms a basis for
negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the
Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what
the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce
them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and
its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the
United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States
wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran
doesn’t want to give.

On the surface, this would seem to open the door for an
attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former U.S. President
George W. Bush did not — and Obama does not — have any
appetite for such an attack. Both presidents blocked the
Israelis from attacking, assuming the Israelis ever
actually wanted to attack.

For the moment, the election appears to have frozen the
status quo in place. Neither the United States nor Iran
seem prepared to move significantly, and there are no third
parties that want to get involved in the issue beyond the
occasional European diplomatic mission or Russian threat to
sell something to Iran. In the end, this shows what we have
long known: This game is locked in place, and goes on.