Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  Several of Khatami’s own cabinet ministers resigned to protest the ban on reformers running again. Tehran’s theocracy had never been so widely split.

  At a 2002 commemoration of the student protest over the newspaper closure three years earlier, Khatami compared his situation to Socrates. The Greek philosopher, he noted, had opted to drink poison in order to maintain respect for the principle of law and order.

  “Forget Athens,” the students shouted back. “Change this place first!”17

  In the end, Khatami was an ivory-tower intellectual more comfortable with lofty ideas than with dirty day-to-day politics. He was a thinker and a talker, not a doer.

  “Khatami feared instability in Iran, so he wanted to move slowly,” Hadi Semati, the political analyst, reflected. “He was not a street fighter. He did not want to take on his own people. He wanted to talk them into this. He felt moving one step ahead was better than moving three steps ahead and then having to move four steps back.”

  Khatami’s presidency withered. With most reformers ineligible to run, parliament was taken over by conservatives and hard-liners. The reform movement disintegrated into its diverse pieces. He left office in 2005.

  In 2006, the United States granted Khatami a visa to give a series of lectures in five American cities, including an address at the National Cathedral in Washington. President Bush later acknowledged that he personally approved the unprecedented tour. Khatami was the highest-ranking revolutionary to tour the United States since the shah’s ouster in 1979. I saw him twice during that visit. I asked him what had happened to his presidency.

  “Reform is a gradual process,” he reflected during a long conversation in New York. “To make it work, two things have to happen. First, people’s expectations have to be brought in line with reality. Freedoms can’t be achieved in one night. We couldn’t solve the long-standing problems of unemployment or poverty quickly. So we have to convince Iranians to lower their expectations.

  “At the same time, we have to increase the tolerance of government for reform. It is a distinctive feature of dictatorships,” Khatami added, “that they are intolerant.

  “I wasn’t successful in the first part,” he continued, his arm emerging from under his chocolate cloak to scoop up a handful of pistachios from a decorative coffee-table dish. “But I was more successful in the other. For the first time you saw a president at least trying to give people more rights.”

  The solution in Iran, he said, was to shake up the system and redistribute power—including term limits on the supreme leader. Ultimate power should rotate, he added. Iran’s Islamic pope would, in effect, no longer be infallible. “Of course, in our constitution, this is not the case,” he offered. “But if it were, I think it would be better.”

  I noted that the twelve men on the Council of Guardians had been more of a problem during his presidency, since they were the ones to disqualify candidates and shoot down more than 100 laws proposed by a president who had come to office with tens of millions of votes.

  “Twelve?” Khatami said, his eyebrows arching up, his forehead rising. “All they needed was seven votes! Seven is their majority.”

  But the pendulum does swing in Islamist regimes.

  Religious ideologies invoked in earthly politics are just as vulnerable as any other utopian ideology. They come up against the real world. They can fail to deliver what they promise. Publics can turn against them.

  Whatever their powers, clerics depend on the public for their legitimacy. They can be rejected.

  In 2005, Iranians went to the polls to elect a new president. As in 1997, the election appeared preordained. For two decades after the revolution, Iran’s master wheeler-dealer was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the cleric with the Cheshire-cat grin. Iranians called him the Shark, for both his smooth, beardless skin and his killer political instincts. A centrist who appeased conservatives and teased reformers, he was also known as the Teflon mullah because he got away without anything sticking to him—including the arms-for-hostage scandal he secretly orchestrated with the United States in the mid-1980s.

  A popular joke in the 1980s had him driving in a car with the two other most powerful politicians at the time—then-President Khamenei, a conservative, and Prime Minister Mir Hussein Musavi, a leftist. When they came to a T-junction in the road, the driver asked which way he should turn.

  “Right,” Khamenei said.

  “No, go left,” the prime minister said.

  Rafsanjani then instructed, “Signal left, but turn right.”

  Rafsanjani was speaker of parliament in the 1980s. The position belied his power. He was Iran’s wiliest politician. He finagled his way into one position after another. During Iran’s grisly eight-year war with Iraq, he even took over as commander of the Revolutionary Guards. Iranians began referring to him as “Akbar Shah,” or King Akbar, using his first name to imply that he had the powers of a monarch.

  After the Imam’s sudden death in 1989 left the revolution without its father figure, Rafsanjani crafted the post-Khomeini era almost single-handedly. He engineered a succession that put Ali Khamenei into the job of supreme leader. He then had the constitution amended by parliament, which he led, to create a stronger executive presidency—a job he then ran for twice and held in the 1990s.

  In 1997, he put out feelers about amending the constitution again so he could run for a third term. But public opinion overwhelmingly opposed it, and he backed down. That was the year Khatami won.

  In 2005, Rafsanjani decided to throw his turban in the ring again for president. Although he still held several positions, it was to be his comeback at the top. More than 1,000 candidates, including several women, registered to compete. The Council of Guardians disqualified all but eight men; among the rivals allowed to run were two reformers and the little-known mayor of Tehran. But Rafsanjani was the clear front-runner, with one of the reformers expected to be his main competition.

  Then something happened on the way to the polls.

  Rafsanjani ran a slick and lavish campaign the likes of which Iran had never witnessed, complete with bumper stickers, huge banners strung across streets, and campaign tents with Western rock music. Dozens of girls on roller blades skated around the capital with his name—in Farsi and English—pinned on their backs. Two famed Iranian film directors produced his television spots.

  He fudged the issues, always talking in vague terms so he could be every mullah to everybody. But his ticket implied better relations with the United States, privatization to spur the troubled economy, and greater social freedoms.

  Rafsanjani had said in 2002 that exposing a single strand of a woman’s hair was “a dagger drawn toward the heart of Islam.” But in a campaign meeting with youth in 2005, he teasingly offered a different redline. “No nudity,” he quipped.18

  “There is no use imposing tastes, being strict, and going backward,” he told reporters. “Whoever becomes president cannot work without considering the demands and conditions of society.”

  On Iran’s political system, he came down on both sides at the same time. “I certainly believe in democracy,” he said. “But I believe we have to take this course step by step.”19

  In the first round of elections, as expected, Rafsanjani came in first out of the eight candidates, but only narrowly, and not with the majority needed to win outright.

  The runner-up was the shocker. He was not a reformer. The dark-horse mayor of Tehran, a political nobody who had never run for office before, came in a close second. Although city councils in Iran are elected, mayors are appointed. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been mayor for only two years.

  In the run-off election, the two men offered a stark contrast.

  Rafsanjani, the son of a wealthy pistachio trader whose brother had attended a California university, had just turned seventy. He is a tallish man with a robust girth, smooth fleshy cheeks, an almost invisible white moustache, and a tuft of white hair protruding from under his white turban. Of all Iran’s clerics,
he most revels in the limelight and is famed for the way he cajoles and circuitously manipulates others to embrace his positions. He lived in a villa in the cool foothills of North Tehran. He was driven to campaign stops in an entourage of bullet-proof Mercedes limousines.

  Ahmadinejad is a skinny man, small at only five foot four inches. His head is wide at the top but tapers to a narrow jaw that is covered with a close-cropped black beard. He has small, deep-set eyes. His short black hair spills a bit over his forehead, partially covering a deep mark from praying several times a day—a telltale sign not found on Rafsanjani, Khatami, Khamenei, or many other ranking clerics in Iran. It is all the more striking because Amadinejad is not a cleric.

  Iranians called the race “the turban versus the hat.” Ahmadinejad was the first noncleric to make the presidential final runoff election since passage of the Islamic republic’s constitution.

  Born in 1956, Ahmadinejad was more than twenty years younger than Rafsanjani. He came of age during the revolution. He trained as a civil engineer and had a doctorate in traffic management. He was a campus leader during the student takeover of the American embassy, although one of the masterminds told me that Ahmadinejad had opposed the plan because it did not include a simultaneous takeover of the Soviet Embassy. He was a Revolutionary Guard during the war with Iraq in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he was appointed a provincial governor. He then taught engineering at Tehran’s technical university. In 2003, he was appointed mayor of Tehran by a city council elected with only a twelve-percent turnout.

  As mayor, Amadinejad shunned the official manor and stayed in his small town house in a working-class neighborhood. His campaign was unsophisticated. He tapped into mosque networks and personal ties to the Revolutionary Guards and Basij. In his television spots, he was shown praying and, dressed in military fatigues, praising veterans for their sacrifices during the war with Iraq. Many men on his campaign dressed in black shirts; women always wore the full black chador.

  On domestic issues, Ahmadinejad was disdainful of reform. “We did not have a revolution,” he said, “in order to have democracy.”20

  On foreign policy, he was disdainful of rapprochement with the West, particularly the United States. “In the past, the Americans broke off relations with Iran to create pressure,” he said. “If they want to reestablish them now, it is for the same reasons. We do not want to have imposed relations.”21

  Ahmadinejad was a master of earthy street politics. “I take pride,” he said often, “in being the Iranian nation’s little servant and street sweeper.” During the campaign, he drove around Tehran in his 1977 Peugeot.

  The final vote stunned the establishment. The little mayor beat the most cunning politician in Iran by a humiliating seven million votes. Rafsajani garnered only one third of the tally.

  Iranians had again signaled that they wanted something different. Even Khamenei, who owed his job to Rafsanjani, talked of the need for “new political blood.”

  Rafsanjani was not a gracious loser. He lashed out at opponents who “spent billions from the public funds to ruin the reputation of me and my family in a vicious way.” He warned that those who intervened in the election would “pay back in life and after death.”22

  But Amadinejad heralded the election as a turning point. “A new Islamic revolution has arisen,” he said.

  His surprise win marked the emergence of a younger generation of conservative and hard-line technocrats. They were not clerics. They had limited exposure to the outside world, particularly the West. They were young adults during the revolution and worked their way up through the Islamic system, often as its foot soldiers in the war with Iraq.

  But the pendulum swung so dramatically for three other reasons that had little to do with Ahmadinejad’s hard-line politics. Thirty-five to forty percent of Iran’s voters tend to prefer the puritan politics of traditional, conservative, or hard-line candidates, three quite distinct categories in Iran. But the rest had different rationales.

  First, Ahmadinejad was a grassroots politician from the working class, a newcomer, and largely untainted. His father, he boasted, was a “hard-bitten toiler blacksmith.” He campaigned as Mr. Clean—and against the notoriously corrupt clerical oligarchs who had become a virtual mafia. During the monarchy, Iranians complained that everything in Iran was run by 1,000 families close to the shah. With cronyism rampant again, Iranians complained that the oil-rich country was run after the revolution by 1,000 families close to the clerics.

  Rafsanjani’s family empire embodied the new privileged class. His children held powerful or lucrative positions in everything from the oil industry to Iran’s Olympic committee. His daughter had also been a member of parliament. Siblings, nephews, and cousins fared well too. A few months before the election, I interviewed Rafsanjani’s brother, who had headed Iranian television and radio for years; his opulent office was in the shah’s old palace compound.

  So a huge part of Ahmadinejad’s victory was a protest. It was an antielite vote. Iranians have become increasingly sophisticated politically. Even in a rigidly restricted political arena, they look for options. As with Khatami, they were rejecting the status quo.

  “People’s expectations have not been realized over the past eight years [of Khatami’s presidency], so they are looking for something different,” Mirdamadi, the former hostage taker and ex-parliamentarian, told me shortly before the election. “People still want change, and they will vote for anyone they think will be able to change something.”

  Second, Ahmadinejad’s populist economic message appealed to Iranians made poorer since the revolution. He ran as a man of the people on a ticket of piety, price controls, and clean management. He pledged to put oil revenues on Iranians’ dinner tables. He crafted an image as Iran’s Robin Hood.

  The timing was right. The Islamic republic had not produced heaven on earth, and Iranians were increasingly impatient. Unemployment was officially ten percent, but in reality at least twenty percent—and some economists claimed even higher. With at least one in four living below the poverty line in a country with inflation at sixteen percent, many Iranians had two or even three jobs to make ends meet. Women increasingly worked because they had no choice. Despite rigid social controls, prostitution had become rampant, even among women who wore the chador.

  Many in the huge baby bulge of young students who had voted for Khatami eight years earlier had graduated and were out looking for jobs and housing. Iran struggled—usually unsuccessfully—to absorb 500,000 baby boomers added to the labor market every year. Deferred marriage had become a chronic problem because of housing shortages.

  As mayor, Ahmadinejad had set up a marriage fund, granting loans to young people who could not afford to wed. Bread-and-butter issues explained his appeal. He won in part on a variation of “It’s the economy, stupid.”

  Third, Ahmadinejad beat two reformers because Iranians were exhausted by the political infighting and inertia. They were looking for a man of action. “People were tired of the political bickering. Iran was consumed every day with arrests, closures, and infighting. It led to a stalemate,” Hadi Semati, the political analyst, told me.

  “People thought conservatives weren’t going to allow the reformers to move on. And they were tired of the reformers’ inability to fulfill their promises,” he said. “So many people thought the conservatives might at least be able to do something economically.”

  Many Iranians did not initially take Ahmandinejad seriously. Some saw him as a bit of a bumpkin. As mayor, he had banned billboard ads featuring Western celebrities, such as British soccer star David Beckham. He closed down cultural centers that had performed the works of Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, and Victor Hugo and converted them into religious education centers.

  Tehran’s ever-frenzied grapevine speculated that he would segregate, by sex, all public elevators, parks, and even sidewalks. An Iranian friend recounted a joke that had Ahmadinejad standing in front of a mirror combing his hair and repeating, “OK, male lic
e to the left, female lice to the right.”

  Cell phones are ubiquitous in Tehran, and the text-message crowd frantically exchanged new “Mahmoud” jokes, irreverently referring to the new president by his first name.

  Iranians were generally as surprised as the outside world by how his presidency unfolded. Ahmadinejad quickly proved to be Khatami’s opposite. In contrast to the western-educated advisers and enlightened clerics who surrounded Khatami, Ahmadinejad brought in colleagues from the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij. His spiritual mentor, Ayatollah Mohammed Mesbah-Yazdi, was often referred to as Ayatollah Crocodile for both his prickly positions, sometimes to the right of the supreme leader, and his long bulbous nose. “Beware! Don’t let them fool you,” Mesbah-Yazdi once said at Friday prayers. “In legislation, Islam and democracy cannot in any way be reconciled.”23

  Amadinejad began to sweep the nation back in time.

  In the first year alone, he purged professors by forcing early retirements, then called on students to report professors with liberal or secular tendencies. He named a cleric to head Tehran University, replacing an academic normally elected by the faculties. He ordered the confiscation of satellite dishes that brought in news and entertainment from the outside world. He banned Western music, including the classics, from radio and television. The sound tracks, without words, of the Eagles’ hit “Hotel California” and Eric Clapton’s “Rush” had often been used as background music on Iranian news.24

  The new president changed the face of the Islamic republic, both at home and abroad. He brought home dozens of Iran’s most experienced diplomats. He banned the Center for Protecting Human Rights, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi. And he closed the last reformist newspaper and three magazines.

  Even as he launched his own blog, the government clamped down on others. After Israel, Iran has spawned the largest number of Web sites in the Middle East. Iranians love technology. Several ayatollahs have their own sites, on which they issue fatwas in answer to followers’ questions. I once interviewed a senior cleric in the dusty religious city of Qom who had made his life’s work putting all the writings of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism through the ages, and in several languages, on a single website. More than 140,000 Iranian Web sites sprang up between 2001 and 2005. Khatami’s vice president was one of the early bloggers and encouraged others to engage.