A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  Some Western commentators declared that the outcome of the election was immaterial because there was little to choose between the policy intentions of the two main protagonists, Mousavi and Ahmadinejad. That missed the point. Mousavi and his reformist supporters were not looking to overturn the Islamic republic, but what had happened was no less important for the fact that they were not following a Western-inspired agenda. By falsifying the election results (as was widely believed to have happened), the regime had gone much further than ever before in subverting the representative element in the Iranian constitution and had precipitated a crisis over the very nature of the Islamic republic.

  Important figures like former presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami were openly critical of what had happened. The opposition candidates Mousavi and Karrubi refused to be silenced. Several leading clerics criticized the conduct of the election, and others stayed pointedly silent. The crisis was not just a confrontation between the regime and a section of the populace; it was also a crisis within the regime itself. The Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was forced to take a more partisan position than ever before, abandoning the notion that his office put him above day-to-day politics. The demonstrators rewarded him with the chant marg bar diktatur (death to the dictator). His position was weakened. Many Iranians, particularly Green Movement supporters, felt they were now being ruled under the threat of naked force, under the aegis of a ruling group whose claim to Islamic legitimacy had worn very thin.

  In the meantime, the regime blamed Western governments for instigating the demonstrations, presenting the Obama administration with a sharpened dilemma: should America pursue its policy of détente with a regime that had just, in the judgment of many of its own citizens, stolen an election in such a bare-faced manner? The logic of engagement with Iran had not depended upon the virtue or otherwise of the Iranian regime, and cautious attempts to engage with the Iranians continued. But revelations in the autumn that showed the Iranian government had been constructing a uranium enrichment facility at Fordow near Qom and was conducting new missile tests increased the pressure for new sanctions.

  The election and its aftermath further strengthened the position of the Revolutionary Guard corps—Sepah-e Pasdaran. Their close relationship with President Ahmadinejad was well known, and there were many reports (as in 2005) of their engagement in the election campaign in his interest. The regime’s dependence on them to face down opposition and keep the ruling group in power was only intensified by the outcome of June 12. The role of the Revolutionary Guard in every aspect of Iranian life, and especially in the economy, had been increasing and strengthening for many years. It was emphasized further in October 2009 when a company linked to the Revolutionary Guards paid the equivalent of US$8 billion for a controlling share in the state telecommunications monopoly. The country was beginning to look more and more like a military dictatorship—a tighter and more effective version of what the revolution had brought down in 1979. After the June 12 election, Ayatollah Montazeri commented, “What we have is not Islamic republic but military republic.”3

  On December 19, 2009, Montazeri died in his sleep at the age of eighty-seven. There were further demonstrations associated with his funeral in Qom on December 21, and pro-regime thugs attacked Mousavi and Karrubi there in the street. More demonstrations took place on December 27, the day of Ashura, in Isfahan, Kermanshah and Shiraz as well as in Tehran;4 opposition demonstrators were again attacked, and Mousavi’s nephew was shot and killed. On February 11, 2010 (the anniversary of the final triumph of the revolution in 1979), the regime countered the opposition’s practice of using familiar calendar dates to take over official events by closing down Internet servers and mobile phone networks and closing off access to Azadi Square to all but pro-regime supporters bused in from outside. There was another attempt on February 14, 2011—again the regime’s tactics of flooding the streets with police and Basij, preventing small groups from coalescing into larger ones, and closing down telephone and Internet communications proved effective. That attempt was the last for some time by the opposition to express their continuing disapproval of the regime on the streets. The hardline leadership took Mousavi and Karrubi into house arrest, where they remain at the time of this writing (December 2015). Large numbers of reformists left the country and went into exile after June 2009, and an unknown additional number are still in prison.

  In June 2015 a poll was taken in Iran about the events of 2009 and attitudes to the Green Movement. One has to be cautious about all polling, especially polling within Iran (where those polled often have real concerns about anonymity), but the results are nonetheless of interest. Of those polled, fifty-nine percent said that they believed the results of the 2009 election were accurate and that no fraud had taken place; nineteen percent said there had been fraud by the government, and twenty-two percent said they didn’t know or could not comment. The poll also indicated that better-educated, urban Iranians were more likely to doubt the outcome of the election, and it found that exactly the same proportions of those polled (28 percent in each case) used the term “Green Movement” as used the term “Sedition” (the Iranian government’s term for those who demonstrated against the 2009 election result).5 However skeptical one may be from outside Iran, one must accept that a significant proportion of Iranians, perhaps a majority, believe that the outcome of the election was valid. The election produced, or reflected, among other things, a significant division in Iranian society itself.

  The crisis of 2009 threw into high relief a number of important questions about a subject often close to the hearts of academics—the legitimacy of government.

  The events of 2009 damaged the legitimacy of the Islamic regime in Iran, and especially that of its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. But when the regime still commanded the loyalty of the security apparatus, the Basij and the Revolutionary Guard, how much did that matter? Many observers have insisted that Iran is not a totalitarian state, like the former Soviet Union. The election of June 2009 took Iran closer to totalitarianism, but not all the way. One pointer to that, without minimizing the abuses that took place or the bravery of the opposition in the face of them, was the reluctance of the regime to use the full force available to it against the demonstrators. The events of the so-called Arab Spring from 2011 onward provided a comparison (some Iranians have claimed that the demonstrations of the Green Movement were the precursors of and the inspiration for what happened in Tunisia and Egypt). The Iranian regime used brutality, but it did not go to war with its own people like Gaddafi in Libya or the Assad regime in Syria. For a long time, Mousavi and Karrubi were allowed to remain at large, speaking out against what had happened. The regime still wanted to maintain its own self-image of democracy. When he came under pressure, Khamenei closed down Kahrizak. So there was still uncertainty about how far the regime would go in its repression, and whether its security instruments would obey it if it went too far. The revolution, like most revolutions, ended in strengthening the Iranian state, but the regime’s understanding of its own origins in popular struggle against tyranny still acted as a restraining factor.

  In addition, politics in Iran has a rubber-ball quality. It is as if you squeeze politics in Iran in one area, it bulges out irrepressibly in another.

  This showed again in the public row between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad that broke out in the spring and summer of 2011. Beginning with a dispute over Ahmadinejad’s attempt to dismiss his minister of intelligence, Heydar Moslehi, it developed into a major rift, with the dangerous accusation of “deviance” leveled at Ahmadinejad, and the arrest of some of his associates (some of the latter, bizarrely, were also accused of sorcery). Given the lengths to which Khamenei had gone to defend Ahmadinejad’s election result in 2009, few would have predicted that within two years they would be as estranged from each other as Khamenei and Khatami had been in 2000.

  If there were limits to the degree that the state would use its coercive power, there were perhaps limits also to the lengths Iranians were pre
pared to go against the regime. After June 2009 there were many reiterations of the opposition’s commitment to nonviolence, and it has been a commonplace to hear Iranians say that they have experienced one revolution and they do not want another. In Iranian politics, the principle of nonviolence may yet prove a strength rather than a weakness, but the reform movement, generally, since the 1990s, has often proved ham-fisted at using it to achieve real political results.

  The crisis of 2009 was as much a crisis within the regime as a confrontation between regime and citizens. The way that Rafsanjani appeared to have been marginalized after 2009 was a measure of that. One element in the success of the Iranian regime in surviving since the revolution has been the way that its institutions have adapted to absorb faction and dissent. Khomeini himself organized and reorganized the system and shifted his interventions to favor first one faction and then another, to achieve that effect and to keep a diversity of elements and factions in play. But between 2009 and 2013, the hardline Right made themselves dominant, excluded the Left and the reformists—including a large number of prominent former regime adherents and supporters—subverted revolutionary institutions, became ever more reliant on naked force, and fell to squabbling among themselves.

  In the autumn of 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) produced a new report on the Iranian nuclear program. When it at length emerged, there was not all that much new in it, and in particular it did not overturn the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) judgment that Iranian work toward a nuclear weapon had ceased in 2003. But it was much trailed in advance as likely to reveal threatening new facts about the Iranian program, and was used, along with other causes of tension, to justify new sanctions measures. These were much more serious than previous measures, largely blocking Iran off from the international banking system and making it much more difficult to export oil. The Iranian rial lost half of its value by January 2012, and fell further afterwards. The new sanctions were highly damaging to the already weak Iranian economy; inflation soared and many imported goods became unaffordable. Ordinary people found they could not pay for staple foods like rice and chicken.

  Most observers expected, given the continuing tight control over political activity and general tense atmosphere, that the presidential election of June 2013 would follow the pattern of that of 2009, with the regime manipulating the process to secure the election of a candidate aligned with the Supreme Leader and his circle. This expectation seemed to be confirmed when the candidates list was vetted in May to exclude Rafsanjani. This was a shock—Rafsanjani had been humiliated at elections in 2000 and 2005 by the electorate, but for the former president to be vetoed by the Guardian Council seemed to emphasize even further the degree to which the system had swung to the right, narrowing its base of support. Rafsanjani was seemingly being punished for critical statements he had made in the aftermath of the 2009 election. Ahmadinejad’s preferred candidate was also excluded, effectively consigning him and his brand of politics to oblivion.

  But the list of candidates was interesting in other ways, too. Of the eight that the Guardian Council approved, there were five hardline conservatives (Jalili, Qalibaf, Rezai, Velayati and Haddad-Adel), one moderate conservative (Rouhani) and two reformists (Aref and Gharazi). Qalibaf, Velayati and Rezai had all lost in previous presidential elections, Aref and Gharazi were not prominent or charismatic figures, and Rouhani, though well known as a diplomat and nuclear negotiator, had never cut a big figure in popular politics. But three of the candidates had serious foreign policy experience (Velayati, Rouhani and Jalili) and even at this early stage it looked as though the regime wanted to emphasize the foreign policy angle, presumably with a view to finding a solution to the nuclear problem, and relief from sanctions.

  Until the last days before the poll on June 14, the election campaign did not catch fire in the way the 2009 election had, and many felt that the televised debates were for the most part lackluster by comparison with four years earlier. The crisis over the economy, sanctions and the nuclear program dominated the campaign. Jalili, who had been the chief nuclear negotiator under Ahmadinejad, appeared at first to be the preferred regime candidate. But in one highly significant moment in the debates Velayati (of all the candidates perhaps the one closest to Khamenei himself) criticized Jalili’s conduct of the nuclear negotiations for being excessively obstructive and unimaginative—an unprecedented public display of disagreement within the highest circles of the regime on the most sensitive and vital matters of state security. Given that Jalili had been following the approved regime line in the negotiations at the time, the criticism was also rather unfair, but it was another indication of the way that policy was shifting.

  As election day drew closer Aref and Haddad-Adel dropped out, and Aref gave his support to Rouhani, helping Rouhani’s efforts to present himself as a candidate not just for moderates and those who might have voted for Rafsanjani but for reformists also. Rouhani made statements in favor of female equality, release of political prisoners, and free speech, all of which were aimed at gathering support from reformists; this effort was helped enormously when Khatami gave him his endorsement shortly before the poll. Something of a bandwagon of enthusiasm for Rouhani did finally develop in the last hours of the campaign.

  When the votes were counted, it emerged that Rouhani had been elected with 50.7 percent of the vote, narrowly squeaking past the fifty percent threshold required for a candidate to succeed without a second voting round. He was well ahead of his nearest rival, Mohammad Qalibaf, with more than three times the number of votes.

  Given the scale of the alleged fraud in the 2009 election, one might think that it would not have been difficult to skew the 2013 result by the one or two percentage points necessary to ensure that the voting went to a second round—and it was far from clear that Rouhani would have won a second round. This indicated again that the conduct of the election implied a decision by Khamenei and his circle in favor of a candidate well placed and well qualified to resolve the nuclear dispute—an impression reinforced further by a story reported in the Iranian press later to the effect that Rouhani’s candidacy had only narrowly been approved by the Guardian Council after the chairman, Ayatollah Jannati, had intervened personally in his favor.

  But Rouhani’s election seems to have had another, more domestic significance also. The Ahmadinejad presidency had been a significant lurch to the right in Iranian politics. The outcome of the 2009 elections, which increased the dependence of the Supreme Leader on the Revolutionary Guard and the rest of the security apparatus, was a dangerous further lurch in the same direction. Khomeini in his time had always tried to keep Left and Right in balance. Despite the fact that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad eventually emerged still on top, the huge demonstrations that followed the disputed election of 2009 must have sounded a warning to Khamenei. In that context, and without detracting from Rouhani’s success, the result of the 2013 election looked also like a deliberate rebalancing toward more broad-based government.

  Since the 1979 revolution Hasan Rouhani belonged to that group of clerics associated with Rafsanjani (and Beheshti before him)—conservative, but modernizing and above all pragmatic, with significant direct experience of life in the West and good ability in Western languages (at the end of the 1990s, he earned a PhD at Glasgow Caledonian University, albeit largely on a distance learning basis). For most of his career, Rafsanjani has been Rouhani’s main patron and mentor, but Rouhani has been well connected with other major figures across the system. In 1989 he was appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC)—a powerful position of trust that meant he chaired preparatory meetings as Khamenei’s representative. In the closing years of the Khatami presidency Rouhani came to new prominence (from October 2003), as the chief negotiator for Iran on the nuclear question—the Iranian press gave him the nickname of “diplomat sheikh”—but he resigned from the nuclear negotiator job (and from the position as secretary of the SNSC) shortly after Ahmadinejad’s elect
ion in 2005.

  After his election as president in 2013, Rouhani made clear his intention to push forward toward a resolution of the nuclear dispute as a matter of urgency. In September he went to New York for the UN General Assembly (UNGA), and in his speech there on September 24 he said that the era of zero-sum games in international relations was over—coercion and threat had to be replaced by compromise and dialogue to solve tensions and conflicts. Iran was ready to remove “all reasonable doubts” about her nuclear program, but the best way to resolve the question lay through acceptance of Iran’s “inalienable rights.” The speech was carefully written for domestic as well as international hearing, but perhaps more important were the responses of interlocutors to private talks with the Iranian team (led by the new foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif) in the margins of the UNGA. American and British diplomats immediately welcomed a new, more conciliatory and workmanlike approach from the Iranian side. And then, as the politicians and diplomats left New York three days later, Rouhani and Obama spoke by telephone in what was generally interpreted as a breakthrough—the first such exchange since 1979. Diehard hardliners in Iran made dissenting noises on Rouhani’s return, but much more important were continuing statements from Khamenei in Rouhani’s support. With Khamenei behind him, Rouhani did not have to worry too much about those discordant notes.

  Talks resumed in October between Iran and the P5+1 (the permanent five of the UN Security Council—the USA, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany) in a much more positive spirit. When the negotiators reconvened in Geneva at the end of November, they were able to reach an interim agreement (on November 24). The core of the deal was that Iran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment above the five percent level in exchange for relaxation of some sanctions—a relaxation estimated to be worth $7 billion to Iran (“modest,” according to the United States). In addition, the Iranians agreed to begin converting uranium enriched to a higher level to put it beyond weapon use, to increase the frequency and intrusiveness of inspections, to suspend work on the Arak plutonium plant, and to halt development of improved centrifuges that would greatly increase the speed and efficiency of enrichment. Further negotiations would continue toward a final agreement, to be completed within six months. Although only an interim settlement, it was a great success—a development with huge potential implications for better relations between Iran and the United States, and the rest of the world, and perhaps for an improvement in conditions in the Middle East more widely.