Iran Election

The death of Bela Kiraly earlier this week got me thinking about revolutionary contagion -- i.e., the spread of revolutionary movements across borders -- in the context of the recent turbulence in Iran. Kiraly was the Hungarian military officer who commanded the rebel forces in the 1956 uprising, a rebellion crushed by the Soviet army. He escaped into exile, but made a triumphant return to Hungary after communism fell.

Together with Nikita Khruschchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalinism, the Hungarian Revolution dealt a major blow to communism's ideological appeal. For several decades after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, communism seemed to be an attractive alternative to liberal capitalism and plenty of smart but gullible people succumbed to its allure. Western leaders worried that Bolshevism would spread rapidly in the 1920s and again after World War II, and an exaggerated (indeed, paranoid) fear of communist subversion was the essence of 1950s McCarthyism. But the exposure of Stalin's tyranny and the brutal suppression of revolts in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968) revealed Soviet communism for what it was: a brutal dictatorship that depended on the jackboot of the Red Army to survive or spread.  

Marxism-Leninism did take root elsewhere, of course (most notably in China and Cuba), but China quickly broke free of the Soviet orbit and Moscow's other revolutionary clients tended to be weak, fractious, and dependent on Soviet subsidies. The United States enjoyed strong alliances with Western Europe and Japan (the other major centers of industrial power), while the USSR had to prop up its Eastern European satellites and recruit a lot of minor powers like Ethiopia, South Yemen, or North Korea. As a result, America's global alliance network dwarfed the Soviet system on most measures of latent and manifest power. With the benefit of hindsight, communism's eroding appeal was good news for the United States and its allies.

Now consider Iran. Back in 1979-1980, the Islamic Republic seemed to be the vanguard of an emerging wave of Islamic fundamentalism, and the novel combination of democratic structures (including more-or-less free elections) with religious oversight (via Ayatollah Khomeini’s concept of velayet-e faqih, or "guardianship of the jurisprudent") seemed like it might be an attractive model for other predominantly Muslim societies. Because Khomeini sometimes portrayed Iran's experience as a model for others and spoke of the necessity of overthrowing "all treacherous, corrupt, oppressive, and criminal regimes," Iran's neighbors worried that the its revolution might prove contagious. Yet revolutionary Iran has been unable to export its principles elsewhere, and its influence over groups like Hezbollah depends more on material support than on ideological fidelity.

Here's the good news from Tehran. In the aftermath of a stolen election and a harsh government crackdown, the Islamic Republic is an even less attractive model for the many Arabs and/or Muslims who currently seek greater tolerance, openness, and engagement with the outside world. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, and the Revolutionary Guards are clearly no more tolerant than the ruling elites in places like Syria, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, and they have no new model of governance to offer others. Ironically, Iran's ideological appeal would have been enhanced had Ahmaninejad & Co. run a fair election and permitted the Iranian people to express their preferences without coercive interference, but they didn't do that.

The one remaining tool in Iran's ideological arsenal is anti-Americanism, which still plays well in the region. The United States can defuse that weapon too, if we continue to adjust our policies in ways that are more consonant with our overall interests. Obama's Cairo speech and his more principled position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are steps in the right direction, as is pragmatic engagement with Syria and a gradual shift back to an "offshore balancing" strategy in the Gulf. None of these steps will solve all our problems in the Middle East, of course, but they will make it harder forTehran to score points by criticizing the United States and its allies.

The ability of Iran's current rulers to suppress the current challenge to their rule is both disheartening and unsurprising, but there is a silver lining. By forcing them to reveal their true colors, recent events have further diminished whatever regional appeal the Islamic Republic might once have possessed. If Obama's diplomatic outreach to Iran does not succeed and we are forced to rely on some combination of containment and deterrence, Iran's tarnished image will make that task much easier.

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Last weekend's kerfluffle over Vice President Joe Biden's supposed "green light" for an Israeli attack on Iran was perplexing on several grounds.  Appearing on ABC's This Week, Biden told interviewer George Stephanopoulos the United States could not "dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination ... that they're existentially threatened." Some observers saw this as a typical Biden-esque gaffe, while others interpreted his statement as a subtle way to up the pressure on Tehran and as a sign that the administration's position was hardening in the aftermath of the disputed Iranian election. A third view saw Biden's statement as a veiled warning that if Israel chose to act, they would face the consequences on their own.

All this speculation missed the more important features of the situation.  First, Biden was in one sense merely stating a truism: Israel is a sovereign nation, and it is inconceivable that United States would physically prevent it from attacking Iran even if we believed (correctly) that it was a stupid move. In the end, international politics is a "self-help" system, and Biden was simply acknowledging that in an anarchic order, all states ultimately depend on their own resources and strategies.  

Second, it doesn't really matter if the United States gives Israel a "green light" or not. If Israel were to attack Iran, the United States would be implicated in the attack even if we had told them not to do it. The United States is Israel's main ally and the source of the advanced weapons it would be using to carry out the attack. Despite his current difficulties with the Netanyahu government, President Obama has repeatedly emphasized the special nature of the U.S.-Israeli relationship -- just as his predecessors did -- and he referred to America's bond with Israel as "unbreakable" in his recent Cairo speech. In the eyes of most of the world -- including Iran -- the United States and Israel are joined at the hip.  

As a result, the U.S. image suffers whenever Israel does something that others find objectionable -- like building settlements, bombing Lebanon or blockading Gaza -- even in those rare cases where the United States does oppose the actions in question. If we do oppose the use of force against Iran, therefore, top U.S. officials have to say so clearly and repeatedly, and not just whenever the Veep gets careless.

Unfortunately, right now an Israeli attack would appear to many to have tacit U.S. support. Prominent pundits and former officials have been pushing for stronger measures for some time, and at least one hardliner -- former special envoy to Iran Dennis Ross -- is now working in the White House.  Washington will be blamed for an attack even if it wasn't our idea, because it is so closely tied to Tel Aviv and has made an issue of Iran’s nuclear program in the past.

As I've said before, the only way to convince Iran not to seek a nuclear weapons capability is to take the threat of force off the table and see if Iran's leaders will agree to forego weaponization under strict international safeguards. That approach may well fail, which would force Israel and the United States to fall back on a strategy of deterrence. But the post-election crackdown in Iran doesn’t mean that its leaders are either irrational or suicidal; if anything, it shows that they are just garden-variety authoritarians desperate to cling to their power and prerogatives.  Deterrence will work, even if it is not our first preference.

In short, we are more-or-less where we were before. Preventive war could delay but not eliminate Iran’s nuclear problem, and an attack would only reinforce Iran's desire for a bomb of their own. Trying to foment regime change is more likely to strengthen the hardliners than to weaken their grip. The only realistic option is diplomacy, and Biden's loose talk didn't alter that reality either. But it is one of those issues where clarity is preferable to ambiguity, and where the administration needs to speak with one voice.

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The New York Times has an important piece today on why Iran's clerical regime is unlikely to fall in the face of the current wave of protests. The short version is that Iran's rulers have several overlapping security organizations that they can call upon: the police, some three million members of paramilitary Basij, the 120,000-strong Revolutionary Guards, and an army of some 400,000. All report to Ayatollah Khameini and as far as one can tell from news reports, none of them show significant signs of disintegrating.

This story points to a serious lacuna in our understanding of what is happening in Iran. Despite the government’s efforts to exclude correspondents and shut down other channels of information (e.g., the Internet), we've been getting lots of reports and videos from the reformist forces.  But I haven't seen any interviews or tweets from Basij members or Revolutionary Guards, or from the millions of Iranians who did in fact vote for Ahmadinejad. In short, we have no good way of knowing how firm the government’s position really is.

The literature on revolutionary upheavals teaches that governments do not fall so long as the leadership remains resolute and the security forces and the army remain loyal. If the Basij, Revolutionary Guards, and other security elements remain willing to follow orders -- and that seems to be the case so far -- then Iran's current leaders will remain in charge.  

The only prospect for genuine revolution that I can see would be a prolonged and growing wave of popular discontent -- general strikes, funeral demonstrations that get bigger over time (as they did in 1979), etc., -- that begins to make normal life impossible, does further damage to Iran’s already-troubled economy and eventually leads to a major rift among the current rulers and to a major reshuffling of the leadership. But it is hard for me to imagine Khameini or Ahmadinejad boarding a plane into exile the way the Shah did in 1979.

Yet even if the current regime survives the present challenge, the impact of the crisis is likely to be salutary. Iran's appeal as a model of Islamic governance has been tarnished by this episode: instead of being the principled defenders of the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolutionary vision of the "rule of the jurisprudent," his successors now look more like garden-variety authoritarians trying to hang onto privilege and power in the face of widespread popular discontent. And that means Muslims elsewhere will be less inclined to see Tehran as an inspiration, even if they are unhappy with political conditions in their own countries.

The current crisis may also put to rest a lot of the bellicose talk about military action. In recent years, advocates of "kinetic action" (read: preventive war) against Iran have sought to portray it as a nation of wild-eyed revolutionary fanatics, led by Holocaust-denying zealots who openly crave martyrdom and would therefore be willing to fire nuclear weapons at other countries even if it led to their own destruction. That alarmist image was always pretty ludicrous, and it looks increasingly inappropriate today. In the wake of this stolen election (and see here for more evidence of electoral chicanery), Iran's rulers looks less like a group of fanatics and more like a group of grumpy old men. I don't see Osama bin Laden or Che or Qutb or even Khomeini; I see Brezhnev, Andropov, Mussolini, or Ceaucescu. It is also clear that a sizeable segment of Iran’s population -- and especially its younger members -- isn't interested in a confrontation with the West and simply wants many of the freedoms that we claim to cherish. They are also patriots who love their country, however, and the surest way to turn them against us and to reinforce Ahmadinejad et al would be to start dropping a lot of smart bombs on them.  

In fact, we actually do know precisely how to deal with this sort of situation. As we learned during the Cold War, the proper response to thuggish authoritarian regimes is containment via deterrence, combined with hardnosed diplomacy on specific security issues and a sustained effort to win over their societies by showing them that we know how to produce a better way of life. That strategy won the Cold War without the manifold dangers of preventive war, and probably saved millions of lives in the process. The clerics and their front man may hang on for now, and they might even get a few (unusable) nuclear weapons one day. But time is on our side, and we can afford to be patient.

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Like many of you, I'm sure, I remain preoccupied with the events in Iran. It's impossible to know exactly how events will evolve or what the medium-term significance will be, but the turmoil is as gripping as it was unexpected. In terms of Iran's people having a government that is more responsive to their wishes -- and in particular, one that is open to the sort of relaxation of tensions that the Obama administration has sought -- my hopes are with the anti-Ahmadinejad forces.   

But we shouldn't succumb to the illusion that Ahmadinejad's defeat and Mousavi's triumph (or more broadly, the triumph of the anti-government demonstrators) would produce a dramatic shift in Iran’s foreign policy, and especially its nuclear energy program (and any nuclear weapons ambitions it may have).  

For one thing, Moussavi himself has been a supporter of the nuclear program for many years, and the Times reported today that it was he who authorized the purchase of Iran's first centrifuges back in the 1980s. For another, public opinion surveys in Iran have shown that the vast majority of Iranians support the nuclear program. This means that a lot of the people wearing green and marching in the streets are not going to subsequently demand that Iran abandon its efforts to master the full fuel cycle.

Even if Iran were to become a full-fledged liberal democracy, it would not necessarily abandon its nuclear ambitions, including the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons. Right now, five of the world's nine nuclear weapons states are democracies (the United States, France, Great Britain, India and Israel), so being democratic hardly precludes wanting a nuclear arsenal.   

The good news is that the history of the nuclear age demonstrates that nuclear weapons do not enable their possessors to conquer or threaten others with impunity, and thus don't provide much in the way of an offensive or coercive capability. Having tens of thousands of nukes didn't permit the United States or Soviet Union to blackmail other countries during the Cold War, having a handful of nukes hasn't enabled Kim Jong Il to dictate to anybody, and having a sizeable nuclear arsenal doesn't allow Israel to tell Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, or its various other adversaries what to do.  

In fact, nuclear weapons are good for only one or two things: 1) protecting your own territory (and maybe the territory of especially close allies) against conquest and occupation, and 2) making it hard for others to coerce you. As IAEA head Mohammed El-Baradei said of Iran yesterday, "They want to send a message to their neighbors, to the rest of the world, 'Don't mess with us,'" adding that "it is also an insurance policy against what they have heard in the past about regime change."

So while I continue to hope that the reformist forces triumph, we shouldn’t be under any illusions about the short-to-medium term impact of the "revolution" on the major issues that currently divide us.

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My point was about not recognizing now. As to the future, we have to see what it brings. A day is a long time right now in Iranian politics. So let's take this one day at a time for now."

Fine by me. And his blog has been a fascinating read since the election, not least for his spirited debunking of a lot of foolish neoconservative posturing on these events.

I wasn't able to do any posting over the past few days, but I did want to add my two cents to the commentary on the almost-certainly fraudulent election in Iran. The entire business suggests to me that the ruling elite in Iran is increasingly out-of-touch with broader segments of Iranian society. It's not just that Iran's current leaders oppose the liberal reforms sought by many ordinary Iranians; it is rather that they don't seem to be as tuned in to these forces or particularly adept at manipulating them.  

First, the ruling forces (including Ahmadinejad) appear to have been taken by surprise by the outpouring of popular enthusiasm for reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi in the weeks before the election. Even if Ahmadinejad would have won fair-and-square, it looks to me like the clerics, the military, and the current President all panicked. The disconnect between regime and population isn't all that surprising: about 70 percent of Iran's population is under thirty, which means they were born after the 1979 revolution and have little memory of the Iran-Iraq war. At this point, a middle-aged former revolutionary like Ahmadinejad doesn't have much in common with those younger Iranians who have embraced many aspects of modern global culture (music, the internet, Facebook etc.). Indeed, he's beginning to remind me of a middle-aged parent who can't stand the music his kids are listening to, has no idea why they spend so much time online, and couldn't do a simple file-share without asking for help. Ahmadinejad may be a skilled populist rabble-rouser in some ways, but hip he ain't. And that means he and the clerics are in fact in charge of a society that they increasingly do not understand.

Second, the way the election results were manipulated was crude and unconvincing. As Juan Cole has convincingly argued, the pattern of election results, as well as the speed with they were announced by some officials, was simply not credible. A clever and well-executed strategy to steal the election would have had given Mousavi a large enough share to convince his followers they had been heard, but not large enough to force a runoff or to make them think that some sort of recount was necessary. Again, this speaks of a government machine that was worried, heavy-handed, and anything but subtle. The outpouring of popular protest and the forceful government response to it (which has included efforts to shut down communication with the outside world) also reveals a government that is in fact increasingly isolated from large segments of Iranian society. 

So what does it all mean? The election and the subsequent protests do not mean that another Iranian revolution is imminent, although this morning's reports of protest activity and Ayatollah Khamenei's flip-flopping does make me wonder. See the rapid-fire, too-many-to-link-to reports on Andrew Sullivan's blog here. Remember: Ahmadinejad does have a substantial body of genuine supporters, authoritarian regimes have many tools they can use to retain power, and revolutionary collapses are inherently hard to predict. 

But overall, this entire episode is a setback for the clerical regime. The claim to some degree of democratic legitimacy (however truncated) has been one of Iran’s main public relations assets in recent years (especially when compared with many of its neighbors); that claim has now been badly tarnished if not utterly demolished. As with Ahmadinejad's various diplomatic gaffes, the "election" will make it easier for the United States to round up diplomatic support for its positions (though not in Russia or China, for whom electoral proprieties are hardly a major concern). But no government can be happy to see so many citizens -- and especially younger citizens -- so obviously disaffected.  

For its part, the Obama administration should stay pretty much on course for now. Many Iranians clearly want a more normal relationship with the outside world -- including the United States -- and Obama's approach makes it harder for the regime to use the American bogeyman to stimulate Iranian nationalism and thereby bolster its position. Moreover, a U.S. attempt to exploit popular discontent  is likely to backfire, because it will reinforce long-standing (and I am sorry to say, amply justified) Iranian suspicions that the United States simply cannot resist interfering in Iran’s domestic politics.  

In the end, what really matters is the content of any subsequent U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, not the precise nature of the Iranian regime.  If diplomatic engagement led to a good deal, then it wouldn't matter much who was running Iran. By the same logic, we shouldn't accept a bad deal even if we were happier with the outcome of this election. And there’s no reason to think that Mousavi would have been substantially more forthcoming on the nuclear issue than Ahmadinejad has been. So while I'm as disappointed as anyone in the outcome thus far, I want to wait and see how the two sides respond once the dust has settled.

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