Page 1 of 2 Israel's gift to Iran's hardliners
By Juan Cole
Iran's Green movement is one year old this Sunday, the anniversary of its first
massive demonstrations in the streets of Tehran. Greeted with great hope in
much of the world, a year later it's weaker, the country is more repressive,
and hardliners are in a far stronger position - partly thanks to Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sanctions hawks in the Barack Obama
administration.
If, in the past year, those hardliners successfully faced down major challenges
within Iranian society and abroad, it was only in part attributable to the
regime's skills in repression and sidestepping international pressure. Above
all, the ayatollahs
benefited from Israeli intransigence and American hypocrisy on nuclear
disarmament in the Middle East.
Iran's case against Israel was bolstered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu's continued enthusiasm for the Gaza blockade, and by Tel Aviv's
recent arrogant dismissal of a conference of nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) signatories, which called on Israel to join a nuclear-free zone in the
Middle East. Nor has Obama's push for stronger sanctions on Iran at the United
Nations Security Council hurt them.
And then, on Memorial Day in the United States, Israel's Likud government
handed Tehran its greatest recent propaganda victory by sending its commandos
against a peace flotilla in international waters and so landing its men, guns
blazing, on the deck of the USS Sanctions. Wednesday's vote at the United
Nations Security Council on punishing Iran produced a weak, much watered-down
resolution targeting 40 companies, which lacked the all-important imprimatur of
unanimity, insofar as Turkey and Brazil voted "no" and Lebanon abstained.
There was no mention of an oil or gasoline boycott, and the language of the
resolution did not even seem to make the new sanctions obligatory. It was at
best a pyrrhic victory for those hawks who had pressed for "crippling"
sanctions, and likely to be counter-productive rather than effective in ending
Iran's uranium-enrichment program. How we got here is a long, winding, sordid
tale of the triumph of macho posturing over patient and effective policymaking.
Suppressing the Green movement
From last summer through last winter, the hardliners of the Islamic Republic of
Iran were powerfully challenged by reformists, who charged that the June 12,
2009, presidential election had been marked by extensive fraud. Street protests
were so large, crowds so enthusiastic, and the opposition so steadfast that it
seemed as if Iran were on the brink of a significant change in its way of doing
business, possibly even internationally.
The opposition - the most massive since the Islamic revolution of 1978-79 - was
dubbed the Green movement, because green is the color of the descendants of the
Prophet Mohammad, among whom losing presidential candidate Mirhossein Moussavi
is counted. Although some movement supporters were secularists, many were
religious, and so disarmingly capable of deploying the religious slogans and
symbols of the Islamic republic against the regime itself.
Where the regime put emphasis on the distant Israeli-Palestinian conflict in
the Levant, Green movement activists chanted (during "Jerusalem Day" last
September), "Not Gaza, not Lebanon. I die only for Iran." They took their cue
from candidate Moussavi, who said he “liked” Palestine but thought waving its
flag in Iran excessive.
Moussavi likewise rejected Obama administration insinuations that his
movement's stance on Iran's nuclear enrichment program was indistinguishable
from that of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. He emphasized instead that
he not only did not want a nuclear weapon for Iran, but understood
international concerns about such a prospect. He seemed to suggest that, were
he to come to power, he would be far more cooperative with the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The Israeli government liked what it was hearing; Netanyahu even went on Meet
the Press last summer to praise the Green movement fulsomely. "I think
something very deep, very fundamental is going on," he said, "and there's an
expression of a deep desire amid the people of Iran for freedom, certainly for
greater freedom."
Popular unrest only became possible thanks to a split at the top among the
civilian ruling elite of clerics and fundamentalists. When presidential
candidates Moussavi, Mehdi Karroubi and their clerical backers, including Grand
Ayatollah Yousef Sanaei and wily former president and billionaire entrepreneur
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, began to challenge the country's authoritarian
methods of governance, its repression of personal liberties, and the quixotic
foreign policy of Ahmadinejad (whom Moussavi accused of making Iran a global
laughingstock), it opened space below.
The reformers would be opposed by Iran's supreme theocrat, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, who defended the presidential election results as valid, even as he
admitted to his preference for Ahmadinejad's views. He was, in turn, supported
by most senior clerics and politicians, the great merchants of the bazaar, and
most significantly, the officer corps of the police, the basij (civilian
militia), the regular army, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
Because there would be no significant splits among those armed to defend the
regime, it retained an almost unbounded ability to crackdown relentlessly. In
the process, the IRGC, generally Ahmadinejad partisans, only grew in power.
A year later, it's clear that the hardliners have won decisively through
massive repression, deploying basij armed with clubs on motorcycles to
curb crowds, jailing thousands of protesters, and torturing and executing some
of them. The main arrow in the opposition's quiver was flashmobs, relatively
spontaneous mass urban demonstrations orchestrated through Twitter, cell
phones, and Facebook.
The regime gradually learned how to repress this tactic through the careful
jamming of electronic media and domestic surveillance. (Apparently the IRGC now
even have a Facebook Espionage Division.) While the opposition can hope to keep
itself alive as an underground civil rights movement, for the moment its
chances for overt political change appear slim.
Nuclear hypocrisy
Though few have noted this, the Green movement actually threw a monkey wrench
into Obama's hopes to jump-start direct negotiations with Iran over its
enrichment program. His team could hardly sit down with representatives of
Khamenei while the latter was summarily tossing protesters in filthy prisons to
be mistreated and even killed. On October 1, 2009, however, with the masses no
longer regularly in the streets, representatives of the five permanent members
of the UN Security Council plus Germany met directly with a representative of
Khamenei in Geneva.
A potentially pathbreaking nuclear agreement was hammered out whereby Iran
would ship the bulk of its already-produced low-enriched uranium (LEU) to
another country. In return, it would receive enriched rods with which it could
run its single small medical reactor, producing isotopes for treating cancer.
That reactor had been given to the Shah's Iran in 1969, and the last
consignment of nuclear fuel purchased for it, from Argentina, was running out.
The agreement appealed to the West because it would deprive Iran of a couple of
tons of LEU that, at some point, could theoretically be cycled back through its
centrifuges and enriched from 3.5% to over 90%, or weapons grade, for the
possible construction of nuclear warheads. There is no evidence that Iran has
such a capability or intention, but the Security Council members agreed that
safe was better than sorry.
With Khamenei's representative back in Iran on October 2, the Iranians suddenly
announced that they would take a timeout to study it. That timeout never ended,
assumedly because Khamenei had gotten a case of cold feet. Though we can only
speculate, perhaps nuclear hardliners argued that holding onto the country's
stock of LEU seemed to the hardliners like a crucial form of deterrence in
itself, a signal to the world that Iran could turn to bomb-making activities if
a war atmosphere built.
Given that nuclear latency - the ability to launch a successful bomb-making
program - has geopolitical consequences nearly as important as the actual
possession of a bomb, Washington, Tel Aviv and the major Western European
powers remain eager to forestall Iran from reaching that status.
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