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 Muhammad, 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.
-- Juan
Cole
How Israel’s Gaza Blockade and
Washington’s Sanctions Policy Helped Keep the Hardliners in Power
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 its hardliners are in a far stronger position -- and some of
their success can be credited to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
sanctions hawks in the Obama administration.
If, in the past year, those
hardliners successfully faced down major challenges within Iranian society and
abroad, it was only in part thanks to the regime’s skill at 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 President 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. Yesterday's vote at the
U.N. 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 counterproductive rather than effective in ending Iran's nuclear
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 Muhammad, 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
Mahmoud 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; Israeli Prime Minister 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 President 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 Revolutionary Guards. 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 Revolutionary Guards, 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 Revolutionary Guards 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 President Obama’s hopes to
jump-start direct negotiations with Iran over its nuclear enrichment
program. His team could hardly sit down
with representatives of Ayatollah 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 United Nations 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. As the Geneva
fiasco left the impression that the Iranian regime was not ready to negotiate in
good faith, the Obama team evidently decided to respond by ratcheting up
sanctions on Iran at the Security Council, evidently in hopes of forcing its
nuclear negotiators back to the bargaining table. Meanwhile, Netanyahu was loudly demanding the
imposition of “crippling” international sanctions on Tehran.
Washington, however, faced a
problem: Russian Prime Minister and éminence grise Vladimir Putin initially
opposed such sanctions, as did China’s leaders.
As Putin observed, “Direct dialogue… is always more productive… than a
policy of threats, sanctions, and all the more so a resolution to use
force." Moreover, the non-permanent
members of the Council included Turkey and Brazil, rising powers and potential
leaders of the non-permanent bloc at the Council. Neither country was eager to see Iran put
under international boycott for, from their point of view, simply having a
civilian nuclear enrichment program. (Since such a program is permitted by the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, any such Security Council sanctions on Iran
represent, at best, arbitrary acts.)
By mid-May, Obama nonetheless
appeared to have his ducks in a row for a vote in which Russia and China would
support at least modest further financial restrictions on investments connected
to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Many
observers believed that such a move, guaranteed to fall far short of
“crippling,” would in fact prove wholly ineffectual.
Only Turkey and Brazil, lacking
veto power in the Council, were proving problematic for Washington. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey
leads the Justice and Development Party, which is mildly tinged with Muslim
politics (unlike most previous strongly secular governments in Ankara). Viewing himself as a bridge between the
Christian West and the Muslim world, he strongly opposes new sanctions on
neighboring Iran. In part, he fears they
might harm the Turkish economy; in part, he has pursued a policy of developing
good relations with all his country’s direct neighbors.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva has led a similar charge against any strengthened punishment of
Iran. He has been motivated by a desire
to alter the prevailing North-dominated system of international relations and
trade. Popularly known as “Lula,” the
president has put more emphasis on encouraging South-South relations. His country gave up its nuclear weapons
aspirations in 1980, but continued a civilian nuclear energy program and has
recently committed to building a nuclear-powered submarine. Having the Security Council declare even
peaceful nuclear enrichment illegal could be extremely inconvenient for
Brasilia.
On May 15th, Erdogan and Lula
met with Ahmadinejad in Tehran and announced a nuclear deal that much resembled
the one to which Iran had briefly agreed in October. Turkey would now hold a majority of Iran’s
LEU in escrow in return for which Iran would receive fuel rods enriched to
19.75% for its medical reactor. Critics
pointed out that Iran had, by now, produced even more LEU, which meant that the
proportion of fuel being sent abroad would be less damaging to any Iranian hopes
for nuclear latency and therefore far less attractive to Washington and Tel
Aviv. Washington promptly dismissed the
agreement, irking the Turkish and Brazilian leaders.
Meanwhile, throughout May, a
conference of signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was being held
in New York to hammer out a consensus document that would, in the end, declare
the Middle East a “nuclear free zone.”
Unexpectedly, they announced success.
Since Israel is the only country in the Middle East with an actual
nuclear arsenal (estimated at about 200 warheads, or similar to what the British
possess), and not an NPT signatory, Tel Aviv thundered: "This resolution is
deeply flawed and hypocritical… It singles out Israel, the Middle East's only
true democracy and the only country threatened with annihilation… Given the
distorted nature of this resolution, Israel will not be able to take part in its
implementation."
The hypocrisy in all this was
visibly Washington’s and Israel’s. After
all, both were demanding that a country without nuclear weapons “disarm” and the
only country in the region to actually possess them be excused from the
disarmament process entirely. This was,
of course, their gift to Tehran. Like
others involved in the process, Iran’s representative to the International
Atomic Energy Agency immediately noted this and riposted, “The U.S… is obliged
to go along with the world’s request, which is that Israel must join the NPT and
open its installations to IAEA inspectors.”
A Windfall for the Hardliners:
The Flotilla Assault
With the Tehran Agreement
brokered by Turkey and Brazil -- and signed by Ahmadinejad -- and Israel’s
rejection of the NPT conference document now public news, Obama’s sanctions
program faced a new round of pushback from China. Then, on May 31st, Israeli commandos
rappelled from helicopters onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish aid ship
heading for Gaza. They threw stun
grenades and fired rubber-jacketed metal bullets even before landing, enraging
passengers, and leading to a fatal confrontation that left at least nine dead
and some 30 wounded. An international
uproar ensued, putting Israel’s relations with Turkey under special
strain.
The Mavi Marmara assault was
more splendid news for Iran’s hardliners at the very moment when the Green
movement was gearing up for demonstrations to mark the one-year anniversary of
the contested presidential election.
Around the Israeli assault on the aid flotilla and that country’s
blockade of Gaza they were able to rally the public in solidarity with the
theocratic government, long a trenchant critic of Israeli oppression of the
stateless Palestinians. Green leaders,
in turn, were forced to put out a statement condemning Israel, and Khamenei was
then able to fill the streets of the capital with two million demonstrators
commemorating the death of Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic
Republic.
The flotilla attack also gave
the hardliners a foreign policy issue on which they could stand in solidarity
with Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and the Arab world generally, reinforcing their cachet
as champions of the Palestinians and bolstering the country’s regional
influence. There was even talk of
sending a new Gaza aid flotilla guarded by Iranian ships. Because Turkey, the aggrieved party, is at
present a member of the Security Council, this fortuitous fillip for Iran has
denied Obama the unanimity he sought on sanctions. Finally, the incident had the potential to
push international concern over Tehran’s nuclear enrichment program and that
country’s new assertiveness in the Middle East into the background, while
foregrounding Israel’s brutality in Gaza, intransigence toward the peace
process, and status as a nuclear outlaw.
In the end, President Obama got
his watered-down, non-unanimous sanctions resolution. There is no doubt that Netanyahu’s reluctance
to make a just peace with the Palestinians and his cowboy military tactics have
enormously complicated Obama’s attempt to pressure Iran and deeply alienated
Turkey, one of yesterday's holdouts.
His election as prime minister
in February 2009 turns out to have been the best gift the Israeli electorate
could have given Iran. The Likud-led
government continues its colonization of the West Bank and its blockade of the
civilian population of Gaza, making the Iranian hawks who harp on injustices
done to Palestinians look prescient. It
refuses to join the NPT or allow U.N. inspections of its nuclear facilities,
making Iran, by comparison, look like a model IAEA member state.
Juan Cole is the Richard P.
Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and
director of its Center for South Asian Studies.
He maintains the blog Informed Comment. His most recent book is Engaging
the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Copyright 2010 Juan
Cole
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