Spring 2007 Featured Story The Sum of Iran's Parts: A Political Primer by Rostam Pourzal Every time I travel to Iran, I find more progress there towards a functioning, dynamic society. Civil society groups, ranging from professional and trade associations to unregistered religious, ethnic, women’s, and youth clubs and charities, abound there. With candidates vetted on the basis of loyalty to religion rather than to money, elections in Iran are as clean and free as they are in the United States. A sophisticated social safety net, including state-mandated pensions, low-interest loans, farm subsidies, and affordable health insurance, reaches even remote villages. For the first time in four decades, Iran has become self-sufficient in wheat production, the backbone of Iranian dietary needs. Women employees are entitled to four months of maternity leave. Government-funded family planning and HIV/AIDS clinics provide free condoms and needle exchange. And the list goes on. The surest sign that Iran is not a stagnant society is that well over half of the country’s college population are female students and a record-breaking 44 out of the 264 contested city council seats in provincial capitals were won by women in last December’s elections. All is not well in Iran, as price inflation and high unemployment and addiction rates especially sap the nation’s vitality. But despite a quarter century of escalating American sanctions and threats, Iran is more democratic than almost every ally of Washington in the region. Critics’ exaggerations about Iran’s shortcomings are another reason that I notice mostly progress when I travel there. Based on my observations and interviews, I find as many reasons to question the values of the political opposition in Iran as there are grounds for condemning the country’s leadership. This goes a long way to explain why, despite government abuses, a genuine popular uprising is not likely. The country is about as polarized now as the United States, but the situation reminds me more of Lebanon and Venezuela, because public life in Iran consists of two parallel, and conflicting, universes. The bureaucracy is intrusive and paternalistic, but for most things governmental, there is a less sanctioned or “free” twin in the opposition camp. For every official environmental, recreational, or women’s group, and for every publisher, transit company, and public commemoration sponsored by government insiders, there is a counterpart organized by the citizenry. Persian-language television broadcasts from overseas outnumber state-controlled channels that originate in Iran. During peak tourist periods, vast temporary campgrounds that the government sets up and patrols in urban parks and schools free of charge compete with privately operated hotels. Famously, the country's regular armed forces that remain from pre-revolutionary days are overshadowed by the politically connected Revolutionary Guard Corps. There are even two national anthems – an Islamist and a nationalist version. At times, the officials fall behind a little. After Valentine’s Day found a massive following among Iran’s youth, it took the authorities two years to launch an alternative “Romance Day” last year that was named after a female saint. Before that, the strictest Islamist clergy’s attempts to undermine the secular Iranian new year celebrations failed. Whether an outside observer notices the empty or the full half of the proverbial glass in Iran depends on which of these two halves of Iran he/she notices especially. Whether an Iranian citizen faults Iran’s assertiveness against Western powers, too, depends on which side of the divide he/she trusts more. Copying the opposition’s jargon from inside the Tehran Beltway, most Western analysts mislabel the contending halves of Iran as modern/progressive versus traditional/conservative.
A human rights campaign made ideological The moderates – the opposition, led by technocrats who clamor for civil liberties – demand increased property rights and free trade. They also oppose subsidies to middle and low-income families and government oversight of the market, which they denounce as “economic mismanagement.” In private conversations, the Iranian libertarians insist, in a harsh language that reminds me of the law-and-order lobby in America, that the government encourages working-class “greed.” The opposition’s intellectual trend-setters advocate the type of pro-globalization (“favorable investment climate”) policies in Iran that are championed by tax-cut enthusiasts in the West. For example, the opposition fought hard in Iran’s parliament in the mid-1990s to dilute the comprehensive employee health insurance legislation enacted earlier. At least one leading Iranian dissident, Akbar Ganji, has called for the de-nationalization of Iran’s oil industry. Not surprisingly, the opposition’s struggle for tolerance – including press freedom, gender equality, and improved relations with the West – has generated little enthusiasm among the economically less-secure half of the electorate. In a campaign laced with religious symbolism that holds populist appeal to the working and middle classes, pro-government “conservatives” keep a lid on market activism – and civil liberties. Portraits of the “martyrs” of the Iran-Iraq war on billboards and murals dotting urban landscapes in Iran serve this purpose. The campaign also includes the imposition of unqualified, pious appointees at the helm of universities, the radio and television monopoly, the mega-endowments, government ministries, etc., whenever possible. It is augmented in college admissions and public sector hiring with preferential quotas for the martyrs’ families and war survivors and their families, a largely low-income and devout population. Depending on which side one listens to, this has helped or hurt upward social mobility (“meritocracy” is a favorite buzzword in the opposition camp.) Culturally, the free-market enthusiasts lean towards what they have named “universal” or “advanced” moral standards, while the official power centers stress culture-specific authenticity. Ganji spoke for most of the reform-minded Iranians with whom I’m familiar when he said in a broadcast interview last year that the United States is “the cradle of civilization.” In another perceived display of tolerance, some leading religious figures in the opposition posted on their Web sites eulogies and photographs of a ceremony they held in honor of Pope John Paul II when the pontiff died in 2005. Adherents of the government’s line denounce such gestures as “American” behavior, comparable to some urban middle-class women’s resistance to gender-based legal discrimination. Consistent with this dichotomy, President Ahmadinejad has distanced himself from his predecessor’s offer to the West of a “Dialogue of Civilizations.” The uniting power of "nuclear nationalism" Iran’s two halves have not always been at odds. At several critical junctures in Iranian history, including the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911 and the oil nationalization campaign of early 1950s, they united temporarily. They cooperated again in the revolution of 1978-79 against the open-door policies of the U.S.-backed shah, but parted ways soon after the monarchy ended, because their reasons for opposing openness to the West differed. (The seizure of the U.S. diplomats in Tehran in 1979, which forced the resignation of the Islamic Republic’s first prime minister, the moderate Mehdi Bazargan, was an early sign of the recurring split.) The predecessors of today’s reform parties (a.k.a., the moderates) sought during the 1970s to protect Iran’s nascent banking and manufacturing interests from unimpeded foreign competition. Eventually they lost hope and helped launch the revolution. Flourishing after nearly three decades of protectionist trade policies, this sector now increasingly favors openness to Western capital and management philosophy (the “meritocracy”). A few hundred Iranians of this persuasion staged a candlelight vigil in affluent northern Tehran in September 2001 in sympathy with victims of the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Though he is rumored to have accumulated enormous illegitimate wealth, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has by default become the public face of the moderate half of Iran. The pedigree of Iran’s pro-subsidy authorities, known in the West as the Islamist “hard-liners,” on the other hand, goes back to the social conservatives who opposed the Shah’s open door policy because, they believed, it promoted moral decadence. The current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, represents this half of Iran. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, is the political arbiter and peacemaker between the two sectors. The enduring power of Iran’s insistence on its nuclear rights derives in part from the fact that it helps bring the country's two halves together once more. Just as Hezbollah increases its mass appeal in Lebanon by marching exclusively with the Lebanese national flag instead of its own colors, Iran’s ruling clerics have discovered the uniting power of nuclear nationalism. Washington has increasingly sided with the market-minded half of Iran, which President Bush generally praises as “civil society” because, among other reasons, they advocate compromise over Iran’s nuclear rights. The other half of the nation, which prefers the “welfare state,” has so far resisted this wedge issue. Labels that Western analysts usually apply to Iran’s two halves (for example, pro-democracy versus fundamentalist) obscure the reasons for the political success of illiberal politicians in Iran. If we think of human needs as an integral part of “human rights,” we can better appreciate why the populist Ahmadinejad was able to beat Rafsanjani’s privatizer-dominated promised government of tolerance in the 2005 presidential elections. His popularity, in turn, can influence the outcome of the standoff with the United States. Rostam Pourzal is a political analyst based in Washington, D.C.
©2007 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
