Early this summer, while walking in the Alborz Mountains outside Tehran, I came across three members of Iran’s reformist Green Movement. It was a parching-hot afternoon, and they had taken shelter from the heat in a cherry orchard next to a stream, where fruit hung glistening from the branches. The Alborz Mountains have long provided refuge, clean air, and exercise for the residents of north Tehran. The northern districts are more prosperous than the rest of the city, and their residents are generally more educated and aware of foreign ideas and trends. North Tehran was not the only locus of the Green Movement, but support there was particularly intense last summer after the conservative hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory in the disputed Presidential elections.
One of the most popular hiking trails begins just outside the walls of Evin Prison, where in recent decades thousands of dissidents have been tortured, killed, and buried in secrecy. A few hundred feet away, just across a wooden bridge over a narrow river canyon, the last paved streets of the city end. Along the river’s banks are open-air teahouses, where nostalgic music is played and people drink fresh cherry juice and smoke narghile waterpipes. Such places offer a respite from the restrictions of life in the Islamic Republic, away from the roving units of religious police and the paramilitary Basij, the plainclothes zealots who attacked Green Movement supporters in last year’s protests.
Since the government crackdown, street demonstrations have been rare, and so, too, have foreign journalists in Iran. I had been given a visa to come interview Ahmadinejad, and during my stay was watched closely by the government. Even a hike in the mountains did not insure privacy; as I climbed, I saw, among the other hikers, several pairs of men who wore the scraggly beards, nondescript clothing, and tamped-down looks of Basijis. At one point, I passed a unit of soldiers. They were out hiking with everyone else, but it was apparent that they were there to make their presence felt. The women on the trail were flushed and sweating in their chadors and manteaus, the black tunics that Iranian women are obligated to wear over their clothes.
In the orchard, though, women had taken off their head scarves and were laughing and talking animatedly. People greeted me politely, obviously recognizing me as a Westerner, a rare sight in Tehran these days. One man struck up a conversation; in excellent English, he made it clear that he was a reformist. Three other men who were sitting together nearby looked over appraisingly, then raised their voices enough to be overheard. Quoting the late Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou, one of them recited:
They smell your breath,
lest you might have said I love you.
They smell your heart.
These are strange times, my darling.
The butchers are stationed at each
crossroads with bloody clubs and cleavers.
Gesturing toward Tehran in the distance, he said, “There are the new butchers. They sniff out everything, not only in public but in private life, too.” His friends nodded. One of them said, “The people’s frustrations will find an outlet once the cracks in the monolith begin to appear.”
The man I was speaking with told me that he recognized two of the others, professionals in their fifties, from the protests in June, 2009. They were, he said, followers of the reformist Presidential candidates Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. The protests, which had started over election fraud, had grown into huge demonstrations against the Islamic regime, the largest in Iran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah, in 1979. But in the weeks that followed, Iran’s ultimate political authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, endorsed Ahmadinejad’s victory and condemned the protests; riot police and Basij, armed with knives and guns, were sent into the streets to attack the protesters. Between forty and eighty people were killed, Mousavi’s nephew among them, and thousands were arrested.
In show trials held in August, more than a hundred detainees were paraded in court, many of them thin and pale and clearly terrified; according to Amnesty International, many detainees had been beaten, tortured, and raped by guards and interrogators, often at secret detention centers. Several “confessed” to an improbable range of political crimes, including treason. Since then, most have been released on bail, including the Iranian-Canadian Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari, who fled the country. But hundreds of others have been sentenced to harsh prison terms, and at least five sentenced to death. Two have already been hanged for the crime of moharebeh—warring against God.
The Green Movement continued to hold intermittent demonstrations through the end of last year and, in diminishing numbers, into the spring. But the movement has been constrained. Days before a rally planned for June 12th, the anniversary of the election, Mousavi and Karroubi called it off, explaining that they were doing so for the “safety of the people.”
During the campaign, Mousavi spoke out brazenly for women’s rights and for normalizing relations with the United States, and denounced Ahmadinejad’s statements questioning the reality of the Holocaust. Now he rarely leaves his home in north Tehran, appearing only in pictures and statements on his own Web site. He and the other reformist leaders have been living under an informal house arrest, subjected to heckling and assaults by pro-regime mobs whenever they venture out.
At mourning ceremonies held on June 6th, the twenty-first anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, his reformist grandson Hassan Khomeini was jeered by hard-liners, who forced him to leave the stage. (Afterward, he reportedly walked up to Iran’s interior minister and punched him in the face, breaking his nose.)
Mehdi Karroubi, who was also present, was accosted by a mob of men yelling “Death to hypocrites.” A week later, Karroubi visited the reformist cleric Grand Ayatollah Yousef Saanei at his home in the holy city of Qom; while he was there his vehicle was attacked by an organized mob of men chanting “Dirty,” “Corrupt,” and “American stooges.” Under such sustained pressures, the Green Movement has effectively ceased to exist as a visible political force. Karroubi is the only prominent reformist leader who still regularly appears in public.
In the cherry orchard, the Green Movement men were joined by their wives. One of the women spoke about Spinoza, whose writings had helped lead to the Enlightenment in Europe and the separation of what she called “mosque and state.” “We need a Spinoza in Iran,” she said. In the meantime, she believed, social-networking sites were “the best way forward for the people to be able to communicate and be ready when the rifts in the power structure emerge to provide an opportunity for change.” Otherwise, there was little the Green Movement could do. There could be no more street demonstrations, she said, because it would “cost lives,” and “violence only begets more violence.”
One of the men disagreed with her. “This revolution came in by violence, and the only way it is going to go is through violence,” he said. “Change will only come when you take it, and make it happen.” The woman said, sadly, “But I must live with some hope. Can’t I?”
Along the path back to the city, there were stone walls and boulders on which protesters had spray-painted slogans; since the summer, the government had painted them over. The only one left untouched was a stone the size of a goose egg on which someone had scrawled in green crayon, “Death to the dictator.”
This was a very different Tehran from the one I had last visited in December, 2008, six months before the contested elections. Most of the politicians, journalists, and academics I saw then were no longer free to talk. Among them were the well-known reformists Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former Vice-President under President Khatami and an influential blogger, and Mohammad Atrianfar, a publisher and adviser to ex-President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The two of them—both robust, outspoken men who had been frankly critical of the faults in Iran’s political system—had been arrested in the post-election crackdown. When they reappeared, weeks later, in the show trials, they were broken figures who humiliated themselves by confessing to a series of outlandish crimes, naming friends and colleagues as their co-conspirators. Abtahi said that he had been guilty of “provoking people, causing tension, and creating media chaos.” Atrianfar praised his “polite interrogators,” said he was proud of his own “defeat,” and spoke of the paramount importance of “preserving the system” in Iran.
In private, supporters of the movement spend a lot of time thinking over the events of last year. They are often dispirited, even rueful. “People miscalculated,” one of my Iranian friends said. “They thought everyone in the country was like themselves, and that the rest of the country was like Tehran.” The demonstrations, in his view, had as much to do with social class as they did with politics. Mousavi’s and Karroubi’s voters in the Green Movement were largely middle or upper class. The soldiers and the Basij who attacked them were for the most part Ahmadinejad voters, drawn, like the President himself, from the less privileged majority of the city’s population, based predominately in the south of the city. The Green Movement’s ability to put significant numbers of protesters—estimates range from hundreds of thousands to three million—onto Tehran’s streets sometimes created the impression that they represented a majority in the country. “They were wrong,” my friend said. “And their leaders misunderestimated—to paraphrase your former President Bush—just how savage the regime could be.” Adopting a mocking tone of voice, he added, “ ‘What, you thought that with your vote you’d get change? That you actually had a choice?’ ” A friend of his had been detained and released after agreeing to sign a statement of repentance. “His interrogator told him, ‘This time you have no choice. You either submit or I’ll ram this stick up your ass. That’s your choice.’ ”
Not long after arriving in Tehran, I attended a press conference held by Ahmadinejad—at which I was the only Westerner present—and not a single reporter mentioned the Green Movement. When I asked an Iranian journalist about the omission, he raised his eyebrows and asked, “Why ask about something that doesn’t exist?” Instead, Ahmadinejad took questions about the latest clerical demands for stricter dress codes. This is an important issue for many younger Iranians—in north Tehran, the streets are full of dyed-blond hair, spray tans, and Amy Winehouse-style beehive hairdos—and Ahmadinejad had angered conservative clerics by opposing their demands. A few days later, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance published official guidelines for appropriate hair styles for Iranian men: pompadours were permitted, but not gelled, spiked, or overlong hair.
Most of the other questions had to do with the controversy around Iran’s nuclear program. On June 9th, new sanctions had been approved by the U.N. Security Council—with the notable assent of China and Russia—and soon after a separate measure was announced by the U.S. and several other Western governments. Among other things, the American sanctions demanded that foreign firms doing business with Iran, particularly in the oil and gas sectors, give up their interests or risk being banned from the U.S. financial markets. Ahmadinejad retaliated by announcing that Iran would suspend all nuclear talks with the West until late August. Before they could be resumed, he said, Iran must know the position of its negotiating partners in the P5-plus-1 group—the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany—toward the “Zionist regime” and its nuclear weapons. Listening to Ahmadinejad, it was hard not to feel that a confrontation was looming.
Throughout the press conference, he seemed calm and confident, almost cocky. The uneasy manner that characterized his public appearances a few years ago was gone. Since winning reëlection, he had neutralized the main reformist politicians, and was now pursuing his rivals in Iran’s conservative establishment. In recent weeks, he had resumed his ongoing fight with ex-President Rafsanjani—a wealthy ayatollah who is regarded as the ultimate patron of Iran’s reform movement—by mounting a campaign to gain control of one of his most lucrative power bases, the Islamic Azad University. With three hundred and fifty-seven campuses across Iran and some 1.4 million students and faculty members, the university is among Iran’s wealthiest institutions. Ahmadinejad had accused Azad of providing support to the reformists and proposed a bill that would allow a government takeover. Parliament voted against the measure; then, after Ahmadinejad’s loyalists angrily protested and threatened violence, it reversed its decision. (The battle for control has since moved to the courts.) At the press conference, when the President was asked about Rafsanjani he merely glanced away and said, airily, “Next question?”
A few days later, I was summoned to meet Ahmadinejad at the White Building, part of the Presidential complex in downtown Tehran. The building, which was a Prime Minister’s office in the days of the Shah, is set in walled gardens, and its interior rooms have elegant panelled walls and polished wood floors covered with Persian carpets. Over the wall, in an adjacent compound, lives the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who rarely appears in public but is by constitutional writ the decisive power in Iran.
Ahmadinejad customarily wears a beige windbreaker, the unofficial uniform of the Basij, but when he received me he had on a gray suit and white shirt without a tie, in the unprepossessing style that is widespread among functionaries of the Islamic Republic. His face was covered in pancake makeup, and the cavernous salon where our meeting was to take place had been set with klieg lights, film parasols, and microphones. The interview, evidently, was going to be filmed for Iranian state television. A bevy of producers, translators, technicians, and bodyguards were gathered, staring. The President and I sat facing each other in the middle of the room. As technicians adjusted my earphone, the President’s press officer, an earnest man in his thirties, approached me to ask solicitously if I would refrain from asking about the likelihood of war between Iran and the United States, and ask instead about the possibilities for “peace.” He also suggested that the President would be pleased to talk about his concern about the global financial crisis and about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for which, he said, Ahmadinejad had offered “Iran’s help.”
Ahmadinejad is expected to attend the U.N. General Assembly when it convenes in New York at the end of the summer, and this interview was clearly a form of Presidential messaging. During my time in Iran, officials repeatedly echoed the theme that, in spite of the new sanctions, they were dealing from a strengthened position, and that they would like to resume nuclear talks, if the conditions were right. One Iran expert I spoke to, who asked not to be identified, told me that Iran wanted “what every country that has gone this route before them—like Pakistan and India—wants: nuclear legitimacy. They want a deal with the U.S. that will accept them as a nuclear power.”
In the Iranian imagination, a nuclear weapon is essential if the country is to assume its rightful place among the world’s leading nations. Iran once controlled a vast empire that included both Georgia and Tajikistan, and Iranians are proud nationalists, extremely sensitive about what they see as their country’s historic humiliations by Great Britain, the United States, and Russia. At the same time, they hold deep-seated feelings of cultural superiority over their neighbors. This has made for a prevailing world view that is at times both alarmingly naïve and toxically presumptuous.
The previous afternoon, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, Ahmadinejad’s senior media adviser and the director of IRNA, Iran’s official news agency, had called me to his office and politely suggested that I could be “more than just the President’s interviewer, but an instrument of peace.” I had it in my power, he said, to relay Iran’s “honest and good intentions to the United States.” When I raised the topic of Israel, he affected a mournful look. “Israel is unfortunately doomed,” he said. “I say this without any animosity but as a statement of fact. The rest of the world demands it, and the United States should separate itself, because it can gain nothing from this relationship except more trouble.” He smiled and added, “It is like a mother with a spoiled child, a child that is disobedient and which the mother does not discipline, but also a child which bothers the neighbors.”
When I suggested that a military confrontation might be a likelier prospect than peace, Javanfekr looked astonished. “You actually think that the United States, after everything—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—can still attack Iran?” he said. “They don’t even know what’s going on inside their military command in Kabul”—an allusion to the scandal in which General Stanley McChrystal was removed from his command—“so how can they hope to know what’s happening here?”
As I left Javanfekr’s office, he gave me a letter to forward to Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary. In it, he mentioned my interview with President Ahmadinejad and suggested that the White House should “positively reciprocate” by granting an interview with Obama, the first with a U.S. President by an Iranian reporter.
Ahmadinejad is an engineer by training, with a Ph.D. in traffic management, but he seems to think of himself as a sort of moral philosopher. As is his custom, he began our interview with an unprompted soliloquy about “the universality of humanity, love, friendship, and respect,” then grinned good-naturedly when I asked him if he understood why some were made nervous by his repeated calls for the destruction of Israel and his insistence on Iran’s right to nuclear energy. He replied, “The Iranian nuclear-energy program and the issue of Palestine are two separate issues. They have no connection to one another.” He went on, “Iran has accepted the Non-Proliferation Treaty, we have signed it, and officials of the I.A.E.A. are present in our country; they have cameras that have all of our activities under surveillance. Has the American government accepted the Non-Proliferation Treaty? Hasn’t it used the bomb? Hasn’t it stockpiled them? Who should be concerned about nuclear weapons; should they be concerned or should we?”
Even leaving aside the fact that the U.S. did ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in 1970, Ahmadinejad’s arguments seemed diversionary. A consensus has grown in the West that Iran is indeed seeking the capability to produce nuclear weapons. Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, said in June that intelligence suggested Iran could have enough enriched material for a bomb in the next one to three years. A former senior U.S. civilian official who is privy to the Obama Administration’s Iran policy told me, “Information I have seen suggests that Iran has gone beyond its argument that it does not seek a nuclear weapon.” The Iranians have argued that their aims are limited to a civilian nuclear program, but, the official said, “on the basis of the available evidence, it seems that the Iranians would like to be able to be in the position to make a bomb without actually making one.”
This possibility has distressed American strategists, who feel that there is little difference between having a weapon and being ready to make one. But some analysts think the idea of the bomb could be as useful to Iran as the bomb itself. The Iran expert told me, “The danger posed by Iran is in the eye of the beholder. I do believe that Iran wants a nuclear-weapons capability, but first and foremost for its defense, in order to have a deterrent capability.” He pointed out that Iran’s nuclear program went back to the nineteen-seventies, when the Shah was in power, and intensified in response to Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons. In recent years, with “two to three hundred thousand American troops on either side in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a nuclear-armed Israel,” the desire for a deterrent had “accelerated” in Iran.
This view is complicated by Iran’s position in regional politics. The United States and Israel have long argued that Iran maintains a program of covert support for terrorism in the Middle East, through Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Hamas, in Gaza. Last January, it was reported that the U.S. Navy intercepted an Iranian freighter loaded with military supplies as it headed for Syria, and in November Israel’s Navy stopped another ship carrying war matériel; the cargoes were believed to be bound for Hamas and Hezbollah. In March, after several days of meetings with Arab and Israeli leaders in the Middle East, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters that she had heard many complaints about Iran’s meddling in the region. “It is clear Iran intends to interfere with the internal affairs of all of these people and try to continue their efforts to fund terrorism, whether it is Hezbollah or Hamas or other proxies,” she said.
When I raised these concerns, Ahmadinejad responded dismissively. “Look, these questions brought up by the Zionists belong to the same order of things that should be eliminated,” he said. “We have never hidden our support for the people of Lebanon, Palestine, or Iraq. . . . We do it with pride, as an act of humanity. The people of Palestine are in their own home. So are the people of Lebanon and Iraq, and in Afghanistan, too. We are not in the home of the Americans. These people who are now governing as Zionists, where were they eighty years ago?”
Arguments like this are now familiar, and, along with Ahmadinejad’s routine denials of the Holocaust, have led to widespread public outrage in the West and embarrassment in some circles in Iran. Whether he is genuinely or willfully ignorant of twentieth-century history, he certainly understands the provocation he causes with his outrageous language. He looked delighted when I asked if he believed in an international Zionist conspiracy to control the world. (He intimated that he did.) As a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he suggested, as he has before, that a referendum be held on Israel and the Occupied Territories. “We believe that the people of Palestine, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or Jew, should be allowed to choose their own fate. Those who came from elsewhere, if they are interested in staying, should live under the government of the people, and that government will decide what they should do. If they want to return to their own lands, they can do so.”
When the interview turned to internal politics, Ahmadinejad denied the numerous reports about his government’s repression of reformists, journalists, and human-rights activists. “One of the problems of the leaders of the West is their lack of information about the issues of the world,” he said. “Show me a country in the West where eighty-five per cent of the people participate in Presidential elections! There aren’t any! Iran is the record-holder in democracy. . . . Today you can see that all my rivals and the so-called ‘opposition’ are free.” He compared the violence against the Green Movement’s demonstrators with the unrest at the recent G-20 summit. “If someone sets fire to a car or a building in America, what will they do to him?” He said he had been “shocked” by TV images showing riot police beating demonstrators, “all because they were against the failure of the West’s economic policies.” He told me, with an earnest look, “Iran would never behave in that way toward people.”
Ahmadinejad’s claim is contradicted by the accounts of many witnesses. Karroubi later e-mailed me, “Since the very early days after the election, the regime aimed at confining me and controlling my links with my entourage and the members of my party. The state’s first step toward this confinement was to shut down my newspaper, my party’s office, and my personal office.” Karroubi also confirmed the reports of attacks against him, describing the mobs of hard-liners as “mercenaries.” “In my meetings with clerics and other officials, as well as during public ceremonies and events, some mercenaries would attack me. They even went as far as attempting to assassinate me and shooting at my car.” In Qom, he said, they also attacked the houses of Ayatollah Saanei and the late Ayatollah Montazeri after his visits there, breaking their windows. “All these actions have been carried out in order to confine me and to terrify those willing to stay in contact with me.”
Still, Ahmadinejad insisted that in Iran there was freedom to say and do as one liked. “Look here, you are comfortably speaking to me with no apprehension,” he said. “No American President has ever had the courage to allow an Iranian reporter to do the same, to freely ask him questions. Is this a freedom or a dictatorship?”
When I asked Ahmadinejad if he would allow me to interview Mousavi, Karroubi, and Khatami, he said, “Is it up to me to authorize someone to interview someone else? Everyone is free. Of course, some people may have some limitations within the judicial system; that is up to the judge; it has nothing to do with the government. There is freedom here. They all have Web sites, news channels, and newspapers, and they say whatever they want about me. No one disturbs them.”
But the closing of Karroubi’s newspaper was part of a wide-ranging censorship drive, in which numerous other publications, including political, economic, and cultural journals, were suspended or banned for such transgressions as provoking “unrest and chaos” and fostering a “creeping coup.” Official firewalls have been erected to block Western and Iranian opposition news sites; many Western satellite TV channels, such as the BBC’s highly regarded Farsi-language service, have also been blocked intermittently.
Ahmadinejad affirmed that relations between Iran and the U.S. had become increasingly confrontational: “I am not happy with this situation. Iranians are not happy with it.” He recalled that after Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 he had sent the new President a congratulatory open letter and soon after proposed bilateral talks, “in front of the media.” As a result, he had endured a great deal of criticism at home and abroad, he said, but Obama had not reciprocated. Instead, there had been only threats from him since he became President.
In fact, within weeks of taking office, Obama released a video message to Iran, on the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, in which he offered his commitment to a policy of “engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect” and “to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us.” Ayatollah Khamenei, who ordinarily does not involve himself in public politics, challenged Obama’s message, saying that Iran wanted more than “changes in words” from the United States.
Since then, Obama’s team has pursued opportunities for dialogue, while remaining insistent that Iran not develop a nuclear weapon. (In this year’s Nowruz message, Obama lamented that, “faced with an extended hand, Iran’s leaders have shown only a clenched fist.”) During the post-election unrest, Obama awkwardly refrained from embracing the Green Movement protests, apparently on the assumption that any statements of support might undermine the chances for nuclear talks.
In May, Ahmadinejad signed a deal with the leaders of Brazil and Turkey, in which Iran promised to hand over approximately half of its stock of low-enriched uranium in exchange for a smaller quantity of more highly enriched uranium—sufficient for Iran’s medical needs and research purposes. Although the Obama Administration had previously encouraged Brazil and Turkey to intercede, it rejected this deal, on the ground that it did not address concerns over Iran’s nuclear intentions, and immediately sought the new sanctions package at the U.N. Security Council. Ahmadinejad shook his head. “What was the response? A sanctions resolution,” he said. In America’s government, “the personalities have changed, but the policies have not changed. They still think they need to hold up a bludgeon in order to get concessions from us,” he said. “Remember that this method has already failed. It has been tried before, and has no future. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is on the road to failure.”
As the interview ended, Ahmadinejad and I got up from our seats, and technicians removed our earphones and microphones. One of the President’s aides said to him, “It seems like the Americans want to sort out all their problems with the Muslim world at once!” Ahmadinejad, evidently concerned that the remark was being picked up by a microphone, said curtly, “Be careful what you say!”
Despite Ahmadinejad’s assurances that I was free to interview whomever I liked, a senior government official told me that I should avoid behaving “sneakily” during my stay, illustrating his point with a serpentine movement of his hand. In the end, I was authorized to interview only one other person: Hossein Shariatmadari, an adviser to Khamenei, and the editor-in-chief of Kayhan, the daily newspaper that speaks for Iran’s clerical establishment. Shariatmadari was imprisoned in his twenties for his activities as a militant follower of Ayatollah Khomeini, and was serving a life sentence when the Shah fled Iran, in 1979. When Khomeini took power, he was freed, but the Shah’s torturers left him without any of his original teeth. Though he is sixty-one, his mouth is sunken like a very old man’s.
Shariatmadari is a frank speaker, and his pronouncements are a generally reliable barometer for the opinions of Iran’s Supreme Leader. Six months before the June, 2009, election, he had predicted to me that Ahmadinejad would win, and afterward he had repeatedly called for the arrest of Iran’s reformist leaders, whom he refers to as “Fifth Columnists” for the West.
“The circumstances today are certainly very sensitive” between the U.S. and Iran, he said carefully. “But it can’t be called a crisis.” Indeed, from the perspective of Iran’s government the situation today seemed advantageous. Shariatmadari said, “In his reaction to the unrest in Iran, Obama threw away all the political capital the U.S. had built up here. Although it turned out to be a catastrophe for Obama and his Israeli allies, it was a good opportunity for us.” He explained, “Over the past two decades, the West had mobilized some groups and trends and hatched some plots for their planned subversive D Day against the Islamic Republic. Mr. Obama saw the election time in Iran as his opportunity and used those people the West had saved up for the purpose. And he put all his eggs in one basket.”
If anything, Obama has been criticized for showing scant support for the Green Movement, and yet Shariatmadari suggested that reformists were something like sleeper agents for the West, and that the unrest had helped the Islamic Republic by exposing their identities. “Obama gave us an opportunity to see who the subversives were. So, in that sense, we have actually taken a step forward.” He went on, “Some people have protested to us and asked, ‘Why didn’t you arrest Khatami, Mousavi, and Karroubi during the unrest, when their involvement was revealed?’ But it was very clever not to arrest them, because it finally showed their true faces.”
The Green Movement, he said, was part of a grand conspiracy—conceived by, among others, Michael Ledeen (a veteran foreign-policy hawk), Richard Haass (the president of the Council on Foreign Relations), Gene Sharp (an authority on nonviolent resistance), and George Soros (the financier and philanthropist)—with the aim of overthrowing Iran’s government. The protests were not against Ahmadinejad, he explained, but “against the whole system.” Fortunately, “the people” had been mobilized and had stopped the conspiracy in its tracks.
The officially encouraged mobs of hecklers, the attacks on the clerics Saanei and Karroubi, and the embarrassing incident with Khomeini’s grandson indicated that Ahmadinejad’s victory over the Green Movement had come at a cost; the religious establishment and Iranian society at large seemed far less unified than Shariatmadari claimed. He acknowledged that there were differences, but denied that the Islamic Revolution was tearing itself apart. “Please note carefully,” Shariatmadari said. “The Islamic Revolution is not devouring its children but purging its delinquent children.” Speaking of the reformist leaders, he went on, “Ultimately, they will be arrested because they have committed crimes, and they will definitely be tried for treason and imprisoned, but not right now.”
The United States’ decision to ignore the nuclear-swap deal and push through a new sanctions package was also “positive for us,” he maintained. “First, because it shows that the Americans are not interested in positive engagement, and prefer force, and, secondly, because if the sanctions are implemented it may hurt us, but it won’t seriously harm us, because many other countries will complain that their interests are hurt by such sanctions. Any country with seventy billion dollars of buying capacity cannot really be hurt by sanctions.”
Furthermore, he said, “if they think they are going to inspect our ships,” as stipulated in the sanctions, “they should remember that the Straits of Hormuz are under our control, and that if anyone inspects our ships we will retaliate. A British ship may inspect one of ours, let’s say, but when they enter the Straits it will be our turn.” (Two weeks later, Iran’s conservative-led parliament passed a resolution demanding “retaliation” by Iran’s government in the event of any coercive inspections of Iranian ships by foreign navies.)
Despite Shariatmadari’s dismissals, Iran’s economy is troubled. For decades, the government has diverted roughly a hundred billion dollars a year of the country’s oil wealth into a system of price subsidies, which the sanctions have made increasingly unsustainable. Ahmadinejad has attempted in recent months to pass a bill that would cut those subsidies by forty per cent, a politically risky move; the measure would cause the price of gas to quadruple, by some estimates, and would vastly increase the cost of basic goods, which could seriously damage his standing among poorer Iranians. Ahmadinejad has wavered on implementation dates. In an effort to shore up the government’s revenues, the bill also calls for increasing taxes on merchants by seventy per cent. In mid-July, the influential merchants of the Grand Bazaar in Tehran shut down their shops in protest. The strike was effective: the government backed down, promising to raise taxes by only fifteen per cent.
But sanctions alone may not cause enough distress to bring Iranians back out onto the streets. For most Iranians, life will probably become tougher, but not insurmountably so. And if they believe that their country’s economic woes have been caused largely by Western sanctions, as Ahmadinejad has insisted, they may be just as likely to rally around the government as to protest against it, especially if tensions with the United States and Israel continue. “Keep in mind, too, that public opinion in the world is on our side now,” Shariatmadari added. “In the Middle East people are just waiting to see who will defy the West.”
Shariatmadari seemed to preclude the possibility of a military assault by American forces. “They are in a blind alley in their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have failed. What have they achieved in either country? It’s very difficult now for them to prepare public opinion for another attack.” He dismissed the idea that an attack would likely come in the form of air strikes, aimed at devastating the country’s nuclear installations as well as its military capabilities. “There is no possibility for a limited attack against us. Any attack on us means all-out war. We won’t let them go. Yes, they may limit the war, but the end of the war is not in their hands,” he said. “In whatever combination they attack us, the Americans with Israel or without, we will hit Israel. They have nukes, yes, but their entire territory will be under the barrage of our missiles.”
Shariatmadari ended our interview with a prediction: “Five years from now, Iran and the U.S. will still not have any diplomatic relations. The U.S. will ultimately accept a nuclear Iran, and will find another pretext in order to confront it. I see a very low probability of war, because the U.S. is not in a position to attack us. Of course, some politicians in America may make a stupid mistake, but let’s hope there are some wise men among them.”
American officials find the regime’s brash talk worrisome. “The view there that the United States is militarily incapable, that’s a dangerous view,” Lee Hamilton, the former congressman and co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, told me. “It’s not a question of capability. If we have the will to do it, I think we can.” He believes that Ahmadinejad might have misread the West’s intentions. “They are very isolated in Iran and they don’t know the United States nearly as well as they think they do.”
Nonetheless, in the past few weeks the Iranian government has seemed newly open to negotiating. On July 26th, the European Union and Canada announced yet another round of sanctions; the same day, Iran’s government sent a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency that, an Iranian official said, offered its willingness to resume talks on the Brazil-Turkey deal “without any conditions.” The former senior civilian U.S. official said he believed the sanctions had the desired effect. “In my experience, the things that have the most influence on Iran are those which find ways to block what they want to do, and one of those things is to be a big regional player. They can’t do that very well under sanctions. They respond to adversity.”
Meanwhile, Obama has kept up the pressure on Iran to make a more comprehensive deal. In recent weeks, the Administration publicly raised both the prospect of negotiations and the possibility of war. Hamilton said that officials were still debating the best approach to take with Iran, but many felt that the time for diplomacy had begun to run out. “Since about three months ago, there is a discernible mood for military action,” he said. “The Administration has said that a nuclear weapon in Iran is unacceptable, which implies that containment is off the agenda.” (He noted, though, that the U.S. had ruled out containment in the past, only to embrace it later, as with North Korea.)
On August 1st, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, confirmed on “Meet the Press” that the United States had made contingency plans for a strike against Iran. “Military actions have been on the table and remain on the table,” he said. “I hope we don’t get to that, but it’s an important option, and it’s one that’s well understood.” Mullen added that he worried that an attack could have “unintended consequences that are difficult to predict in what is an incredibly unstable part of the world.”
Three days later, Obama told reporters that he remained open to negotiations with the Iranians, if they offer “confidence-building measures.” He said, “It is very important to put before the Iranians a clear set of steps that we would consider sufficient to show that they are not pursuing nuclear weapons,” and added, “They should know what they can say ‘yes’ to.”
If Obama is to bring Iran to talks, he will have to overcome a good deal of resistance in Washington. “You saw the sanctions vote. What was it, four hundred and eight to eight in Congress?” Hamilton said. “Obama is confronted with a very strong, very committed, very heartfelt opposition to Iran in Congress.” This difficulty is compounded by frustration over the inability to find a diplomatic solution. Because America’s engagement with Iran has focussed on the single, intractable issue of nuclear arms, it has become difficult for the Administration to make perceptible progress. Obama has been more successful than Bush in orchestrating an international sanctions effort. But, after sanctions, what else can he do?
Hamilton advocated a patient course of continued diplomacy. “There won’t be a parting of the skies overnight. The Iranians seem to feel the United States must go first, and make a dramatic gesture, but such a gesture by Obama is very difficult right now. . . . My feeling is that the talks must be conducted secretly, whoever does them or wherever they take place.”
With its constant tension and endless delays, Hamilton said, the American-Iranian impasse reminded him of Cold War-era relations with the Soviet Union. “Year after year, we met and read out speeches to each other and then raised toasts to our grandchildren with each other, but nothing ever happened. Then, finally, we got down to talks, and things moved. I hope this doesn’t take forty years.”
Reformist groups in Iran have tended to wax and wane—the movement that deposed the Shah took nearly twenty years to gather its full strength—but the Green Movement as it stands seems to present little threat to Iran’s government. Mousavi, on his Web site, recently criticized Ahmadinejad for his handling of nuclear negotiations, saying that his efforts have made sanctions worse and prevented Iran from developing “peaceful nuclear technology.” Some analysts interpret this as part of Mousavi’s continuing attempt to present himself as an unflinching nationalist, in the hope of retaining influence in the reformist movement. But the Iran expert told me that, in the absence of strong leadership, the movement was splintering. He explained, “The Green Movement was made up of different kinds of people: those who hated the regime, those who were offended by the election fraud, and those who joined because they were offended by the treatment of the prisoners. Eventually, they began to separate out.”
One Iranian, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his safety, described the movement’s status. “Despotism works,” he said. “That’s what this situation shows. The reformist movement is over. The middle classes aren’t willing to die en masse, and the regime knows this. It has killed and punished just enough people to send the message of what it is capable of doing. The reformist leaders and the regime have a kind of unspoken pact: ‘Don’t organize any more demonstrations or say anything and we’ll leave you alone. Do anything and we’ll arrest you.’ It’s over.”
But the members of the movement I spoke to have not changed their sympathies. In Tehran, I was invited to watch a televised soccer match in the home of an Iranian family. During a break in the action, someone mentioned that I had interviewed President Ahmadinejad that week. One of my hosts, a professional woman in her thirties, immediately put two fingers into her mouth and bent over in a pantomime of gagging. “Oh, how I hate him,” she said. “He makes my skin crawl. He is the worst kind of Iranian; he offends our dignity and our sense of ethics, and the worst thing is he thinks he is so clever.” The mere mention of his name, she said, made her feel depressed. In the crackdown that has followed last year’s unrest, she added, many of her friends and acquaintances—mostly other educated young professionals, of the sort that overwhelmingly supported the Green Movement—had fled the country, or were planning to. She did not plan to emigrate, but she understood the urge to do so. “The frustration is almost too great to bear. People feel so robbed, and their dignity and hopes are so offended. Every day, it is so painful. It hurts. This feeling will not just go away. The Green Movement represents this feeling, and it can’t just disappear. Somehow, maybe in another shape, it has to reëmerge.” ♦
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