- Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences by James Buchan
John Murray, 482 pp, £25.00, November 2012, ISBN 978 1 84854 066 8
At
the end of the Second World War, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced in
the seminaries of Qom, the bastion of Shia learning. The
Unveiling of Secrets accused
Iran’s monarchy of treason: ‘In your European hats, you strolled
the boulevards, ogling the naked girls, and thought yourselves fine
fellows, unaware that foreigners were carting off the country’s
patrimony and resources.’ Iran, it proposed, should be ruled by an
assembly of religious jurists headed by a wise man. In such a state,
there would be no need for elections or a parliament, or even a
standing army: a religious militia (basij)
would ensure obedience to the law.
It’s
unlikely that anyone outside Qom read The
Unveiling of Secrets;
even inside the seminaries few would have embraced its programme.
Yet just three decades later the pamphlet’s author, Ruhollah
Khomeini, helped launch a revolution against the monarchy and
established himself as Iran’s supreme leader, with powers even the
shah would have envied. The political landscape was transformed: the
Shia of Iran, a minority in the house of Islam, had rewritten the
script of revolution in the Middle East. James Buchan’s Days
of God shows
how a radicalised clergy took control of a popular uprising against
a Western-backed dictator and set up the world’s first and only
Islamic republic. Buchan tells that story as well as anyone has
done, but Days
of God is
also an erudite reflection on three important questions: why there
was a revolution, why it was Islamic and what its legacy has been.
The Iranian Revolution was, Buchan argues, a revolt against
Western-imposed modernisation in favour of an enchanted path to
modernity. It had a spiritual aim that grew out of the history of
Shiism, with its themes of martyrdom and redemption, but the attempt
to infuse governance with divine authority ended up expanding –
and ultimately sanctifying – the authoritarian state the clerics
inherited from the shah. ‘In revolt against Pahlavism,’ Buchan
writes, ‘the Islamic republic is also its continuation in turban
and cloak.’
The Pahlavi
dynasty was founded in 1926, when Reza Khan – a soldier in the
Iranian Cossack Brigade who had come to power in a British-backed
coup against the Qajar monarchy five years earlier – crowned
himself shah. Although he and his son Mohammed styled themselves as
heirs of Cyrus the Great, their dynasty was never more than a
father-and-son operation, dependent on foreign patronage that they
groaned about but could never quite shake off. Reza was an
authoritarian moderniser in the Atatürk mould who forced nomads to
become sedentary; disciplined rebellious ethnic minorities; built
railways and roads; and created a modern army and bureaucracy. But
his Westernising project, in particular his attacks on the veil, ran
up against clerical opposition, and he could never overcome the
perception that he was a stooge of the British. In fact he bristled
at foreign interference and attempted to renegotiate the reviled
1919 agreement with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, but was
outmanoeuvred at every turn. Finally, having declared Iran neutral
in the Second World War, he was deposed by Soviet and British troops
in September 1941.
Mohammed,
the pampered, fragile son, was no fonder than his father of his
patrons in the West but learned never to cross them, especially
after the CIA-orchestrated coup against his prime minister,
Mossadegh, in 1953. Dashing, fluent in French and English, with a
worldly sophistication acquired from his years at a Swiss boarding
school, Mohammed was a nationalist of a kind, but he made the
mistake of imagining he could buy popular support in the absence of
national independence. After the 1953 coup, he signed a better deal
with British Petroleum that gave Iran 50 per cent of the profits.
Though this fell short of Mossadegh’s plans for nationalisation,
it underwrote a massive boom, and big, garish projects his father
would have admired: dams, hydro-electric schemes, even an enormous
steel mill financed and built by the Soviets, a token declaration of
independence that soothed his ego. Iran’s population grew from 19
to 30 million, and Tehran became a modern metropolis. Economic
growth earned the shah applause in the West, but it failed to win
him the love he felt he deserved from Iranians, who turned against
modernisation itself: they saw it as a form of imperialism, an
existential threat to Iran’s own traditions. Obsessed with plots
against the throne, he leaned more and more on the Savak, his
intelligence services, which the CIA, Mossad and MI6 had trained in
surveillance and interrogation. Those who objected to his
friendships with the US, Israel and apartheid South Africa had a
choice of exile in Berlin or Paris; or imprisonment in one of
Savak’s prisons.
The
shah tried to co-opt the left with his ‘white revolution’, an
ambitious programme of land reform launched in the early 1960s, but
its principal achievement was to disrupt life in the countryside and
provoke an exodus of rural migrants to the slums of Tehran, which
grew into a centre of opposition. Buchan witnessed the disorienting
effects of the white revolution in the early 1970s as an English
teacher in Isfahan, whose palaces looked ‘so flimsy you could blow
them over with a sigh’. Pahlavism struck him as a ‘blunt saw
across the very grain of Iranianness’, and he suggests it was the
‘style of Pahlavi rule’ as much as the shah’s policies that
brought him down: his shameless desire to impress the West with his
‘great civilisation’, his haughty indifference to the mass
dislocation caused by his reforms, his ill-concealed contempt for
the Shia faith and the bazaar, which he saw as backward and dingy.
Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of the Revolution’s intellectual prophets,
complained that Iranians no longer knew who they were, that they had
succumbed to a plague he called gharbzadegi:
‘West-struckness’, or ‘Occidentosis’. By the time of the
1971 bash at Persepolis, where royals celebrated 2500 years of
monarchy with 69 heads of state over a spread flown in from Maxim’s
(a ‘feast of bestial gluttony’, in Khomeini’s words), the shah
was practically goading his people to overthrow him.
Yet
when revolution came, it wasn’t the communist uprising that the
shah and his Western patrons had feared, but an Islamic revolution
that banned alcohol, forced women to cover themselves and empowered
the clergy. The usual explanation for this turn of events is that
the shah, by colluding in the overthrow of Mossadegh and repressing
the left, created a vacuum that the clergy were able to fill. But
this doesn’t explain how the clergy, who had seen politics as
unclean, came to think of themselves as political actors and moved
to seize power. Suspicion of state power runs deep in the Shia
faith, which views all efforts to legislate or govern as ‘at best
provisional, and, at worst, usurpations’ until the return of the
12th imam, who vanished in Samarra in 874. Another, more secular
reason for the clergy’s quietism is that it was in their material
interest. Over the course of the 19th century, they had become rich
thanks to their alliance with the bazaar, which channelled its
profits – as much as a quarter of which came from the opium trade
– into the mosques and seminaries. Although the clergy had joined
with the bazaar to oppose commercial concessions to foreigners and
to defend modesty in dress, they had otherwise kept themselves to
themselves. Ayatollah Hosein Borujerdi, the senior marja-e
taqlid (‘source
of emulation’) in Qom throughout the 1940s and 1950s, forbade
clerical involvement in politics. The virtuous cycle of money-making
and mosque-building had to be protected against the intrusions of
the state – particularly when the shah began to talk about land
reform in the countryside, the clergy’s stronghold. If there was
to be an Islamic revolution, it would have to be preceded by a
revolution in Islam itself.
During
the Borujerdi era, Khomeini was a marginal, even ostracised figure
in Qom, known mostly for his austere lifestyle and his expertise
in erfan (mysticism).
His lectures attracted a following, but they also raised suspicions
that he was an infidel, perhaps even a Sunni. He cultivated an air
of otherworldliness that entranced his followers, and he disdained
his colleagues, the ‘stupid, reactionary mullahs’. He admired
men of action who performed their religious duty by assassinating
members of the regime. Borujerdi held Khomeini at a distance,
fearing that his radicalism might leave the seminary vulnerable to
the security services. But after Borujerdi died in 1961, Khomeini
started to raise his voice against the shah. His first target was
the white revolution, which the shah put to a referendum in 1963.
Khomeini believed that by giving the vote to ‘a lot of ignorant
ladies’ the referendum threatened to ‘extirpate Islam’. Yet he
instructed his followers not to dwell on its contents, a package of
land reform and nationalisation of forests that many Iranians –
particularly the urban nationalist middle class – supported.
Instead, he attacked the referendum as a violation of the
constitution. Royalist forces ransacked the Faizieh seminary, and in
the clashes a student fell to his death. Khomeini and his supporters
turned the mourning ceremony forty days later into a political
protest, just as they would during the Revolution’s ‘days of
god’. In a furious speech, he called the shah a ‘worthless
wretch’ and warned him to ‘learn from your father’s fate’.
When Khomeini was arrested, a nationwide uprising broke out; the
shah’s forces fired on protesters who were chanting: ‘Khomeini
or death!’
‘Why
not leave politics to us?’ Hassan Pakravan, the head of Savak,
asked Khomeini, whom Pakravan had persuaded the shah to release.
‘Politics is villainy, lies and hypocrisy. Don’t let yourself be
sullied by it.’ Such talk might have worked with Borujerdi, but
Khomeini was made of tougher stuff. (Once in power, he thanked
Pakravan by having him executed.) His religious prestige was now
growing: the Qom establishment had promoted him to marja-e
taqlid in
order to get him released from jail. But Khomeini’s new title gave
him no protection when, in 1964, he denounced the granting of
diplomatic immunity to US military personnel. ‘If some American’s
servant, some American’s cook, assassinates your marja in
the middle of the bazaar, or crushes him underfoot, the Iranian
police may not arrest him,’ he thundered. But ‘if someone runs
over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted.’ A
week later, Khomeini was expelled to Turkey. A year after that, he
moved to a seminary in Najaf, in Iraq. There he set up a network of
revolutionary Iranian students, working closely with Abol Hassan
Bani-Sadr, a wealthy young tier-mondiste who
had been living in Paris and who became the first president of the
Islamic Republic.
A
stern man in a turban, Khomeini was an improbable student leader.
But his fearless opposition to the shah and his interweaving of
Shiism and anti-imperialism resonated with young readers of Al-e
Ahmad and Ali Shariati, the spiritual fathers of the Revolution.
Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi and
Shariati’s Return
to Ourselves presented
an incantatory blend of Marxism, Shia mysticism and Fanonism. They
spoke to a common feeling that Iranian culture was in danger of
being overrun, even destroyed, by Western consumer culture. The
Islamic leftism of Al-e Ahmad and Shariati was itself a jumble of
Western and Muslim ideas, as vivid as it was imprecise, but it
testified to the yearning for an alternative modernity, a radical
style of will that was – or at least felt – authentically
Iranian. The solution to Iran’s problems, they argued, lay not in
Western models but in the ‘true’ Islam of national liberation
and social justice that had been concealed by the old men in Qom.
Islam was not a fixed code of rules and prohibitions, but a religion
of freedom, a kind of Persian existentialism, and its home was the
individual conscience, not the mosque. ‘The Imam of the Age for
whom we are all waiting is within each one of us,’ Al-e Ahmad
wrote.
Khomeini
came under pressure from Qom to excommunicate Shariati as a
‘deviant’ for his attacks on veiling and polygamy. But, not for
the last time, as Buchan writes, he ‘proved more subtle and
patient’. He had little to gain from attacking the students’
idol, and Shariati’s criticisms of the clergy made him a tactical
ally of Khomeini’s against the conservative establishment in Qom.
Khomeini saw that Shariati’s fusion of Islamic and leftist motifs
could be a potent mobilising tool. The slogans of Khomeini’s
followers during the Revolution – ‘Islam belongs to the
oppressed, not the oppressors’; ‘Islam represents the
slum-dwellers, not the palace-dwellers’ – owed much to Shariati,
who died in exile in England in 1977. Thousands of Shariati’s
followers – notably the Islamic leftist guerrillas of the People’s
Mujahedin, who helped ignite the Revolution but broke violently with
the Islamic Republic – would hang in Khomeini’s jails, but for
now, as Buchan puts it, ‘the reckoning with the Shariatists could
wait.’
While
Shariati spoke of liberation, Khomeini focused on what would happen
after liberation. The question of who should rule after the shah was
the only question that mattered. In a series of lectures he gave in
Najaf in 1970, published a year later asIslamic
Government,
Khomeini argued that the Quranic concept of the velayat-e
faqih,
‘the stewardship of the jurist’, applied not just to widows and
orphans (as most scholars believed) but to society as a whole: the
Islamic state should be ruled by a group of clerics; even, he
hinted, by ‘a single man’, though he could not be a monarch,
since Islam was inherently hostile to monarchy. This would have come
as news to clerics who had supported Iran’s monarchs since the
founding of the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century. For all its
scriptural trappings, the velayat-e
faqih was
a fanciful reading of the Quran.
*
When
Western reporters visited him in Neauphle-le-Château, the village
outside Paris where he spent his last four months in exile, Khomeini
didn’t mention the stewardship of the jurist. Unaware of his
arguments in Islamic
Government,
the Westerners who sat with him under his apple tree, most famously
Michel Foucault, reproduced his claims that he had no interest in
power and that women would be free in the Islamic Republic. Few
Iranians had heard of the velayat-e
faqih;
for them, in his seeming simplicity and humbleness Khomeini
represented not only opposition to the shah but national honour
itself. The spectacle of Khomeini in France, Buchan writes,
‘reinforced in Iranians a notion of themselves that was both
vulnerable and precious’. Even the exiled communists of the Tudeh
Party swore allegiance to him. (In 1983, the Tudeh’s leader made
an abject televised apology, extracted under torture, for the left’s
‘treason’ since the Revolution.) In his serene indifference to
the Western gaze, Khomeini had become the ultimate rejoinder
to gharbzadegi,
the Occidentosis of the Pahlavis.
It was an
attack on Khomeini, published pseudonymously in an Iranian newspaper
three days after Jimmy Carter’s New Year visit to Tehran in 1978,
that led to the Revolution’s first clashes. Yet the shah and his
patrons persisted in thinking that the real threat came from the
left. The CIA claimed as late as August that year that Iran was ‘not
in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation’. But
after a fire on 19 August at the Rex Cinema in the oil town of
Abadan killed more than four hundred, it was clear that the shah’s
days were numbered, not because the regime had set the fire, but
because no one could believe that it hadn’t. After the Revolution,
a former drug dealer confessed to having set the fire with a group
of Islamic activists. He said he hoped the fire would attract praise
from ‘the people making the Revolution’. Khomeini was known to
see cinemas as dens of iniquity. But Khomeini saw where his
strategic advantage lay. He said the fire was ‘contrary to all the
laws of Islam’ and therefore obviously the work of the shah. In
September came the Black Friday massacre of protesters in Zhaleh
Square, followed in October and November by wildcat strikes at the
Abadan refinery and the burning of banks. The shah’s third wife,
Queen Farah, described all this as a ‘little feu de joie by the
people’. The shah moved to dissolve the one-party state and
introduce what he called ‘responsible democracy’, but it only
made him look weak. As unarmed crowds called for him to step down,
he lacked his father’s willingness to take the necessary measures.
In December, it was Khomeini, not the shah, who persuaded striking
oil workers to run enough barrels through the refinery for domestic
consumption. In mid-January 1979 the shah fled Iran with Queen
Farah, carrying a little box of Iranian soil.
In the two
weeks between the shah’s departure and Khomeini’s return, it was
not clear who, or what, would replace him. Prime Minister Shapour
Bakhtiar, a Mossadegh-era official and a former prisoner of the
shah, dissolved Savak, released political prisoners, outlawed the
sale of oil to Israel and South Africa, and lifted press censorship.
Bakhtiar’s reforms might have satisfied most Iranians – but even
before he reached Tehran, Khomeini insisted on his resignation. The
American government was divided between those in favour of a
military coup, and those, like William Sullivan, the American
ambassador in Tehran, who saw Khomeini as a Gandhi-like figure and a
potential ally in the fight against communism. The Soviets assumed
that America’s loss would be their gain, and that the shouts of
‘God is great!’, the sea of turbans and chadors in the streets
of Tehran, were merely a façade for socialist revolution. But
Khomeini’s slogan was ‘neither East nor West’, and he meant
it: Iranians had made the Revolution in order to break with a
history of foreign interference, not to find a new superpower patron
– least of all the current incarnation of their old enemy imperial
Russia. ‘This is not an ordinary government,’ Khomeini said in
Tehran on 5 February, four days after millions of Iranians flooded
the streets to welcome him back. Less than a week later, civilians
stormed military compounds, soldiers deserted their posts, and
Bakhtiar, disguised as a French businessman, flew to France.
A
month later, a referendum for an Islamic Republic gained an
overwhelming majority. Khomeini’s prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan,
a cautious, liberal-minded Islamic nationalist who had run the oil
industry under Mossadegh, had wanted Iranians to have the choice of
a ‘Democratic Islamic Republic’, but Khomeini vetoed it: ‘Islam
does not need adjectives such as democratic … It is sad for us to
add another word near the word Islam, which is perfect.’ Yet he
resigned himself to some of the Westernisms he loathed, including an
elected parliament and voting rights for women. The state he
fathered was a hybrid of velayat-e
faqih and
the French republic. But the 73-man Assembly of Experts, dominated
by Khomeini loyalists, most of them clerics, had the upper hand; and
presiding over it was the Supreme Leader himself, who would rule for
life. Khomeini also set up a shadow government in order to
consolidate his control of the state, composed of the Revolutionary
Guard Corps, the Islamic Republican Party and the IRP’s militia,
who were unleashed on campuses in a violent ‘cultural revolution’
against the left, Khomeini’s former allies. Royalists and others
suspected of ‘sowing corruption on earth’ soon found themselves
on trial in revolutionary courts, where Sadegh Khalkhali, a minor
cleric whom Khomeini appointed as Iran’s hanging judge, oversaw
thousands of executions. Their purpose was not merely to punish,
but, in the words of state radio, to ‘infuse new blood into the
veins of the Revolution’.
Khomeini’s
decision to support the Followers of the Line of the Imam – the
students who took over the American Embassy in November 1979,
shortly after the shah arrived at New York Hospital for cancer
treatment – was taken with a similar objective in mind. His real
target was not so much America as the more moderate nationalists who
had helped him to seize power: men like Bazargan, whose university
education and hope that Iran might re-establish relations with the
West made him a suspect ‘liberal’. The Followers of the Line of
the Imam claimed to be preventing a repeat of the 1953 coup, but the
Americans were now hoping for a rapprochement, and Khomeini knew as
much. When the hostage-takers scaled the walls of the embassy,
Bazargan, with Khomeini’s approval, was meeting in Algiers with
the US national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Bazargan
denounced the students for their violation of international law and
diplomacy, but the Supreme Leader embraced them, taking the
opportunity to paint opposition to the embassy takeover as cowardly
surrender to the Great Satan. Bazargan resigned. When the hostages
were finally released in January 1981, the hostage-takers’
spiritual leader, Mohammad Khoeiniha, declared that ‘the tree of
revolution has grown and gained in strength.’
In fact, the
revolutionary tree had been sapped of some of its strength: the
Islamic Republic received only $2.88 billion of the $12 billion in
frozen assets it was owed; most of the remainder went to servicing
the shah’s debts. ‘It was now clear who was hostage and who
hostage-taker,’ Buchan writes. Yet for many the financial losses
were more than offset by the defeat of the ‘liberals’ and by the
psychological victory over America and, no less, over their
pre-Revolutionary selves. In the Revolution’s most
phantasmagorical set-piece, young women whose grandmothers ‘had
knotted carpets in the 1920s’ now pieced together shredded
documents in the ‘nest of spies’. With Iran’s destiny in its
own hands at last, international isolation, debt and sanctions
seemed a small price to pay. And the Islamic Republic could afford
to steer a defiant course because Iranian oil was now finally under
Iran’s control.
The hostage
crisis reinforced the radicalism of Khomeini’s revolution; the war
with Iraq gave his republic resilience and popular legitimacy. It
began in September 1980 when Iraq staged a surprise attack in the
hope of redrawing the border at the Shatt al-Arab waterway. The
Americans and French supported Iraq, and even the Soviets tilted
towards Saddam. Iran’s only supporters in the region were Syria
and, briefly, the Israelis, who hoped Khomeini might become an ally
against the Arabs as the shah had been. By July 1982, Iran had
driven out the Iraqi army from the south-west of the country, but
Khomeini squandered the victory by rejecting Saddam’s offer of an
armistice. The Israelis had just invaded Lebanon, and Saddam
suggested to Khomeini that they set aside their differences and
fight the ‘Zionist enemy’. But Khomeini suspected that Israel’s
invasion was a trap set by the West to protect Iraq from Iran’s
punishment. As things turned out, Israel’s war was a blessing for
Iran, which found a ‘lung’ in the Arab East: the Shia guerrilla
organisation Hizbullah, set up by the Revolutionary Guard Corps in
the Bekaa Valley in the summer of 1982, is now the Islamic
Republic’s most precious regional asset, a shield against an
Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities.
The
continuation of the war with Iraq condemned Iran to six more years
of immense suffering, including chemical weapon attacks by Saddam’s
forces. Iranian boys who had barely reached puberty were given ‘a
weapon and twenty rounds and sent against an artillery position’,
and told they were fighting Israeli troops. The new objective of the
war was the overthrow of the Baath regime and the expansion of the
Islamic Revolution. Well over a hundred thousand Iranian soldiers
died before, in late 1988, Khomeini finally accepted a UN ceasefire.
He agreed to ‘drink the poisoned chalice’, as he put it, after
the USS Vincennes shot
down a plane full of Iranian civilians that it mistook for an F-14.
Almost three hundred passengers and crew died in the crash, which
Khomeini was convinced was deliberate: a message from the US that it
would never allow Iran to win the war. The attack on the plane was a
genuine blunder but Khomeini read American intentions correctly.
Defeat at the hands of the world’s greatest superpower gave him a
more honourable exit. Redemption for Iran’s martyrdom would come
14 years later, when Iraq fell into its lap courtesy of the American
military.
With
the war over, Khomeini began to fret about the future of his
revolution, and launched a new round of purges. The first to be
executed were nearly three thousand members of the People’s
Mujahedin, who had fought with Saddam. Next in line were those
convicted of ‘warring against god’: the victims included the
13-year-old daughter of a fellow cleric of Ayatollah Hosein-Ali
Montazeri, Khomeini’s protégé and designated successor.
Montazeri wrote to Khomeini to protest against this ‘act of
vengeance and spite’ and to remind him of Islam’s belief in
mercy – Khomeini ignored him. On the Revolution’s tenth
anniversary, Montazeri wrote again, deploring the restrictions on
liberty. This time Khomeini told him that he would never be Supreme
Leader and warned that unless he shut his mouth, ‘I will
definitely be obliged to do something about you. And you know me, I
never neglect my obligations.’ Montazeri took refuge in Qom.
Khomeini convened a special constitutional assembly, most of whose
members he had appointed, which amended the articles requiring that
the Supreme Leader be a marja-e-taqlid.
This cleared the way for Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who was not
a marja but
was a redoubtable Khomeinist, to replace him after his death. By a
single stroke of its author, the scholastic foundation of
the velayat-e
faqih was
abolished.
*
Efforts
to democratise the Islamic Republic in the Khamenei era have come to
grief. The reformist president Mohammed Khatami, a former student of
Montazeri, was undermined from within by hardliners, and from
without by the Bush administration, which thanked Iran for its help
in Afghanistan after 2001 by spurning its peace overtures and
grouping it with North Korea and Iraq in the ‘axis of evil’. The
demonstrations in 2009 by the Green Movement, in response to the
apparent rigging of presidential elections, were suppressed by
the basij militias
with Khamenei’s blessing. The state apparatus is now comprised of
hardline clerics led by Khamenei and anti-clerical Islamists in the
Revolutionary Guard Corps; these groups dislike one another but have
closed ranks against reformers. Islam still gives the republic a
more indigenous source of legitimacy than communism did in the
Soviet Union, but a growing number of clerics have either joined the
opposition or returned to the aloof quietism of an earlier
generation. Among the intelligentsia, the Islamic Republic is at
best tolerated, and mostly despised.
Yet
Iranians aren’t eager for another revolution, or regime change
from abroad. There’s a crucial difference between the tyrannies of
the Pahlavi dynasty and the Islamic Republic: the latter is the
product of a homegrown revolution, and has deeper roots. Belittled
by the Pahlavi monarchs for their backwardness and superstition,
Khomeini and his clerical allies established what Reza Shah and his
son could only dream of: an independent modern Iran, with the status
and prestige of a regional power whose reach now extends to Lebanon,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Palestine. The revolution’s great
casualty has been the vision of freedom that Al-e Ahmad and Shariati
put forward, and to which Khomeini paid lip service in
Neauphle-le-Château. Since the collapse of Khatami’s reform
project, the state has grown more authoritarian, more paranoid and
more brutal in its treatment of dissidents. Young people, chastened
by the ferocity of the basij,
are cynical about the potential for reform and have turned away from
politics. Their main concern is making ends meet in an era of
punitive sanctions.
The
sanctions are intended to prevent Iran from pursuing its nuclear
programme, which, not very plausibly, it insists is for merely
peaceful purposes. But the sanctions aren’t likely to work. Iran
has nuclear-armed enemies and fresh memories of being attacked by
chemical weapons while the world looked the other way; and in any
event, refusing to back down under foreign pressure is a first
principle for the Islamic Republic. Though it craves international
recognition, it has weathered isolation before and is in some ways
more comfortable with it. (In this it is not unlike Israel, a state
which also speaks in the name of a persecuted minority and justifies
its defiance of international law with a rhetoric of religious
nationalism and righteous victimhood.) Isolation has nourished
self-reliance, self-reliance has encouraged sacrifice, and sacrifice
is widely seen as proof of virtue. The Islamic Republic’s tenacity
during the war with Iraq should give pause to anyone who imagines
that it will bend under sanctions – or as a result of Israel’s
assassination of its nuclear scientists. The nuclear programme is
broadly popular with the public, which sees it as a deterrent and
can’t understand why Israel, Pakistan and India should be allowed
the bomb, but not Iran. Resistance to Western pressure has defined
Iranian nationalism for more than a century, and remains one of the
few cards the otherwise unpopular regime has left to play. Buchan
concludes his book with the hope that Iran will prove less stubborn
than he believes it was in 1953, when Mossadegh was removed from
power for taking on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. But Khamenei and
his colleagues may draw a different lesson from the events of 1953,
especially if they are of a mind to compare the fate of Gaddafi, who
ended his nuclear programme, with that of the North Korean regime,
which did not. They may be devout Shia, but that does not mean they
wish to become martyrs.
