I was not quite 10 in early 1979 when the Shah of Iran flew into exile, preempting the takeover of that country by the mullahs, led by the odious fanatic the Ayatollah Khomeini.
That was not the only thing going on around that time. The USSR rolled tanks into Afghanistan a few months later, and Communist China attempted an unsuccessful invasion of Vietnam.
I suppose that this period was my introduction to geopolitics, given that I did not really understand much on the news before that time in my childhood.
Soon afterwards, we watched as the US Embassy in Iran was stormed by Islamist students with the tacit approval of the new regime, in violation of The Hague Convention on diplomatic relations. The Iran Hostage crisis stretched out across late 1979, all of 1980, and into early 1981, burying the Carter presidency’s chances of a second term.
Since that time, Iran has been controlled by a theocratic regime, where unelected mullahs have the constitutional authority to disqualify election candidates and overrule the parliament. Over these intervening 47 years, the regime has regressed Iranian society, taking it backward from the late 20th Century into an earlier more regressive time.
In recent weeks, the Iranian public has revolted against this regime, protesting in all major cities, resulting in an internet blackout and the murder of at least 2000 and possibly 12000 civilians.
This is one of the big stories of the moment, rivalling the sideshow in Greenland and the Venezuelan intervention.
So what is going to happen in Iran?
I am very pessimistic about the overthrow of the regime actually succeeding. The various agencies and movements connected to the theocracy are quite powerful, including not only intelligence services and the military, but also a religious vigilante militia known as the Baseej, which is best known for enforcing hijab on women and beating transgressors.
The state apparatus is quite hardened with half a century of experience in repression, and well equiped to commit violence against its citizens.
I might be wrong. I do hope so. The Velvet Revolution of 1989-1991 saw the end of the communist occupation of Eastern Europe, and then the Arab Spring saw some regimes overturned across the Middle East just over a decade ago. But I also remember Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, which did not change anything.
But if we witness the collapse of the 49 year old Islamic Republic of Iran, what will we see replace it?
Crowds are chanting for the return of the Shah (actually the son of the Shah who fled in 1979). Apparently what little they remember of the relatively liberal and progressive society (as compared to post 1979), they identify with the rule of the Pahlavi family.
Many either do not know, or are willing to overlook, that hundreds, if not thousands, were killed by the security forces during the Pahlavi regime, and that many dissidents were arrested and tortured, even if not killed outright.
The regime also, from 1953 onward, was effectively a puppet government protecting the interests of US and UK oil companies, and serving as a local enforcer of US foreign policy interests. 1953 is a significant milestone, because it was at that time that Kermit Roosevelt, CIA officer and grandson of a former president, orchestrated a coup, overturning a democratic elected government in order to prevent nationalisation of the oil industry.
I am of the view that it is not possible to consider (and feel indignant about) the 1979 US Embassy Hostage crisis without using the CIA coup of 1953 to provide some context. The US lost its local legitimacy as an honest broker in 1953, and what happened in 1979 at their embassy was in part a direct result of their intervention a quarter of a century earlier. [I will qualify that with the observation that Russian diplomats had been murdered in Iran/Persia previously, so the sanctity of envoys was not something embedded in Iranian political culture.]
So I am skeptical about the type of regime which might replace the mullahs if it were to be led by the return of the Pahlavi dynasty. They had a lot of blood on their hands, even if it were nowhere near as much as what the mullahs have shed in the past half century. [And whilst I am in general terms a monarchist, I do feel skepticism towards royal families who have not done the right thing by their people in the past – eg the House of Savoy in Italy.]
What are the prospects of an actual working democracy emerging, one which would be somewhat more similar to the social democracies of mainland Europe or the liberal democracies of the Anglosphere? That is something which we would be more comfortable with, from our safe vantage points in the Western World.
A viable democracy requires a civil society where there are working institutions outside of the state, and where there is a political culture which is willing to express and work out its differences without a tendency to resort to violence. Such civil societies do not sprout overnight like mushrooms – they need to grow. In Eastern Europe after the Velvet Revolution, there were trade unions like Solidarity to foster such a culture, and where the separation of Church and State meant that the adherence of many Eastern Europeans to their religions had kept a healthy skepticism towards authority alive during the Cold War.
What about Iran?
Taking the power of religion as a transformative force first. The ‘Twelver’ sect of Shia Islam is the religion, at least nominally, of the majority of the population. It has provided Iran with the mullahs who have tyrannised it for the past half century. Shia Islam is not going to contribute to the growth of a civil society which would be tolerant and skeptical of authority. Other versions of Islam could possible provide even worse repression – the Sunni fanaticism of ISIS across large tracts of Iraq and Syria has not receded as a threat to the people who occupy those regions.
Then there is the ethnic diversity of Iran – various linguistically differentiated Kurdish groups live across Iran (perhaps 10%), and who might wish for separatism, as their compatriots in Iraq and Turkey have tried; about 20% of the population are Azeri, and there are others. The most oil rich areas have Arab majorities. Historically, ethnic minorities in the area have been repressed, including violently, and much of the civil war that has infested neighbouring Afghanistan in the past 50 years has been between ethnic divides at least as much as religious.
The main hope I would have for Iran is in the diaspora across the world. Much as emigres to Western Europe, North America and Australia would have contributed to the birth of democracy and freedom in post communist Eastern Europe, emigres from Iran can similar contribute, through both remittances of money and more tolerant liberal ideas.
But western style democracy is not something that can be imposed on a non western country. After the US intervention in Iraq in 2003, the American Spectator (a conservative magazine which used to have an actually offline format) ran rather naive ads in which it promoted fund raising for translation into Arabic of a play about the US founding fathers. It argued that Virginians were dominant in the colonies at that time, just as the Sunni minority had been politically dominant in Iraq, and that if enough people in Iraq read this play about the US, it would help them form a US style democracy. Do I really need to say how breathtakingly naive and culturally arrogant that endeavour was?
I remain pessimistic. The mullahs are, to my mind, likely to remain in power. The alternative might be another repressive restored monarchy. A democracy, in the form which we would like, would be very difficult to have take root.
And I have not really talked about foreign intervention. Russia and the UK intervened preemptively during the Second World War to occupy Iran. Then the US, with tacit UK support, got rid of a nascent democratic government in 1953. I think that Russia or the US or both seeking to intervene in Iran would be the worst possible of outcomes, as it might push the world closer to actual superpower confrontation at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.
Lost For Words! 