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The Next Iranian Revolution
20.9.2007
By Michael J. Totten
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How armed exiles are working to topple Tehran's
Islamic Government
September 20, 2007
In a green valley nestled between snow-capped peaks
in the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq is
an armed camp of revolutionaries preparing to
overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran. Men with
automatic weapons stand watch on the roofs of the
houses. Party flags snap in the wind. Radio and
satellite TV stations beam illegal news, commentary,
and music into homes and government offices across
the border.
The compound resembles a small town more than a
base, with corner stores, a bakery, and a makeshift
hospital stocked with counterfeit medicine. From
there the rebels can see for miles around and get a
straight-shot view toward Iran, the land they call
home. They call themselves Komala, which means
simply “Association.”
Abdulla Mohtadi, the Komala Party’s secretary
general, and Abu Baker Modarresi, a member of the
party’s political bureau, hosted me in their meeting
house. Sofas and chairs lined the walls, as is
typical in Middle Eastern salons. Fresh fruit was
provided in large bowls. A houseboy served thick
Turkish coffee in shot glasses.
Both men started their revolutionary careers decades
ago, when the tyrannical Shah Reza Pahlavi still
ruled Iran. “We were a leftist organization,”
Mohtadi said, speaking softly with an almost
flawless British accent. “It was the ’60s and ’70s.
It was a struggle against the Shah, against
oppression, dictatorship, for social justice, and
against—the United States.” He seemed slightly
embarrassed by this. “Sorry,” he said.
I told him not to worry, that I hadn’t expected
anything else. The U.S. government had backed the
dictatorship he fought to destroy. Pro-American
politics had not been an option.
The Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, arrested
Mohtadi and his closest comrades. He suffered three
years of confinement and torture in the dictator’s
dungeons. Modarresi quietly sipped his coffee while
Mohtadi explained this to me, interrupting only to
say that he too was arrested and tortured, and
jailed for four years. Both were later released. And
both took part in the 1979 revolution that brought
down the state.
The even more tyrannical Ayatollah Khomeini replaced
Reza Pahlavi, and the Iranian Revolution, like so
many others before it, devoured its children. It had
been broad-based and popular at the beginning:
Liberals allied with leftists, and leftists allied
with Islamists. It didn’t seem like a recipe for
fascism, but that’s what they got. The Islamists
came out on top and smashed the liberals and
leftists.
Mohtadi is still a critic of the United States,
though he is much milder about it today. “There has
been lots of oppression,” he said, “and killings and
torture and expelling people from their land and
sending them to internal exile in Iran and shelling
the cities and all kinds of oppression. The problem
with the policy of the United States is that for a
long time they neglected the violations of human
rights in Iran. Also the European governments, the
European countries, they didn’t say anything about
the atrocities going on in Iran. They called it a
critical dialogue, but it was not a critical
dialogue. It was lucrative trade with Iran.”
Komala vs. Komala
Don’t confuse the Komala Party with the Komala
Party. Iraqi Kurdistan hosts two exiled leftist
parties from Iranian Kurdistan, both with the same
name, the same (red) flag, and the same founder.
Both parties have armed camps and military wings.
Both built their compounds on the same road outside
the city of Suleimaniya. They’re right next to each
other, in fact. Stand in the right place, and you
can see one from the other. The difference is that
one is liberal and the other is communist.
I didn’t know there were two until I set up an
appointment to meet Mohtadi, of the liberal Komala
Party, and wound up inside the communist camp,
unannounced. The communists were good sports about
my mistake. They granted me interviews, introduced
me to Secretary General Hassan Rahman Panah, and fed
me lunch. They gave me the grand tour. They didn’t
tell me I was at the wrong compound. That news came
from Modarresi, when he called to ask why I hadn’t
shown up.
On the surface, the two parties are more confusingly
interchangeable than the Judean People’s Front and
the People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s Life
of Brian. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mohtadi says
Life of Brian is one of his favorite movies.
Today’s liberal Komala Party members belonged to the
communist Komala Party and the larger Iranian
Communist Party until they bitterly divorced in the
1980s.
“They were hard left, to the point of Maoist, at one
point,” says Andrew Apostolou, a Brookings
Institution historian who specializes in the region
and knows Komala well. “We took part in the
Communist Party of Iran,” Mohtadi said, “but after
some years we realized it was a mistake. We
criticized that and split from them. It took some
years, of course. It was not just like that.” He
snapped his fingers.
“You split with them over what, precisely?” I said.
“Over so many things,” he said, his voice heavy with
disappointment. “They have lost contact with the
realities of the society. They have no sympathy for
the democratic movement in Iran. We think the time
for that kind of left is over.” Mohtadi disagrees
with Iran’s communists on every point that matters:
human rights, democracy, economics, the appropriate
use of violence, the proper stance toward the West.
Komala’s economic views are still leftist, like
those of small-s “socialists” in Europe, but Mohtadi
flatly rejects systems like Cuba’s. “I know they
have social achievements in health care and
education and all that,” he said. “But in terms of
political oppression and cult of personality, that’s
outdated. It’s not acceptable for a modern civil
society.”
For his part, Panah of the communist Komala said
dismissively of his wayward comrades, “We do not
speak to each other.”
Even in Iraq and Iran, left-wing parties fracture
and withdraw into mutually loathing camps. The
radicals always denounce the moderates as heretics,
sellouts, “capitalist roaders,” neoconservatives.
Both Komala compounds were shelled and gassed with
chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein. Saddam did his
worst to erase the Kurds of Iraq from the face of
the earth. Komala’s members came from Iran, and they
opposed the Islamic Republic just as he did. But
they were still Kurds.
Komala was defenseless. Komala needed an army, not
only to fight the Islamic Republic but to defend
itself in Iraq. So it built one.
Those Who Face Death
The Iraqi Kurds called their guerrilla movement
against Saddam Hussein the Peshmerga—“Those Who Face
Death.” The contemporary Kurds’ professional army,
which functions as a constitutionally sanctioned
regional guard in the Kurdish autonomous region, is
also called the Peshmerga. And the liberal Komala
calls its warriors the same thing. They protect the
base from Iranian infiltrators and death squads, and
they cross the border into Iran during uprisings.
“When the time comes we can organize not hundreds
but thousands of Peshmergas,” Mohtadi said. “It is
very easy.”
The last major Iranian Kurdish uprising was in 2005.
It failed to topple the state, but it was huge and
made headlines all over the world. “It swept many
cities and towns and even villages,” Mohtadi said.
“It started from Mahabad. Young people were brutally
killed by the authorities, tortured and then
killed.”
One of the victims, Shwane Qadiri, belonged to the
Revolutionary Union of Kurdistan, which recently
changed its name to the Kurdistan Freedom Party. “He
was a member of our party,” says party spokesman
Zagros Yazdanpanah. “After that, all of Iranian
Kurdistan rose up. Everywhere in all cities there
were demonstrations against the Iranian regime. Our
people inside are organized. Our people are in
hiding; it is very dangerous.”
“There was an uprising in Mahabad and violent
clashes between people and the authorities,” Mohtadi
added. “That incident was spontaneous. There was no
political party behind it. And from Mahabad,
spreading it to other cities, we were behind it. We
were the most influential political party that
organized most of the demonstrations. We even
organized its date and its time.”
Yazdanpanah says Komala shouldn’t take all the
credit—his party organized demonstrations too, as
did others—but he agrees that Komala’s role was
substantial. It sent in its fighters, hoping to
seize control of parts of Iran from the regime. The
Revolutionary Guards and the police were too much
for them, though, and they later had to return to
Iraq.
Nadir Dawladi Abadi, a member of Komala’s Political
Bureau, gave me a tour of the training camp where
Peshmergas are made. We walked unannounced into a
classroom where new recruits studied weapons.
Everyone in the room stood up at once and greeted us
formally. They did not return to their chairs until
I awkwardly gestured for them to sit. I felt like an
intruder, but they ignored me as the lecture
continued.
To my surprise, there were women there. None wore a
hijab, the Islamic head scarf, over her hair, which
is required by law in Iran. The students sat in
plastic chairs with notebooks and machine guns in
their laps. “They are studying RPGs [rocket
propelled grenades],” Abadi whispered to me.
Modarresi later told me new recruits also study what
he calls “the Komala ideology.” The red Komala star,
a branding remnant from the communist days, loomed
like a baleful eye on the wall over the whiteboard.
The idea of a red star and “ideological instruction”
made me wince. Modarresi put me at ease. They aren’t
reading Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto, he
said. They’re learning about democracy, human
rights, pluralism, and civics, concepts that are not
taught in schools by the Islamic Republic. I can’t
confirm Komala’s classroom curriculum, but the party
members are well-known locally for being
ex-communists, despite their continued use of the
red flag and star.
“What kinds of weapons do they learn how to use in
their training?” I asked Abadi.
“Kalashnikovs, AK-47s, sniper rifles, grenades, RPGs,
and anti-aircraft guns,” he said.
“Can you tell me how many Peshmergas you have here?”
I said.
Abadi laughed, shook his head, and laughed again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t even know the answer
to that.”
We walked the grounds. Several members of the party
joined us so they could listen in. I snapped
pictures of everyone with my Nikon. Then,
unexpectedly, they all wanted pictures of me. Out
came cell phone cameras and giddy smiles. I posed
with them for 10 minutes. Apparently, they didn’t
receive many visitors from the West.
“How much longer do you think the Iranian regime
will survive?” I asked Abadi after they put their
cameras away.
“Ask your government,” he said and chuckled. Big
laughs all around.
“What would you think if the United States invaded
Iran?” I said.
“There are many points of view about that,” Abadi
said. “But in general the people of Iran are happy
to see that.”
“A war?” I said. “Really?”
“Invasion, yes,” he said. “The people of Iran are
thinking politically. The people have had many bad
experiences since the 1979 revolution. They want the
American people to topple the regime, not to occupy
the land.”
He did not only mean that the Kurds of Iran want a
war, as the Kurds of Iraq wanted a war. He also
meant most Persians want an invasion.
This is not the official Komala line. “We are not
for a military attack by the United States,” Mohtadi
said later. “Support the internal opposition against
the regime. That’s the best way to change. We are
for regime change.”
Abadi’s claim that Iranians as a whole would support
an invasion of Iran is a bit dubious. Some would
certainly support it. But the regime points to the
threat of invasion as an excuse to remain in power,
and there is a danger that American intervention
would merely drive potential rebels back into the
government’s arms. Even among the anti-regime
activists, there are many—including Abadi’s boss,
Abdulla Mohtadi—who say they want revolution and not
an invasion.
The Komala Party’s members, or at least its senior
leaders, are among the most experienced armed
revolutionaries in the world. They’ve already
toppled one Iranian government, badly as it may have
turned out for them in the end. As they plot another
insurrection, they hope this won’t be a rerun of the
last one. “We are for democratic values,” Mohtadi
told me. “We are for political freedoms, religious
freedoms, secularism, pluralism, federalism,
equality of men and women, Kurdish rights, social
justice. We are for a good labor law, labor unions.
There is an element of the left in our political
program.”
They sounded like European-style social democrats. I
asked if I could describe them that way. “We won’t
be angry,” Modarresi replied with a laugh.
Terror and Liberalism
When are acts of violence against a state justified?
What kind of violence is moral, and what kind is
not? These are the questions Komala grapples with.
The old-school Komala Party, Hassan Panah’s
communist group down the road, thinks any act of
violence against an oppressive state is justified,
including attacks on civilians who live in and visit
the country. For the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK),
the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla militia waging a
terrorist war in Eastern Turkey, Turkish soldiers,
cops, and civilians are legitimate targets. So are
Kurdish civilians opposed to the PKK’s program and
methods. So are foreign tourists who visit the
Turkish beaches. Recently the PKK opened a branch in
Iran, where it pretends to be something else. There
it calls itself the Party of Free Youths in
Kurdistan, or PJAK. Panah’s Komala supports both the
PKK and PJAK.
An ancient Middle Eastern saying holds that “the
enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It may seem Panah’s
party subscribes to this maxim, despite the fact
that its Islamist “friends” in the Iranian
Revolution of 1979 liquidated the left when they
came to power. But Panah won’t even speak to Abdulla
Mohtadi or anyone else in the liberal Komala Party.
And Panah’s party, like Mohtadi’s, is heavily armed.
The communists holed up in their own lonely compound
are, if not terrorists themselves, at least armed
supporters of terrorists. At the end of the day,
this may be a distinction without much difference.
Running an ethically sound revolution requires hard
moral as well as political work, and Mohtadi will
have none of Panah’s apologetics for scoundrels,
even if it means the Islamic Republic will last
longer. “They are very fanatic in their
nationalism,” he said of the PKK. “They are very
undemocratic in nature. They have no principles, no
friendship, no contracts, no values. In the name of
the Kurdish movement, they eliminate everybody.”
Mohtadi and his party also stand foursquare against
the Iranian Mujahideen Khalq, a small and
ideologically bizarre armed group that fuses
Marxism, Islamism, Iranian nationalism, and a
personality cult around its leaders. They appear on
most country’s lists of terrorist organizations,
including those of both Iran and the United States.
Mohtadi knows all too well what happens to
revolutions with totalitarians in them. Even his old
comrade Panah knew that when they worked together in
the 1970s.
“We were not against revolution,” Mohtadi said. “We
were not against overthrowing the regime of the
Shah. What we were against was violence by small
groups of guerrillas who were separated from the
mass movement. There were two different groups,
religious and secular leftist guerrilla groups, who
were influential at that time. People thought they
were the way out of the dictatorship. Many, many
intellectuals and students and political activists
joined them. But we wrote different pamphlets
criticizing their methods.”
These aren’t academic questions in the Middle East.
Opposing this or that faction or group isn’t about
political posturing, as it often is in the West.
Dilemmas over the use of force don’t apply strictly
to the struggle inside Iran. The Islamic Republic
sends spies into Iraq. Gun fights between government
agents and party members have broken out on the
roads in the province. Occasionally, Mohtadi told
me, his people awkwardly run across Tehran’s men in
the city markets of Iraqi Kurdistan’s northeastern
city of Sulaimaniyah. There they can pretend they
didn’t see or don’t know each other.
Most worrying is when the regime’s secret police
sneak into the compound.
Nadir Abadi showed me to a small one-room building
on the Peshmerga training grounds. Three men
lounging inside on the floor stood up to greet us.
“These people recently came out of Iran,” he said.
“They want to become Peshmergas. We have to
investigate them first, so they have to stay here
two or three months. After their identities are
cleared, they will join the training courses.”
“I’m curious how you investigate them,” I said, “but
I suppose you can’t tell me.”
“We have contacts with underground activists who do
such kind of things,” he said. “We can learn about
them from them.
It’s not that complex.”
But it does take several months. And what, I asked,
do they do when they catch someone they think is a
spy?
“We don’t have jails here,” Abadi said. “We thought
about executing them. But we don’t want to do that.
So we make them sign a paper and confess their guilt
and promise not to do it again. Then we send them
back to Iran.”
It may sound like a weak response in such a tough
neighborhood, assuming the claim is true. But unless
the regime has figured out a way to evade Komala’s
own intelligence agents, the seemingly weak response
apparently works. It has been years now, Abadi said,
since they caught anyone on site working for the
Islamic Republic.
Some armed political parties in the region sucker
gullible reporters into portraying them as more
moderate and reasonable than they really are. A
member of Hezbollah’s political bureau tried it with
me before their media relations department
threatened and blacklisted me. But Brookings’
Apostolou doesn’t think the party is playing the
fake moderate game. “They are not linked to the PKK,
PJAK, or the Mujahideen Khalq,” he told me.
“We were against the guerrilla warfare movement that
swept the world in the 1970s,” Mohtadi said. “We had
our theories against that. We believed in political
work, raising awareness, organizing people.”
Komala’s model of the ideal guerrilla movement is
Iraq’s Kurdish Peshmerga. These men (and, yes,
women) were and are a genuine “people’s army” backed
almost unanimously by civilians. (The PKK,
meanwhile, car bombs its Kurdish opponents.) The
Peshmerga fought honorably against Saddam Hussein
without resorting to the terrorism and
authoritarianism that corrupt so many Middle Eastern
militants of both the left and the right.
Komala’s stance on erstwhile enemies such as the
United States also is—and was—complex and cautious.
Mohtadi bristled when I off-handedly, without
meaning offense, referred to the party’s previous
position as anti-American. “We were not
anti-American,” he said. “We were against the
policies of the United States at that time.”
I’ve heard this sort of thing before from people who
don’t really mean it. At least a dozen Lebanese
supporters of Hezbollah have told me, a tad
unconvincingly, that their “Death to America” slogan
expresses merely a policy disagreement with the
United States. There may be a small point in there
somewhere. The Arabic language is flush with
hyperbole. But if the U.S. government opened
sessions of Congress by shouting “Death to
Hezbollah” or, worse, “Death to Lebanon,” I doubt
Hezbollah would take it in stride.
Mohtadi, though, isn’t made of Hezbollah material.
Instead of railing against the United States and
waging war on its allies in the region, he recently
met with State Department officials and asked for
help from the American government. “We are not
asking for an invasion,” he told Eli Lake at The New
York Sun in April. “We are saying that helping
Iranian parties fight for democracy and regime
change is good for us and good for America.”
Mohtadi and Modarresi asked me to stay for dinner.
Several other political bureau members joined us at
the table. Servants brought us baked chicken,
barbecued lamb, steamed rice, an enormous stuffed
fish from one of Kurdistan’s lakes, and four bottles
of red wine from Lebanon.
The 66 hostages seized from the American Embassy in
Tehran in 1979 finally came up in conversation. “We
were against that from the very beginning,” Mohtadi
said. I half expected him to bang his fist on the
table. Suddenly his soothing demeanor was gone.
Mention of the hostage episode had riled him up. He
may have been politically anti-American when the
embassy workers were taken, but he says that act of
anti-Americanism gravely violated his own standards
of conduct.
Besides, the United States now is a potential if not
actual ally in Mohtadi’s struggle against the
Islamic Republic. Perhaps it’s not surprising that
Mohtadi’s list of ideological foes has changed over
time. Today his enemies are precisely those with
whom he aligned himself during the battle against
the Shah: the totalitarian left and the Islamist
right.
Iran Isn’t Iraq
More encouraging than Komala’s moderation and
political evolution is its plausible claim—backed up
by most Iranian activists, expatriates, and
dissidents—that Iranian society as a whole is far
more sensible and mature than it was in 1979, at
least at the level below the state, on the street.
The aftermath of an Iranian revolution, Mohtadi
said, will not resemble the postwar occupation of
Iraq with its civil war, insurgency, kidnappings,
and car bombs.
“We have an internal opposition,” he said. “We have
an internal movement against the regime. Women were
warned not to celebrate 8 March, Women’s Day. They
did. There are demonstrations in Iran. There are
movements in Iran. You have the intellectuals, the
political activists, the human rights activists,
then the Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, different
nationalities. There is a movement in Iran, unlike
in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, where you had Kurds
and nobody else.” (Iraq’s Shia did rise up against
Saddam in 1991, but they had been quiet since
Baghdad’s brutal response to that insurrection.)
“It’s not like that in Iran.”
Iran’s opposition undoubtedly has more breadth and
maturity than Iraq’s did under Saddam Hussein. And
if Iran’s government falls to a mass revolution
rooted in civil society instead of an outside
invasion, post-regime chaos is less likely—assuming
the various ethnic groups can hold it together.
Iran is commonly thought of as Persian, but ethnic
Persians make up only 51 percent of the population.
Twenty-five percent are Turkish Azeris, 10 percent
are Kurds, and smaller numbers are Baluchis and
Arabs. How are Iran’s relations among its various
“nationalities”? “Much better than the relations
between Kurds and Arabs” in Iraq and Syria, Mohtadi
said. “Historically Persians and Kurds have been, as
people say, cousins. Culturally they are closer to
each other than Kurds and Arabs, who have almost
nothing in common.”
“The Iranian people and the Iranian Kurds are more
developed,” he continued. “They are more cultured;
they are more organized. Even the Iraqi Kurds admit
that culturally [Iranian Kurds] are higher and more
developed economically. The credit doesn’t go to the
Islamic Republic. For a long time Iran has been a
civilization. Iraq’s tribal and medieval culture,
the brutality, the lawlessness, revenge—Iraq was
very primitive and still is, apart from Kurdistan.
You look at it, and you become astonished at how
undeveloped politically they are.”
He has a point. Iraqi Kurds built the only safe,
prosperous, and politically moderate place in Iraq,
yet they admire the Iranians (though not their
government). The Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah
is far more liberal and open, and noticeably less
backward and tribal, than the Iraqi Kurdish cities
of Erbil and Duhok. This, according to people who
live there, is partly due to Suleimaniyah’s
proximity to Iran and the centuries-long
liberalizing effect Iranian Persians and Kurds have
had on their culture.
Mohtadi could be wrong. Maybe he’s talking about a
minority that looks to him like a majority. Perhaps
his analysis is slightly deceitful, a little
self-serving. These things happen. We know how
inaccurate Ahmed Chalabi’s rosy predictions about
post-Saddam Iraq turned out to be. There is no way
to know for certain until the Islamic Republic is
gone. If Mohtadi does turn out to be wrong, though,
he won’t be alone. Most opposition groups inside and
outside Iran claim the Iranian people—Persians,
Kurds, and Azeris alike—are far more prepared than
Iraqis for civil, democratic politics.
What they don’t know—what no one can know, and what
may in the end matter most—is how much damage a
fanatical minority can do in Iran after it’s thrown
out of power. It may not matter if most Iranians
want a normal life in a quiet country.
Most Iraqis are not insurgents, but the insurgency
rages on.
We can look, though, at the behavior of the ruling
fanatics today. As oppressive as the Iranian
government is, it’s an enlightened model of
restraint compared with Saddam’s regime in Iraq.
Saddam destroyed the city of Halabja with air
strikes, artillery, chemical weapons, and napalm. He
wiped out 95 percent of the villages in northern
Iraq. He drained the marshes in southern Iraq and
chopped down the forests of Kurdistan. He threw
dissidents into industrial shredders and acid baths.
The most mundane things were banned: cell phones,
maps, even weather reports. The Mukhabarat, his
secret police, arrested anyone who so much as looked
at one of his palaces. Iraq was the North Korea of
the Middle East.
Iran is harsh, but it isn’t quite that bad.
Opposition to the regime is widespread, deep, and
open—an unthinkable situation in Saddam’s Iraq. It’s
impossible for the Iranian government to crack down
on everyone. The police don’t even try anymore.
“You can complain about the government,” Mohtadi
said. “You can insult them. But America is a red
line. Khomeini himself is a red line. The Israelis
are a red line, absolutely.” Iranians can’t buck the
party line on certain topics, but they are brave
enough, or just barely free enough, to protest the
government to its face. “When [Iranian President
Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad spoke to students,” Mohtadi
pointed out, “hundreds of students stood up and
called him a fascist and burned his picture.”
Iran’s Genocide of Islam
Sealing the rugged Iran-Iraq border is all but
impossible in the north, where like-minded Kurds
live on both sides of it. People, as well as goods,
cross every hour. Alcohol is smuggled into Iran.
Gasoline and drugs are smuggled out. Komala’s
location in the area makes it the perfect place for
a vast, sprawling safe house. Activists, underground
party members, and dissidents from Iran—the Persian
heartland as well as from Iranian Kurdistan—slip
through the mountains to visit every day.
I’ve stood on the border myself and contemplated
walking undetected into Iran. Komala leaders even
offered to take me across and embed me themselves.
“We can get you inside Iran and leave you for weeks,
if you want, among our supporters and among our
people,” Mohtadi said. “It is very easy.”
If I were caught in Iran without a visa or an entry
stamp in my passport, I would almost surely be
jailed as a spy. Tempting as the offer was, I had to
pass. Anyway, I could speak to Iranian dissidents,
if not necessarily ordinary Iranians, in the Komala
camp just as easily as I could have inside Iran. As
it happened, a famous Persian writer and dissident
had arrived there just before I did.
Kianoosh Sanjari is a member of the United Student
Front in Tehran. At 23, he has been imprisoned and
tortured many times. His last arrest was on October
7, 2006, after he wrote about clashes between the
Revolutionary Guards and supporters of the liberal
cleric Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi. Charged with
“acting against state security” and “propaganda
against the system,” he was released on $100,000
bail last December. Some months later, he fled to
Iraq and moved to the Komala camp.
Unlike most Iranian visitors who use Komala as a
safe house, Sanjari didn’t bother remaining
anonymous. He told me his real name and said I could
publish his picture. If you can read Farsi, you can
read his blog at ks61.blogspot.com. “I’m just now
coming out of Iran,” he said. “It’s a hell there. I
know the sufferings. I am inclined to accept any
tactic that helps overthrow this regime.”
“Does that include an American invasion of Iran?” I
asked.
“Maybe intellectuals who just talk about things are
not in favor of that kind of military attack,” he
said. “But I have spoken to people in taxis, in
public places. They are praying for an external
outside power to do something for them and get rid
of the mullahs. Personally, it’s not acceptable for
me if the United States crosses the Iranian border.
I like the independence of Iran and respect the
independence of my country. But my generation
doesn’t care about this.”
Sanjari has fierce and intimidating eyes, the eyes
not of a fanatic but of a deadly serious person who
is not to be messed with. He spoke slowly and with
great force. “They repress people in the name of
religion,” he said. “They torture people in the name
of religion. They kill people in the name of
religion. The young generation now wants to distance
themselves from religion itself.”
Islamists seem to fail wherever they succeed.
Perhaps Islamic law looks good on paper to Muslims
who live in oppressive secular states, but few seem
to think so after they actually have to put up with
it.
More than 100,000 Algerians were killed during the
1990s in a horrific civil war between religious
insurgents and the secular police state. As a
consequence, Islamists are more hated now in Algeria
than at any time since they rose up. Al Qaeda is
trying to reignite the war there, and it is failing
spectacularly.
Iraqis are turning against Al Qaeda faster and
harder than Iranians turned against the Islamic
Republic. Harsh as the Islamic Republic may be, Al
Qaeda is worse by an order of magnitude. Its now
infamous warnings to street vendors in Iraq’s Anbar
Province not to place cucumbers next to tomatoes in
the market because the vegetables are “different
genders” is one of myriad reasons why most Sunni
Arab tribes in that region recently flipped to the
side of the hated Americans.
Islamist law is so widely detested and flouted in
Iran that it’s a wonder the regime even bothers to
keep up the pretense. In June 2005 Christopher
Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair that every person he
visited there, with the exception of one single
imam, offered him alcohol, which is banned.
Everyone I met at the Komala compound said the
Iranian regime itself wallows deep in the
post-ideological torpor that inevitably follows
radical revolutions. Except for the most fanatic
officials, the government cares only about money and
power. “Followers of the regime are not ideological
anymore,” Sanjari said. “They are bribed by the
government. They will no longer support it in the
case that it is overthrown. Even among the Iranian
military and Revolutionary Guards, there are so many
people dissatisfied with the policies of the regime.
Fortunately there aren’t religious conflicts between
Shias, Sunnis, and different nationalities.”
Mohtadi concurred. “The next revolution and
government will be explicitly anti-religious,” he
said.
The Iranian writer Reza Zarabi says the regime has
all but destroyed religion itself. “The name Iran,
which used to be equated with such things as luxury,
fine wine, and the arts, has become synonymous with
terrorism,” he wrote. “When the Islamic Republic
government of Iran finally meets its demise, they
will have many symbols and slogans as testaments of
their rule, yet the most profound will be their
genocide of Islam, the black stain that they have
put on this faith for many generations to come.”
It’s certainly possible to be overoptimistic.
Iranian dissidents have been predicting an imminent
revolution for several years running. Michael Hirsh
wrote recently in Newsweek that women in Tehran have
“gone defiantly chic” in style and that the men are
looking “less and less menacing and more and more
metrosexual,” which makes the place sound more like
freewheeling Beirut than an Islamist theocracy. But
the state, he added, could still endure for some
time. “It is an old, familiar umbrella of oppression
that now stays just distant enough to be tolerated,
even if it is little loved,” he wrote. “The success
of this oppressive but subtly effective system
should give the regime-change advocates in
Washington some pause.”
Whom to believe? Hirsh’s analysis has been the
correct one so far, but Iran is notoriously
unpredictable even for those who are supposed to be
experts. The 1979 Revolution shocked even CIA agents
who lived in Iran while it was brewing. They
insisted the Shah was firmly entrenched and could
not possibly fall.
‘Developments in Iran Aren’t Controllable’
The Middle East is so rife with conflict, factions,
murky alliances, foreign interventions, multisided
civil wars, and wild-card variables that trying to
predict its future is like trying to forecast the
weather on a particular day three years in advance.
There’s a reason the phrase shifting sands has
become a cliché.
If the Islamic Republic is overthrown, almost
anything might happen. Iran could become a modern
liberal democracy, as most Eastern European states
did after the fall of the Soviet Empire. It could
revert to a milder form of authoritarian rule, as
Russia has. It could, like Iraq, face chronic
instability and insurgent attacks. Or its various
“nationalities” could tear the country to pieces and
go the way of the Yugoslavs. Optimists like Sanjari
and Mohtadi may have a better sense of what to
expect than those of us in the West, but still they
do not know.
The only thing that seems likely is that a showdown
of some kind is coming, either between factions in
Iran or between Iran and the rest of the world.
Predictions of the regime’s imminent demise have
been staples of Iranian expat and activist discourse
for years, so it’s hard to take the latest
predictions seriously. But authoritarian regimes
increasingly seem to have limited shelf lives. As
Francis Fukuyama’s flawed but compelling book The
End of History points out, there has been a
worldwide explosion of liberal democracies since the
18th century, from three in 1790 to 36 in 1960 to 61
in 1990. (In 2006 Freedom House classified 148
nations as free or partly free.) History isn’t over
and never will be, but it hasn’t been kind to
dictatorships lately.
The Iranian state is soft and vulnerable compared
with the worst abusers out there, and it constantly
faces resistance from citizens. Something will give.
“Movements are taking shape in Iran,” Sanjari said.
“The Iranian regime confronts the whole world with
its policies. Political developments are very rapid
now. Developments in Iran aren’t controllable. I
hope the Iranian people overthrow this regime with
no or few sacrifices. But that is a dream.”
Michael J. Totten is an independent journalist
whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal,
The Jerusalem Post, Beirut’s Daily Star, L.A.
Weekly, Time, and the Australian edition of
Newsweek. The Week magazine named him Blogger of the
Year in 2006 for his dispatches from the Middle
East.
reason com
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