Radical Democrats

Looking back at the demonstrations in Iran, it is not surprising that the regime is still there. As cheering as it was to see hundreds of thousands of Iranians show their contempt for both Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, and thus confirm their utter lack of legitimacy, the “green revolution” lacked several elements to be successful.

First, the political aim of the demonstrations was blurred by their own immediate cause. What started it was a falsified election, but what is the point of complaining about electoral cheating when the election itself lacked any legitimacy? Mousavi may have been the “legitimate” winner of the presidential election, but does he have any more legitimacy than Ahmadinejad?

It is highly possible that many demonstrators, perhaps the majority of them, asked for Mousavi to be appointed to the presidency but did not care that much for him. Indeed, it seems hardly believable that so many people would have gone risking their lives in order to bring about some kind of “internal reform”. So what did they really want?

Second, the demonstrators lacked a force. Any demonstration, even in a democratic country, is in its own way a demonstration of force. One or two centuries ago, in Europe, a mass demonstration had every chance to end up as a riot with casualties on both sides. The Western democratic system changed the rules of the game in several ways: it made demonstrations legal, it provided a way out of political crises when governments called for new elections, and it made it much more difficult for the government to suppress a demonstration or a riot with the brutal use of force. But the basic principle of the demonstration remains the same. When hundreds of thousands of people take to the street and chant hostile, sometimes warlike, slogans, they still send a message to the government: look what will happen if this turns into a riot.

In a place like Iran, the demonstrators may well send that kind of message, but the government can use force without any restraint and the demonstrators know it. As for this particular government, the use of force by the Iranian authorities seems to have been very professional and relatively subtle, if brutal and murderous. They kept reporters out, they suppressed means of transmission like cell phones and most of the internet and then proceeded with a targeted repression conducted by specialized and reliable units. There was probably not much the demonstrators could do about it.

Third, the demonstrators apparently lacked an organizational structure. That is not surprising under a totalitarian regime, but it is still difficult to organize anything significant without at least some leaders, and if possible some kind of chain of command. Thus, they couldn’t do much apart from rallying around the Mousavi couple, but if that was all that they had in terms of leadership, they probably couldn’t get very far.

Still, the story is far from over. The regime has probably been hurt in several ways. Its international credibility has probably been shattered. The Islamic Republic’s project of becoming the dominating power of the Muslim world has never been very realistic, but these last years, they at least had some results to show for it. They had inflicted some damage to Israel though local proxies at a minimal cost. They had hurt the American operation in Iraq. They had made a joke of the anti-proliferation regime, which is now probably damaged beyond repair. But the demonstrations have shown that all of these achievements can be undone in a few weeks, provided the next attempt is more successful than this one. For all the Islamic chants heard during the demonstrations and the choice of green as the new “revolutionary” color, there was probably some kind of pro-Western component to the pro-Mousavi movement. To what extent the support for Mousavi was a code word for a pro-Western democratic movement is unknown, but the possibility is here, and if Iran becomes a pro-Western country again, democratic or not, it may no longer go on with its nuclear program and its support for terrorist movements across the Middle East. And as is the case with all totalitarian regimes, no one will see the end coming. After all, Iran is the latest Middle Eastern country in which the government has been overthrown by mass demonstrations. That could happen again, and such a perspective will certainly not bolster the regime’s standing in the region.

How did the recent demonstrations make it more likely that the regime will be overthrown? Many political movements have started with riots that gave birth to political organizations, which became more effective with time. Think of the 1961 Sharpeville riots in South Africa, or Northern Ireland’s Bloody Sunday, or the 60’s riots in Germany and Italy during which future members of Baader’s RAF or the Red Brigades, or other less violent leftist underground movements, discovered their vocations. In all of these cases, dead protesters played a significant role by becoming the martyrs of the new movements. These riots may have failed to reach their immediate goals – when there were any discernible ones, but they also provided an occasion for the more determined militants to emerge and start what would become mass movements in some cases, vulgar terrorist organizations in others, but often significant problems for their respective governments.

People learn by their own failures. In Iran, some of the most determined demonstrators have probably been treated harshly by the security forces and may not want to go back to underground politics, but it shouldn’t prove too difficult to replace them. The means of transmissions suppressed by the government during the riots can be turned on and off at will, but the Iranian government will not turn off the Internet and cell phone networks permanently. People should soon be able to regroup, but more discreetly and methodically. They will not try to overthrow the regime by force all of a sudden, which would be suicidal. Rather, they will probably start by discussing the modalities of the future revolution, and more precisely of what they want in place of the current regime. In Eastern Europe, when Gorbachev decided to abandon the various satellite governments, there were actual democratic alternatives, usually student movements that hadn’t done much apart from holding secret meetings, but nevertheless proved useful. The day they felt that their governments were dead men walking, they took a significant part in the Velvet Revolution, and the governments were very smoothly replaced in countries like Czechoslovakia and Hungary. By contrast, in Romania, where nothing like that existed, the revolution was a messy business essentially aimed at replacing the mad leader with less notorious regime apparatchiks.

One remaining question is to what extent the Iranians really want a Western-style democracy for their country. No one knows, but it can safely be assumed that the more urban and rich the population, the closer they feel to the Western democratic model, at least in general. Thus, Tehran is probably a much more pro-Western city than more remote places. Having visited Iran, I can only mention that some people in Tehran spontaneously came to tell me how much they despised their terrorist government, while in a place like Yazd, people seemed more on board with the official conception of morality (women wearing the burka and so on). But the Iranian population is about 70% urban, so the majority does not fit the cliché of traditionalist, “conservative” peasants who would support a regime which they would see as more traditional. Clientelism certainly plays an important part in Iranian politics, and probably explains Ahmadinejad’s popularity in some quarters, but clientelism is a conditional form of support. It is not fanaticism. Overall, it is easy to see how the regime can keep its population from overthrowing it simply through riots, but it is difficult to imagine a significant part of the Iranian population willing to take any risk to defend it.

The regime’s leaders might have ignored how much their popularity was limited until now, as totalitarian leaders are usually poorly informed about their people’s state of mind. Now that they know, some of them may try to rebuild some kind of legitimacy through attempts to reform the regime from the inside, but thanks to the Soviet experience, we know how successful these moves can sometimes be. With a bit of luck, the Islamic Republic could someday put itself in an impossible position, with some so-called reformers like Mousavi or anyone else trying to use the street to push their own political careers, as Gorbachev sometimes did, and hopefully with the same success. Anything can happen, but now would probably be the right time to try to see what is going on inside Iran. Now, there might be some interlocutors there, though they might not be easy to locate yet.