Ally of Evil
Is the U.S. suffocating reform in Iran?
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The contentious relationship between the United
States and Iran
remains one of the longest-running soap operas of modern politics. The story
swings from hatred to friendship, with broken promises, treacherous betrayals,
blackmail, public antagonism and covert rapprochement.
In a new plot twist, some Iranian opposition leaders claim that Washington
has cut a deal with Iran’s
conservatives that would effectively trade democracy in Iran
for regime change in Iraq.
“Despite sporadic verbal concern with the condition of human rights in Iran,
the U.S. is
protecting and providing clandestine support to the right-wing conservatives in
Iran,” says Sayed Ali Asghar Gharavi, a member of the banned but tolerated Iran Freedom
Movement (IFM), the country’s leading opposition party. “The U.S.
government in no way favors the coming to power of the reformist groups in Iran
and is secretly supporting the religious conservatives.”
Government insiders in Iran
allege that the deal, first proffered by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw,
is simple: If the hard-liners quietly support the United
States in Iraq,
Washington will quietly support
them. U.S. State Department officials declined to comment.
In the near term, such a bargain may appear rational to U.S.
military planners. Iran
is in a state of flux. Helping Iran’s
hard-liners consolidate their power could prevent domestic instability from
compromising U.S.
actions in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Since
the hard-liners also control Iran’s
military, their acquiescence to U.S.
presence in the region is essential.
In the longer term, such a deal could fatally debilitate Iran’s
democracy movement. With U.S.
support, Iran’s
tottering conservatives could re-establish their control over the nation and
squelch Iran’s
fledgling opposition. If such a deal is proven—or even widely believed to
exist—it could crush the growing amity many Iranians feel for the United
States.
The widespread anger over U.S.
support for the Shah, which for years inspired the regular burning of American
flags in the streets, has waned. After two decades of economic stagnation and
harsh social restrictions, many Iranians have come to see America,
the Great Satan of yesterday, as the great hope of tomorrow.
Since the mid-’90s, as a new generation of Iranians has struggled for the
freedoms and opportunities of an open society, they have looked to America
for inspiration. As they have built their resistance against the same
hard-liners that Washington
opposed, there seemed to be an unspoken compact between the two.
On campuses, where a visceral hatred of America
once defined student culture and precipitated the 1979 storming of the U.S.
Embassy and the ensuing hostage crisis, the new admiration for America
changed perceptions. “Everyone knows America
is the best country in the world,” Zara Abddi, a university student, says unflinchingly. “It is
best because it is free, and I want to be free, too.”
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In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was a massive outpouring of empathy
for America.
Vast numbers of students gathered on Tehran’s
streets to hold spontaneous candlelight vigils. Visitors flocked to the U.S.
Interest Section of the Swiss Embassy to sign a book of condolences. On
national TV, Iran’s
national soccer team observed a moment of silence before beginning a game.
“September 11 fostered solidarity between Iranians and America,”
says Javad Ghatta, an English teacher and
reformist in Esfahan. “It was a common bond coming from
a sense of both having been violated by Islamic extremists.”
Iran’s three major political groups—the conservatives who run the country, the
reformers trying to reshape it, and the pro-democracy parties and
students—attempted to reach out to the United States. “There is a strongly held
belief that the party or person that can develop a working relationship with
the United States will ultimately rule Iran,” Ghatta says.
The conservatives, who control Iran’s secret police and military, cooperated
fully with the United States in Afghanistan. Tehran pressured Afghan warlords
to support the Karzai government and collaborated in
tracking down al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Iran’s
reformists, led by President Mohammad Khatami, tried
to engage the United States
by condemning terrorist groups worldwide and making gestures of goodwill. Last
November, on the anniversary of the 1979 taking of the hostages at the U.S.
Embassy, former student leader Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, who is now a reformist, went on national TV to
say the action had been “a mistake.”
In the months after September 11, student groups and pro-democracy activists
stepped up their anti-government protests. Some even supported President Bush’s
targeting of Iraq.
They hoped that the presence of U.S.
forces along Iran’s
eastern border in Afghanistan
and Pakistan
would further squeeze Iran’s
hard-liners and build regional momentum toward democracy.
Government hallways, college campuses and coffee shops reverberated with talk
of a turnaround in U.S.-Iran ties. “People were waiting for the United
States to make some gesture of reconciliation
with Iran,”
says Ghatta, who wishes Bush had used the opportunity to re-establish
diplomatic ties with Iran
that have been severed since 1979.
Instead the president branded Iran
as an “axis of evil” nation and increased the country’s isolation by denying
visas to even non-political Iranians, including filmmakers and students, says Ebrahim Yazdi, Iran’s
ex-foreign minister who is now the leader of the IFM.
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Initially this response was seen in Iran
as a U.S.
rebuff. But in recent months, the Bush administration’s muted criticism of Iran’s
hard-liners, its silence over the arbitrary arrests of
several pro-democracy activists, and its increasing cooperation with Iran’s
military in the war against al-Qaeda is leading many
Iranians to accept Gharavi’s assertion that the United
States is “secretly supporting Iran’s
totalitarian government.”
Says one reformist MP who asked to remain anonymous, “The United States might
like what we say, and what we want to do for our country, but it prefers what
the hard-liners can do for them.” What the United
States really wants, he says, is what only
the hard-liners could supply: military cooperation and a reduction of direct
support to the Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Such murmurings are already creating a deep resentment among Iranians and
invoking bitter memories in Iran of the 1953 coup, in which British and U.S.
forces deposed the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh and brought the hugely unpopular but pliant Shah
to power. Mossadegh had incurred the West’s wrath by
nationalizing Iran’s
oil industry. By deposing him, says Yazdi, who was a
student activist at the time, the British and Americans “suffocated the
development of democracy in Iran
in its embryonic stage.”
The coup made Iranians acutely sensitive to the U.S.
propensity for supporting right-wing dictators at the expense of local
democracy movements, Yazdi says. This belief was also
reinforced when the secular opposition in other Islamic states such as Saudi
Arabia were
demolished, with the connivance of the United
States. “For more than a century, Iranians
have relentlessly struggled for a democratic system,” Gharavi
says. “This striving has always had its not-so-little price, and the aftermath
of each rout has always revealed the influence of the United
States and the United
Kingdom in thwarting Iranian efforts for
liberty.”
The feared scenario is that Iran’s
hard-liners will ease the U.S.
entry into Iraq,
and then use the bogeyman of the “Great Satan” as an excuse to crack down on the
opposition. IFM activists say that a crackdown has already begun. Iran’s
hard-liners have arrested scores of people making even minor criticisms of
their regime. Among them was Hashem Aghajari, a reformer close to President Khatami,
who received a death sentence for saying that Muslims need not follow mullahs
blindly, “like monkeys.” In an August speech titled “Islamic Protestantism,” Aghajari told students: “In all matters, especially in
religion, your reason is a better tool of discernment than all the sayings of
prophets and clerics.”
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That the crackdown has come just as Khatami tabled
two resolutions in parliament aimed at reducing the power of clerics in Iran’s
government is not lost on Iranians. Many see it as a direct challenge to the
reform movement. Massive demonstrations have rocked Tehran
in protest since November. Demanding the release of Aghajari,
students have held massive protests, blocking off major roads. Despite the
arrest of student leaders, the passionate protests have spread to include
disenchanted workers and average citizens.
But Iran’s
hard-liners have remained stoic and unyielding. More protests have been banned
and additional arrests ordered. The Bush administration’s silence in protesting
these actions is further promoting the belief that Washington
and Tehran are “dancing to some
private tune,” says Azar Bharami,
a poet and women’s rights lawyer in Tehran.
Not everyone agrees. Hameed Motafarian,
a religious teacher in Qom,
scoffs at this idea, dismissing the allegations against the government as
political maneuvering. Motafarian says the IFM sees
both Iran’s
religious clerics and capitalist America
as political antagonists. By arguing that both are in cahoots, Motafarian says, the IFM is trying to emphasize its distinctiveness
and win new supporters to its “socialist” cause.
Yet secret agreements between the United States
and Iran are
nothing new. The Iran-Contra deal, where arms were exchanged for hostages
during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, is only the best-known example.
Still, Yazdi says the United
States “has consistently failed to
understand the deep impact” of its suffocation of Iranian democracy. The
revolution of 1979 was nothing but a delayed reaction to the coup of 1953, he
argues. Having then struggled through two decades of internal turmoil to build
the region’s largest grassroots democracy movement, Iranians are likely to
react sharply to any U.S.
attempt to further undermine them.
If the recent thaw in how Iranians perceive America
is reversed, political reconciliation with Iran
could be pushed back decades. The cost of losing Iran,
just as it seemed so close to returning into the world system, would
reverberate globally. As the only nation in the region that has overthrown its
“American puppet” and established an Islamic state, Iran
is the inspirational model of radical Islamic groups across the world.
Resurgent anti-Americanism in Iran
could fan a new upsurge in militant Islam across the region.
Standing under the elegant Si-o-Se bridge
in Esfahan, surrounded by people singing sad Iranian
folk songs, Ghatta worries that President Bush’s excessive zeal in prosecuting
the war on Iraq
is leading him to miscalculate on Iran.
“It’s like a game of pool,” he says, his Western education still coloring his
metaphors. “While pocketing the Iraq
ball, Bush needs to make sure he is also positioning himself well with respect
to the Iran
ball. Or else things could go very wrong.” 
Jehangir Pocha, a native of Bombay,
is an international journalist based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.