Iran: The Regime Tightens the Screws

David Aikman

Internal factors may yet destabilize the government of Iran, but don’t bet your foreign policy on it.

The photographs were deeply unsettling: seven bodies swung in the breeze from public gallows in the city of Mashad, Iran’s second-largest city. “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) shouted the crowd assembled to watch the public executions. In case the grim message was being overlooked, local TV carried a live broadcast.

This is Iran, early in August 2007, and apparently in the grip of the most intensive crackdown on dissent and political opposition since a purge of the country’s universities in 1984. According to some people, the crackdown on real and suspected opponents of the regime may be as murderous as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s execution of regime opponents in the year 1980, within months of his taking power. 

The numbers of those currently targeted for repression by the regime almost numb the imagination. According to the Iranian government’s own sources, 118 people have been executed since late June (four of them by stoning), and a further 150 are awaiting their death in various Iranian prisons. Since April, the same sources acknowledge, 430,000 Iranians have been arrested on drug offenses, and an incredible one million men and women for violations of the compulsory Islamic dress code. More ominously, there have been dozens of “disappearances” of opposition figures, from journalists to students to labor union leaders—even to suspected opposition mullahs.

The world has grown used to the international saber-rattling of Iranian president Ahmadinejad since he came to power in 2005. His denunciations of the Holocaust, full-court rush to acquire nuclear weapons, and his meddling in the internal affairs of his neighbors have drawn the hostile attention of several international observers. Among Iran’s neighbor or near-neighbor states, the evidence of Ahmadinejad’s meddling has been even more menacing. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iranian-manufactured armor-piercing projectiles have caused the deaths, by now, of scores of U.S. and NATO soldiers. In Lebanon, Iranian money, weaponry, and training have created a virtual state-within-a-state in the form of the political organization Hezbollah. This Lebanese Shiite fascist-style political group (its salute is a Nazi-style right arm extended at an angle upwards) recklessly precipitated the war with Israel in the summer of 2006 and continues its efforts to intimidate and destabilize the pro-Western Lebanese government of Fouad Seniora.

Cumulatively, Iran’s neo-imperialist bombast and aspirations to be a major regional power in the Middle East have pushed into a de facto alliance against it an unlikely amalgam of Sunni Arab regimes—not particularly friendly hitherto to the “Great Satan” adversary of Iran, the U.S.—and the U.S. itself.

But it is the Iranian regime’s bizarre domestic policies that ought, by now, to be gaining more international attention. U.S. government analysts of the situation in Iran clearly hope that the militantly anti-American and anti-Western regime will self-destruct before Iran acquires weaponized nuclear devices which would, quite possibly, provoke a pre-emptive attack on itself by either the Israelis or the Americans. That hope may not be as far-fetched as it first seems. One of the most important reasons is the poor performance of the Iranian economy.

When Ahmadinejad was first elected in May 2005, one of his promises was that the wealth acquired by Iran’s oil experts would trickle down to ordinary Iranians. In fact, the Iranian government has spent more money subsidizing the artificially low price of domestic gasoline than it has earned in petroleum exports overseas: $60 billion in government subsidies as against $50 billion in oil revenue. A Chinese commitment to invest in the development of petroleum extraction in the Yadavaran oil field in Khuzestan has been held up, reportedly because the Chinese Sinopec investor has been holding out for a higher investment return—perhaps as high as 15 percent—than the Iranians have been willing to agree to. Iranian oil extraction, however, has been falling at the rate of 5 percent a year because of the country’s failure to attract significant new foreign investment in the petroleum industry. With 80 percent of government revenue based on oil, that ought to be a significant source of worry to the regime and to Iranians in general.

As is common with dictatorial leaders who are facing rising unpopularity, Iran’s president has done his best to blame foreigners for what is going wrong in Iran. Americans, of course, are the favorite enemy. There are currently four American citizens of Iranian background being held in Iran. The most prominent is a woman, Haleh Esfandiari, who is director of Middle East Studies at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Esfandiari encouraged exiled Iranian scholars to study at her institute, but assumed—incorrectly, as it happened—that her own public advocacy of U.S. dialogue with Iran would protect her from acts of repression by the regime. She was arrested in Tehran in May 2007, and has been charged with “endangering national security through propaganda against the system.” One interpretation of Esfandiari’s arrest and subsequent detention in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison is that she is being held as hostage for Iranian agents who were captured, and are still being held, in Iraq. But the arrest of four American citizens may be the least paranoid of Iranian anti-American outbursts. A news report from Tehran reported with a straight face in July that four squirrels had been intercepted in Iran equipped with intelligence-gathering devices. They had, supposedly, been ordered into Iran by those pesky American forces in Iraq.

It would be unwise for American policy-makers to gamble that Iran’s internal unrest will deliver into American hands an otherwise virulently anti-American regime. It is true that youthful and urban Iranians are sympathetic to many things American and bitterly resent the harsh insistence of the regime on an austere and intolerant micro-managing of Iranian culture. It is also true that the universities as a whole are increasingly resentful of interference by the regime’s thugs in their programs and teaching. There have been repeated warnings by Ahmadinejad for Iranian intellectuals not to be sympathetic to “Zionist-Crusader” claims that the Holocaust actually took place.

But the regime of the Ayatollahs in Iran is, of course, powerfully invested in its own survival. The Council of Guardians, Iran’s supreme political force—higher even than president Ahmadinejad—recently selected four mullahs to oversee the choice of candidates in the 2008 elections. No one of whom the regime disapproves will be allowed to run. Freedom of choice is simply too dangerous a concept to be allowed to get out of hand in Iran.

Still, the survival instincts of the Iranian regime are not all-powerful. Dictatorships must always look over their shoulders for fear that they will be overthrown. A change of government in Iran may still seem unlikely today. On the other hand, very few people would have predicted the ouster of the Shah of Iran back in 1979.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

2 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Good and Evil, Religious Liberty, War and Peace, Thu 16 Aug 2007