Views on the Iranian Demonstrations

It is difficult to assess what is truly going on in Iran. It is obvious that the regime is corrupt and suppressive. They have thrown out foreign reporters and arrested local reporters. Their actions are blatant frauds, even as seen from this distance.

What is known are the following:

• Mousavi was a radical in the 1979 revolution and served as Prime Minister during the Iran-Iraq war. Apparantly he has mellowed and is no longer as hard line. Another thought is that he has been caught up in the emotions of his "supporters" and moved toward a more liberal view. Perhaps it is an influence of his wife, Zahra, who was a political advisor to the reformer Khatami, the previous president.


• All candidates in this election were screened to ensure their allegiance to the current state structure, the "Islamic republic". So differences are limited to how to rearrange furniture within the existing structure, not revolution to overthrow the current structure


• There are deep rifts in the current leadership. Rafsanjani's daughter, Faezeh, attended Mousavi campaign rallies and has now been arrested by Ahmadinejad. Rafsanjani ran for president of Iran in 2005 and lost to Ahmadinejad so there is some bad blood between them.


• This is a brutal regime. When it took power it crushed the Left and other elements that had been part of the revolt against the Shah. Executions were numerous. There are many books that give you insight into the brutality of the regime, for example Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman's Story of Survival Inside an Iranian Prison by Marina Nemat or a less brutal book but one with more insight into the ruling elite Things I've Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi.

Street battles are going on. Here are two videos:

Here is a scene of chaotic battling: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8111233.stm

Here is an example of a stone-throwing crowd slowly overpowering a police unit and forcing them to retreat: http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2009/06/090621_ag_street_clashes.shtml

In trying to interpret what is happening, you are left with reading opinions and trying to sift out the ones that sound correct. Here are a few opinions that appear to be sound:

First, from a blog entry at Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish:

It is true Mousavi has presented his campaign and movement as trying to restore and not unravel the Islamic revolution. This is an effective and necessary trope within Iran--Mousavi would have been prohibited from running, had he presented himself as opposed to the Islamic Republic. But efforts to reform the Islamic revolution in a meaningful sense have been exhausted. This is why Mousavi, insofar as he is a vessel of Iranian contempt for and rage at Khamenei, is the undoing of the 1979 revolution, not its restoration.

The Islamic revolution, if it is to mean anything, it is the institutions created after 1979 that guard a regular democracy from deviating from Islam. It is the office of a supreme leader, the assembly of experts, the guardian council etc.. These institutions have at every turn blocked the reformers, to the point that the reformers tried and failed in 2003--through constitutional amendment--to limit the powers of supreme leader, in order to pass the kinds of social and cultural reforms demanded by the vast majority of Iranians. And the reformers that sought to limit and modify the institutions of the Iranian state were met with something of a coup--all of those reformers were barred from running for re-election in the Majlis, many reformers were arrested, and any coordinated effort to reform the Islamic Republic since 2003 ran up against the hardliners in the state, whose job was to guard the revolution, a major subset of this group is the revolutionary guard.
In this contest, there is a claim on both sides for the spirit of the 1979 revolution. But there is also a recognition, I think for Mousavi, that the Islamicness of the Islamic Republic has led Iran to this depraved state of affairs. I find it very hard to believe that if Mousavi's movement succeeds there will still be a supreme leader. He has talked about returning Iran's government to its people, and he is openly defying now Khamenei. In Persian thought there is a concept called Farr, the aura around the emperor. Roger Cohen wrote about this idea yesterday. Well it's gone. And that aura, this notion that the people's institutions, the presidency and the majlis must be checked by clerics, is gone too. None of this means that Islam will not thrive in Iran, but it will be a quietist Islam, the kind advocated by Montazeri and Sistani. Khomeinism, if Mousavi succeeds, is finished.

And this one from Spencer Ackerman's blog:

Moussavi issues this statement to the opposition and to the world. The most compelling description of the relationship between Moussavi and Karroubi to the opposition is that they're the vehicles for it, rather than acting as its leaders. While they appear to be rising to the moment, it's probably prudent not to describe the statement as a manifesto. But he wouldn't have said what he says here if he didn't think it captured the sentiment of the opposition.

And so it's conspicuous how fundamentally reformist a statement Moussavi has issued. His message is one of reaffirming the promise of the 1979 Iranian Revolution -- "a revolution for freedom, a revolution for reviving the dignity of men, a revolution for truth and justice." The era of Khomeini was one of enlightenment and joint spiritual and material fulfillment. Moussavi's career has been dedicated to proving "it was possible to live spiritually while living in a modern world." And although the new Iranian generation stands "accused of being removed from religion," its iconography and sloganeering -- the Sea of (Islamic) Green, the chants of God is greater than the enemy -- proves that it's possible to rekindle the spirit of the Islamic Revolution. That's what they fight and suffer and die for.

Clearly we're in the realm of myth, and foundational myth at that. It matters very little what westerners think about Moussavi's description of Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution. By locating the opposition within the promises of the Revolution, Moussavi claims a clear source of legitimacy, the same that the regime claims, and seeks to denies that legitimacy to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. His rhetoric is designed to convince patriotic Iranians to join the opposition -- and to reassure the millions of Ahmadinejad supports that the opposition does not seek to fundamentally do away with their way of life.

This may be the most significant aspect of the statement:

If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hays of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and in practice, the ideology that Islam and Republicanism are incompatible will be proven.

This outcome will make two groups happy: One, those who since the beginning of revolution stood against Imam and called the Islamic state a dictatorship of the elite who want to take people to heaven by force; and the other, those who in defending the human rights, consider religion and Islam against republicanism.

Several things should now be apparent. First, he's really talking about the U.S. here, as we have for 30 years described the Islamic Republic in precisely the way Moussavi outlines. (And we've been right to have that view; or, at least, we haven't been wrong, descriptively speaking.) Accordingly, would it really be better for the opposition if we embraced Moussavi's neo-Khomeinist movement? Second, we in the west would not want to live under the sort of system that Moussavi envisions. But we are not the issue here.

Third, and most importantly, the west has nothing to fear from Moussavi's restorative attempt to reconcile Islam and republicanism in and of itself. Obviously the Iranian government has its interests and desires and we have ours, and they can conflict. But Moussavi's rhetoric, in this important speech at least, is not filled with the anti-western demagoguery that marked Khomeini's and marks Ahmadinejad's. The opposition movement is not a movement of "liberals" in the way that some inwardly-focused American writers lazily imagine. But that doesn't mean that the reformist syncretism that Moussavi offers adds up to an effort that western liberals, intellectually, can't support. What it means is that Iranians are working to redefine their Islamic Revolution, not abandon it, and do so in a way that favors openness and justice and freedom. The contours of that debate may be restricted by brute force over the coming days, but a significant proportion of the Iranian people are not going to settle for those restrictions for long. And they're pushing their interpretations of their foundational myths in a direction that Americans -- as progressives, as conservatives, and as everyone concerned about U.S.-Iranian relations -- can welcome.

And this from a posting by a reader at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish:

It is true Mousavi has presented his campaign and movement as trying to restore and not unravel the Islamic revolution. This is an effective and necessary trope within Iran--Mousavi would have been prohibited from running, had he presented himself as opposed to the Islamic Republic. But efforts to reform the Islamic revolution in a meaningful sense have been exhausted. This is why Mousavi, insofar as he is a vessel of Iranian contempt for and rage at Khamenei, is the undoing of the 1979 revolution, not its restoration.


The Islamic revolution, if it is to mean anything, it is the institutions created after 1979 that guard a regular democracy from deviating from Islam. It is the office of a supreme leader, the assembly of experts, the guardian council etc.. These institutions have at every turn blocked the reformers, to the point that the reformers tried and failed in 2003--through constitutional amendment--to limit the powers of supreme leader, in order to pass the kinds of social and cultural reforms demanded by the vast majority of Iranians. And the reformers that sought to limit and modify the institutions of the Iranian state were met with something of a coup--all of those reformers were barred from running for re-election in the Majlis, many reformers were arrested, and any coordinated effort to reform the Islamic Republic since 2003 ran up against the hardliners in the state, whose job was to guard the revolution, a major subset of this group is the revolutionary guard.
In this contest, there is a claim on both sides for the spirit of the 1979 revolution. But there is also a recognition, I think for Mousavi, that the Islamicness of the Islamic Republic has led Iran to this depraved state of affairs. I find it very hard to believe that if Mousavi's movement succeeds there will still be a supreme leader. He has talked about returning Iran's government to its people, and he is openly defying now Khamenei. In Persian thought there is a concept called Farr, the aura around the emperor. Roger Cohen wrote about this idea yesterday. Well it's gone. And that aura, this notion that the people's institutions, the presidency and the majlis must be checked by clerics, is gone too. None of this means that Islam will not thrive in Iran, but it will be a quietist Islam, the kind advocated by Montazeri and Sistani. Khomeinism, if Mousavi succeeds, is finished.