The post-election episodes that have taken place in Iran, which continue to occupy front-page headlines of world newspapers, have perplexed and mystified many.
Although the dissidents who continue to defy the government’s call for an end to the protests over the June 12 presidential election have failed to provide hard proof that the election was rigged in favor of the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, their suspicions are reasonable and their right to speak out against a perceived wrong unquestionable.
On the other hand, there are those who allege interference by foreign powers attempting to fuel unrest and destabilize the government with the eventual goal of regime change in mind, suspicions which are also not unreasonable given the historical record, which contains no shortage of precedents for similar actions.
The 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’etat that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was one such example, well remembered in Iran but often purged from U.S. accounts and unknown among much of the American public.
Stephen Kinzer has done much to remedy this with his book All the Shah’s Men, which documents events leading up to and following the coup in extraordinary detail. An award-winning journalist for the New York Times, Kinzer was at one time also the paper’s bureau chief in Istanbul, and has received an honorary doctorate for his lifelong contribution to journalism.
Stephen Kinzer generously set aside time from his busy schedule, which includes work writing a new book on realpolitik in the Middle East set to come out early next year, to join me in an interview for Foreign Policy Journal to try to clear up some of the ambiguities surrounding Iran’s disputed election and to share his view of the events that have followed and the controversy that has captured the world’s attention.
Following is the full text of my interview with Mr. Kinzer:
Stephen, conservative figures in Iran and progressive commentators abroad assert that raising the allegations of fraud and manipulation in the Iranian elections was a premeditated effort, planned beforehand by opposition leaders to concertedly chip away at the conservative campaign and raise doubts about its possible victory. Do you believe this theory?
The Iranian opposition is not organized or united enough to have planned in advance for what happened after the recent election. Even the announced result might not have provoked such an outburst if people had confidence that it was legitimate. If there was a miscalculation, it may have been on the part of the regime. For the Supreme Leader to maintain credibility as a national figure, he has to be seen as above factional disputes. By siding so openly with one side in the election campaign, he wiped away one of the regime’s moral pillars.
Iranian officials are constantly accusing foreign leaders and Western media of meddling in the country’s internal affairs and instigating unrest and violence, while Western politicians and media figures claim that they are not linked with the political upheaval in Iran.
A sense of grievance against the outside world, a belief that the outside world wants to hold Iran back and prevent its development, is deeply rooted in the Iranian consciousness. Iranians feel that as a nation, they have been dispossessed and wronged. Part of this is rooted in the Shiite culture of suffering and martyrdom. But the last 200 years are full of examples of how foreign powers exploited and looted Iran.
This history not only fuels Iran’s sense of grievance, but makes it very difficult for outside powers, especially Britain and the United States, to criticize Iran for its lack of democracy. Such criticism makes Iranians think back to 1953, when those two countries intervened to crush their country’s fragile democracy. The moral authority of the outside world to criticize repression in Iran is lamentably minimal.
After a wave of arrests and clampdowns, journalists, legal opposition figures, political activists, and pro-reform pundits are now behind bars, and calls for the detention of Mir-Hossein Mousavi are being heard from the conservative camp. Can we expect the survival of reform movement in Iran with the pressures it is undergoing?
The political evolution of Iran is not over. The situation there remains volatile, perhaps not in the short term, but over time. Protests after the recent election were fiercely repressed, but they were also thrilling evidence that a vibrant civil society thrives in Iran. Dissidents have begun to feel their power, and the ruling elite are no longer united. This should be a time for the opposition to reflect, regroup, organize and plan. The government will of course use its repressive tools to prevent the opposition from doing so.
So, with the ongoing standoff which has engulfed Iran’s political relations with the West, is the next 4-year period going to be a witness to the further protraction of acrimony, tension, and quarreling between the two sides?
Recent events make it more difficult for Iran and the U.S. to talk meaningfully, if only because American public opinion would be dubious. Nonetheless these two countries, despite their thirty years of enmity, have many long-term interests in common. Not only are they not fated to be enemies forever, they can become partners. Bringing them to an agreement will not be easy. Powerful forces in Washington and Tehran will work assiduously to undermine an agreement. But the opposition movement in Iran favors better ties, and as long as that is the case, the U.S. should try to negotiate.
The talks would have to be direct, comprehensive and unconditional. If they are not, they will fail. Some in Washington want to assure that they fail, so that the military option can be revived. But there is probably no strategic step the U.S. could take anywhere in the world that would bring as great a leap in strategic power as striking a “grand bargain” with Iran.
As an amateur historian on Iran, Guatemala and Chile, I read Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men with keen interest.
My first impression was that He is a “good American” who understands the consequences of the criminality of 1953 coup. He understands that “for every action there is a reaction” and since the action of toppling Mossadeq was an immensely powerful historical act, he is expecting strong Iranian reactions for sometimes to come. How strong? If Iranians had done that to Americans the reaction would’ve been “total obliteration”. Yet, Iranians are not like Americans.
That is why I am not sure that Stephen fully understands some of the peculiarities of the Iranian culture and the specific important points where his culture and that of Iranians are so different.
As an example, one of the grave side-effects of the 1953 coup was that, in Iran, because of their tumultuous history, a mind-set was ever- evolving along the idea of “a pleasurable way to live this crazy life is to share the joy and pain of others” (Khayam, Saadi…). Although a very small percentage of the Iranian population was adhering to such beautiful morality, yet, the foreigners who lived in the country occasionally could meet interesting people who “were not for sale, at any price”.
After the coup, gradually that kind of attitude started to fade away. Instead of “crazy life”, “ugly, evil life” was replacing the base of the conscience of the those who were evolving from “solids, trees, animals and people” to “an angelic super-being beyond the realm of our imaginations” (read Rumi’s dazzling poetry on this)
Killing that beautiful humanistic concept for “profit” was a heinous crime indeed.
Yet, Iranians will shake hands with Americans only if they are treated with respect and if instead of Bolton, Kinser is the negotiator.
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Kinzer’s comments are egregiously compromised by a presupposed “maybe-they’ll-be-just-like-us-someday-and-won’t-that-be-wonderful” mindset. All of which makes his vision of recent events highly suspect, as balanced as they would otherwise appear to be on the surface. Deep down, Kinzer roots for the “color revolution” with its elitist preferences for a vision of a woman’s role in Islamic society that is deeply at odds with history and culture. At the extreme, this view has increasingly fueled American aggression in Afghanistan/Pakistan and, if left unchallenged, will be accepted where it hasn’t been so already as a legitimate casus beli when the inevitable attack on Iranian nuclear capability is launched. What then to make of “progressive” characterizations of the claimed Evangelical “crusades” against Islam in the Middle East? Is the cause of Bella Abzug then to be justified by some different but terribly superior morality, one that exposes a long suspected fascist vein in feminist thinking? Don’t be surprized, the attempts already are being made.
I’m relieved to see one Western outlet reminding that there hasn’t been enough evidence of any election fraud. As an Iranian living in Tehran, I can confirm that Ahmadinejad has indeed many supporters. But the problem is, his supporters are frequently conservatives who are not media-savvy, not fluent in English and rarely reach out to Western journalists. Other than that, they feel the government is representing them and they are not motivated so much as Mousavi’s supporters to be active in the media and reach out to the outer world. Also, probably most of the wealthy, intellectuals, students, activists, journalists, Web users, etc. support Mousavi. He has the majority in Tehran even by the official results, and has two-thirds of the votes in the wealthy, elite northern Tehran.
So my feeling is that the magnitude of the messages generated by Mousavi’s supporters, both before and after the election, and their enthusiastic activism has led to the false perception (even among themselves) that they are the majority.
Having said that, the government was panicked by the protests and reacted hastily since it was the first time that such demonstrations were happening, which were perceived by the gov’t people as a security threat (actually some violence happened on part of Mousavi’s supporters or maybe some anarchist hooligans, which caused widespread damage to public property and almost halted business in central Tehran, although he denied that they were his genuine supporters). This rather false perception led to the sad events afterwards. I think the government genuinely (and falsely) believes that a velvet revolution was planned. They have “reasons” for that, e.g. see here: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=99327§ionid=351020101
I call this woeful state of affairs “The Great Misconception” which I think is going on at both sides.
p.s. If you are at doubt that Ahmadinejad has many supporters and may have actually won, consult some impartial surveys on the public opinion of Iranians. e.g. a WPO poll in 2008 found out that reformists only make up 18% of Iranian population: http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/609.php?nid=&id=&pnt=609&lb=brme
You may have also heard about the famous Terror Free Tomorrow poll which predicted an Ahmadinejad win: http://www.terrorfreetomorrow.org/upimagestft/TFT%20Iran%20Survey%20Report.pdf
A prominent Iranian pollster organization, namely Iranian Students Polling Agency (ispa.ir) whose members are reportedly mostly pro-Mousavi, found out that a majority of Iranians were going to vote for Ahmadinejad and Mousavi had support of less than one-third of the people. However, I have heard this through unofficial channels and cannot verify it. I’m eagerly waiting for the official results and subsequent analysis to be released (which haven’t yet and are expected to be released after the election dust settles down. This policy is because of political sensitivities which prevail in Iran).
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As Roberto says above how about scholars like Kinzer as negotiotors instead of Bolton or Ross now?
Thanks for the article.
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The problem with the western society in their contacts toward Iran is that they judge Iran and it’s people by the media and it’s government. Every media is dependent upon a government in one way or another. So the more media a nation has the more idea it can inject into the minds of the naive. So until our judgements are based on media information we can be sure that it’ll be incorrect. Not to mention that the “judgement” itself, especially when it be by a different culture, will basically be wrong from the very beginning.