10 Days in Tehran: What I Saw At the Iranian Revolution
Pastor Dale Morgan
Thursday, Jun. 18, 2009
*10 Days in Tehran: What I Saw At the Iranian Revolution*
By Joe Klein
Time Magazine
A few days before the Iranian election, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
held a big rally at the Mosallah Mosque — said to be the world's
largest, if it is ever completed — in central Tehran. It was not very
well organized. About 20,000 supporters of the President were inside the
building, being entertained by a series of TV stars, athletes and
religious singers. Many thousands more swirled outside. Inside, a TV
host led the crowd in chanting "Death to Israel." "Squeeze your teeth
and yell from the bottom of your heart," he implored. Later, the host
said he had once asked Iran's President where he got the energy to
travel to all the provinces. "My heart is powered by nuclear fuel,"
Ahmadinejad replied. The place was hot, and packed, and people were
fainting. After several hours, the host announced that the President
would not be speaking: he had gotten caught up in the crowds outside the
mosque. And so Nahid Siamdoust, TIME's Tehran reporter, and I began a
three-hour journey to get back to my hotel, which was only a few miles
away. (Photos: Iran's Elections and Their Turbulent Aftermath.)
We walked at first, then found a cab. But central Tehran had become an
implacable traffic jam — and a gridlocked political debate. The
Ahmadinejad supporters, many on motor scooters, skittered through the
lines of automobiles, most of which were decked out with signs
supporting the moderate challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. There was
good-natured banter between the two groups. "Chist, chist, chist," the
Ahmadinejad supporters chanted, referring to Mousavi's awkward, constant
use of that word — Farsi for "y'know" — during his debate with
Ahmadinejad. The Mousavi supporters chanted, "Ahmadi — bye, bye." After
about an hour, our cabdriver gave up, and Nahid and I set out on foot.
The streets were getting very crowded now — and there was a giddiness to
the scene. It was the sort of crowd that might gather after a football
victory. The Ahmadinejad supporters, dressed in the red, white and green
of the Iranian flag, seemed to be enjoying the freedom as much as the
more flamboyant Mousavi supporters, who were draped in green. At one
point, an Ahmadinejad supporter stuck his head out the window of his car
and sang a lullaby, "Mousavi — lai, lai," in response to the students
chanting "Ahmadi — bye, bye." The students laughed. It was as if someone
had opened a door and an entire country had spilled out. It was possible
to believe, for a moment, that these genial young people, from both
sides, might be creating a new, more open Iran for themselves.
And then, the door slammed shut again.
It has to be assumed that the Iranian presidential election was rigged,
but it is impossible to know how heavily the government's thumb rested
on the scales. It is entirely possible that Ahmadinejad would have won
anyway, but narrowly, perhaps with less than 50% of the vote, setting up
a runoff election he might have lost as the other candidates united
against him. It is possible that his government, perhaps acting in
concert with Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, decided to take no
chances. (Read "The Man Who Could Beat Ahmadinejad: Mousavi Talks to TIME")
But even if the election campaign, in the end, proves meaningless, it
provided a rare look at the divisions in Iranian society, and not just
between the working-class Ahmadinejad supporters and the wealthier,
better-educated backers of Mousavi. It also put the internal rivalries
at the highest levels of the Iranian government on public display for
the first time, and in the most embarrassing fashion.
The President was, without question, the best politician in the race.
His debates against the two reformers, Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were
routs. Both challengers were exemplars of the older generation — the
generation that made the Islamic revolution in 1979 — and both were
flummoxed by a candidate who seemed to have been trained by some Iranian
equivalent of Karl Rove. They appeared paralyzed by what they considered
his coarse impertinence; in American terms, these might have been
debates between George Bush the Elder and Newt Gingrich, a gentlemanly
establishmentarian against a rude populist brawler. Ahmadinejad was a
slick combination of facts and accusations. He spoke directly into the
camera. He deployed little charts, as Ross Perot did in the 1990s, to
show that things weren't as bad as people thought. His statistics were
heavily massaged and challenged by his opponents, but he had muddied his
greatest vulnerability — the stagflating Iranian economy. The real jaw
dropper, however, was Ahmadinejad's willingness to attack in the most
personal terms. He attacked Mousavi for being supported by former
President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whom he flatly called corrupt (a
widespread belief among reformers and conservatives alike); he attacked
Mousavi's wife Zahra Rahnavard, a famous artist and activist, for
allegedly getting into college without taking the entrance exam; he
attacked Karroubi for taking money from a convicted scam artist.
The reformers — and even many of the more prominent conservatives (who
call themselves principalists) — considered these attacks outrageous,
outside the rules of Iranian politics. "The attacks might have worked
with Ahmadinejad's supporters," said Amir Mohebbian, a prominent
principalist thinker who backed Ahmadinejad with some reservations. "But
they were not good for the system." Indeed, Ahmadinejad's toughest
debate was with the other principalist candidate, Mohsen Rezaei, a
former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, who challenged the
President's inflationary tendency to spend money on direct wealth
redistribution — all sorts of stipends for the working class and the
poor — while neglecting a long-term investment strategy. Unlike the
older reformers, Rezaei refuted the President's arguments effectively.
He directly addressed the Iranian people: "You go to the store. You know
the price of cheese ... The people know what the real story is."
But much of the cheese-buying public — the working class, the elderly,
the women in chadors — seemed to adore Ahmadinejad. One of the favorite
slogans of his supporters was "Ahmadinejad is love." On election day,
Nahid and I went to Ahmadinejad's childhood neighborhood, Nazi Abad, and
interviewed voters. The lines at the central mosque were every bit as
long as they were at the voting stations in sophisticated north Tehran.
There was a smattering of Mousavi supporters, but the Ahmadinejad
worship was palpable. He was kind to the families of martyrs, one man
said, which was true — Ahmadinejad had lavished attention on the
veterans of the Iran-Iraq war and given special preferences for
university admissions to their children. "He works so hard for us," an
elderly woman in a chador said. "He doesn't sleep at night." A younger
woman said, "He is the one person who really supports our class of
people. Everyone has been insulting him, but I believe that the Messiah
is supporting him. I saw it in a dream." See pictures of Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad.
Mousavi, on the other hand, inspired little personal adoration. He was
known as a tough and effective manager, and a favorite of Ayatullah
Khomeini's during the early years of the Islamic republic — especially
during the Iran-Iraq war — when he served as Prime Minister. But he had
pretty much disappeared from public view for 20 years, living a quiet
life as an artist and architect until he re-emerged as a polite
prototype of the north Tehran élite. These were people — like the two
former Presidents who backed his campaign, Rafsanjani and Mohammed
Khatami — who seemed as concerned with Ahmadinejad's crude populist
style as with his crude populist economics. Mousavi's wife inadvertently
made plain the mind-set when I asked her about her husband's art and she
told me, "Artists exist at the very top of a society. When an artist
becomes President, it is a step down. But there's no way out. For the
happiness of the people, it is necessary."
Mousavi seemed less pretentious. On the day before the election, Nahid
and I interviewed him in a building he had designed, part of an art
school and gallery complex in central Tehran. He seemed an exceedingly
gentle man, soft-spoken to a fault — whisper-spoken, in fact. His most
emphatic moment came when we asked about Ahmadinejad's attack on his
wife. "I think he went beyond our societal norms, and that is why he
created a current against himself," Mousavi said. "In our country, they
don't insult a man's wife [to] his face. It is also not expected of a
President to tend to such small details."(Read "Top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms")
He also criticized Ahmadinejad's incendiary rhetoric on international
issues like Israel and the Holocaust, as he had during the campaign: "In
our foreign policy we have confused fundamental issues ... that are in
our national interest with sensationalism that is more of domestic use."
But "sensationalism" for "domestic use" is what political campaigns are
usually all about. During more than a week in Iran, I interviewed as
many people who admired Ahmadinejad as were appalled by him. On election
day at the Hossein Ershad Mosque in north Tehran, I spoke with Ismail
Askari, the head of the taxi drivers' union in the city of Malard, just
west of Tehran. He was a Mousavi supporter, but he admitted, "Most of
the people in my cab have been happy with the present government."
And while it's the ultimate journalistic cliché to quote a cabdriver, I
can't resist this one: on the Saturday before the election, I attended a
large and metaphoric Mousavi rally — someone had cut the electricity, so
the candidate couldn't speak — in the city of Kharaj, about an hour west
of Tehran. The cabbie who drove us back to Tehran said his parents were
divided on the election. "My mother supports Mousavi, and my father
supports Ahmadinejad," he said. "I was uncertain until I saw them
debate. Ahmadinejad seemed stronger. I don't think I would want Mousavi
negotiating with other governments."
Which may be exactly what the Supreme Leader — who is the real power in
Iran, with control over the military, the judiciary, foreign policy and
the nuclear program — had in mind when, on June 13, he prematurely
certified the phantasmic Ahmadinejad landslide. In the days before the
election, reformers and principalists — including several Ahmadinejad
advisers — told me that negotiations with the U.S. were likely,
regardless of who won. "But it might be easier for the Supreme Leader to
proceed if the tough guy is re-elected than if Mousavi is," said
Mohebbian, the prominent principalist. "The negotiating team will be
jointly decided by the Supreme Leader and the President. The Leader, who
has great doubts about proceeding, will want a tough bargainer."
In truth, the reformers I spoke with seemed as unyielding as
Ahmadinejad, if more politely so, when it came to discussing what Iran
would be willing to concede in negotiations with the U.S. They were
adamant on Iran's nuclear enrichment program, which is permitted for
peaceful purposes under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. None of
them, except Mousavi, was willing to acknowledge that weaponization of
uranium might be in the works and therefore be a subject for
negotiation. (Mousavi told me that if such a program existed, it would
be negotiable, but he didn't say, and may not know, that it actually
exists.) The reformers were unanimous in the belief that Barack Obama's
conciliatory words were not enough, that the U.S. had to take palpable
actions before talks would be possible. I asked each of them what steps
Iran was prepared to make for peace. The answer was always the same.
"It's natural that the first step should be taken by the Americans,"
said Karroubi, the most progressive of the four presidential candidates.
"We didn't stage a coup against your elected government," he said,
referring to the CIA's participation in the 1953 overthrow of the
Mohammed Mossadegh government. "We have not frozen your assets. We don't
have sanctions against you." (Of all the reformers, only Mousavi seemed
to think that Obama's acknowledgment of the 1953 coup in his Cairo
speech was a "positive step.")
Ahmadinejad's advisers were even more adamant than the reformers. When I
asked Mehdi Kalhor, Ahmadinejad's top communications adviser, what he
thought of Obama, he made a crude attempt at humor. "Only the skin color
has changed" from George W. Bush, he said. "Now the color is chocolate.
Chocolate is sweet. Children like it, but I don't very much." We met in
Kalhor's office. He was wearing a red golf shirt, and his long hair was
tied in a ponytail. "We understand Obama is different from Bush," he
said, more seriously. "But you need these negotiations more than we do."
I asked him why the U.S. did, since Iran was the country that was
isolated from the rest of the world. "You're more isolated than we are,"
he replied, directly reflecting his boss's public arrogance. Ahmadinejad
has offered to debate Obama at the U.N. but has been silent about
substantive negotiations. When this point was raised by an AP reporter
at his postelection press conference, Ahmadinejad was dismissive.
"That's a suggestion," he said. "Not a question."
Such intransigence — and the tarnished election results — makes the
question of negotiations harder for Obama, but also easier in some ways.
The U.S. President was appropriately cautious after the elections —
criticizing the use of violence against the protesters, but not the
results of the vote. It seems clear that his Administration will
continue to seek negotiations that will, among other things, attempt to
increase the transparency of Iran's nuclear program. If the Iranians are
smart, they will respond quickly. If they continue to dally, Iran's
electoral embarrassment will make it easier for Obama to rally other
countries behind a tougher sanctions-and-deterrence plan that will
further isolate Iran. But that may be exactly what the current regime
wants. "Look, for the past 30 years, the Supreme Leader — first
Khomeini, now Khamenei — has blamed all our problems on the Great
Satan," a prominent conservative told me. "If you take away the Great
Satan and we still have problems, how does he explain it? Almost
everyone here is in favor of ending this war with America. But no one
has less incentive to make peace than the Supreme Leader."
On the day after the election, two crowds gathered in front of the
Ministry of Interior — Mousavi and Ahmadinejad supporters, several
hundred of each, separated by the police. They chanted their slogans
back and forth, and I was reminded of the wonderful street debates I'd
seen several nights earlier. But suddenly the police, on motorcycles and
on foot, dressed like starship troopers in body armor and brandishing
billy clubs, charged into the Mousavi crowd. People began to run; some
were knocked down; bodies were flying. And the Ahmadinejad crowd began
to cheer.
It is impossible for an outsider, in Iran for 10 days, to sift through
the governmental opacity, the contradictory demonstrations, and predict
what comes next. It seems likely that no matter how many people flood
the streets in protest, the Supreme Leader will continue to back
Ahmadinejad. It also seems likely that while Barack Obama should
continue to press for negotiations, he shouldn't be too optimistic about
the prospect of success