The bipartisan Iraq Study Group's recommendations for an overhaul of United States policy in the middle east seem to have produced a sceptical response in the White House. A day after the report (released on 6 December 2006) described the situation in Iraq as "grave and deteriorating", President Bush begged to differ. "I believe we'll prevail" was his mantra. It also looks like business as usual with Iran, as George W Bush remained committed to the principle: no shift in Iran's nuclear plans, no dialogue.
The threat of "axis-of-evil" member Iran still looms large in the western media. News reports have even linked Iran with al-Qaida. Yet as the Iraq Study Group (ISG) report has highlighted, the Saudis are a source of direct funding of Iraqi insurgents. Moreover, the bloodline of savage jihadis runs through longstanding United States allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan.
The unpromisingly named General Custer, senior intelligence officer at US central command in Iraq aptly expressed the situation: "If I could snap my fingers and move Iran out of the picture it wouldn't change - it wouldn't end the conflict. It wouldn't drastically change the conflict. It's not decisive."
Nasrin Alavi is the author of We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (Portobello Books, 2005). She spent her formative years in Iran, attended university in Britain and worked in London, and then returned to her birthplace to work for an NGO for a number of years. Today she lives in Britain.
Also by Nasrin Alavi on openDemocracy:
"Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fear" (November 2005)
"Inside Iran"
(February 2006)
"Iran: the elite against the people" (May 2006)
"Tehran's red card to human rights"
(23 June 2006)
Tehran divided
Meanwhile, in Tehran, the supposedly powerful president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still dominates the news as the glowering face of Iran; ominously, he is even a frontrunner in Time magazine's "person of the year" poll.
But Ahmadinejad's puffed-up persona in the western press has to be balanced against - as is too seldom done - the erosion of his rickety powerbase at home. He was elected in June 2005 on an economic platform and he will be judged on the economy. Iran is struggling with rising unemployment and surging inflation that is felt most severely by the poor, who are among his most important constituency.
In October 2006, the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admonished his cabinet to "try to ease this problem". Indeed, it won't be easy. There is a huge budget deficit and Ahmadinejad's extravagant inflationary handouts cannot be sustained. The currently forecast downward movement in the oil price is likely to cause more chaos than the imposition of any possible United Nations sanctions.
What, apart from a miracle, could lighten Ahmadinejad's accumulating burdens? Only a continuation of the same old combative stance and policies from the White House, which serve more than anything to unite Iranians behind their president and divert the nation's attention away from problems at home.
Against what many in the west believe, Iran's foreign policy apparatus is largely impervious to the comings and goings of presidents. It was post-war (Iran-Iraq, 1980-88) confidence and pragmatism that saw the presidency of Mohammed Khatami reaching out to the west. Today, the Iranian regime's newfound bravado is thanks largely to the so-called "war on terror". With the fall of Saddam and the July-August 2006 war in Lebanon, Iran's oil-price-fuelled influence - both in Shi'a-dominated Iraq and across the middle east - has grown. It almost seems that, at times, the Iranian leaders can't believe their luck. It is no wonder that the negotiations over Iran's nuclear programmes have turned into a movable feast.
The ruling elite may be able to muster a unified front abroad. But with the reformists out of government, internal feuds between hardliners have intensified. This backbiting has been in full view as elections to the Assembly of Experts and nationwide councils on 15 December 2006 approach.
For the council elections one possible legacy of the recent parliamentary reform movement is that most major candidates - excluding Ahmadinejad's allies - are running on a reformist platform.
The powerful Assembly of Experts is made up of eighty-six conservative ayatollahs, elected by the people every eight years. It is in charge of overseeing, discharging and electing the supreme leader, who is appointed for life. But candidates for these elections are vetted by another body in Iran's complex, overlapping system of government agencies: the Guardian Council. This time, as is the norm, no reformist candidates have been allowed to run. But what is remarkable is that clerics aligned with Ayatollah Mesabah Yazdi (President Ahmadinejad's' guru and patron) were also struck off the list.
This is more than a squabble amongst associates; it is a direct move by the ruling elite to crush this faction. Parliamentary sessions have been hard for Ahmadinejad as he has wrestled with MPs for the endorsement of his cabinet and polices. But things are bound to get harder. The Iranian parliament even voted by an 80% majority to cut Ahmadinejad's term of office by eighteen months (the pretext was cost-cutting by bringing the presidential and parliamentary elections together).
Ahmadinejad has attracted other opponents who are starting to feel the regressive impact of his presidency. In policies reminiscent of the paksazi (cleansing) adopted during the early days of the 1979 revolution, Ahmadinejad has tried to replace longstanding veterans throughout state institutions with inexperienced ideological allies; and in the process has left countless well-connected enemies in his tracks. There has been a crackdown against NGO's and civil-society groups' the closure of newspapers, and the banning of an unprecedented number of books banned; the seizure of satellite dishes from homes and increased internet censorship. The government even announced that they planed to prosecute those sending critical text messages.
The powerless Iranian citizen mocks authority figures as a natural defence mechanism; in a country under clerical rule, the temptation to send SMS jokes of the "ayatollah said to the actress"' variety is too great for some. Yet few officials in the history of the revolution have garnered so many jokes than the current president. Many refer to his level of hygiene, his dishevelled looks and demeanour; others just poke fun at everything he stands for. (An example: Ahmadinejad goes to Las Vegas, from where he calls his wife. "I think I've been martyred" "Why?" "Because I'm in heaven!").
A generation loses fear
The repression takes yet other forms. A state strategy referred to by student activists as a "second cultural revolution", numerous academic staff have been sacked or forced into early retirement, and dissident students summoned to court, expelled or arrested. Student publications have been closed down, long-established student groups banned and student election results nullified.
But these plans are not working out. Iran has a young, educated society: 70% are under 30, with no memory of the revolution - and in many cases, no fear. Iran's largest student union Tahkim Vahdat (Office to Foster Unity) was set up by Ayatollah Khomeini at the dawn of the revolution. It gradually acquired legitimacy through free elections and the vote of the nationwide student population, and today has become an independent pro-democracy union. A generation after the revolution, no hardline Islamic student group is (or has been) able to gain control of any Iranian campus in the land through elections.
Ahmadinejad cannot turn back the clock. Some of the youth of Iran's Arab neighbours may dream of replacing the dictatorships they live under with Islamic states; the Iranians have been there, done that, got the apparel - and suffered the drawbacks.
On 6 December, despite the government's extraordinary crackdown, an extraordinary crowd of students participating in an event called "university is alive" broke down the gates of and demonstrated inside the main campus of Tehran University. One slogan chanted was "nothing to lose but our chains"; others called for the resignation of the education minister and sang "students, workers, unity, unity", "free political prisoners", "death to dictators", "we want bread, not bombs". There were many gatherings at other universities: Tehran's Amir Kabir, Mazandaran (Babolsar), Mashad, Tabriz (Sahand) and Hamedan.
The timing was significant: a day before the anniversary of 7 December 1953, which saw the shooting of three students by the Shah's soldiers after the coup backed by the US and Britain that toppled the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. Since the 1979 revolution, students have marked this day across Iran.
In recent years, the Tahkim Vahdat has not been given permits for such gatherings; instead, a government-backed militant basij group has been granted permission to demonstrate in the same location in Tehran and on the same day, with well-known hardline figures as speakers. There are no reports of the basij rally taking place this year; the main student demonstration won the day.
It seems too that student groups, from pro-democracy Islamists to socialists, united in non-partisan slogans. They do not appear to have leading figureheads who can be silenced and imprisoned or exiled, or leaders who can betray them or lead them astray. It is the members of such groups, part of Iran's educated baby-boom generation, who will ultimately determine the country's future.
Iran's ruling elite are unmistakably rejecting Ahmadinejad-style revolutionary resurgence with pragmatism. It is this critical expediency that will force them to ultimately concede to the demands and needs of Iran's youthful population.
A student leader in the Tehran protest was acclaimed for saying: "Our struggle is twofold, against internal oppression and external foreign threats". Western powers that see an ascendant Iran on the horizon should take note: unlike (for example) Iraq or Saudi Arabia, Iran is one of the few countries in the middle east whose rising trend is toward democracy.
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