Ignatieff on Iran

A good, long, worthwhile read by Michael Ignatieff on reform in Iran ... such that it still exists. Clearly, the recent election is a setback for whatever ounce of reform there is in the elected corridors of Iranian politics.

One aspect struck me for more than just Iran or the Middle East, though:

At Shahid Beheshti University, I gave a seminar on human rights to a class composed mostly of young women in full-length black robes and head coverings. When I went up to shake their hands before the session started, they pulled their hands away. Such contact between the sexes is frowned upon. But in class, they were anything but docile. In often fluent English, they asked what I thought about Islamic Shariah law and its punishments, which can include stoning women to death for adultery. The challenge, I argued, is not understanding why these are wrong but prevailing politically against the religious authorities who believe that their own power depends on enforcing these penalties.

This goes well beyond the topic at hand. In the same NYT Mag, there's a Matt Bai article on Lakoff that's next on my list. A point of connection being that in any political movement, there's got to be more than just a realization of how the other side is wrong, but also an understanding of how the party in power depends on many of those "wrong" elements. Without drawing a moral equivalency, it's as if you could draw some parallel to the stale corruption of crony capitalism practiced in many Governor's Mansions and Oval Offices where power goes unchecked to the Sharia laws in the Middle East. That isn't meant to equate a tax break for a Nebraska sporting goods store to stoning women for exposing the tip of their nose to a beating Iranian sun. But the connection of these practices to the maintenance of power is similar in it's own right ... just less lethal.

Beyond that spark of an idea, Ignatieff offers a slew of insight into Iran, circa 2005:

One day, I paid a call on Saeed Semnanian, the chancellor of one of Tehran's most conservative universities. We sat in his spartan office, while female engineering students walked to and fro in the gardens outside his window. I began with compliments about the achievements of the revolution. Female literacy has risen to 70 percent (though male literacy is still higher, at 84 percent), while income per head has doubled since the end of the war with Iraq. But, I went on, everyone I talked to in Tehran told me the revolution has congealed into a corrupt, repressive system of privileges that exploits Islamic orthodoxy to remain in power.

"Whom do you talk to?" he asked me with a level stare.

"Intellectuals, writers, journalists."

"You are trying to take the temperature of the revolution, but all your thermometers are wrong," he responded.

All this complaining, he implied, is what you would expect from discontented liberals. The achievement that matters, he said, is that Iran is independent. In the presidential elections, all the candidates were pure Iranian. In the shah's time, nothing was pure Iranian. Everything was decided in the American or the British Embassy.

He seemed faintly amused by my failure to understand his country. For him, the history of Iran is the history of attempts to subvert its independence. As far as he is concerned, it might be yesterday, and not in 1953, that Kermit Roosevelt and the C.I.A. organized the coup that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister who nationalized the Iranian oil fields. The seizure of the American Embassy and the hostage drama were, as Semnanian saw it, an exquisitely drawn out revenge for the C.I.A.-inspired coup, just as the regime's current drive for nuclear weapons is a search for an ultimate guarantee of its freedom from foreign interference.

Iranian democrats contend that if Iran were a democracy, its nuclear weapons would not threaten anyone. What makes Iranian weapons dangerous, they argue, is that the regime is a theocracy with connections to Hamas and Hezbollah. A democratic Iran that broke with terrorism would be easier to live with, even if it possessed a nuclear bomb. As Shirin Ebadi told me, "Who cares about France's force de frappe?"

American neoconservatives also tend to argue that democracy will make Iran peaceful and pro-American. This might be wishful thinking. Fear of encirclement by the United States means that the regime's drive for weapons has widespread popular support. If a genuine Iranian democracy were as nationalistic as most new democracies usually are, a democratic Iran might well remain a bellicose opponent of the United States and Israel.

In any event, America has almost no capacity to promote democracy inside Iran, and some capacity to do harm to Iranian democrats. Every Iranian I met wanted to spend time in the United States -- and wished there were more scholarships to take them to America -- but nearly every one of them laughed when I mentioned the recent Congressional appropriation of $3 million to support democratic opposition groups inside and outside the country. Iranian democrats look on American good intentions with incredulity. It would be fatal for any of them to accept American dollars. "Do they want to get us all arrested as spies?" one said to me.

Hence the paradox: the Middle Eastern Muslim society with the most pro-American democrats will strenuously resist any American attempt to promote democracy inside it. It is easy to understand why. ''We fought for our independence," Semnanian told me. "You think when our people fought to drive out the invaders from Iraq for seven years, we were fighting only Saddam? We were fighting the U.S.A., Britain, the whole world. We saved our country. And now we are free."