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Iran's
“Security Outlook”
Farideh
Farhi
July
9, 2007
(Farideh
Farhi is an independent researcher and an affiliate professor of
political science at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.)
Widespread apprehension attended
the June 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency
of the Islamic Republic of Iran, at least among those Iranians who
had approved of the country's direction under the reformist clerics
led by President Mohammad Khatami. Their worries had little to do
with Ahmadinejad's signature campaign issue, the flagging Iranian
economy, and much to do with potential reversal of the political
and cultural opening under Khatami, now that hardline conservatives
controlled every branch of the government. The opening had begun
to close long before the hardliners' accession to power, of course,
but many Iranians feared that Ahmadinejad would seal it tight, by
shuttering the remaining opposition or independent publications,
for instance, or by censoring books, music, film and theater, dismantling
satellite dishes, imprisoning political activists and more rigorously
imposing an “Islamic” dress code.
For
the first two years of Ahmadinejad's presidency, these fears seemed
exaggerated. There was a crackdown, to be sure, but it was aimed
at a limited number of people -- NGO staffers, lay and clerical
dissidents, intellectuals, students, unionists and journalists --
whose activism the new government and its deeply conservative social
base deemed particularly threatening. Though it carefully controlled
its more vocal opponents, the government endeavored not to antagonize
the vast middle of the political spectrum, those Iranians who, while
unhappy with the status quo, bear its burdens quietly. The government
also plied the majority of the population with cheap imports and
lavish welfare spending made possible by record-high oil prices.
Iranian analyst Saeed Laylaz was quoted in an International Crisis
Group report calling this policy “the Iranian version of the China
model. The difference is that in China economic prosperity is underwritten
by economic productivity. In Iran, the middle group is bought off
with oil money.”
In
the first half of 2007, however, the crackdown has broadened. Criticism
of Ahmadinejad's policies is still common in the pages of reformist
and centrist papers, a couple of which were even able to resume
publishing in the spring after winning court battles (although one,
Ham-Mihan , was reclosed by court order on July 3 amidst
popular unrest over gasoline rationing). But the political reins
are tightening, with accusations of “action against national security,”
“propaganda against the system” and/or spying on behalf of external
powers leveled at a prominent Khatami-era official, as well as four
Iranian-Americans who were doing civil society work or simply visiting
family members in Iran. The government has also lowered the boom
on women's rights, student and labor activists, taking them to court,
setting excessive amounts of bail and meting out unusually stiff
jail sentences (though many are yet to be implemented). More significantly,
socio-cultural repression has accompanied the political, with stepped-up
harassment of women wearing “improper” Islamic attire ( bad-hejabi
) in Iran's major cities and roundups of
men identified by the police as “hoodlums and thugs.”
Almost
ritually throughout the existence of the Islamic Republic, campaigns
to curtail bad-hejabi have commenced at the beginning
of summer, with members of the basij militia scanning the
streets for form-fitting manteaus and forelocks peeking out from
under headscarves. But these efforts have usually been short-lived,
appearing and disappearing with little fanfare, and the basij
, as a paramilitary force, has lacked access to all the levers
of the state. This time around, the campaign has blared from the
government-controlled television channels and gendarmes answering
to the Interior Ministry, the Security Forces of the Islamic Republic
( Niruhaye Entezami-ye Jomhuri-ye Eslami ), have
been fully in command. Extensive television interviews with ordinary
citizens portray the clampdowns on both bad-hejabi and
“hoodlums and thugs” as professional responses to the genuine desires
of the “family-oriented” majority. In its search for alleged miscreants,
the Intelligence Ministry has gone so far as middle-of-the-night
entries into the homes of young men who have done nothing in particular
to be arrested now, but have been blacklisted for past activities.
Many families do not know where their sons are imprisoned or the
nature of the charges against them.
It
remains to be seen whether these public morality campaigns will
persist or peter out as summer progresses, as in the past. What
is noteworthy, however, is the reality that these campaigns, along
with the shrinkage of the political sphere, have created a clear
sense even among the competing political elites of Iran that the
original apprehensions of June 2005 were justified: A newly security-conscious
state, bordering on paranoid, has indeed emerged. Also significant
is the fact that this security consciousness is not denied by the
government, which sees its tightened grip upon society as a necessary
step for countering external (chiefly, US) attempts to undermine
not only the government but also the Islamic order itself.
Given
Iran's highly contentious (even if narrowly circumscribed) political
environment, the security-oriented approach must prove useful if
Ahmadinejad's allies in the parliament, or Majles, are to retain
their seats. Primarily, it must appear to succeed in mitigating
the multitude of economic and political pressures upon Iran due
to US policies and UN Security Council Resolutions 1737 and 1747,
directed at Iran's nuclear program. In other words, security consciousness
has to be marketed as an effective policy, particularly since the
hardline conservative deputies in the Seventh Majles are expected
to face a hard-fought election campaign in March 2008.
GRASPING
AT REDEMPTION
Economic
and social inequality brought Ahmadinejad to power. In response,
there has indeed been a change of economic priorities, spearheaded
by oil windfall government spending, away from capital accumulation
and toward redistribution of wealth. The economy took center stage
in the last week of June when mini-riots broke out throughout Iran
after the government rather reluctantly decreed rationing of gasoline
and raised its price by 25 percent. What lay behind the unpopular
decision was the need to reduce gasoline imports and cap budget
deficits bloated by state subsidies.
But,
economics aside, the salient changes under Ahmadinejad have occurred
in the three key ministries of Intelligence, Interior, and Culture
and Islamic Guidance, from the top of the chain of command on down.
The transformation of these ministries is striking precisely because
great energy was spent under Khatami to render them less intrusive
in Iranian life. Since Ahmadinejad became the subject of international
scrutiny, his background during the Iran-Iraq war in the Revolutionary
Guards, founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 to safeguard
the Islamic Revolution within the Iranian state and without, has
fueled assertions of that group's influence in the president's cabinet.
In fact, it has been three ministers -- Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejeii
at Intelligence, Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi at Interior and Mohammad
Hossein Saffar-Harandi at Culture and Islamic Guidance -- who have
brought into their respective ministries what, in Iran, is called
a “security outlook.” Over the past year, these ministries have
become the major proponents of the argument that, though the United
States has placed the idea of direct military confrontation with
Iran on the back burner, it is still trying to unseat the Iranian
regime through a “soft and smart” approach. The activities of the
Intelligence Ministry, in particular, are worthy of examination
because they shed light on the institutional and ideological roots
of the changes that have transpired, as well as the tentativeness
of the policies pursued.
At
the institutional level, the Intelligence Ministry's security outlook
can be considered a reaction to the “cleansing” of this body that
occurred under Khatami. During that administration, the ministry
was publicly labeled as an institution “kidnapped” by “rogue” elements
after revelations of its involvement in the serial murders of intellectuals
and political dissidents. Khatami's first minister of intelligence,
Qorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, was replaced with a second, Ali Younesi,
who today has become a leading critic of what he calls “security-oriented
interpretations of the atmosphere of society.” Many “cleansed” officials
left the ministry, joining parallel security organizations with
opaque institutional affiliations .
Others stayed, but felt humiliated in front of their families and
friends. As such, the aggressive approach taken by Ejeii's Intelligence
Ministry is a grasp at redemption, an attempt to prove to the various
power centers in Iran that the spymasters can solve the country's
problems.
This grasp at redemption
has taken several forms. In the economic arena, the Intelligence
Ministry has used its means of coercion to combat inflation, which
is considered to be the most important threat to the economic viability
of the Islamic Republic, even more than unemployment. Rejecting
the argument forwarded by economists critical of the government,
who see the rise in money supply caused by Ahmadinejad's expansive
budgets as inflationary, the ministry has instead blamed individual
speculators and smugglers. Several names have reportedly been passed
along to the judiciary as a way of breaking the “housing mafia”
allegedly responsible for the spiraling prices of real estate. The
ministry has taken a similar tack against the fledging private banking
system, forcing the resignations of chief operating officers and
harrying the banks' favored clients. It is also said that the Intelligence
Ministry discovered a multi-million dollar fuel smuggling network
with direct ties to the Ministry of Petroleum, several of whose
members were ultimately convicted. But Intelligence's biggest success
story was the capture of Shahram Jazayeri-Arab, a shady businessman
imprisoned for kickbacks to several (mostly reformist) politicians.
In February 2007, it was revealed that Jazayeri-Arab had escaped
from the notorious Evin prison and left the country. It took Intelligence
Ministry operatives a month to locate him in a remote village in
Oman, presumably with the help of Omani officials, and bring him
back to Iran. The scandal led the head of the judiciary to can Evin's
warden, the head of the judiciary's Conglomerate for Combating Economic
Corruption and two judges, as the Intelligence Ministry accepted
kudos for its “daring.”
Ejeii's ministry is also
implicated in the drive to restore “social serenity” through the
arrest of “sources of social disturbance,” namely the so-called
hoodlums and thugs. Intentions are difficult to assess, but the
severity of the arrest campaign, which included many widely reported
instances of public humiliation of the young men in question, could
be considered a calculated step to instill fear in society in preparation
for disturbances that were expected to follow the implementation
of gasoline rationing that took place at the end of June.
Finally, the security outlook
has made a political impact. In a move that jolted Iran's political
arena, the Intelligence Ministry arrested Hossein Mousavian, a senior
member of the nuclear negotiating team under Khatami and the deputy
director of the Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank affiliated
with the Expediency Council. (The Expediency Council is a clerical
body empowered to mediate disputes between the Majles and the Guardian
Council, another unelected panel of clerics that vets legislation
for its constitutionality and adherence to Islamic law.) The think
tank, which since Ahmadinejad's election has become a refuge for
former diplomats, is headed by Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator,
Hassan Rohani, and is closely tied to the former president and current
head of the Expediency Council, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Mousavian
was held on the charge of passing secret information to foreign
powers (reportedly, the United Kingdom and Japan). Although he was
released in a few days, presumably after much political pressure,
the charge was not dropped and he still awaits trial. The disconnect
between the seriousness of the purported crime and Mousavian's release
(on relatively low bail) has forced Ejeii to go before the Majles
for a question-and-answer period in which he flatly announced that
Mousavian was “guilty as far as the Intelligence Ministry is concerned.”
The judiciary spokesman, in turn, pointed out that Ejeii's opinion
has yet to be accepted by the presiding judge who set the bail.
Though there is yet no victor
in this tug of war, the mere fact of such a momentous charge against
a high-ranking member of the Iranian establishment has created an
atmosphere of fear among past and current officials in contact with
foreign diplomats. Nervous current officials include senior managers
at the Ministry of Petroleum, who are now constantly watched for
signs of corruption and are routinely escorted by Intelligence minders
when they travel abroad. But the stigma placed upon contact with
foreigners goes well beyond the dealings of Iranian diplomats. Finding
an excuse in the $75 million sought by the State Department in 2006
for “democracy promotion” in Iran, most of which was allocated by
Congress, the Intelligence Ministry has now effectively declared
that all interactions with foreigners are suspect unless proven
otherwise. In an exclusive news conference in late March with the
Islamic Republic News Agency, for instance, Ejeii warned “domestic
agents, infiltrators and the enemy's fifth column” that their activities
and cooperation with the outside in order to create “psychological
war” were not hidden from the Intelligence Ministry. In what was
considered an open warning to Iranian academics and intellectuals
about contacts with their counterparts in other countries, he continued:
“With the information they gather, these domestic agents send the
wrong signals to the enemy and unfortunately move according to the
desires of the United States and Israel.” At issue was not merely
the intentional transfer of secret information, but also publicly
available data that could be exchanged unintentionally at academic
and policy-oriented conferences, and used by external players hostile
to Iran.
WHO PAYS THE PRICE
The main selling point of
the security outlook is the notion that the United States, having
lost the political will to go to war with Iran militarily, is nevertheless
engaged in an economic, political and psychological “confrontation.”
This confrontation is said to have many manifestations, but probably
nowhere is it as evident as in Iraq, where repeated US accusations
of Iranian armament of insurgents, and the detention without charge
of five staffers of the Iranian liaison office in Erbil since January
2007, are very sore subjects for the Iranian leadership. The US
posture is also deemed to have many objectives, the most important
of which, in the words of Alireza Zaker Esfahani, head of the Strategic
Research Center, a think tank affiliated with the Office of the
President, is to “undermine the unity and solidarity of the people
[of Iran] and the system's forces.” In a recent interview with Rajanews,
a website close to Ahmadinejad, Esfahani identified the threat of
military attack, continuously discussed in the American press, as
only one instrument of “psychological distress” wielded to keep
the Iranian population and political elite off balance. But, in
general, he judged the US goal to be infiltration of the Iranian
political landscape through “intellectual-political elites and ethnic
minorities.” He further argued that movements organized around women's
and workers' rights are originated and organized, knowingly or unknowingly,
to further US aims in fomenting disunity in Iran, while agitation
among ethnic minorities is instigated by external forces. Thanks
to the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq
in 1953, as well as press reports of undercover US activities in
Iran's border areas, the actual promotion of such destabilization
efforts by some neo-conservatives and the proclaimed US desire to
weaken the Iranian regime by funding civil society groups, this
rhetoric does not sound wild to some Iranians.
Intellectuals and opinion
makers are deemed particularly significant by the security outlook,
because with the increased economic and financial pressures on Iran
and the resultant economic hardship, journalists, writers and academics
can and will play a crucial role in propagating the image of an
incompetent state rife with factional conflict. Culture and Islamic
Guidance Minister Saffar-Harandi justified the reclosure of Ham-Mihan
, for instance, with the allegation that the paper was assisting
“a creeping coup in the press.” As far as Ahmadinejad's government
is concerned, those who exert pressure upon Iran for its nuclear
program do so because they believe that pressure will lead Iran
to “retreat” and also cause “deep divisions within the country and,
ultimately, political turmoil.” External actors have been encouraged
in this belief by intermediaries who, in the words of Ali Larijani,
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, are purveyors of a “strange hope”
that inside “the country there will be some sort of change so that
[external players] can impose their will on us.” Larijani goes on
to say that the Islamic Republic is too “strong to allow a few kids
to create disorder.” The irony, of course, is that the Islamic Republic,
by harassing journalists, activists and intellectuals who merely
offer uncongenial analysis of current affairs, does not appear very
strong at all.
By reversing more than a
decade and a half of promoting contact between Iranians of various
persuasions and expertise and their counterparts outside of Iran,
particularly in the United States, through a policy known as Track
II, the Ahmadinejad administration looks less than confident. This
is an odd image to project at a time when, according to the analysis
of Iran's own Intelligence Ministry, “the enemy's” perception of
what goes on inside Iran directly affects its demands on Iran during
nuclear negotiations. Still, members of the Intelligence Ministry
and the hardline government continue these policies because they
believe that the threat to the Islamic Republic is real, deviously
working through the perceptions and analysis relayed by intellectual
intermediaries. They also persist with their line because fanning
fear and paranoia strengthens them vis-à-vis other domestic
players.
This interactive dynamic
is clearly articulated in the arrest of two Iranian-American scholars,
Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh. Esfandiari and Tajbaksh are
among the four Iranian-Americans (along with Ali Shakeri and Parinaz
Azima) currently charged with “action against national security”
or propaganda against the state. Another American, former FBI agent
Robert Levinson, has simply disappeared in Iran, bringing the total
number of Americans held in Iran to five and giving rise to the
rumor in Iran that their confinement is a quid pro quo for the US
imprisonment of the five Iranian officials in Erbil. Whether or
not this rumor is true, there is no doubt that the charges against
Esfandiari and Tajbaksh have reverberated widely because of what
they were doing (and not doing) before they were jailed.
Both of these scholars have
been engaged for years in exchanges of academic research that, under
both Rafsanjani and Khatami, would have been considered Track II
and, in fact, would have been encouraged, precisely because of the
sorry state of official relations between the two countries. Though
the overtly adversarial stance adopted by the Bush administration
since 2002 soured those relations even further, Esfandiari, Tajbaksh
and scores of other Iranians and Iranian-Americans essentially continued
to do what they had been doing for the past 15 years. By making
these individuals pay the price for the aggressive policies of the
Bush administration, over which they have next to no control, the
Iranian government has disseminated the intended chill through the
halls of universities and even ministries that dispatch personnel
abroad. These personnel, according to Ejeii, are purveyors of false
information to the enemy (presumably in the same way Hossein Mousavian
and the past nuclear team was passing along wrong or secret information).
But the cost of such escalated repression is the enhanced belief
on the part of decision-makers in the Bush administration that their
policy of political and economic isolation is working and what is
needed is more, not less, pressure. Hardliners in both Iran and
the United States are in a win-win situation. The situation is lose-lose
for those who see contact as a means to avoid war and confrontation,
and a tragedy for the people taken hostage, whether in Tehran or
Erbil, to be pawns in the hardliners' game of chess.
PARANOIA AS “NORMAL” POLITICS
The Bush administration,
Congress and many American pundits are increasingly convinced that
the squeeze on Iran, in the form of Security Council resolutions
and more so the economic and financial coordination of the United
States and its allies, is working. Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek
, for instance, has written that “the financial measures, aggressively
pursued by the Bush administration, have hit where it hurts.” Sharp
criticisms of Ahmadinejad's policies, including his cabinet's security
orientation, are interpreted as a reflection of elite conflict and
harbingers of an eventual push toward compromise on the nuclear
issue. Recent evidence of Iran's economic difficulties in the form
of gasoline rationing is seen as yet another indicator of sanctions
and pressures having the desired impact, despite the fact that rationing
and the more general plans to reduce gasoline consumption and, more
importantly, subsidies have been in the works for several years.
A bipartisan panel in the House of Representatives is even pushing
for sanctions against countries that sell gasoline to Iran.
What is missing from this
type of analysis is that, in pursuing a publicly stated and defended
security-oriented policy, the Iranian government is behaving in
a rather “normal” fashion for a government of a country that sees
itself, and in fact is, under external attack and pressure. Indeed,
the US is giving the Iranian government ammunition on a daily basis
not only to implement its security approach but also to sell it.
Iranians who burn down gas stations because they are upset with
government rationing are called “terrorists” in the pay of foreign
powers which have “allocated funds to cause turmoil”; intellectuals
doing research on Iran are “naive lost souls who are knowingly or
unknowingly serving the interest of external powers” by supplying
them with a skewed understanding of Iran; even past government officials
are, at best, appeasers and, at worst, spies. There is no reason
to think that Iran will become an “abnormal” country where outside
pressure weakens rather than strengthens the security outlook.
To
be sure, the upcoming parliamentary election, now set for March
2008 after much controversy and deliberation, will afford reformist
and centrist political parties the opportunity to challenge this
security-oriented turn. All the major reformist and centrist political
players in Iran have resolved to take these elections seriously
and field sufficiently large slates of candidates to counteract
the possibility of wholesale disqualifications by the Guardian Council.
This decision is an important indicator of the importance now given
to elections, not necessarily as a vehicle for reforming the political
system as a whole, as was the case from 1997-2004, but as a means
of effecting changes in personnel as well as policy direction. The
hope is not to win per se, but to perform well enough, as during
the December 2006 municipal elections, to shape the leadership and
the decisions of the Eighth Majles by forming alliances with the
more pragmatic and less security-oriented conservative forces. But
the hardline conservatives, who have taken over consequential ministries
since Ahmadinejad's election, are banking on the Bush administration
to give them what they need to wall off the public sphere, accuse
opponents of treason and, ultimately, rally public support in the
name of security and national unity. Their tools are the squelching
of political dissent and forcible “Islamization” of the way people
behave in public. The more threatened the hardliners feel, the more
paranoid they will become, and the more they will try to make Iranians
with ties -- whether in terms of direct contact or cultural habits
-- to the outside world, particularly Europe and the United States,
pay.
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