04 Mar 2013 03:26:29
The Islamic Republic of Iran that emerged from the revolution of 1979 has lasted quite well. Thirty years on, and better late than never, Iran is a more prosperous country than under the Pahlavi monarchy overthrown in that turbulent year. Bled by a long and inconclusive war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988, revolutionary Iran has kept aloof from the chaos on its borders, where three states (the Soviet Union, Ba'athist Iraq and Afghanistan) have disintegrated. Since the rise in 2005 of the price of oil, which makes up all but a fraction of the country's revenue, Iran has become more assertive, though it's not wholly clear to me what it is asserting. Yet, according to Michael Axworthy in his calm and literate portrait of the Islamic Republic, certain long-lived chickens are coming home to roost. A fissure within the constitution of 1979, between parliamentary democracy and ecclesiastical control, now threatens to detonate the revolutionary ruling class known in Persian as the nezam or "system".
An attempt to consolidate Islamic government with a nuclear weapon has alarmed Israel and the world powers. International sanctions and a cult of administrative incompetence have choked off Iran's revenue and destroyed its currency and credit. History appears to be converging on 14 June, when Iranians will vote to elect a new president. The system is jumpy. The country's "leader" or "guide", Ali Khamenei, last month told Iranians to stop calling for free elections. They were, he said, already as free as can be. An academic historian, and sometime British diplomat, Axworthy avoids the grand schemes and theories that have so clouded the study of Iran. If he has a theory of the revolution of 1979, it is the celebrated phrase of young Tancredi in Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard: Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi ("If we want things to stay as they are, everything must change").
What Axworthy means is not that Iran in 1979 had anything in common with Sicily in the 1860s, but that an elite of clergy and wholesale merchants concluded it must destroy the Pahlavi monarchy so as to preserve its values and privileges. Taking charge in the second half of 1978 of a broad movement for political liberty, Ruhollah Khomeini and his supporters drove the shah into exile and all but demolished the royal army. Then, under the blanket of the war with Iraq, they wiped out their allies and rivals – leftist, liberal and, in the seminary, orthodox and quietist.
With the peace, the revolutionaries set about reinventing the wheel. In almost every department of government, the Islamic Republic pressed on with the Pahlavi project. Here it all is, though draped in the banners of the prophet of Islam and his family: state-controlled industry, neglected agriculture, urbanisation, economic autarchy, suppressing the tribes and ethnic minorities, state handouts, mass education and the release of women from seclusion. Also, as Axworthy records, prostitution, drug addiction and judicial murder on a scale the Pahlavis could never have imagined. What distinguishes Iranian monarchy and republic, he argues, are not so much the black banners and veils that fascinate and repel the west but old-fashioned parliamentary democracy. Iran has a tradition of constitutional government going back to 1906 and, though it was reduced to impotence for about half the Pahlavi era (1925-79), parliament is (with Islam) one of the two pillars of Khomeini's republic.
The Constitution of the Islamic Republic, drawn up in the second half of 1979, never resolved "the debate between Islam and democracy", while the chaotic occupation of the US embassy in Tehran that November led Iran into "a twilight zone of diplomatic breakdown and international isolation from which the country has never really re-emerged".
Yet in its three decades, the Islamic Republic has managed to change its governments. The period of drift after Khomeini's death in 1989 is shown by Axworthy to have been full of political and electoral incident, from the Khatami landslide of 1997 to the appearance from nowhere in 2005 of the jack-in-the-box Ahmadinejad. If the definition of democracy is that it can spring ballot-box surprises, then Iran has a democracy.
The turning point for Axworthy was the presidential election of 2009. That June, two drab regime loyalists, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, found themselves thrust to the head of a mass movement for liberty and an end to the country's isolation. The system panicked, manipulated the returns, threw its support behind a second term for Ahmadinejad, knowing full well his chaotic nature, and regressed into old habits of imprisonment and torture. Ahmadinejad, who is for Axworthy a "mixture of ignorance and chutzpah", duly went on to set the system by the ears and smash up the economy while showing every sign of enjoying himself and wanting to stay. Though barred from a third consecutive presidential term, he is said to be planning to do a Putin: put in a placeman and come back next time.
The significance of 2009 for Axworthy is that a ruling clique abandoned Khomeini's policy of balance between the factions in favour of "naked force". Yet that move has not strengthened the republic but weakened it. Who knows what the ballot box, which gave the system the equally unwelcome Khatami and Ahmadinejad, will throw up this summer?
Axworthy sympathises with the system. Like many Persianists, he frets that if the Iranians are granted freedom to choose they will choose America and a great civilisation will be destroyed. Yet western liberty is also his solution to the double crisis of legitimacy and the bomb.
There is no very deep tradition of enmity between Iran on the one hand and Israel and the US on the other. Indeed, Axworthy says, apart from Ba'ath Syria, Israel was by far the most consistent ally of Iran in its long war with Iraq. When President Obama held out an olive branch to Iran at the beginning of his first term, "the response from ordinary Iranians was such that it helped to produce [in June 2009] the Iranian regime's most serious crisis since 1979 … The reconciliation effort needs to be resumed, reinforced and maintained with determination till it succeeds."
