Fear and Loathing in Tehran

The hopeless and the damned: Mir Hossein Mousavi's followers rioted after the June 12, 2009 election gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a dubious landslide victory. (Farmaraz Hashemi via flickr)

"First the cop screamed abuse at Mir Hossein Mousavi's supporter, a white-shirted youth with a straggling beard and unkempt hair. Then he smashed his baton into the young man's face. Then he kicked him viciously in the testicles. It was the same all the way down to Vali Asr Square. Riot police in black rubber body armour and black helmets and black riot sticks, most on foot but followed by a flying column of security men, all on brand new, bright red Honda motorcycles, tearing into the shrieking youths – hundreds of them, running for their lives. They did not accept the results of Iran's presidential elections. They did not believe that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won 62.6 per cent of the votes. And they paid the price."

That's how Robert Fisk, who's been covering the Middle East from the bloodiest to the deepest trenches since before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, describes the scene today in Tehran, where the police always treat protesters in the same way: "A smash in the face, a kick in the balls and Long Live the Democrator." (That's what Fisk calls Ahmadinejad, the democrat who loves dictatorial order, hence the Democrator.)

(For visual updates of scenes from Tehran, follow the excellent site, tehranlive.org, which says it was banned in Iran on June 13; see also Faramarz Hashemi's stream at Flickr.).

Meanwhile, 100 opposition figures were reportedly arrested, and the Al Arabiya satellite network's bureau in Tehran was closed. No word on whether Mousavi, the "reformer" contesting the election results, was among them. Police shuttered his office on Palestine Street. But they were not able to keep his supporters from distributing his written condemnation of the official version of events:

The results of these elections are shocking," he proclaimed. "People who stood in the voting lines, they know the situation, they know who they voted for. They are looking now with astonishment at this magic game of the authorities on the television and radio. What has happened has shaken the whole foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran and now it is governing by lies and dictatorship. I recommend to the authorities to stop this at once and return to law and order, to care for the people's votes. The first message of our revolution is that people are intelligent and will not obey those who gain power by cheating. This whole land of Iran belongs to them and not to the cheaters.

Surreal, these words: Mousavi is among the early and enduring architects of the thuggish theocracy and its ball-crushing means he now decries. He's not, truth be told, one to talk about "law and order" and "care for the people's votes." Ahmadinejad isn't better, and is in most ways much worse: he's incompetent at governing (the economy on his watch went from crippled to intensive care), he's bombastic, he's a holocaust-denier, and all told he's not the brightest bulb ever to shine on the ramparts of Persepolis. But really. What did anyone expect? Ahmadinejad is Ali Khamenei's boy: docile, easy to manipulate, easier to blame when things go wrong and ignore when things go right. And what the "supreme leader" wants, the supreme leader gets.

I don't doubt that there was massive fraud, or that Mousavi was the likely winner. But it's irrelevant because the election was irrelevant all along. It was one more exercise in pretending that Iran is a democracy when it is anything but. The results were pre-ordained. Even if they'd been different, it's doubtful Mousavi would have effected changes other than in the president's variety of suits and the tenor of his speeches.

So it was encouraging to see the Obama administration foregoing the wounded-spirits act and press on with its decision to talk to the Iranians, whoever is in charge. It's a recognition that the Iranian president is a figurehead anyway, a nuisance at best, a loudmouth at worst (as now). The power is Khamenei and the Guardian Council.

That's not to diminish the skull-smashing going on on Tehran's streets. There's a possibility, small though it is, that the election's many farces, culminating in the ultimate farce that Ahmadinejad will always be, is sparking an upheaval that could spiral out of control just as the upheavals of 1978 spiraled into the Iranian Revolution of the following year. That's the new hope out West, and maybe in the shadows of Tehran's streets.

But before you raise your hopes too much, keep a couple of points in mind. First, back in 1978, while the shah of Iran very much wanted to crush skulls the way protest-busting police are doing right now, the Carter administration held him back. (More specifically, Jimmy Carter did. Zbignew Brzezinski, his national security adviser and as much an admirer of violence as Henry Kissinger, wanted to unleash the troops on protesting Iranians.)

Second, it's not as if the opposition in Iran has either a coherent agenda or a charismatic figure around whom to rally. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Assembly of Experts, is vaguley promising, but only as a different kind of establishment man, not a counter-revolutionary. Mohammed Khatami, the former president, is not up to the challenge (he has the intellect but not the instinct for ruthlessness), and Mousavi is a founding father, or at least uncle, of the revolution. He's compromised. He's out for power, not reform. That's the essential point most western reporting on this thing is missing. There is no serious movement for genuine reform in Iran. But these smash-ups, these small revolts, could produce it, if they're sustained, if a more coherent leadership manages to emerge out of them (even if it's Mousavi, though that's an enormous if), and if the regime's thuggish revolutionary guards and uniformed police don't crush too many skulls (an even bigger if).

All in all, a miserable day in Iran. Stupidity and repression win. Reformers are left to fend for themselves. And the loudest sound in Tehran is not that of revolutionizing the revolution, but of heads and testicles meeting their smashers.

See Also:

• Dashing Fabricated Hopes: The Meaning of Ahmadinejad's Victory
• Iran Goes Florida? Not Quite: Ahmadinejad Wins
• How Should Obama Deal With Iran?
• Mir-Hossein Mousavi: Profile
• Profile: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
• Who Rules Iran and How? A Primer