Iran's future poised between reform movement and reaction

Martin Woollacott, Guardian News Service, London

This week, on the fourth anniversary of student protests in Tehran which ended with many injured and at least one dead, thousands of demonstrators are expected to burst on to the streets of the Iranian capital.

The regime is fearful and divided about the proper response, while the protest leaders are anxious that their show of force should have some genuine impact rather than subsiding without any visible result. Iranians are waiting, without much hope, for some resolution of the contradictions of their political system -- and for an end to the paralysis which leaves them forever poised between reform and reaction, autocracy and democracy, international isolation and acceptance.

They have waited for such a resolution for years, but two significant changes, one domestic and one international, could mean that what has always in the past been subject to indefinite postponement may not be too far away.

The domestic change is the coming of age of the generation born just after the Iranian revolution, men and women with no memory of the Shah or, except for childhood recollections, of the Iran-Iraq conflict. The international change is the result of the two wars that have put America next door to Iran in Afghanistan and now Iraq -- a change which makes the two countries even more important to one another than they were in the past.

Iran could undo the Americans in Iraq, while the U.S. has new means, including conceivably military ones, of influencing events in Iran. Yet a military intervention, even a limited one against nuclear facilities, is the remotest of prospects.

What is likely to ensue is a wary sparring for advantage, within Iran and between Iran and the U.S. and Europe, as competing elements within the Iranian regime and in the Iranian opposition all look for American support.

Whoever can play the American card in Iran, also delivering security against the U.S. threat and meeting the aspirations of a youthful population for a nation more open to the world, will win the political game there, at least for a time.

The emergence into adulthood of the 1979 generation is the culmination of a demographic explosion that has seen the population of Iran double since Ayatollah Khomeini returned in triumph from Paris.

It has added to the mass of doubtful and discontented young people who have been at the center of Iranian politics since the early 1990s. Their experience of the Islamic republic, especially if they are middle class, is conditioned by their active alternative life as virtual citizens of the wider world, which they know through television, film, and the back and forth circulation of the huge and constantly topped up Iranian diaspora in America, Europe and Australia.

Even the devout among them have their doubts about a regime whose religious credentials have eroded after years of exposure to the temptations of office, and after respected clerics have raised anew the question of whether it is theologically right that the clerical class should enjoy political power.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme cleric, said last month after a week of student protests that "disgruntled people" who allowed themselves to become "mercenaries" for the Americans would be punished. But he and others know that shooting students in the streets would be wildly counterproductive.

The wily former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, projecting both moderation in dealing with protesters and a desire for dialog with the U.S., shows that he knows that the key to political success in Iran is to satisfy some of their demands.

Because a romanticized America, in part a code for a more general opening up of Iranian society, has such symbolic importance for many of the youthful middle class, whichever Iranian leader can claim to have achieved an understanding with the U.S. would get a big lease on political life, for himself and the regime as a whole.

In that sense, Rafsanjani is in competition with the much more genuinely liberal Mohammad Khatami, the current president, who promised so much but has been able to deliver so little. He is also in competition with less flexible conservatives who may accept that some concessions to the U.S. are unavoidable but still see America as an enemy to be resisted in the Middle East.

American leverage, therefore, arises much less from American military power than from the fact that almost everybody in Iranian politics probably wants to do some kind of a deal with them, or at least benefit from a deal done by others.

Some readiness to bend has been apparent in Tehran. The visit of United Kingdom's foreign secretary Jack Straw adds to the evidence that the Iranians are prepared to allow the intrusive inspections of nuclear plants upon which America, with support from Europe, Russia and the International Atomic Energy Authority, has been insisting. The Americans and Europeans also want, and probably already have seen, some reduction in Iranian support for groups like Hizbullah, or the use of its influence to moderate their behavior.

In the U.S. the idea of inducing a sudden and total regime change in Iran has its supporters. Many of them set store on the opposition group connected to Reza Shah, the last Shah's son.

But few Iranians, however discontented, have any interest in a monarchical restoration, just as few had any time for the Mujahedin Khalq. Backing outside opposition groups is not a serious policy.

The real choice before America and Europe is a harder one. If Iran is ready for some kind of bargain with western countries, a bargain which Europe has been pursuing for years, should that bargain be done with an essentially unreconstructed regime, for whom an American deal would be the glue that would enable it to enjoy a few more wobbly years of power over an unhappy population?

Or should we wait in the hope of a more radical transformation, perhaps based on an alliance between the more moderate segment of the regime and the opposition?

That may be wishful thinking; but the best policies could lie somewhere between unwise attempts at regime change and support of the Iranian regime as it now exists.