Legatum Institute Prospects for Iran Jonathan Paris Prospects for IranProspects for Jonathan Paris www.li.com Legatum Institute, 11 Charles Street, Mayfair, London, W1J 5DW, United Kingdom Telephone +44 (0)20 7148 5400, Facsimile +44 (0)20 7148 5401, www.li.com Copyright © 2011 Legatum Limited ISBN 978-1-907409-15-8 January 2011 9 781907 409158 January 2011 Prospects for Iran Jonathan Paris Legatum Institute Copyright © 2011 Legatum Limited All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Please direct all enquiries to the publishers. Legatum Institute 11 Charles Street, Mayfair London, W1J 5DW United Kingdom T +44 (0)20 7148 5400 F +44 (0)20 7148 5401 www.li.com [email protected] CONTENTS About the Author 5 Acknowledgements 6 Executive Summary 7 Introduction 12 Chapter 1 Domestic Considerations 13 Chapter 2 The Nuclear File 34 Chapter 3 Regional Snapshots 64 Conclusion 70 3 ABOUT THE autHOR Jonathan S. Paris is a London-based security specialist and Non-resident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council of the United States South Asia Center. He is also an Adjunct Fellow at the Legatum Institute and an Associate Fellow with the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College London. In 2010, he authored the Legatum Institute’s Prospects for Pakistan Report. Before moving to London in 2001, he was a Middle East Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York from 1995-2000, where he worked on the four MENA Economic Summits and the Middle East peace process, and was deputy to Paul A. Volcker, former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman, at the Council’s Middle East Economic Strategy Group. Jonathan also co-edited the first book on Indonesia’s democratic transition, The Politics of Post-Suharto Indonesia (Brookings/CFR 1999). A Senior Associate Member at St. Antony’s College, Oxford from 2004-2005, he is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School. 5 Acknowledgements I thank Nazenin Ansari, Hemal Shah, Iona Debarge and Yasmine Moezinia for their generous assistance. Karim Sadjadpour was kind to introduce me to Omid Memarian, who contributed extensively to the sections dealing with domestic Iranian considerations. I would like to extend my gratitude to Legatum Institute, to Will Inboden and, especially, to Claudia Mendoza, Research Associate at Legatum Institute, for her wise counsel from the inception of this project. Finally, I am very fortunate to have the support of my wife Carrie, and Tanya and Joey. I dedicate this Report to Sam, who urged me a decade ago to spend more time writing about critical foreign policy issues. For Sam, may you continue to serve faithfully, and come back safely. Jonathan Paris 6 EXECUTIVE Summary Iran is opaque and difficult for outsiders to understand. One of the more thoughtful insights to emerge from the WikiLeaks release of confidential US diplomatic cables in November 2010 comes from Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, whose greatest worry “is not how much we know about Iran, but how much we don’t.”1 What we do know is that the Iran crisis is very important to the international community and that it is in fact two crises: the emergence of civil resistance inside Iran as a result of the disputed election of 12 June 2009, and the pursuit of nuclear weapons by the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Domestic Considerations Iran’s domestic crisis was born from a confluence of badly managed state affairs, generating widely shared grievances and culminating in mass protests in the June 2009 presidential election. The protests reflect a political chasm between the regime and its two sources of legitimacy: the Iranian people, who saw their votes dismissed, and the religious establishment, many of whom lost confidence in the supreme leader after he lent his partisan support for President Ahmadinejad in the dispute over the election results and the violent crackdown on demonstrators, mostly young, and dissidents. There have been several protests before, but the political schism in 2009 was different for a number of reasons: First, previously protesting sectors were joined by the educated, professional, urban elite. Second, whereas these earlier instances involved only one sector of society at any given time, in June 2009 various sectors of society came together to denounce the election outcome. Third, the previous protests set civil society against the state. This time, the inner core of the state turned against figures who are or who have been part of the state, including Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (a former president), Mir Hossein Mousavi (a former prime minister), and Mehdi Karroubi (a former speaker of the majlis, or parliament). These men have support inside the regime, including ministries, parallel organisations and the security apparatus. 1 David Sanger, “Around the World, Distress Over Iran” The New York Times, 28 November 2010 at http://www.nytimes. com/2010/11/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html 7 Legatum Institute Fourth, the presence of international broadcasters in the country and the access of many Iranians to modern telecommunication devices and new media, including the internet, Skype, Paltalk, YouTube and Twitter, altered the information flow to the detriment of the government. The Farsi-language broadcasts of the BBC Persian service, Persian News Network, Radio Farda, Voice of America, in addition to the ubiquitous internet, deprived the state of its monopoly over the means of communication. Two years later and the regime appears to have reconsolidated power and contained the Green Movement, which has been unable to mobilise large demonstrations in Teheran and other Iranian cities since early 2010. The Green Movement itself is fractured and its leadership has turned inward. Meanwhile, quarrels among the regime elite, though serious, are deceptive; whenever regime survival is threatened, the elites seem to unite. The centrist- reformist, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has far more to lose if Iran ceases to be an Islamic Republic than if he continues to languish outside the corridors of power wielded by his rivals, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nonetheless, the growing divisions within the elite have led to the current decision- making paralysis in the IRI. The deepening fissures are multiple: between reformists and conservatives, conservatives and ultra-conservatives, President Ahmadinejad and the parliament, Ahmadinejad and the judiciary, Ahmadinejad and the clerics in Qom, Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader, the supreme leader and the Qom clerics, reformists and the guardian council, the parliament and the guardian council, and more. The Revolutionary Guard, also known as the IRGC, has grown more powerful politically and economically throughout President Ahmadinejad’s tenure since 2005. The IRGC controls the instruments of power, secures the streets and has become the edifice on which the survival of the clerics depends. It is hard to imagine the clerics ruling without the IRGC, but it is possible for the IRGC to survive without the clerics. The one benefit the ayatollahs provide the IRGC is the legitimacy of Iran as an Islamic Republic among other Muslim countries. Otherwise, Iran would simply be another authoritarian regime ruled by a praetorian guard.2 Domestically, the Achilles heels of the regime are its economic mismanagement and human rights violations. Economic stewardship under President Ahmadinejad has been a disaster for all but a few privileged groups, including the IRGC. The anger of the people over the state of affairs wrought by the sanctions and government policies is rising. More and more people question the government’s skewed priorities in which hospitals are left inadequate and jobs non-existent as limited Iranian state revenues go abroad to rebuild southern Lebanon and at home to improve upon North Korean ballistic missiles and assemble a space programme. The other vulnerability of the regime is its human rights violations, particularly since the crackdown following the June 2009 election.3 Stories of rapes of young male and female 2 The author of the concept of the praetorian guard is Samuel P. Huntington, which he explains in his book, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968). 3 Human Rights Activists News Agency documented 38879 cases between in one month alone, between 21 March and 21 April 2010. 37,519 labourers, 537 students, 255 civil society activists re freedom of expression, 34 sentenced to hanging, 259 suffered torture and abuse of prisoners’ rights, 7 were killed in provinces at the borders, and 124 were ethnic minorities, and 68 religious minorities, each suffering arrests and human rights abuse. See full report at http://www.hra-news.org/1389-01-27- 05-27-51/792-000.html 8 Prospects for Iran reformers by their torturers in Teheran prisons have surfaced repeatedly through the efforts of Mir Hussein Mousavi and others in the Green Movement. Other human rights violations take place against minorities, both ethnic and religious, and against women. Many in the Green Movement have been arrested and are languishing in prison. It is hard to predict the next couple of years in Iran since the Green Movement is split between those who want reform and those who want regime change. Disenchanted demonstrators appear unwilling to return to the streets to help Mousavi recreate the earlier pristine Islamic Revolutionary days of 1979. Many of them no longer wish to live under any Islamic regime with the increasingly discredited jurisprudential system of Velayat Faghih (rule of the Jurists) that gives ultimate power to the supreme leader. They want free and fair elections where the people are sovereign. The traditional Shi’a clerics are becoming more vocal in their support for separation of religion and politics and the repeal of the Velayat Faghih.