Hi Shaurya,
You're right, this exchange does belong on the Iranian thread. However its a very good discussion and I'd like to maintain continuity, so I shall have to continue to reply here until some kind admin finds the time to move this full set of posts to the Iran thread. I've replied to your post in the Iran thread there.
Rudradev wrote:That he didn't respond as well to British string-pulling as his erstwhile sponsors would have liked, hardly alters the fact that Britain interfered with Iran's governance through colonial politicking, and no Iranian I've spoken with considers the British to have done their nation a favour by foisting Reza on them... except in the serendipitous happenstance that Reza did undertake a vigorous modernization program as you recount. The British also come in for resentment for forcing Reza to abdicate in 1941 so as to create a supply corridor to the Soviet Union through Iranian territory. To the Iranians, the fact that Britain first sponsored Reza's coup and then deposed him when he proved inconvenient twenty years later, amounts to adding insult to injury.
I think you've missed our original point of departure - I have never suggested that Iranians would be happy about direct British involvement in Iranian political affairs - you're free of course insist that it must be my assumption, but I can only tell you that you're quite wrong.
Whatever the Iranian resentment of external involvement, the majority of Iranians regard Reza Shah as far more nationalist, and someone who did far more good for Iran than the Qajars who were seen as weak, exploitative and ineffectual.
Reza Shah's ability to maneuver the British and the Soviets against each other, along with the loyalty of his troops allowed him to restore Iranian sovereignty.
It worked until Hitler brought Britain and the USSR on to the same side - the only way to have continued to keep the British and Soviets divided would have been for Reza Shah to have also opposed Hitler and worked the divisions within the alliance.
Unfortunately Reza Shah wasn't quite so nimble, having gotten quite close to Germany in the 1930s, and become convinced of its Germany's eventual success. In fact he had officially changed the country's name to Iran in the 1935 to emphasise its 'Aryan' nature, ecouraged by Hjalmar Schacht who was his economic advisor.
The long and short of this verbiage is that even you admit that the US would have attacked Iran's nuclear facilities had not *American* public pressure mounted on the Bush administration, post 2006, to discard Rumsfeld and disregard Cheney.
I'm sure there are back channels of Iranian diaspora, but their existence hardly can have said to exercise "instrumental" influence over Western policy towards Iran... indeed their influence would have been negligible had the 2006 Congressional elections not put the Bush administration on the backfoot.
The elections did not decide whether or not the US would attack. It moved the debate over the right course of action from the West Wing of the White House to the Council on Foreign Relations, i.e. the wider establishment.
Hillary Clinton, the leading candidate at the time, and de facto issue leader within the Democratic party is, and was only a fraction less hawkish towards the IRI than the Neoconservatives.
She, like some of the more cautious Neoconservatives favoured allowing Israel to do the job sooner rather than later, specifically before Natanz reached an industrial operational capacity.
It is the Iranian-American diaspora, particularly in academia that played a huge role in shifting the debate against this course. This was through relaying messages from both the Iranian state, as well the Iranian opposition, and integrating them in the context of American interests. The message was dont bomb yet, negotiations have a real chance of succeeding.
Today the US is back to square one, asking for IAEA members to vote to refer Iran to the Security Council. So apparently Obama's policies of accommodation and negotiation via the diaspora "back channels" haven't presented any significant influence either.
This has far more to do with the factionalism of Iranian politics. The negotiations went very well thanks to the level of communication that had taken place beforehand. The problem arose when the radicals at home shot down the deal that the pragmatic conservatives had secured.
The radicals and the diaspora don't talk, and don't get along. Will the radicals be able to block the deal indefinitely? Depends on Khamenei really. If this drags on, then the diaspora will not be able to prevent issues from escalating.
The Iranian government is biding its time with the "Green Movement", because in any such stalemate the status-quo power inevitably has an advantage. Eventually they will exhaust the opposition. This is not the 1980s when a Tiananmen Square type of response could be mounted and then suppressed... so of course, repression of a dramatic sort would have been more politically costly than it was worth.
Rudradev,
Iran's Tiananmen has already happened.
Most Iranians were in total shock when the regime chose to unleash the Basij and the IRGC on the millions who demonstrated against the election. They didn't think the regime would go that far.
The backlash was enormous, and the government has reluctantly retreated, although the radicals are fuming about it.
The status quo is *not* stable. If you ask your Iranian friends one question, ask this one - does the Iranian government still have legitimacy with the majority of Iranians?
That is the crucial tipping point that has been passed. It is not just Ahmadinejad, but even Khamenei who have lost their legitimacy.
The CPC retained legitimacy (by a narrow margin) after Tiananmen first and foremost because it delivered economically to the majority of Chinese, and secondly because the majority of Chinese citizens after the constantly shifting household inquisitions of the Cultural Revolution that its safer to be an apolitical loyalist.
Under the current regime life has been getting steadily harder, and much like the Shah it is because the authorities refuse to listen to sound economic advice.
In addition people blame the government for chosing a confrontational course with huge financial costs for ordinary people, when negotiated alternatives are available.
Most importantly, Iranians simply arent as apolitical as the Mainland Chinese.
Ultimately, what I've heard from the Iranians I've spoken to is that they hope the West will refrain from interfering for political capital in an indigenous process that could yield genuine reforms if negotiated honestly between the Iranian government and its people. Western interference will not weaken the regime's hardliners, only strengthen them while maligning those Iranians who genuinely want reform. Protestors who openly call for Western pressure are, in fact, despised even by the reformists... in much the same way as Arundhati Roy and Dilip DeSouza (who called for a US invasion to preserve Indian "secularism") are thought of by Indians.
Nobody in the movement wants Western
intervention on their behalf.
But they do measure who their friends are on a people to people basis based on who shows solidarity.
They don't want Western governments to send in bombers and parachutists - but they do expect *all* governments around the world to publicly condemn violence against the Iranian people, and to avoid legitimising rigged elections, and to provide refuge for people fleeing repression.
When you're struggling against the odds, you appreciate those who lend a hand in support. One of the reasons that Iran has been so supportive of the Palestinians for example was Yasser Arafat's support in the 1960s and 70s to all of the Iranian revolutionary movements.
The fact is that that most of the Iranian opposition movement are disappointed in Obama administration's refusal to morally condemn the Iranian government's actions.
However, they do appreciate the support that people in the West have provided to them, just as they were grateful for Palestinian and worldwide leftist support at the popular level when they were weak.
If you're talking about dramatic spectacle, surely Yeltsin leading tanks against the Duma will suffice. In the days of the USSR, political protestors were far less motivated to clog the streets and create a spectacle... it would have led to getting killed and quite possibly no one hearing about it. The Iranian protests make sense in the information age when video clips from mobile phones can be uploaded instantly to websites and cable news stations accessed by millions of people worldwide. The anti-Soviet protestors had no such propaganda incentive to risk their lives in mass demonstrations.
The Iranians have been conducting mass protests for much long before mobile phones or the internet were available - 1978, 1979, 1961, 1953, etc.
Today, the Iranians continue to demonstrate in numbers even as the mainstream media's coverage has shrunk.
The most recent vote for the Russian governorates was rigged on a massive and unprecedented scale. Everyone in Russia acknowledges it was rigged, but no one cares. Like Mainland China, people are politically apathetic. The burst of hope and energy in 1990-91 is gone.
There was one group of Russians who *routinely* defied the state publicly in the Soviet era - and those were Jewish activists, particularly after 1967. Brezhnev and Andropov were obsessed with crushing the movement, but they never could. Sharansky and others won out.
For that matter, why is a Solzhenitsyn not comparable to Akbar Ganji, or a Yeltsin to Montazeri? The former pair are both dissidents feted with a great deal of hype by the West; the latter are political reformists within their respective parties. What exactly do you mean by "When did the Russians ever have anything like...."? Yes, the Iranian people have had more involvement in picking their leaders than Soviet citizens ever did... but the greater level of popular investment is a strength of the Iranian establishment relative to the Soviets establishment. Not a weakness.
Which establishment? The one that was elected, and then disbarred from running for election by the Guardian's Council when they beat the conservative candidates?
The one that's been arrested (including former ministers) and tortured when they protested the rigging of elections?
The Islamic Republic's establishment was always an uneasy alliance between different ideological groups.
The Supreme Leader was supposed to keep the peace by allowing fair competition between the groups. Khamenei's tilt towards the conservatives after 2000, allowing them to use every means against the reformists has led to a mounting crisis, and that crisis reached boiling point in June 2005.
It went from being a crisis behind closed doors, to a crisis on the streets.
It is also disingenuous to attempt an analogy that equates the Iranian government to Stalin... there were no such Soviet purges in the post 1979 period in which the IRI has existed. The methods of Stalin's time are more accurately reflected in the techniques of his approximate contemporary, the American client Mohammed Reza Pehlavi, whose SAVAK would have given the NKVD a run for its money any day.
I'm not the one who brought up the Soviet analogy of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.
I wouldnt say it was Stalinist, but Khomeini's era was even more totalitarian than the Shah's, which is why so many of Iran's intellectuals who supported Khomeini during the Shah's overthrow broke with him by the 1980s.
However, if you speak to Iranians they will tell you about the revolutionary terror modeled on the French and Bolshevik revolutions that was applied.
Revolutionary courts secretly tried executed thousands in the Iranian government in several waves. Many of them were retired. Officers, diplomats, civil servants, ministers. Many of them were people who had fallen out with the Shah, but whom Khomeini considered dangerous. In the next waves people much further down suspected of loyalty to the old regime, to the Marxists, anyone other than Khomeini were arrested and shot.
Then you had what they called the 'cultural revolution' when they tried to purge the educational system of all 'un-Islamic' content and ended up shutting down the universities for three years.
The paranoia of those around Khomeini meant that even Islamic revolutionaries were not safe, particularly those progressives associated with Shariati and Taleghani.
For example in 1982 the serving foreign minister Qotbzadeh, a former Ayatollah Khomeini aide was arrested for plotting coup, put through a show trial, convicted and executed. Ayatollah Shariatmadari was stripped of his title and placed under house arrest.
In fact its episodes like this that led to Montazeri, Khomeini's heir-designate to fall out with him and become a reformist. Its a particularly good example of the regime's viciousness and factionalism.
The arms-for-hostages negotiations (known in the US as Iran Contra) were in full swing in 1986 to the point that US NSC staffers were secretly visiting Tehran. The cleric in charge of negotiations was Hashemi Rafsanjani. One of Rafsanjani's most serious rivals was a senior cleric named Mehdi Hashemi, who was in charge of exporting the Iranian revolution worldwide, and coordinated with Hezballah, which had conducted the kidnappings. Hashemi was the protege of the then extremely radical Montazeri.
Hashemi thought he might curry favour with Khomeini, and defeat his rival by leaking the negotiations in the Iranian press. Unfortunately for him Khomeini had approved the negotiations, and wanted them to succeed, but to acknowledge that would be impossible given that he had declared any contact with the USG to be treasonable.
So what did Khomeini do? He had Hashemi and his associates arrested for treason, tortured, and forced to confess on Iranian television that he was an American and Israeli agent. He is executed in September 1987 before his guilty verdict could be announced to preclude the embarrassment of Khomeini facing a public campaign on Hashemi's behalf by Montazeri, the official no.2.
Montazeri for the first time began to wonder if he, or those close to him could ever expect justice in a system where *anyone*, at any time, for any reason could be judicially murdered. A month after Hashemi's execution Montazeri calls for the legalisation of all political parties under strict regulation. Calls for “an open assessment” of the Islamic Republic’s failures.
That was the beginning of the break. It was complete after the secret mass liquidation of all Marxist prisoners in Iranian prisons in August 1988. There was a secret inquisition first - prisoners were told they were being interviewed to arrange their release. In reality the intention was to determine those who could be considered believing Muslims, as opposed to apostates. A few managed to fake it, but most were secretly condemned, and executed. The whole thing appalled the newly sensitised Montazeri.
That's the thing about Iran - even the most hardened Islamic revolutionary can change.
Do you seriously expect to convince anyone that the Americans were *forced* to give the Shah a weapons system as advanced as the F-14 Tomcat in 1976... an aircraft that they hadn't even begun supplying to many long-standing West European allies? The Americans may be capitalists, however, they've never been so mindlessly mercantile as to provide their most sophisticated armaments to regimes they didn't trust completely.
I'd like to see some substantiation of your contentions that "not even Israel" or the Saudis ever exercised such a veto over American foreign policy as the Shah's Iran.
America will make excuses for allies damaging behaviour in order to protect strategic relationships, but it almost never grants them the right of veto over US actions without repercussions.
The Saudis were utterly against the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, fearing both Sunni blowback, and the growth in Shia power once Saddam was gone. The Americans told them to cooperate on Iraq or face public wrath over 9/11. The Saudis provided some cooperation, but the US-Saudi relationship still hasn't recovered.
The Likud Israel in the first Gulf War was determined to make public warnings, and to go after Iraqi scuds itself once they started falling. They feared that any sign of dependence on direct American military action would reduce their ability to directly deter aggressors. The Bush elder administration made some blunt warnings to the Likud government about what kind of effect unilateral Israeli action might bring.
The Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations allowed their sensitivity towards the Shah's concerns act as a veto on US actions in Iraq, the Gulf, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US essentially abdicated leadership in the region to the Shah.
Saddam's claims to Khuzestan or the Arvand Roud were not in any way related to the Cold War; they were a territorial dispute between Iran and Iraq which later became the basis of the 8-year war between those countries after the Shah was deposed. It neither suited the Soviets nor harmed the Americans for Saddam to gain these territories... as witnessed by America's help to Saddam in a war to capture those same territories from Khomeini's Iran in the next decade. So I'm not sure how this is an example of the Shah not fighting the "Cold War".
To the extent that the Shah could use American and Israeli help in pressuring Iraq via Kurdish separatists, he availed of it. What interest did the Americans and Israelis have in continuing their support to the Iraqi Kurds afterwards? There was no hope of actually toppling Saddam by backing the Kurds, and Kurdish irredentism was a threat to American ally Turkey as well.
I think you've captured quite well the disjuncture between US and Iranian aims, and the way that US aims became subordinate to Iranian ones.
Kissinger and Nixon met the Shah to discuss the Kurdistan covert action on their way back from the Moscow Summit.
Saddam's treaty with the USSR, and the influx of Soviet weapons and advisors to Iraq was the primary US concern.
Concerned enough to risk alienating Turkey which is extraordinarily sensitive over the Kurdish issue. They continued the Kurdistan operation even after the Turks closed most US bases in Turkey after Congress backed Greece during the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
The Americans really didn't care about the Iran-Iraq border dispute. They wanted to pressure Iraq away from the Soviets. The Shah terminated the operation when he got what he wanted on the border front, while the Iraqi-Soviet relationship continued. The Americans got nothing but ill will from all involved - the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Turks and the Soviets.
First of all, that's hardly a "shadow" of the help the Shah offered Pakistan from any rational standpoint. Offering safe harbour to Pakistani submarines and supplying the PAF with state-of-the-art fighter aircraft is much more aggressive an action, than merely delivering oil, treating wounded soldiers or allowing supply overflights.
When I used the phrase, I meant in terms of risk.
With all those Iranian transports buzzing through Syria, what do you think the chances of losing Iranian personnel flying Iranian aircraft wearing Iranian markings on them was, given IDF/AF activity was? The Shah was walking a very, very dangerous edge, especially given his strategic relationship with Israel.
Secondly, no, I don't think the Shah's assistance to the Arab powers in the 1973 war was a favour to the Americans. It was a bid to establish influence across the Middle East centered around the highly contentious issue of Israel... the Arab-Israeli conflict having far more resonance in the Gulf region than any India-Pakistan war at the time. Conversely, the Shah's assistance to Pakistan against India in the 1971 war was not calculated to win the approval of Arab states... it was the execution of an American directive by their Cold War allies in Teheran, pure and simple.
So you're suggesting that the Shah wanted to extend influence in the Arab world, but wasnt interested in establishing influence over Pakistan, its immediate neighbour?!
The Shah's pattern of activity throughout the 1960s and 1970s was clear - he intended to turn Pakistan in to his client state.
From urging co-production of the Mirage (not an American idea!) in the 1960s and 70s, to intervention in the Balochi insurgency from 1973 onwards, to providing billions in aid to Pakistan when the Americans werent interested in subsidising them, there's no question of what the Shah wanted.
American disinterest after Nixon's triangular relationship with the Soviets and Chinese was achieved meant that Pakistan bought two kinds of weapons in the 1970s - French and Chinese. Chinese weapons in the Maoist era were sold at 'friendship' prices, i.e. nothing. French weapons were paid for by the Muslim world's money.
Bhutto understood the regional tensions and set up a bidding war between the Arabs and the Iranians, and the Shah won out. However the Shah also won out in Afghanistan, and the price that Bhutto had to pay was to give up the conflict with Daud.
The larger point here is this - the Shah did what he wanted in the Gulf and South Asia whether it overlapped with American aims, or not. Sometimes there was more overlap, sometimes less, sometimes none.
Neither Egypt, nor Syria, nor Iraq saw popular revolutions - this is not a Sunni-Shia difference. It is the difference between the Iranians and other societies.
Ah, the heart of the matter. Which brings me back to my original contention: the Iranians are less likely allies for the Americans than any other power from Lebanon to the Phillipines, with the possible exception of India.
That's because the Iranians are not willing to submit to the sort of subsidiary alliance
Was Syria or Iraq under the Baathists under a subsidiary alliance? Egypt's under Sadat and Mubarak might be said to be. All three states have had different foreign policy approaches, but all three are/were one party states. The Arabs just have not revolted against domestic despotism in the same consistent way.
The Shah acted independently in alliance with the Americans, and the clerics have acted independently against the Americans, but foreign policy orientation is not what Iranians object to.
The Iranian people's fundamental objection was not to the substance of the Shah's foreign policy - it was to the economic costs of his policies, and his tyranny.
These are the same objections that the Iranian people have towards the Iranian government today.
...that America seeks from all its partners, other than a select few countries with which America has fraternal and filial civilizational ties.
Civilisational ties? The educated Iranian classes intellectual value system is rooted in the Enlightenment and post-modernism, just like the West. Even the progressive Islam of Ali Shariati is almost identical to liberation theology.
Fraternal and filial ties? While the Indian elite have many ties to the West, that is not true of the bulk of the Indian population. Iran on the other hand has diaspora connections in the West down to the grassoots, and Iranians continue to be high achievers abroad.
However, few people would argue that Kerensky represented an ideal agent for rapprochement between the West and Communism... and Bazargan is of hardly more consequence than Kerensky in this day and age.
How many Russians can name the movement, or thinkers that Kerensky was associated with?
Shariati, and those around him like Taleghani still mean a great deal.
Yeltsin made no reference to Kerensky, whose administrations was derided by Russians as the proof of the failure of liberal ideas.
Yet people like Khatami and other reformists continue to reference Shariati positively. The first 7 months of the revolution are not looked at with contempt (as was Kerensky), but nostalgically, as the best of times before it all went horribly wrong.
So ineffectual was Bazargan (whom you describe as "popular") at effecting rapprochement that he could not even stop the storming of the US Embassy... he could only resign in protest. He even continued in the Majles thereafter, regarded with some justification as a Western stooge, but not considered threatening enough to be taken seriously.
It is not Bazargan who was personally popular - he was a well respected individual. It was the progressive Islamic movement and its leadership that was hugely popular. Khomeini could not move until Taleghani and Shariati were dead.
You might make the comparison to the relationship between Khomeini and Moussavi in the 1980s. Khomeini was the one with following; Moussavi was somone who followed him who was appointed Prime Minister. If Khomeini had died suddenly, early on, how long would the Khomeinists have survived?
The storming of the embassy was not a popular demonstration that got out of hand. It was a special operation planned by a cell of armed student loyalists of Khomeini, and at his direction.
There were two options - to fight it out with Khomeini, and turn the revolution against itself, or to try and minimise friction, and internally negotiate matters.
The Islamic progressives have almost always chosen the least violent, least confrontational means of resolving differences with their former allies, and although they have paid politically for this lack of ruthlessness, in the long run the reactionary Khomeinist tactics have undermined their legitimacy, while enhancing that of the progressives.
Khatami and Montazeri are a long way from endorsing the ideals of civil and democratic rule that Bazargan supposedly stood for... including Bazargan's stand against the involvement of clerics in all aspects of politics, economy and society.
Again, more than Bazargan it was Shariati and Taleghani who developed the reformist, or progressive position.
The position called for clerics to be actively
involved in all aspects of society as thinkers and activists, but opposed the idea of giving clerics special legal powers, which is the heart of Khomeini's 'velayat-e-faqih'.
Montazeri in fact recently publicly apologised for having supported the concept of velayat-e-faqih for those first eight years in power, and that he felt responsible for all those who had been killed under the system;
http://payvand.com/news/09/sep/1160.html. You can find his site here;
http://www.amontazeri.com
Khatami in public has insisted that he will not oppose the velayat-e-faqih, but it should be permissible to discuss change. However he's made it clear that while he's OK with leaving a clerical office as head of state, he wants to dismantle all of the mechanisms that allow the clerics of the Supreme Leader to control who runs for elections, direct the judiciary and armed forces, etc. In effect, turn him in to a figurehead, while strengthening all directly elected offices such as the parliament, the presidency, mayors and town councils. He has also repeatedly stressed ensuring that the government is never above the law in dealing with citizens.
No Iranian I've heard from, however pro-reform, is confused about the intentions of the US government towards his country. There is a big difference between protesting the hardliners' use of anti-Westernism as a pretext for repression, and trusting in the Americans as honest brokers or desirable partners on the world stage.
Most of the Iranians who are politically conscious are hardened realists when it comes to international affairs between states.
That means they assume *everyone*, whether America, or Iran, or anyone really is out for their own interests - and they're OK with that. They recognise there are areas where the US and Iran can work together, and where they will differ.
Their contention is that Khomeini's anti-American ideology restricted Iran's freedom of movment, and made being anti-Iran an ideological factor in American policy as well. Removing ideology on both sides allows realism to come in to play, and they believe Iran will excel in a realpolitik environment. They regard the ideas of particular countries as bogey men, or special enemies as nonsense.
or at least offering AMU / JNU scholarships to Uighurs (a bit of a risky move in that the Ulema might get ideas above their aukat, but I assume that we can more or less control these sarkari maulana-types, and it is time all the toadying to the left and to the Muslim ulema paid off) etc. 
However, my point is this: even now, we're dealing with a government that has made such alarming compromises on our fundamental national interest that it may well be on its way to giving up Indian territory without even gaining anything. This has already been indicated, as by Sharm el Shaikh, and by the "MMS-Musharraf plan" to make borders "irrelevant" in Kashmir... a sure-shot track to giving up the whole territory of J&K quite inevitably. If that weren't bad enough, what would we get in return for it? America giving up the Indian subcontinent to Chinese dominion, as quite clearly suggested by the "monitoring role" Obama has stated that he favours for China in our region? America walking out of Af-Pak, bribing the TSPA to launch fresh offensives against us on a conventional and sub-conventional level in exchange for allowing the occasional predator mission to take out specifically anti-Western Jihadis? That is exactly what Biden and Jones are suggesting. 
”