Finding the way forward on Iran
Regime’s hypocrisy must be exposed by providing details on the billions held by the Revolutionary Guard and the supreme leader
ast May an article in The New York
asked, “Is Iran a democracy or a dictatorship?” After more than a week of protests in as many as 80 Iranian cities, it’s safe to say we have the answer. Again.
So much was apparent from the speed with which the demonstrations, initially about the rising price of eggs, morphed into calls for “death to the dictator”, complete with the burning of images of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. So much was apparent, too, from the force with which the regime cracked down on what it branded “sedition”. Real democracies don’t live in fear of their own people.
It’s too soon to say whether the protests have been stamped out, at least for now. But it’s not too soon to start rethinking the way we think about Iran.
For the most part, Western attention focuses on what Iran has — centrifuges, ballistic missiles, enriched uranium — as well as what it does — fund Hezbollah, assist Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, arm Al Houthis in Yemen, or imprison the occasional British or US citizen. Administrations of both parties have spent most of their Iran energies trying to cajole or coerce Tehran to relinquish and desist, without much success.
Not nearly enough attention, however, goes to the question of what Iran is. This isn’t just about whether it’s a dictatorship. What kind of dictatorship? To get the answer right is to know what kind of pressure can change its behaviour or break its back.
The conventional wisdom is that it’s a dictatorship with democratic characteristics, and that it’s riven between hardliners who want to make it more repressive and militant and reformists who want to make it less. Western policy, according to this analysis, should do what it can to encourage and reward the latter at the expense of the former.
But the analysis fails to explain why, for instance, the number of executions in Iran rose under the ostensibly reformist leadership of President Hassan Rouhani. It doesn’t account for Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif laying a wreath in honour of Emad Mugniyeh, the Hezbollah man responsible for killing hundreds of Americans. And it doesn’t explain Tehran’s hyperaggressive foreign policy in the wake of the 2015 nuclear deal, which was supposed to inaugurate its opening to the rest of the world.
A better way of describing Iran’s dictatorship is as a kleptotheocracy, driven by impulses that are by turns doctrinal and venal. Note how quickly the provincial protesters turned their sights on the supreme leader: Maybe it’s because they know better than most how thoroughly he’s fleecing them. As Steve Stecklow and his colleagues at Reuters reported in 2013, a supposedly charitable foundation controlled by Khamenei, known as Setad, had assets worth an estimated $95 billion (Dh348.87 billion).
“Setad built its empire on the systematic seizure of thousands of properties belonging to ordinary Iranians,” the Reuters investigation noted. “The organisation now holds a court-ordered monopoly on taking property in the name of the supreme leader, and regularly sells the seized properties at auction or seeks to extract payments from the original owners.”
What’s true of Setad goes for other