Washington invaded Iraq with a declared aim to remold the region and its politics. You would have to be obsessed by anti-Americanism not to accept that those politics are being changed. Today’s parliamentary elections in Iran are taking place against a background where the talk of democracy, the frustration of the young with the old theocratic ways, the expectations for the future are all of an order quite different than the mood of a few years ago.
But if you actually look at the specifics on the ground, the changes are far less clear-cut and optimistic. Iraq is hovering between a democracy which the Shiites want and a civil war which the occupying powers, and the UN, fear. Iran’s elections have been made a mockery of by the exclusion of 2,500 of the leading reformist candidates by the religious authorities.
Look at Iran, the most democratic and the most politically sophisticated state in the Middle East, for all the Western assumptions that it is a theocratic tyranny. For some time it has also been clear that the political leadership has wished to rejoin the world community and that even the religious heads have accepted the need to mend fences with the West, including the “Great Satan” America. Witness the approaches made by Tehran to Europe and indirectly to Washington, especially in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and the initial success of the European triumvirate of Britain, Germany and France in gaining cooperation over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and you could say (as Colin Powell does) that the way is now open to closer engagement. Look on the other hand, as the conservatives in Washington do, to the more recent evidence that Tehran is still not coming clean on its nuclear plans and that the latest elections are deeply flawed, and you could argue that confrontation and international pressure is the best tactic.
In reality neither assumption is right. If you regard Iran in the same way that you might view any other medium-sized nation such as Japan or France, you can see that its main international thrust has been to become a regional power, and its major threat as it has seen it has come from hostile neighbors such as Iraq and Israel backed by a US whose president deliberately singled them out as a member of the “axis of evil”.
In those terms, a huge opportunity was missed not to build on the country’s desire to join in the anti-terrorist coalition post-Sept. 11. Just as in Iraq, Iran wanted a change in regime in Afghanistan and it wanted to take a seat at the top table when the postwar decisions were made. In both cases it was kept out of it.
In that light, of course it is going to want to seek and keep an ability to develop nuclear weapons. Whether it actually wants to make them is another question. And, of course, it wants to continue a dialogue with the West as a parallel and possibly alternative way of ensuring its security. There’s nothing peculiarly new or devious about the way it is behaving. Those have long been its considerations.
So with the issue of democracy. The balance of power within the Iranian regime has long been carefully balanced between conservatives, operating through the Guardian Council and the internal religious security apparatus, and the reformers operating through the political process and the traditional departments of state such as the Foreign Office and armed services. The election is one further round in this struggle. But it is a round made more complicated not only by the exclusion of reformist candidates but also by the failure of President Khatami to sort out the economic problems facing the country. If the elections result — as seems likely —in a conservative victory on a very low turn-out, the reformers will only have themselves to blame. To view it through Washington’s prism of liberal democracy versus theocratic oppression misses the point.
What the result ought to do, of course, is to give the West pause for thought. Iraq has shown clearly enough the dangers of outside intervention in the Middle East. For a long century, the Middle East has suffered from the meddling of the West, always claiming that it is for the countries’ own benefit. It has nearly always ended in misery for the populations and instability for the region. We can be interested observers of Iran’s internal struggles. We can, and should, proclaim our belief in democracy. But we cannot determine the result. Nor should we try.
