Persian mutability was both the bane and the pleasure of my work as an Iranian-targets officer in the CIA's clandestine service. An Iranian could appear one day as a hirsute, pro-Khomeini revolutionary, the next as a clean- shaven, pro-Western democrat who never really believed those chestthumping, anti-American chants. Finding the truth behind such changes of heart is difficult, especially for Americans, who like their enemies constant. There are good reasons why many Persians are philosophically flexible, but that historical insight won't help U.S. policymakers wrestling with contradictory signals from Tehran.
Mercifully, the Islamic Republic isn't as opaque as the former Soviet Union: We don't have to scrutinize the mullahs lining up for Friday prayers to analyze the indices of power. What Iranians lack in consistency, they make up in volubility. Persian journalists, editors, and intellectuals -- whose differences often reflect those among the ruling clergy -- love to spit at one another in print. Iranian presidents, dissident clerics, even intelligence ministers sometimes write illuminating pamphlets and books. Parliamentary debates are regularly raucous. Though the clergy is a tightknit club rarely penetrated by even the most dedicated lay Islamic revolutionaries, reliable mullah gossip gets around.
Amid all the usual anti-American clerical chatter, an interesting signal came on December 14, when Iranian president Mohammad Khatami expressed his wish for a "dialogue" between Iran and the "great American people" and raised hopes in Washington and Tehran that the U.S.-Iranian confrontation might finally be ending. Then on January 7, in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Khatami repeated his wish for a friendly unofficial dialogue between the Iranian and American peoples. Though other clerics -- notably Iran's revolutionary leader, All Khameneh'i -- unceasingly refer to the United States as "the Great Satan," Khatami often uses kinder descriptions. The Iranian president's recent appeals lead one to wonder: Will the real Iran please stand up? What is the American government to make of a clerical regime that oscillates between calls for an Islamic alliance against the United States and appeals to comity among nations? Specifically, what should Washington do to help those inside Iran who want to reestablish civil, if not diplomatic, relations?
Khatami's election to the presidency on May 23, 1997, convulsed the ruling clerical establishment. Khatami took an astonishing 69 percent of the vote. Though the clergy in general was well aware that the Iranian people weren't happy, Khameneh'i hadn't realized the depth of popular resentment and anger against his regime. Instead, confident of victory, he had held a free election, to the surprise of many inside Iran and out. The regime's preferred candidate, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, the speaker of the parliament, was trounced in every major city, including both Qom and Mashhad, Iran's most important clerical seats of learning.
Khatami himself was shocked by his election. A former minister of cultural guidance (1982-92), he was little known around the country, though he'd developed a following in literary circles for his efforts to advance freedom of expression. The preferred candidate of the intelligentsia, the author of thoughtful little books about the cultural collision between Islam and the West, Khatami didn't seem to burn with a desire to be president. Nor did the regime fear him: The cleric-controlled candidate-review board, which vets would-be presidential candidates and eliminates most of them, cleared him to run. Among his friends, Khatami was known for neither boldness nor courage. When hard-core revolutionary forces attacked him in 1992 for allowing the production of controversial films and books, Khatami put up a fairly feeble fight before resigning. A considerate family man with an unassuming presence, he never displayed the talent for realpolitik that catapulted so many mullahs into power.
The very lack of that quality, however, aided him in the presidential campaign. Though a member of the clerical elite, Khatami was seen by the Iranian people as a political outsider, a mullah who wasn't unha, one of " them," the clerical nomenklatura.
To the dismay of Khameneh'i's crowd, a cult of Khatami developed among university students, junior clerics, women, and the poor. It is essential to realize that the vast majority of those who supported him voted not for Khatami but against Khameneh'i's regime. Khatami's vague but sincere campaign promise to build a more democratic nation of laws, where the young toughs in the Morals Police would no longer harass people for insufficient " Islamic" rectitude, struck a chord throughout the nation. Persians, a fun- loving, witty, somewhat naughty people, were tired of being bored out of their minds. They were tired of the Islamic Republic's dreary economy. Many Iranian women, even those from poor traditional homes, wanted a regime that treated them with greater equity and kindness. The revolution had made war on the softer, poetry-loving side of the Iranian character, and now Iranians were voting in record numbers for a soft-spoken mullah who distanced himself from an intolerant and corrupt regime.
Khatami unquestionably has the people behind him; Khameneh'i has everything else. The Revolutionary Guard Corps, the mullahs' praetorians; the Basij, the Ministry of Interior's security force; the army, the courts, and the state prosecutors all are under Khameneh'i's command. Equally important, the mullahs' money men, the new-age bazaaris who run the semi-public foundations and nationalized industries, give their allegiance to Khameneh'i or former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, still an immensely powerful and wealthy man. With the coercive powers of the state arrayed against him, Khatami is at best "a knife without a handle" -- journalist Oriana Fallaci's description of Mehdi Bazargan, the Republic's first popularly elected leader, overthrown in 1979 by the revolution's hard core.
Yet the ruling mullahs cannot ignore the popular will -- at least not so early in President Khatami's term. Although the Islamic Republic is a theocracy, where Muslim divines hold ultimate authority, it is also a democracy, however illiberal and truncated in form. Since the Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989, the vox populi has been gaining ground.
This places the lackluster Khameneh'i at a disadvantage. Even his most ardent supporters don't claim Khomeini's successor shares the imam's charisma. The mullahs know that their power depends, instead, on the young men who make up the security forces and is therefore fundamentally unstable. The average Iranian male is 20 years old. He doesn't remember the revolution. He experienced neither the intoxicating magic of Khomeini nor the brutal comradeship of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. Unlike his father, he views the clergy with little regard and less interest. He knows only the ennui of the last 10 years. At all costs, Khameneh'i and the revolutionary hard core want to avoid a head-on collision with Khatami that might test the loyalty of the forces on whom the regime depends.
So the mullahs, feeling caged, attack instead the president's friends and supporters. The mayor of Tehran, Gholamhosein Karbaschi, a powerful and popular ally of Khatami, is accused of corruption. Ibrahim Yazdi, the revolution's first foreign minister and one of the country's most dogged liberal dissidents, is jailed. Anti-Khameneh'i intellectuals and student leaders are pummeled. Commonly referred to as Sayyed-e Mazlum, "Mr. Oppressed," Khatami is already seen as the victim of a Khameneh'i-led conspiracy.
Again, however, the regime has misplayed its hand. Khameneh'i's multi- pronged offensive against Khatemi's winning coalition has largely immunized the president politically. The revolutionary leader, not the president, will probably take most of the blame for the current government's failure to right the economy. Confronted with a worldwide oil glut likely to last several years, Iran, which is dependent on oil for its well-being, is in serious trouble. If the Saudis continue to force down the price of oil to gain market share, the Iranians will have to follow suit even though they lack the extra capacity needed to maintain their revenues (hence, the urgent importance of new oil and gas deals with foreign firms). A significant drop in state expenditures could provoke widespread social unrest.
Khatami is in a difficult position. He is no clerical counterrevolutionary, but to maintain his popularity, he must continue to define himself in opposition to Khameneh'i -- without undermining the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. Under the Republic's constitution, any attack on Khameneh'i's authority is treasonous. Only recently, Khameneh'i accused Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, Iran's preeminent dissident cleric, of treason for declaring that neither Khameneh'i nor his office is sacrosanct.
Montazeri's attacks on the revolutionary leader may be more personal than philosophical: Montazeri was Khomeini's first chosen successor and loathes those who dethroned him. But the dissident's opinion of the ruling elite is common among clerics, who traditionally have preferred to see their kind maintain a certain distance from politics. And Montazeri has always had the common touch, a gift for knowing and voicing the poor man's thoughts. Disenchanted revolutionary mullahs, conservative clerics, student leaders at the University of Tehran, intellectuals, and the man in the street are all now expressing with ever greater clarity their distaste for Khameneh'i's authoritarian rule. President Khatami's statements about the need for a more open Islamic society and a "dialogue" with the United States reinforce -- though probably not intentionally -- Khameneh'i's mounting anxiety about his legitimacy.
Is Khatami, then, Iran's Gorbachev, a mullah who will overturn the revolution even as he tries to save it? He is unquestionably a reformer and, in the clerical context, a modernist. An intellectually honest man, Khatami recognizes that the West is, and will be, the dominant civilization in the world, and that Iran must borrow the West's ideas as well as its technology if the regime is to survive. Unusually for a mullah, he doesn't deny that the West has done a better job than Islam of protecting certain human rights. That Khatami even comes close to defining human rights as we do is a significant step away from both traditional and revolutionary Islam, where " obligations" to God and His Holy Law define the social contract. Khatami believes that a properly paternalistic Islamic government is the best guarantor of human dignity, social justice, and religion, but he doesn't claim that Islam has all the answers, as Muslim militants usually do.
How substantially Khatami would alter the Islamic Republic if he could is hard to say. The president insists he wants to wage a "cultural revolution," to forge some sort of clericalism with a human face. He wants -- above all else -- to prove that Islam can successfully compete against the West. But with only the power of the pulpit and the threat of resignation behind him, Khatami can effect bureaucratic changes slowly, if at all. He may speak out for a more open society, but Khameneh'i can unleash the Morals Police against "improperly" attired women or dissident intellectuals whenever he believes the president has gone too far.
In fact, it is Khatami's lack of power that makes him unlikely to become Iran's Gorbachev. He simply doesn't have the means to gut his own system. More important, the primary impetus for reform in Iran isn't Khatami or the growing ranks of dissident clergy. It's the people. The clerical regime is lucky Khatami won the election. His victory -- like the recent triumph of Iran's World Cup-bound soccer team, which provoked jubilant, distinctly un- Islamic celebrations -- provided an outlet for frustrations that in the past have led to riots. However long the reign of the ayatollahs lasts -- a few months, or many years -- Khatami has probably added a little to its lifespan.
The 1997 elections let the evil genie of democracy out of the bottle. With Khomeini's charisma buried, no other force is likely again to deflect Iran from evolving into a more democratic society. Khameneh'i and the other politicized clerics, who've grown accustomed to their privileged position as intermediaries between God and man, will try mightily to break the advance of democracy and its detestable partner, a laical society where church and state aren't one. But the odds are against them.
As Khatami knows well, Western ideas have poured into Iran for over a century. They have penetrated into every clerical school, university, urban peasant slum, and village. Through books, newspapers and magazines, foreign radio and television, and now the Internet (in the Middle East, only Israel and Turkey may have more Internet addicts than Iran), democratic ideas have reached millions. After two revolutions, four shahs, one imam, and other lesser mortals, Iranians have pondered and tested the democratic idea as no other Middle Eastern people has save the Turks. They haven't got it right yet, but they are trying.
As President Khatami's CNN interview revealed, he is probably too much a mullah, and too timid, to advance a foreign policy that would please the United States. Nonetheless, Washington should wish the president well. He is that rarity in a land whose religions have so clearly delineated Good and Evil in theory and so muddled them in practice: a moderate cleric, the very thing the Reagan administration searched for but couldn't find. In contemplating what it might do to support Khatami, the Clinton administration should remember Bazargan and Brzezinski in Algiers in 1979. Though the first and last liberal prime minister of the Islamic Republic eventually would have fallen to the revolution's hard core, his meeting with President Carter's national security adviser hastened the date. Khatami may believe that the Islamic Republic could survive a rapprochement with the United States, but it's doubtful Khameneh'i does. Clerical Iran stands essentially on two pillars: antiAmericanism and the chador. Remove either one and the regime will probably collapse.
A simple way of understanding this truth is to imagine Khameneh'i shaking the hand of an unveiled Madeleine Albright and offering his salutations to the American president and people. Even in a country as duplicitous as the Islamic Republic, where family ties, human decency, and greed often make mincemeat of revolutionary ideals, there are limits. Khameneh'i is unlikely to risk more normal relations with the United States unless a correlation of forces inside the country demands it. If it does, the ruling clergy might try to co-opt improving relations with America as a means of rebuilding its support among the people.
For the time being, Khatami and Khameneh'i are probably operating more or less in tandem, playing good mullahbad mullah for the crowd. Painfully, the revolutionary leader is adjusting to the people's rejection of his presidential candidate. It helps that Khatami and Khameneh'i have been fairly close, cooperative, and mutually respectful for years. Both men passionately believe in the Islamic revolution and a vanguard role for the clergy. Khameneh'i probably gave his blessing to the president's recent appeal for " cultural dialogue" with Americans in hopes of exploiting the resulting goodwill and optimism at home and abroad. If Khatami, with his considerable international prestige, can diminish the U.S.-led opposition to the Islamic Republic, then Khameneh'i will play along. If Khatami is successful, then Khameneh'i and the entire clerical ruling class can avoid what they fear most: being forced by Iran's economic and social troubles to risk a direct dialogue with the United States.
Americans should remember that Khomeini called this country "the Great Satan" for cause. America, like the satanic Tempter in the Qur'an, is ever whispering into the believer's ear, tempting him with worldly pleasures. The allure of America today in Iran is strong thanks to the revolution's failure, but the Islamic hard core sees an end to anti-Americanism as poison.
Khomeini once had to swallow poison, when he allowed Rafsanjani and Khameneh'i to sue for peace in the Iran-Iraq War. Khameneh'i may decide that he too must take a little drink to save the revolution. If he does, and Khatami sends a messenger to America, Washington should of course respectfully respond.
But Khatami -- for his own sake -- should be the one to take the lead. Though well intended, American approaches via the Swiss aren't going to open up Iran. If we offer the clerics concessions -- for example, agreeing to the construction of pipelines across Iran from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf -- they will of course accept them, and say thank you, and ask for more.
In any future engagement, we should be wary of counsel encouraging Washington to use a series of "confidence-building measures" to smooth the way toward better U.S.-Iranian relations. It isn't a lack of trust that separates Washington and Tehran, nor is it Israel and the Jewish lobby, as Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Murphy, and James Schlesinger suggest. It is ideas. Islamic militancy and the Western tradition are like fire and water. Though there are certainly unexplored ways for the United States and Iran to pursue common interests (for example, reviving opposition to Saddam Hussein in northern Iraq), we shouldn't confuse mutual profit with moderation. When need be, clerical Iran has always been willing to deal with the devil (witness Bud McFarlane and Oliver North).
If Tehran says it wants to change the status quo, Washington should not counter with a list of conditions. It should make only one stipulation: Before a dialogue can begin, the U.S. embassy in Tehran must reopen. For as soon as U.S.-Iranian relations are restored, the Islamic revolution, if not the Islamic Republic, is over. The Nixon Center's Peter Rodman makes a good argument that radical anti-Western ideologies aren't necessarily undermined by diplomatic relations with Western powers -- the Soviets lasted decades -- but in the case of Iran, he's wrong.
In 1979, Khomeini's "students" took U.S. diplomats hostage to prevent Bazargan and the revolution's moderate forces from normalizing relations. Ever since, that seizure -- the triumph of Good over Evil -- has remained pivotal to the revolutionary identity. But as Iran's hard-core rulers know well, the yearly celebrations of that "victory" have drawn ever-smaller crowds.
If our embassy reopens, power will effectively pass to Bazargan's spiritual heirs. Once it does, the other difficult U.S.-Iranian issues -- Iran's frozen assets, terrorism, the Arab-Israeli peace process, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, Salman Rushdie, etc. -- can be dealt with one by one. (And in negotiations over particular issues, the Iranians may do better than they think. Though Washington's charges against Iran are true, they aren't always convincing. Tehran definitely wants to acquire nuclear weapons. You would, too, if you lived next to Saddam Hussein and had lost nearly one million men to his aggression.)
If Khatami and Khameneh'i really believe that the Islamic revolution is an undeniable, permanent fact reflecting the will of the Iranian people -- and Khatami emphatically said he did in the CNN interview -- then they have nothing to fear from restoring official relations with Washington. The United States should challenge them to do precisely that. Salaam, the most progressive of Iran's revolutionary newspapers, has suggested that a national referendum should determine whether to restore diplomatic relations with the United States. We should encourage Khatami and Khameneh'i to prove their faith in the great Iranian people.
If Tehran refuses the offer, Washington should hold firm. Though the "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran hasn't been a resounding success -- the Clinton administration has replaced the Roman rule of "divide and conquer" with " unite and avoid" -- the policy hasn't yet proved a failure. The clerical regime and Paris constantly rail against it -- a sign we're doing something right.
In the case of Iran, the primary weakness of containment is the discrepancy between U.S. rhetoric and will. French, Russian, and Malaysian energy companies sign a $ 2 billion deal to develop Iranian natural gas that ought to trigger U.S. sanctions against them, and Washington does little to show its displeasure. There are few things in life more debilitating than to make a threat, then fail to follow through. Particularly in the Middle East, where awe is the sine qua non of politics, being seen as "wobbly" is fatal. The United States would be better off with no sanctions policy than one ignored.
Fortunately, Iran's oil and gas industry remains heavily dependent on U.S. and British parts (the United Kingdom, though wobbly, hasn't left our side). Refurbishing or replacing Iran's decades-old piping, pumping, and drilling equipment to match European specs will be an extremely expensive undertaking. Iran's overtaxed electrical grids are mostly of old American and third-rate East European manufacture.
Foreign governments and businessmen who want to make money in Iran are still wary of a resurgence of U.S. resolve. That caution will evaporate, however, if the Clinton administration doesn't demonstrate soon that opposing our foreign policy is costly. Nor should the administration and Congress take the easy route in expressing their dissatisfaction. Sanctioning Russia and Malaysia will accomplish little. Punishing France, however -- the French government, that is, not just the "privatized" oil company Total, which has been preemptively selling off its American assets -- will send a clear signal to the European oil and gas companies, which have the financial and technical resources to enlarge significantly Iran's oil and gas production. If we effectively harass an ally that has crossed us, then Tehran will know we are deadly serious.
Khatami's December 14 and January 7 appeals for dialogue should have reinvigorated the administration's containment policy. Though the Iranian president is a decent man as clerics go, he didn't reach out to "the great American people" from kindness or pity. Certain former U.S. officials and American journalists may not see the correlation of forces working against Iran. Khatami does. He knows that the Islamic Republic cannot prosper, or perhaps even survive, if "the Great Satan" continues to isolate his country. His salutations were unquestionably a confession of weakness, not strength.
The mullahs are at war with their own history and culture. If Khatami saves the Islamic Republic from the hard core -- or, more likely, popular pressures buckle the regime -- the Middle East will never be the same.
The historian Bernard Lewis has remarked that the Middle East is in a battle between Kemalism and Khomeinism. Turkish fundamentalists are shaking the foundations of the secular state erected by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk after World War I. Islamic militants may yet overturn Ataturk's legacy, which has given Turkey more democracy, popular legitimacy, and rule of law than any other Muslim country has enjoyed. However, if the Turkish secularists hold firm, and the Islamic Republic of Iran gives way, millions of Muslims in the Middle East threatened by, or advocating, Islamic militancy will see that radical Islam's triumph is not inevitable. Secular government, the bedrock of Western civil society, could then gain ground. Iran would likely become again what few policymakers in Washington and clerics in Tehran expect: a powerful American ally in the Muslim world. And this time around, Iranian-American friendship would be built on something far firmer than the glory of the peacock throne.
Edward G. Shirley is the pseudonym of a former Iranian-targets officer in the CIA's clandestine service. He is the author of Know Thine Enemy, A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997).