Four Myths About Iran's Clerical Regime

Is Ahmadinejad an anti-imperialist, or really a deceptive populist? Let's address the illusions that lead people to support the Iranian president and his regime.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979, with its original demands for national independence, democracy, political freedom, and social justice, was one of the most important events of the 20th century.

It was initiated by secular intellectuals, men and women, writers, artists, academics, students, civil servants, and workers. Yet, paradoxically it gave rise to a repressive and religious obscurantist regime.

Years of suppression by the Shah’s regime had left a vacuum that was effectively used by the clergy. Khomeini’s rhetoric from exile fooled us into thinking that the clergy would be engaged only in religious and spiritual matters and that the democratic demands of the Iranian people would be respected. The takeover of the American Embassy by Khomeini’s followers and the Iraqi invasion created an illusion that the clerical oligarchy was progressive and anti-imperialist.

In the incredible and lengthy three decades of Islamist rule in Iran, the country regressed in all aspects of life – the political, the social, the cultural, and the economic – and the Islamic regime itself went through various phases of transformation.

In the first phase, which coincided with the Iran-Iraq war and the increasing influence of Islamist militarists, the regime consolidated its power by co-opting or eliminating all opposition.

The second phase, following Khomeini’s death, was eight years of the neo-liberal policies of Rafsanjani – himself a billionaire cleric – under whose leadership a new class of capitalists emerged, consisting of clerics, their family members, and military/Islamic Guard officers. The gap between the rich and the poor widened extensively. Many Islamists who were waiting to go to heaven discovered heaven on earth in north Tehran.

The third phase was eight years of another cleric, Khatami, with the promise of reform. Although no major reform took place, the relatively lax political atmosphere revitalized the civil society on the one hand and angered the fundamentalists and the far right on the other.

The fourth phase started in 2005, and a military-clerical alliance pushed back the “traditional right” clerics and established the most obscurantist version of Islamic fundamentalism in post-revolutionary Iran with the election of Ahmadinejad as president. With the collapse of Khatami’s reformist agenda, the marginalized masses had rallied around the crude populism of Ahmadinejad.

Among other things, Ahmadinejad and his associates are firm believers in their mission to expedite the return of the Shi’i messiah, Mahdi, who they believe resides in a well in the village of Chamkaran near Qum. A cabinet member regularly drops a copy of Ahmadinejad’s policies in the well to get his approval (this is not a joke).

Each of these phases attracted attention from various individuals and groups in the West. Rafsanjani attracted that of the neo-liberal right and those interested in investing in Iran. Khatami attracted that of the liberal intellectuals in the West and those Iranians who had illusions of the regime reforming itself. Ahmadinejad, with his anti-Israeli, anti-American rhetoric, gained the support of a portion (not all) of the left intellectuals in the West.

Focusing on the present, I want to decode and discuss the myths that lead certain individuals in the face of American and Israeli threats to support, implicitly or explicitly, Ahmadinejad and the regime. What are these myths?