Children of Paradise (51 page)

  IV  

R
ESISTANCE

  FOURTEEN  

A C
OMMON
M
AN

I
RAN NEVER HAD A POLITICIAN
like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It had suffered the paternal stewardship of monarchs and learned clerics, aristocrats and scholars; even Mohammad Mossadegh was a patrician sort. All were elites, whether they spoke of social justice, national dignity, or civil society. Ahmadinejad was something else. He was a common man, and a demagogue. The body politic reacted as to some new and potent liquor—some parts of it euphoric, others suspicious, as though watching a normally staid loved one stagger from the dinner table.

Ahmadinejad circled the country, visiting some two thousand towns in two years. He all but threw money into the crowds that greeted him. He pledged federal funds on the spot for a town’s pet project or most glaring need, to uproarious applause. He was like a game show host or a faith healer. He made miracles; he anointed ordinary people with his largesse. He stayed long enough to feel the shining eyes upon him. The state bureaucracy scrambled behind, frantically squeezing budgets and breaking rules so as not to disappoint the hopes he’d raised.

To make good on the president’s impulsive promises required raiding the country’s oil stabilization fund, set up by the Khatami administration in order to float the country’s economy in years when oil prices dropped.
Sometimes the president just ordered the banks to issue more currency. Ahmadinejad didn’t care to look forward or back. Oil was at a premium, and (so he believed) the provincial people loved him.

Ahmadinejad would be associated, particularly in the international press and among the upper classes in Tehran, with the Iranian hinterland. But he was entirely a creature of the capital city. Born in 1956, Ahmadinejad was one of the millions of rural migrants who swelled Tehran under the shah. His family moved there from a village called Aradan when Ahmadinejad was only a baby. His father was a blacksmith, forging iron gates in the economically diverse eastern neighborhood of Narmak. The chip on Ahmadinejad’s shoulder must have been a familiar protrusion among men of his background: internal immigrants, Iranians who had never actually known village life but absorbed their parents’ alienation from the cities they called home.

Ahmadinejad was small, wiry, and cocky, his chin jutting upward in nearly every youthful photograph, as though waiting to deflect a blow. He discovered Shariati during his university years—he stayed close to home, studying engineering in Narmak at a university called Elm va Sanat—and he would devote his political career to his interpretation of Shariati’s radical call for social justice. But unlike many of Shariati’s acolytes, Ahmadinejad swung to the Islamic right rather than the left. Like Soroush, he was attracted to the right-wing anti-Bahai group called the Hojjatieh. He was either the founder or an early member of Elm va Sanat’s Islamic Society, which, also like Soroush, dedicated itself to combating Marxism with Islam.

After the revolution, Ahmadinejad was active in the Cultural Revolution, serving on the committee that purged his university’s faculty and student body. Well before Ali Afshari, he was a member of the national student council, Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat. But when students took over the American embassy, Ahmadinejad balked. The hostage takers hailed from the Islamic Left, and Ahmadinejad from the right: by some accounts he argued that the students should seize the embassy only if they took the Soviet embassy as well. By other accounts he argued that occupying the embassy would lead to lawlessness. In any case, for an ambitious young
revolutionary, the embassy seizure was an opportunity missed. The hostage takers vaulted into Iran’s permanent political class. Ahmadinejad would have to get there the hard way.

As a young man, Ahmadinejad went west. He was just twenty-four when his revolutionary associates offered him political postings in the provinces along Iran’s western borders, where he was charged with helping to put down a Kurdish insurgency and yoke ethnically diverse borderlands to the increasingly repressive central state. In 1993 he was made governor of the sizable, ethnically Azeri province of Ardabil. He was an unpopular governor—a Tehran native whose priorities lay well to the east of Ardabil. He used his post to campaign for Nategh-Nouri, Khatami’s conservative rival for the presidency in 1997, and later came under investigation for diverting local funds to the presidential campaign. When Khatami came to power, his deputy interior minister, Mostafa Tajzadeh, cleaned house, sweeping the old governors out of office and replacing them with reformists. Ahmadinejad would remember Tajzadeh for this.

It must have seemed to Ahmadinejad, when he moved back to Tehran, that the reformists had taken everything. He ran for city council in 1999 but lost; for the parliament in 2000 but lost. According to his biographer,
he was active in those years against Khatami to the point of being a regular speaker at private gatherings of Ansar-e Hezbollah. But it was the victory of the conservative faction called Abadgaran in the municipal elections of 2003 that would restore Ahmadinejad’s ambitions.

Abadgaran was as much a child of the revolution as reform had been. The Basij, the Revolutionary Guard, the hardline seminaries, and other revolutionary institutions had now been around long enough to credential a new class of political hopefuls. These young men and women had marinated in the rhetoric of the early revolutionary period, but not in the complexities of governance. They spoke the language of the past with the zeal of the untried. Now they rebelled as much against the smug paternalism of the right as against the syncretism and perceived impiety of the reformists. They made Ahmadinejad mayor of the vibrant, difficult, teeming city he called home.

• • •

T
HE CITY OF
T
EHRAN BECAME
, for about two years, Ahmadinejad’s problem. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, the underlying machinery of the city did not change. When Karbaschi had set it all in motion—density sales, overbuilding, the casino of construction and property flipping—it seemed an expression of the Rafsanjani faction’s mentality, opaque and even a little ruthless in the name of efficiency and growth. When the reformists, for all their talk of popular participation and political development, failed to replace the Karbaschi machine with something more transparent or fair, it seemed a political failure, a reflection of fecklessness and abstraction. Now came Ahmadinejad, a hardline conservative with a populist bent, a common man who refused to live in the mayoral residence and granted himself only the secretary’s cubby of Karbaschi’s former penthouse office. Ahmadinejad, too, sustained Tehran on density sales.

As they had done so many times before, city planners beseeched the mayor to stop selling building permits. Tehran’s population was about to exceed nine million, which would pose serious problems for earthquake safety and water supply. Ahmadinejad refused. “The city lives because of construction,” one city planner remembers Ahmadinejad telling the city council. “Can you imagine Tehran without construction? Would it be a living city?” With a stroke of a pen, at a single meeting Ahmadinejad threw the planners’ work into chaos by increasing the city’s density by 10 percent beyond what the planners had carefully negotiated over the previous two years.

Ahmadinejad was trained as a traffic engineer, and in the end, arguably, his most lasting achievement as mayor was the construction of turnouts to facilitate U-turns. But he did everything he could to be remembered instead for his devotion to Islam, to the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, and to the values of the traditional lower class from which he came. He would bury the remains of Iran-Iraq War dead in the city’s public squares, he told the public. The city would become a monument to its martyrs. When city dwellers recoiled from this as morbid and manipulative, he assigned the graves to university campuses and parks instead.

Ahmadinejad restricted the programming at the cultural centers Karbaschi had founded, giving them a more Islamic cast, and he announced his priorities by offering generous grants to neighborhood religious groups, mosques, and the Basij. He repaved the streets in poor neighborhoods but not in rich ones, and he cultivated a close relationship between the city management and the Revolutionary Guards. None of this made Ahmadinejad a hero or a villain to the Iranian public, nor, certainly, did it prepare anyone for his star turn as president. In fact, hardly anyone in Tehran knew his name. Only later would a character affix itself to those two years in Tehran’s municipal life—one that was brash and contemptuous of expertise but adept in symbolic politics.

• • •

P
RESIDENT
A
HMADINEJAD
hated economists. They were penny-pinching killjoys who always found reasons not to make the people happy. “
Immediately these people say our decisions raise the people’s expectations and that they are not in accordance with the science of economics,” Ahmadinejad complained. “If your economics does not help meeting the rightful demands of the people, then we hate your economics!”

When the new Iranian president promised to bring the oil money to the people’s tables and to improve the lot of Iran’s lower classes, he did not propose to do so through economic planning or any structural change in the country’s distribution of wealth. Rather, he meant to hand out money. He disbanded the Management and Planning Organization, which was the one governmental redoubt of economists dedicated to solving the country’s deep-seated problems. And he injected billions of dollars in oil revenues directly into the economy. He did it with his rural bequests, his grants to young married couples, his precipitous hikes in wages, and his looting of the country’s savings. There would be no economic planning under Ahmadinejad; only damage control, after the fact.

About a year into his presidency, fifty economics professors wrote an open letter to Ahmadinejad, imploring him to reverse course. He risked squandering the oil surplus and stoking inflation, they protested.
“
Economics, like any other science,” they wrote, in tones at once pedantic and pleading, “is the result of the accumulation of human knowledge, and scientific achievements of economics are used for the advance and prosperity of human societies. For this reason, economics can and must be used in drawing up the government’s economic policies.” Ahmadinejad gleefully discarded their advice.

Liquidity increased by nearly 40 percent in the space of a year. Iranians used this cash to buy imports, which buried local industries and sent prices soaring. Within a year of Ahmadinejad’s election, Iran’s inflation rate was the fourth highest in the world, after Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, and Burma; by the summer of 2008 it topped 28 percent. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad slashed interest rates, a move that encouraged lending, drove the country’s fragile banking sector to the edge of ruin, and contributed to a surreal housing bubble in Iran’s cities. In 2007 and then again in 2008, Tehran real estate prices more than doubled.

The analyst Saeed Laylaz said of Iranians who rented their homes, “One night they slept, and they awoke in the morning and they realized that they were under the poverty line.” Nearly seven hundred thousand urban Iranians fell into poverty in 2006. Inequality worsened for the first time since the Rafsanjani reforms. But Ahmadinejad fancied himself a man of the people, with his thumb in the eye of the reformist elite.

• • •

A
HMADINEJAD APPEARED TO MAKE
foreign policy the way he made fiscal policy: he smashed things and watched indifferently as others picked up the pieces, moaned over the consequences, or tried to divine his motives and knit them into policy. He shocked world opinion by denying the Holocaust and then inviting fellow Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other sinister Westerners to Tehran for a conference celebrating his views. He wrote arrogant, rambling, messianic letters to world leaders.
He even invited German chancellor Angela Merkel to cast off the weight of historical guilt and humiliation unfairly heaped on her great country and join Iran in an alliance against the victors of World
War II. He evinced little to no understanding of diplomacy or world history, and he swept aside all the efforts of his predecessors to find revolutionary Iran a place among nations that was respected if not loved.