Children of Paradise (52 page)

But foreign policy, unlike economic policy, was not then and never had been administered from the pocket of the president. Ahmadinejad’s provocations, his flagrant anti-Semitism, his demagogic style, were surely his own, but Ayatollah Khamenei remained firmly in control of the deep security state, in both its domestic and its international dimensions. If Ahmadinejad’s theatrics provided Iran time and cover of darkness under which to pursue nuclear technology, this was not a vicissitude of factional politics but a rational decision on the part of a largely consistent foreign policy establishment that now saw an American military presence on two borders and understood itself targeted, as a member of an “Axis of Evil,” for regime change. At home, too, the judiciary, the intelligence apparatus, and the militias, all under the command of the Leader’s office, were no more answerable to the president than they had been under Khatami. If the space for free expression constricted, if the reformist parties and media came under pressure, this was not the doing of the president alone. It just so happened that he approved these measures and that there was not much daylight, during Ahmadinejad’s first term, between the security apparatus and the elected government.

And yet, if Khamenei had expected Ahmadinejad to act solely as his deputy, he had severely misjudged the man’s character. No one as impulsive and grandiose as the little man from Narmak could be held entirely in line.
Ahmadinejad undertook the most far-reaching governmental housecleaning since the revolution itself, replacing a reported twenty thousand bureaucrats, including all the bank managers and some forty diplomats. “They were very arrogant,” said Nasser Hadian, a childhood friend of the president’s, about Ahmadinejad and his camp. “They didn’t want to make any compromises. He has stood against the entire political structure in Iran, not inviting any of them, even the conservatives, to be partners. You don’t see them in the cabinet, you don’t see them in political positions.” And for that there was a price to be paid. The conservatives split into two
broad camps: one, ultra-hardline and populist, was linked to the president, and another, known as traditional conservatives, were more seasoned, cautious team players who were ultimately loyal to Khamenei.

• • •

T
HE PRESIDENT’S RELIGIOUS PREDILECTIONS
were eccentric. He dropped references to his personal relationship with the Mahdi, or the vanished twelfth imam and Shiite messiah. He spoke of seeing himself surrounded by light when he addressed world leaders in New York, and of how none of them, while bathed in his aura, could so much as blink. He claimed that the United States had dispatched spies to Iraq and Iran to hunt the Mahdi because they knew his return was imminent and sought to foreclose Iran’s coming state of grace. Traditional Iranian clerics found such talk offensive, self-regarding, and borderline heretical. The ultra-hardline Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi encouraged it.

Mesbah, as the ayatollah was called, had known the president and stoked his spiritual delusions for more than a decade. The authoritarian cleric had an occultist, superstitious streak. He suggested that certain mortals could open direct channels to the Mahdi, who would then speak and act through them. Ahmadinejad was apparently among the anointed. In 2005, Mesbah and his acolytes campaigned for Ahmadinejad and hailed his ascension to the presidency as a divine miracle. For Mesbah, it might as well have been.
In the first year of his presidency alone, Ahmadinejad allocated $3.5 million from the federal budget to Mesbah’s institute in Qom; by 2011 the allocation would reach $7 million.

Skeptics would note that Ahmadinejad’s occult pretensions were as much a political tool as his cash handouts—that they preyed on the ignorant and the desperate, fostering passivity and slavish devotion. As president, Ahmadinejad invested in shrines to the twelfth imam, encouraged the susceptible to see ubiquitous signs of his imminent return, and suggested that his own policies were the work of the exalted hidden world. The country’s first elected lay president since Bani-Sadr had sacralized himself more than any of his cleric predecessors had ever dared to do.

Mesbah’s political aims were no secret. He sought to purge the reformists from power and consolidate religious autocracy. He openly disparaged popular sovereignty, free speech, women’s rights, the separation of powers, and Islamic reform.
The elected institutions, Mesbah believed, served at the pleasure of the Supreme Leader. Because God ruled Iran through the person of the Leader, to complain of despotism was blasphemy. “
We shall wait to see what place these foxes who set claim to be the supporters of reform will occupy in hell,” he proclaimed, and, of participatory democracy: “
It doesn’t matter what the people think. The people are ignorant sheep.” Mesbah held that the government should regulate the content of speech “
just as it checks the distribution of adulterated or contaminated foodstuff.”
He called for the violent elimination of those who disagreed with him.
Ahmadinejad, too, scorned all efforts to establish democracy in Iran as counterrevolutionary. He was as much a tool in Mesbah’s hands as Mesbah was a tool in his.

Mesbah had powerful supporters in the establishment, including the elderly ayatollah who presided over the Guardian Council. But other traditional clerics balked. Not only did they reject, as a matter of doctrine, the notion that the Mahdi meddled in this world from his occultation, let alone that he did so through select mortals, but
they worried that the president and Mesbah undermined Islam by toying with the people’s faith in order to justify Ahmadinejad’s policies.

• • •

T
HERE WOULD BE TWO MIDTERM ELECTIONS
during Ahmadinejad’s first term. The first, in December of 2006, was really two elections in one. Iranians were to elect their city councils on the same day that they elected the Assembly of Experts, the body of high-ranking clerics that would select the next Supreme Leader should anything happen to Khamenei. The Assembly of Experts election was normally a quiet affair, held once every eight years with candidates drawn from preselected lists of elderly ayatollahs. Scheduling it the same day as the city council election was meant to drive voters to the polls. Ahmadinejad further enlivened the scene by
offering his own slates of candidates. For the city councils, it was a front related to Abadgaran and mystifyingly called the Pleasant Aroma of Service. For the Assembly of Experts, Ahmadinejad endorsed Mesbah and a ticket of ultra-hardline scholars associated with him.

Mesbah had been waiting for this. In the fall of 2006, his group put forward a tidal wave of candidates in a bid to transform the assembly. The Guardian Council disqualified more than half of all proposed candidates for the Assembly of Experts, and this time the rejects included not only most of the proffered reformists, but a large number of Mesbah’s students as well. Even so, clerics associated with Mesbah stood a reasonable chance of winning forty of the assembly’s eighty-six seats.

But the electorate rejected both the hardline Islamic scholars and the Pleasant Aroma of Service. Reformists won some 40 percent of all city council seats and even dominated in some cities. The conservative city council candidates who did well were not those associated with Ahmadinejad. Most dramatically, for the Assembly of Experts, Rafsanjani’s vote dwarfed Mesbah’s nearly two to one. This was the first of two midterm elections that would offer clues about Ahmadinejad’s public standing.

• • •

U
NDER
P
RESIDENT
A
HMADINEJAD
, Iran became a tensely coiled country, as much confused as suppressed. The red lines delineating the boundaries of acceptable behavior and discussion had never been drawn with clarity or consistency; now they seemed to be tightening nooselike around a public sphere that had enlarged, despite its difficulties, under Khatami.

Reform was not irreversible, it turned out. Politically undesirable university professors could be fired, and some two hundred were. Students could be punished for their activism, and they were, via a “star” system that marked them for expulsion on political grounds. Ahmadinejad introduced a “Program for Social Safety” that dispatched police vans to city squares to harass improperly dressed women; he pressed legislation that eroded the status of women in marriage and set quotas limiting the numbers of women accepted
to universities in certain fields. By 2008, newspapers associated with Rafsanjani and Karroubi were the last redoubts of the critical press. Karroubi’s political front, called Etemad Melli like its newspaper and consisting of cautious clerics, was the only reformist party still active in politics.

When the reformists stopped to ask themselves how they’d reached this pass, they had to concede one thing to Ahmadinejad. It was, as might be said elsewhere, the economy, stupid. Iran’s economic problems were structural, and they predated both Ahmadinejad and the reformists. The government depended on oil for 65 percent of its revenues. So long as Iranians understood that their country was rich in resources, the have-nots would look in suspicion on the haves. The money was there. It was the people’s birthright. Why, then, did some Iranians live well and others poorly? The very opacity of this arrangement would always leave openings for demagogues. Then there was the fact that economic mismanagement was as old as the Islamic Republic, and probably much older than that.

Oil rendered Iranians dependent on the state, which controlled the resource, and the state independent of its people, who hardly needed to participate in the economy to keep it afloat. The middle class, with its disposable income, its professional expertise in fields like law and medicine, and its entrepreneurial potential, drives productivity in many of the world’s economies, but in Iran it was practically superfluous. If the state had depended for its revenues on a taxable, productive middle class, it might have had to cultivate a relationship of trust and a climate of cooperation with these citizens. But with oil rents, the government saw no necessity or virtue in stimulating productivity.

The numbers told the story. Under Khatami, thanks to an oil boom, poverty had declined, inequality did not rise, and by 2005 the standard of living in Iran was the highest it had been since the mid-1970s. But oil rents tended to create unskilled jobs in sectors like construction. During Khatami’s two terms, unemployment among illiterate men declined from 17 to 8 percent; among men with advanced degrees, it leaped from 15 to 23 percent. And among the most educated women, it was a stunning 43 percent.

The Islamic Republic was becoming a victim of its greatest success.
The postrevolutionary state had done much to promote social mobility, from modernizing the countryside and lowering the rural birthrate to expanding the country’s university system.
More Iranians than ever before climbed into the middle class, but once there, they found themselves adrift. The professions were heavily vetted for political orthodoxy, and there was not much private sector to speak of. Iran was by and large a middle-class country by the time Ahmadinejad took office, but to sustain a middle-class lifestyle required many Iranians to depend on unstable and ultimately unproductive sources of income: informal second jobs, the brokering of deals among third parties, the selling of family property. Middle-class Iranians complained, but even economists dismissed their complaints as so much entitlement or melodrama. The educated middle class was thought to be a prime reformist constituency, and the reformists were out: Ahmadinejad saw no political or economic cost to ignoring or antagonizing it.

Anyway, the president was in luck. He presided over the most dramatic spike in oil prices since the Islamic Revolution. He turned it into liquid cash, and loans upon loans. He’d come into the presidency offering patronage to the poor and spiritual exaltation to the gullible, but he had no interest in addressing the chronic insecurity of Iran’s broad middle class, which, along with everyone else, now faced soaring prices and a real estate bubble. What should have felt like boom years felt more like a recession. When the price of oil declined, as it was sure to, the country would not even have its savings to fall back on.

The economic frustration that Ahmadinejad had tapped into with his 2005 campaign turned strongly against him by 2008. More than half of the deputies in the parliament had signed a letter blaming Ahmadinejad’s policies for rising unemployment and inflation. In a parliamentary election that March, even Ahmadinejad’s political allies could not run from his economic program fast enough, with many of them openly criticizing his contribution to inflation. The president’s conservative critics carried the election by a comfortable margin. The conservative electorate was calling the president to heel.

• • •

B
Y THE TIME
of the 2008 parliamentary election, Mosharekat, once the party of the ruling reformist majority, seemed a relic. It occupied a dilapidated pale brick town house in central Tehran, with a second-floor office designed for the wheelchair-bound visionary Saeed Hajjarian. While in the gleaming glass headquarters of the United Fundamentalist Front, not far from Haft-e Tir Square, candidates who differed by a hair’s breadth tangled in lively and consequential debates about economic policy, Mosharekat theorists gathered for discussions so abstract they threatened to lift off the earth. Was Iran locked in a sultanistic system, or merely a sultanistic situation? Had official lies inured the populace to dishonesty and weakened the country’s ethics? Were human rights enshrined in Islam? All of these were topics for discussion at a forum commemorating the anniversary of Hajjarian’s shooting, but also coinciding with the parliamentary election campaign. One must have imagination, a reformist philosopher intoned at the gathering, without nurturing illusions.

The party still had a handful of members in the parliament, mostly from the provinces. The reformist minority leader, Nouradin Pirmoazen, a thoracic surgeon from a prominent family in Ardabil, happened to be at a conference in the United States when he heard that most of his colleagues, including many incumbents, had been disqualified by the Guardian Council from running for reelection. Pirmoazen spoke out in an interview on Voice of America, objecting that the election would be neither free nor fair. He soon found himself the subject of televised threats from the intelligence minister. Pirmoazen, marooned in Boston, would be one fewer reformist legislator for the fundamentalists to deal with.