Iran Awakens Yet Again
Iran, its internal fissures exposed as never before, is teetering again on the brink of change. For months now, I've been urging another look at Iran, beyond dangerous demonization of it as a totalitarian state. Seldom has the country looked less like one than in these giddy June days.
I wandered in a sea of green ribbons, hats, banners and bandannas to a rally at which Ahmadinejad was mocked as "a midget" and Moussavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, sporting a floral hijab that taunted grey-black officialdom, warned the president that: "If there is vote rigging, Iran will rise up."
That stirring has deep roots. The last century taught that Iran's democratic impulse is denied only at peril. Ever since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, the quest for representative government has flared. Moussavi is dour but seen as a man of integrity, the anti-Ahmadinejad who can usher back the 1979 revolution's promise rather than incarnate its repressive turn.
Rahnavard, a professor of political science, is not dour. She has emerged as a core figure in Friday's vote through her vigorous call for women's rights and the way she goaded Ahmadinejad into a rash attack on her academic credentials during his no-holds-barred televised debate last week with Moussavi.
Iran's democracy is incomplete but vigorous to the point of unpredictability. Nobody knows who will triumph in an election that chooses the second most powerful figure in Iran under the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but some things are already clear.
The first is that the frank ferocity of politics here in recent weeks would be unthinkable among U.S. allies from Cairo to Riyadh, a fact no less true for being discomfiting. The problem with Iran caricatures, like Benjamin Netanyahu's absurd recent description of the regime as a "messianic, apocalyptic cult," is that reality -- not least this campaign's -- defies them.
The second is that while Ahmadinejad still marshals potentially victorious forces, including the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia, he now faces a daunting array of opposition ranging across the political spectrum.
If his attack on Rahnavard was rash, his broadside in the same debate against Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the regime's eminence grise, looks like recklessness. It has ushered this election into the inner sanctum of authority. That's a transgression Ahmadinejad may not survive.
Rafsanjani, a former president, was so incensed by Ahmadinejad's accusations of Mafia-like corruption that he responded with a blistering letter to Khamenei, who's supposed to sit above the fray. The president's suggestion that corruption was endemic to the revolution also angered the Qom clerical establishment, which responded with its own dissenting letter: How dare Ahmadinejad defile the very system?
Why the sudden turbulence? Here we come to the third critical characteristic of this campaign. Radicalism in the Bush White House bred radicalism in Iran, making life easy for Ahmadinejad. President Obama's outreach, by contrast, has unsettled the regime.
With Lebanon denying an electoral victory to Hezbollah, the oil-driven Iranian economy in a slump, and America seeking reconciliation with Muslims, the world now looks a little different.
Moussavi's attacks on the "exhibitionism, extremism and superficiality" of Ahmadinejad's foreign policy resonate.
Rafsanjani believes in a China option for Iran: a historic rapprochement with the United States that will at the same time preserve a modified regime. I also think that's possible -- and desirable -- and that Khamenei's margin for resisting it has just narrowed. So, too, has the margin for the foolishness of anti-Iran hawks.