07/01/09 – Dilip Hiro – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're also streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio.
And I'm very happy to welcome back to the show Dilip Hero, he's the author of five books on Iran.
The latest is called The Iranian Labyrinth, Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and its Furies.
His most recent article at AntiWar.com, it's in the Tom Englehart archives there at original.antiwar.com slash Englehart.
It's called The Weeks of Living Dangerously, The Clash of Islam and Democracy in Iran.
Welcome back to the show.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
My pleasure.
So this is a really interesting article.
You really kind of give us a real background of the history and the politics of Iranian civilization since the revolution and the various clashing cultural forces that play between the Ayatollahs and the young and that kind of thing.
So I guess I'd just like to give you carte blanche to sort of tell us what you think is important for us to understand about who the Iranian people are, what that society is really like.
And, and then, you know, we can get into the actual conflict of the election and recent events.
Absolutely.
I think basically what happens, and this is a kind of a newspaper headline, all revolutions have problems when they get to be about 20 to 25 years old.
Because what happens is that the new generation which has come up after the revolution doesn't really know what was the situation before the revolution happened.
And that particular job is supposed to be done by the education system.
Because after every major revolution, education textbooks are changed and this new system tries to socialize young and coming up generation into what it was before, why things are better now.
Now, of course, this is one of the revolutions in Iran.
But quite simply, revolution means that all the established power structure of a country is completely overthrown.
And that's basically what happened in Iran.
Of course, I remember something very interesting, which is that all the revolutions before the Iranian revolution were secular revolutions.
And they were focused on their cross revolution to change the property and class relations in society.
Iran's revolution was not like that.
Iran's revolution was based in religion.
Now, this may come as a big surprise to most people, but of course, even if you go back to the, I'm talking about the last century, I'm not going back to the French revolution, because the French revolution was anti-clerical.
But if you go back to the last century, 1910, the Mexican revolution was the first one, then the Bolshevik revolution and so on.
So I think what happened was, that's where I come to the Iranian history.
There are two things to keep in mind.
One is that 90% of Iranians, 98% are Muslim.
Amongst them, 90% of the total population are Shiite Islam, and only 8% are Sunni.
Now, in Shiite Islam, the mullahs, or what they call ayatollahs, or whatever, they have independent existence from the state.
If you take the Sunni state like Egypt, there the preachers are basically civil servants of the state.
Turkey is the same.
But in Shiite country, you have an independent base for the religious organizations, religious leaders.
And that was what happened that in the days of the Shah, a conflict arose between the religious side and the Shah of Iran, who was nominally a Shiite Muslim, but he was secular, he was totally aligned with America in the Cold War, and that was a big gap.
And in that gap came in an ayatollah called Khomeini, not Khamenei, Ruhullah Khomeini.
He acted in a very, shall I say, innovative way.
He combined Shiite Islam with nationalism and anti-imperialism.
Now, that's something quite amazing to do.
And so, let me give you one quick example.
In Shiite Islam, martyrdom is to be desired, i.e., if you die in the name of Islam, then you go to heaven and interesting things happen to you.
It doesn't matter whether you believe it or not, but you have to accept this belief which is prevalent in Iranian society.
And so, what he would do when the Shah's soldiers started to shoot people and kill them, in Islam, you have a 40-day mourning.
On the 40th day of the death of somebody, then you have a procession or a memorial service.
And so, what Khomeini would do is, when the Shah's soldiers killed people in demonstrations, then he would call on people on the 40th day to come out and demonstrate in a big way.
And then more people would be shot, and so the next 40 days you get still a bigger demonstration.
You see, and that is how he built up the momentum.
You see, the Shia in Islam and martyrdom is a very important aspect to understand.
The second thing that he did was he combined not only the religious people, but also leftists, secular people, Marxists of various shapes.
He also combined them to have one single objective.
One simple and powerful objective.
Throw away the Shah of Iran.
Throw away the dynasty of the Shah of Iran.
Now that's a very radical platform on which to combine so many disparate organizations, religious, secular, and the Marxists.
All of them, they want to get rid of the Shah.
And that achievement was supposed to be superhuman, but it came about.
But that's the background.
Now, what's happening is that, of course, the young generation would come up in Iran.
I mean, they don't remember, of course, they were never around.
And the education system has not actually explained or communicated to them how bad the Shah's regime was.
See, that's one.
Secondly, in this day and age, it's very difficult for any regime, whether it's the religious regime or secular regime or territorial or democratic, to have a firewall for the people.
We live in the age of internet.
We live in the age of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and so on and so forth.
And that is something which again goes against the Mullahs, because the Mullahs would like to control it, but they cannot actually go against what you call the oncoming technology.
And also remember, the Mullahs, the regime has not completely shut down the internet system.
In Burma, for example, they completely shut down the internet system for six weeks.
In Iran, they haven't done it, because internet is a very important part of the industry and business.
And Iran has a developed industry and oil industry, so the government simply cannot afford to shut down the whole thing, because that would affect the whole GDP.
So I'm just giving you the background that there is a growing gap between the aging theocracy and the religious leaders and the young generation which has come up, basically young people who are less than 30 years old, and also women.
See, women are required to wear Islamic dress.
Men and women, unless they are married, they cannot even hold hands in public.
And that is very repressive.
In the early days of Islam or revolution, some of these things were tolerated, but as any revolution settles down, the regime relaxes.
But that is the basic problem.
In 1997, in an election for the president, Mohammad Khatami became president.
He won 70% of the vote.
The turnout was 88%, and he got the vote of many young people and women.
And from 1997 to 2005, in eight years of his presidency, things began to relax.
Cultural and social freedoms were more, political freedoms were more, but that gave the whole system, shall I say, a relief, a breathing ground.
And then we got Ahmadinejad, he is trying to reverse that relaxation, and that is where the problem is.
Alright, well let's see, there is a lot to go over there.
I'd like to ask you to, if you can kind of elaborate on the, as you mentioned, Khatami there, and some of the reformers in the 90s, of course Rafsanjani is another famous reformer.
I think you say in your article that Khatami really had a reputation of being a decent guy, whereas Rafsanjani is really known kind of as a crook.
So even though their politics are more modernist and reformist, those two aren't necessarily allies, and the public perception of them in Iran is not the same, right?
Absolutely.
I think basically, of course there is a reformist camp and there is a conservative camp.
In the conservative camp, there are three different sections.
Just like if you take a republican party, you get Rush Limbaugh, and you get, should I say, liberal republicans.
So in the same way, among conservatives, you have three parts.
One is what you may call a pragmatic conservative, of which that section is led by Rafsanjani.
He's not a reformist, he's a pragmatic conservative.
Then you have a centrist, and the present parliamentary speaker, Ali Larajani, is a centrist conservative.
And then you have hardliners, Ahmadinejad and the social media, they are hardline conservatives.
You see, when that election happened in 1997, of course the religious establishment and the supreme leader, they had their own man, who was the speaker of the parliament at that time, Mr. Natek Noori, and he was defeated.
He only got 25% of the vote.
Whereas Khatami got 70% of the vote.
You see, and that showed two things.
One, that the system is open, and two, that it is a republic of Iran.
It's not emirate of Iran, it's a state of Iran, it's an Islamic republic.
That means, power lies with the people.
And so, that particular period, really, was, should I say, the good part of the system in Iran.
Now, the last 2005 election is one we should understand, because in that election, none of the seven candidates got 50% plus one vote.
Therefore, there has to be a second run.
Now, in that election, interestingly enough, Rafsanjani contested.
Of course, he was president for two terms, but then, if there's a break after two terms, you can re-enter.
Theoretically, Bill Clinton can contest, because he was only two terms together.
He can come back anyway.
So the point is that, Rafsanjani got 21%, and then, number two, surprise, surprise, mayor of Iran, not widely known, a gentleman called Mahmoud Nijad, he got 19.5%, and number three was the speaker of parliament, Mehdi Karoubi, who was a moderate reformist, he got 17.5%, only 2% behind.
Now, immediately, I'm talking about the last election, 2005, four years ago, immediately, Mehdi Karoubi, who was also contested this time, he said, wait a minute, in the second largest city of Iran, Isfahan, there was stuffing of ballot boxes, secondly, the Basij militia, which is supposed to be neutral, they publicly canvassed for Ahmadinejad, and thirdly, the son of the supreme leader, Mujtaba Khamenei, he also publicly canvassed for Ahmadinejad.
That is wrong.
And immediately, the supreme leader said, shut up, you are creating tension.
And of course, Mr. Karoubi, who was until that moment, official advisor to Khamenei, he resigned immediately.
Now, you see, what happened was, in the 2005 election, there was minor skill rigging.
That is, in reality, Mehdi Karoubi was number two.
And so, they pushed up Ahmadinejad, and put him number two, because then in the second run, he won, because Rafsanjani is not a proper reformist.
He is a pragmatic conservator, and he and his family are corrupt.
Everybody knows this.
They have a lot of money, oil, and so on and so forth.
You see, so, you can see what happened now is a continuation of the same game.i.e., and this is my thesis, which is that, when Khamenei had a reformist president for eight years, he had a lot of problems.
He had to, you know, control things, he had to do, of course, heavy hand, even though within the constitution.
And he said to himself, this is too much of a headache.
I will not allow another reformist to come in.
And that's why Mahdi Karubi, who had a good chance of beating Rafsanjani, because Mahdi Karubi is a straight guy, he's not corrupt, he's a reformist, and see, but when he was booted out, then a lot of reformists in 2005, in the second run, did not vote.
And that's how Ahmadinejad won by a big margin, because, you know, a lot of people said, oh my God, Rafsanjani is not a proper reformist, he's also corrupt, and see, and so you can see the continuation.
What has happened this time is large-scale rigging that dried and was four years ago.
Well, so now, with the recent election, I guess, well, there's a lot of competing information.
On one hand, everybody says that, you know, there was more than 100% of the vote counted in every precinct, and it was the biggest theft of an election in the history of all mankind.
And then, on the other hand, the polls said that, you know, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund poll there, the New America Foundation poll, said that Ahmadinejad was going to win.
And actually, I'm kind of conflicted too.
I'll go ahead and work into this, to my question somehow here.
Some people are saying, you know, regardless of the degree to which, and maybe no degree, I don't know, people argue that there's a degree to which the CIA here is backing the color revolutionaries, the green revolutionaries, and that kind of thing.
On the other hand, it seemed to me in the run-up to this recent election that the CIA was having Jandala blow up a bunch of things, and, you know, if there can be any rhyme or reason ascribed to the goofballs that run the CIA these days, it seems like the purpose of that would be to help Ahmadinejad, that they would prefer to have the right-winger in there so that they don't have to deal with him, because, or else, why would having Jandala set off a bunch of bombs help the opposition to the current government?
You know, that doesn't make any sense.
I think when he mentions the CIA, I think actually there's an interesting book by James Rice in the New York Times, security correspondent, who wrote a book on Iran, in which he explained, he gave a history of the CIA.
What happened was, the CIA had, of course, set up its network in Iran, and that network was exposed in 2002.
There was one particular agent who was a double agent in Iran, and he was giving the names of the whole network, and he, of course, you know, gave information to the regime, and the regime totally destroyed the CIA network, this would be in 2002, and see, and after that, you found, I mean, not you found, I mean, after that it was seen that a lot of drones, U.S.A. drones, were flying all over Iran, and people were saying, oh, we have got UFOs, you know, identified flying objects, and of course, the regime knew who they are, in fact, and so they would say, yes, these are, you know, we are keeping track of these things, at the same time, they would not shoot them down, because if they did the shooting, then the Pentagon, and the National Security Agency, they would know their air defense system, so anyways, pointed, if it is a question of CIA network, the CIA network was basically destroyed, four years ago, and that is why, the U.S.A., you know, the establishment in Washington, did not have proper information, about the nuclear program, and that is why they went to Pakistan, if you want to connect the two stories, and Pakistan said, yes, we can allow U.S. Special Forces, to go in from Pakistan area, into Iran, because Pakistan and Iran have common border, and they can go in, and you know, what you call, deposit, or fix certain instruments, which can tell you, what is in the air, and if there is nuclear stuff or not, and that was the deal done, if you want to connect certain things, I am sure a lot of people remember, that there was a doctor, A.Q.
Khan, Pakistan's, you know, father of a bomb, and he came out in February 2004, and said, oh, you know, I did actually, did something very bad and wrong, but you know, it was only me involved, nobody else was involved, and Musharraf, then General Musharraf, just put him under house arrest, he said, this was the deal with the Bush administration, i.e., don't push us on, A.Q.
Khan, don't push us, that he will be interviewed by the CIA, and for that, we'll allow CIA special forces, to go in, over ground, from our territory, into Iran, and you know, install these instruments, to keep track of the nuclear program, you see, so what I'm saying is that, the whole idea, the CIA is somehow involved in this thing, and you know, quite honestly, I don't take this seriously, all you have to do is, you know, read this book by James Harrison, James Harrison is not somebody, who's making up things, I assure you, in the New York Times, you know, correspondents, have a certain reputation, okay, I think, I think, you see, there are some, you know, if this were a court case, you know, the grand jury, immediately say, indict, I mean, some basic, very simple, it's not a question of, more than 100%, because they are explaining that, in Iran, if you have your, identification, no matter where you are, you can go to polling stations, show your ID, and vote anywhere, and of course, you know, you get the ink on your finger, so you can't vote again, and see, that has been explained, because it's easy to explain, of course, in 50 cities, it's happened, that's too much, but there are more interesting, important points, one is that, in all elections, what you have to do by law, that the agents of the different candidates, they go to each polling station, the polling office, and they say, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, and the agent of the different candidates, goes to the polling station, the polling office, opens every ballot box, shows them, this is empty, then seals it, that did not happen this time, I'm just giving you one simple example, that didn't happen, secondly, amongst the candidates, Mohsen Rezaei, Mohsen Rezaei, actually, he's the former commander, of the Revolutionary Guard, he said, I have been given 650,000 votes, now, since this thing has happened, 900,000 people, have voted, and the people, have voted, and the people, have voted, and the people, have voted, 900,000 people, have sent me the email, 900,000 people, have sent me the email, and they have given me their ID numbers, and they have said, we have voted for you.
So, there are 900,000 witnesses, to say we will give your vote, and on the other hand, 650,000 votes, and that's giving you two examples, and that's giving you two examples, there are three or four other examples, there are three or four other examples, you know, the election law, you know, the election law, allows up to 72 hours, allows up to 72 hours, in between the closing of the polls, the result being collected, the result being collected, and counted, and recounted, and then announced.and counted, and recounted, and then announced.
This time, lo and behold, within two hours, of the polls closing at midnight, of the polls closing at midnight, of the 12th and 13th June, they announced the result.they announced the result.
I mean, this is unbelievable.
I mean, I'm just giving you some basics.
I'm just giving you some basics.
Sure, sure.
If you were to go to the grand jury, and say, these are my, you know, prime official case, these are the basic evidence I have, they would immediately indict, they would immediately indict, the person who's being accused.
On the other hand, On the other hand, on the other hand, doesn't it sort of at least look like they stole an election they were going to win anyway?
I mean, at least some of the portrayal is that the young, reformer-minded kiddos in Tehran number in the hundreds of thousands, sure, but they're not the majority in the country.and the majority of the country is just like in America.
In the cities, people vote democrat.
Out in the country, they vote republican, for the most part.
That kind of thing.
Yeah, I think on that figure, a figure is that 70% of the population, that's what I said earlier, Iran is a fairly developed industrial society.
You know, it's not like Burma, or it's not like Pakistan, I can assure you.
See, 70% of the people are urban in Iran.
7-0% are urban.
Only 30% live in villages.
That's one.
Secondly, of course, I mean, Tehran itself is a divided city.
One city, which, which runs east-west, which, in fact, called Freedom Avenue, Azadi Avenue, that is divided north from the south.
North is the one which is secular, westernized, and the other ones who have, you know, unit critters, that kind of thing.
Fair enough.
I mean, and the south is definitely not in the same way.
But, you see, even among young people, of course, the Basij, Basij are not all old fellows.
Basij are young as well.
Sure.
I would say that, I mean, a general figure, maybe 20 to 25% people are out with the regime.
Now, they are not with the regime to the extent to go out and fight for it and even die for it.
See, and, and the other hand, you probably have 25 to 30% people who are totally opposed to the system, but they are not going to go out, you know, and fight because they don't have the guns and this is not the way to do certain things, and they do not want to overthrow the system.
They simply want the system to adjust to reality.
You know, if, if the demographic changes going a certain way, if a man and woman, you know, are attracted naturally to each other, you know, to put the risk that you can't hold hands unless you are married and you show your marriage certificate and that the morality police will take you to the police station, I mean, this is, you know, this is, you know, it goes against nature, human nature, you see, and you see, so in itself, the people run the regime looking inwards and say, let's see, what are we going to do or let's see, what are we doing wrong or what is the way to reach out to young people?
How should we, you know, maintain and, you know, cooperate, the cooperation and co-operative system?
Instead of that, they basically, again, they are, remember, I go back to martyrdom, which I mentioned in my book.
They are not killing too many people.
Remember that.
See, most of the shooting of the ammunition is in the air, and they want to frighten people.
They want to beat them and, you know, and have lots of presence of security forces so that everybody is afraid, but they are very keen not to do things on a huge scale to kill people and then martyrdom will take off and that is another important point to keep in mind.
Right.
Well, now, so where exactly do we stand?
Because, you know, the last I heard, you know, the protests have been more or less died down.
It seems like, you know, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad aren't going anywhere, at least for now.
Do the people who have been protesting, are they all in terrible danger now that they've lost?
No, I think what will happen, see, this happened before.
See, again, in 1999, you know, they started the procedural use, et cetera, et cetera, and then started arresting student leaders and this and that.
So, you see, again now, they are doing the same thing.
Arresting people and singling out something and then you have a confession, oh, I was misled by the BBC, CNN, et cetera, et cetera.
So, the smallest scale student protest was repressed in a particular way, this time in a magnified way.
They're using the same tactics.
Then, a small tinkering with electoral process was done in 2005, this time on a larger scale, you see.
So, therefore, the people who are on the top, they think they can manage this time as well.
But what happens is more and more people who are growing up have no idea what was before.
They're not going to go away.
They still have access to internet.
They can, even though satellite dishes are banned, they can watch foreign TV on internet and so on and so forth.
So, I think that you cannot stop and therefore, you cannot recreate the atmosphere and the environment and the social behavior of the early days of Islamic revolution.
Because the conditions in 79, 80, 81 were totally different from what is the case in 2009, 2010.
Things have totally changed.
So, you know, you cannot therefore say, ah, we have to go back to the 90s when we were totally full of revolutionary feeling et cetera et cetera.
I mean, you have a particular feeling or something because you are reacting to something.
There was a Shah, a dictator Shah, a secular.
He was in a pocket of America.
System was corrupt and people were making a lot of money out of oil and that was the feeling which comes and it's not only for the revolution, look at the revolution one of the things about revolution 50 is old and Cuba how do we continue this feeling with young people he openly discuses this.
That's a basic problem that can not be solved in a simple way.
You have to create fear but always be careful not to kill too many people by using force.
Intimidate them, beat them and try to cut off connections to the internet.
You cannot stop
their war.
That's why they reject wars.
50 is bad.
I will never leave Cuba.
50 is bad.
I will never leave Cuba.
50 is bad.
I will never