For many in the west, George Bush's 2002 "axis of evil" speech was instructive because it revealed the stark, vengeful thought processes guiding the US administration in the wake of the attacks of 11th September. With the "axis of evil" ringing in your ears, it was possible to make sense of the subsequent invasion of Iraq and the threats issued against Iran, not to mention that most intolerant and narcissistic of fantasies: to make the middle east anew, and to make it look as far as possible like America.
Inside the axis, reactions were less detached. Saddam Hussein developed his strategy on the assumption that Bush was bluffing. In North Korea, Kim Jong-il assumed the opposite. Only Iran failed to respond cogently to Bush's speech, and the reason for this was the country's internal contradictions. A multipolar world unto itself, a semi-democracy rent by rivalry, Iran's diplomacy is too sluggish and its political structures too atomised to permit deft responses to new threats or opportunities. Iran huffed and puffed, but it also put out conciliatory feelers that America rejected. It desisted from hindering the US invasion of Iraq, but went on to obstruct the occupation. It was both helpful and unhelpful to the US and its allies in Afghanistan.
Where Bush's speech did have a clear effect, unforeseen by its authors, was in Iran's domestic politics. At the beginning of 2002, Iran was in the throes of a struggle between reformists (modernising, mildly pro-western moderates) and conservatives (die-hard, anti-US Islamic revolutionaries). The struggle was already going the way of the latter, but Bush's words, and the tone of confrontation his administration went on to adopt, helped bring about the reformists' ultimate defeat and, in 2005, the election to the presidency of a combustible conservative, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Recalling Bush's phrase, and exploiting the fear of American intentions that it aroused, the conservatives accused the reformists of being an American fifth column. Bush's subsequent allocation of money for the promotion of democracy in Iran was a further gift to the conservatives, and a catastrophe for anyone inside the country advocating enhanced freedoms or women's rights.
The effects are still being felt. Nowadays, no political arrest, no interrogation, no television "confession" is complete without reference to the "velvet revolution" allegedly being planned for the Islamic Republic by Bush. Iranian-Americans on trips home, student leaders, women's rights activists, trade unionists—all have suffered harassment or worse because of their association, real or (mostly) perceived with the US. The number of Iranians victimised in this way remains relatively small, certainly in comparison with those Arab monarchies that Bush visited so cordially recently, with barely a mention of their bulging jails and swingeing limits on the rights of women. But the consequences of the current crackdown, which has intensified since Ahmadinejad's election, go beyond human rights abuses. Those Iranians who are inclined to speak out on basic freedoms tend nowadays to stay silent, either because they fear for their liberty or because they feel that to voice their concerns would be, as their opponents maintain, an act of betrayal.
Thanks to last December's national intelligence estimate (NIE)—the work of no fewer than 16 US government agencies—we now know, or think we know, that Iran had a nuclear weapons programme until 2003. Yet we also know, because the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has told us, and Iran confirms it, that the Iranians have progressed some way towards being self-sufficient in nuclear fuel, which can be used to make either electricity or a bomb, according to taste. (Iran maintains it is interested only in electricity, but many countries, and the IAEA, are sceptical.) As Iran's scientists have advanced technically, so the country's nuclear dossier has spun around the UN security council. So far, the US and its European allies have engineered the passage of two sanctions resolutions designed to curtail Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology, and a third is on the way. And the Iranians have been dogged by speculation, encouraged by hawks in Washington, that the US or perhaps Israel is preparing, should diplomatic pressure achieve nothing, to attack Iran's known and suspected nuclear sites.
The posturing has particularly benefited the pugnacious, publicity-seeking Ahmadinejad. Although he does not decide Iran's nuclear strategy—that is the role of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—he has successfully arrogated to himself the authority to articulate policy, which he does in unusually aggressive, nationalist terms. By "grabbing the megaphone," in the words of one EU ambassador in Tehran, and by describing more dovish Iranian public figures as traitors or spies, Ahmadinejad has come to personify Iran's refusal in the face of demands—unreasonable in the eyes of most Iranians, but far from unconscionable in the frame of international diplomacy—to suspend its nuclear fuel work in return for diplomatic and technological inducements. Inevitably, his best ally has been the US administration, whose depiction of him as a menace to the world has brought him prestige in Iran and among Islamists everywhere.
This, from an Iranian point of view, is why the NIE—or the few pages of conclusions that were made public—is so important. By challenging the image of dotty mullahs bent on nuking Israel, and by hazarding that Iran's nuclear strategy is founded on Iran's perception of its "national security and foreign policy objectives," the NIE underscored the ascendancy of professionals over ideologues in the US's evaluation of intelligence, and their keenness to prevent the administration from manipulating data as it did in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Ahmadinejad greeted the report as vindication of his uncompromising stance, while others expressed pious indignation at the suggestion that the Islamic Republic had a nuclear weapons programme up until 2003. Behind the point-scoring there was a big sigh of relief.
Ahmadinejad made the nuclear issue his own, and he achieved notoriety when he suggested, soon after assuming office, that Israel be "wiped off the map," but he had little to say on foreign affairs during the 2005 election campaign; he came to power on promises to restore clean government, redistribute Iran's oil revenues to the common man and return the country to the unsullied revolutionary state it enjoyed, so the story goes, in the 1980s. Since 2005, Iran's annual oil receipts have soared to more than $50bn a year, and vast sums have been channelled to the poor through subsidies, investment in projects in the provinces and personal loans from the big public banks. Ahmadinejad has dipped heavily into the stabilisation fund set up by his reformist predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, as a hedge against economic downturn. Much of Ahmadinejad's investment, furthermore, has not been very productive. Khamenei has complained that Iran's current growth rate—around 6 per cent—needs to rise.
Meanwhile, inflation has shot up. According to the central bank, last October it stood at 19 per cent, and further rises are expected. House prices have increased even more quickly, pushing rents well above the means of newlyweds and benefiting those speculators who so angered Ahmadinejad in the past. The president used to describe inflation as a malicious fiction dreamed up by his opponents; his scornful reaction to complaints over food prices was to invite hostile members of parliament to come down from affluent north Tehran and buy their tomatoes in his own modest neighbourhood. Only last November did he admit that his government stood no chance of reducing inflation to the 2008 target of under 10 per cent endorsed by the supreme leader. The president continues to absolve himself of responsibility for the crisis—everyone and everything, it seems, is to blame but he: Khatami; an obstructive parliament; the rising price of imports.
Ahmadinejad's apparent indifference to the effects of inflation has alienated middle-class Iranians in cities such as Tehran, Isfahan and Mashhad. These Iranians learned how to act like consumers under Khatami and, to a lesser extent, his predecessor, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. From homes they can no longer afford, many white-collar and private-sector employees observe their wages shrink in real terms and the price of meat and fruit rise faster than inflation, while an uncouth upper class of speculators make fabulous returns on their property investments. The precariousness of Iranian middle-class life is all too apparent, and the stuff of envy, the plasma televisions and flashy foreign cars, abound under the country's relaxed import regime. In the words of Mohammad Atrianfar, a prominent critic of Ahmadinejad, "Opposition is in the air."
Perhaps so, but it was not middle-class votes that propelled Ahmadinejad to power, and attracting them will not be a priority during his re-election campaign next year. Ahmadinejad is a third-world populist in the mould of his friend Hugo Chávez, and his constituency remains the poor and disenfranchised. Uneasy among the sophisticates of Tehran, the president makes regular provincial forays. Far from the capital, in towns which have barely received a minister, let alone the president with his cabinet in tow, Ahmadinejad is a star attraction, flattering huge crowds with pledges of investment, receiving chits like a medieval first minister and whipping up a millenarian frenzy through his devotion to the Mahdi, the occulted final imam of Shia Islam, whose return to earth will herald perfect justice and peace.
Ahmadinejad's mercurial methods and unconventional economics have lost him the support of the conservative-run parliament, and he is roundly opposed by such grandees as Khatami and Rafsanjani, along with two former heads of the Revolutionary Guard, two former chief nuclear negotiators and a flock of senior ayatollahs. He has been criticised for making light of the effects of American pressure on international banks, which increasingly withhold credit for business with Iran, and on western energy companies, which have stopped investing in Iran's oil and gas sector. But Ahmadinejad still enjoys the backing, however equivocal, of the supreme leader.
Khamenei is said to be worried by Ahmadinejad's economic performance, and he was certainly displeased by the president's recent displacement of Ali Larijani, Iran's pragmatic chief nuclear negotiator, in favour of a little-known crony. He recently sided with parliament over the president in an argument over gas shortages during a cold snap that led to dozens of deaths. On the whole, however, the supreme leader continues to praise the government in public, and to protect the president in private, and this is probably because Khamenei, an adept reader of the public mood, appreciates Ahmadinejad's continuing popularity—not to mention his loyalty to the supreme leadership and the values of the revolution.
Yes, Ahmadinejad has the megaphone. His influence over policy is limited, however, for he is bound to the democratic parts of Iran's oddly bifurcated constitution, and is prevented from enjoying more than two consecutive four-year terms in office. The supreme leader, supreme for life, is not bothered by such trifles, so it is to him that one must turn for an idea of the course that Iran may travel.
In his speeches, Ayatollah Khamenei expresses optimistic views about the role that Iran is fit to play in the world—as an example to all countries that "thirst for spirituality." He is a great believer in "religious democracy" as it exists in the Islamic Republic, and in a second commodity, "national self-confidence," without which the nation will be vulnerable to the machinations of its "enemies." Finally, Khamenei loathes liberal democracy, considering it to be a vehicle for cultural and moral depravity.
During a speech he made on 4th January in the desert city of Yazd, Khamenei displayed the classic politician's traits of patriotism, hubris and expedient flexibility. He depicted Iran's efforts to achieve nuclear self-sufficiency as part of a "regional race for development," a race in which Iran must have the "last word." He boasted that Iran's refusal to compromise on the nuclear issue had forced the US to accept the existence of centrifuges on Iranian soil. On the subject of America, Khamenei observed that restoring bilateral relations would not, at present, be to Iran's advantage but that, in different circumstances, "I would be the first person to endorse it."
In fact, Iran and the US already have relations, of a kind, in the form of irregular meetings at ambassadorial level in Baghdad—ostensibly to address the security situation in Iraq, but expandable if the occasion demands it. According to American officials, the Iranians have sharply reined in the use of roadside bombs by their allies in Iraq.
This Iran, the calculating, prosaic, un-exotic one, has no place in the Bush administration's depiction of the world. "Everywhere you turn," Robert Gates, the defence secretary, declared recently, "it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or the cost in the blood of innocents." On 13th January, Bush himself described Iran as the world's "leading state sponsor of terror," a state that represses its own people, subverts peace by supporting militant groups in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, seeks to intimidate its neighbours and destabilises its neighbourhood. And, Bush added, it indulges in bellicose rhetoric.
Bush accommodated the NIE in his speech to the extent that he did not accuse Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, as had previously been his custom, but rather of the lesser crime of "refusing to be open about and transparent about its nuclear programmes and ambitions." His final exhortation, however, suggested he did not believe his own words. "The United States is… rallying friends around the world to confront this danger before it is too late."
It is not very strange that Iran should find itself in conflict with a country, animated by antithetical ideals, which invades the neighbourhood and seeks to impose its writ across the region. Yet with a little imagination, the Bush administration might have won Iran's co-operation; the Iranians have intermittently shown a willingness to accommodate American interests, provided the US recognises their right to further what they regard as their own. Instead, Iran's leaders will stay evil and deluded, and the problems between the two countries unaddressed.
