Modernizers say one man is responsible for these and other encouraging signs: Mohammed Khatami, the moderate cleric who was elected president in 1997. They detect his influence in the country’s explosion of independent newspapers; its overtures toward Europe, and, however slowly and ambivalently, toward the United States, and Tehran’s apparent decision to stop exporting Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. But while it is clear that the Khatami regime is following a quite different course from its predecessors’, the verdict is very much still out about what these changes really signify and where they will lead in the new century.
Most Iranians seem to have no doubt. In these heady days as the country prepares for the February parliamentary elections, Khatami seems to stand like a Rorschach blot in the collective psyche of Iran. He embodies the hopes of women for more freedom, of the poor for jobs, of intellectuals and artists for more freedom of expression, of businessmen for the free market. It is a lot to live up to.
Too much, in fact. Talking to Iranians, it is hard to escape the sense that they are setting themselves up for a terrible disappointment. An Iranian commonplace these days is to call Khatami the “Ayatollah Gorbachev,” as if Iran were on the brink of experiencing an era of glasnost and perestroika. But this seems far too optimistic. Even if Khatami supporters are swept into Parliament in overwhelming numbers, the real levers of power in Iran are still controlled by various unelected bodies made up of mullahs and directed and controlled by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor, the Ayatollah Khamenei. Some Iranians even insist, only half-jokingly, that Iran has the unique distinction of having a political system in which the president is in reality the leader of the opposition.
There are some parallels between Khatami and Gorbachev. The bad news for both Iranians and Khatami’s many sympathizers in the West is that few of them are encouraging. As in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the old ways of maintaining control in Iran no longer work. Anti-Americanism, religious crusades against women’s freedoms and calls to support attacks on Israel do not resonate in the same way they once did. Instead, confronted by an inept and incompetent regime that is unable to provide Iran’s rapidly increasing population with a decent standard of living, many Iranians, perhaps even a majority, have come to believe they live in a kleptocracy, not a theocracy.
This is the dark side of the Khatami-Gorbachev parallel. The hard-line mullahs put up with Khatami not because he intends to bring the Islamic revolution to a close, but rather because they see in him their last best hope for their survival and that of the regime they have created. That, after all, is what the Politburo in Moscow hoped for from Gorbachev: a tweaked version of the status quo. And just as Gorbachev’s real achievement was the combination of his failure to reform the U.S.S.R. and his willingness to preside over its demise, so only a similar failure on Khatami’s part can possibly lead to a genuine transformation of Iranian society. Success as Khatami has defined it–which is reforming the system–would only mean prolonging its life.
In the long run, of course, the medieval schemes of the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors will probably backfire anyway. By confusing tradition with religion, and imposing a government that was both repressive and unsuccessful, the mullahs may well have sown the seeds of precisely what they least wanted to play midwife to–a liberal, modern Islamic nation. For it is hard to imagine that once the mullahs finally leave the scene, many Iranians will willingly continue wearing the head scarf or accepting the abrogation of their liberties in the name of faith. But that is in the long run. In the shorter term, even if Khatami gains both the support of the new Parliament and the acquiescence of the mullahs, Iran’s time of troubles is anything but over.
And in any case, his own chances of success are not high. No political figure could possibly live up to the expectations being placed on him both in his own country and in the West. As a result, he is likely to prove to be a transitional figure–a Gorbachev and not a Yeltsin, let alone a Vaclav Havel. This should make those who believe that now is the time for a broad opening to Iran proceed with great caution. Yes, the changes in Iran are real. But they are by no means as far-reaching or as promising, and may not yet prove to be as enduring, as they now appear. Of course, change will come sooner or later. But most likely it will come from the bottom up, rather than from the decrees of even so liberal a mullah as President Khatami. And the place to look for signs of a true revival of liberalism is where they have always first appeared–on the streets of Tehran.
