Iran may be on the cusp of change. A conversation with Arash Azizi

 

 

LISTEN NO · 1:03:07

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Turbulent World with me, James M. Dorsey, as your host.

Iranians vote with their feet.

Earlier this month, turnout for parliamentary elections and the 88-member Assembly of Experts that appoints Iran’s supreme leader was at 41% an all time low.

In 2022 and 2023. Iran was racked by mass protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini while in the morality police’s custody, Mrs. Amini was detained for allegedly violating Iran’s strict rules requiring women to cover their hair with a hijab, or headscarf.

Many hoped the demonstrations, like multiple earlier protests, signaled the beginning of the end of Iran’s clerical regime that came to power in the 1979 Islamic revolution. The revolt overthrew the Shah, the first toppling in the last 40 plus years of an icon of US influence in the Middle East.

Hardliners in the United States and elsewhere have called for supporting civil society opposition.

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Others advocate breaking Iran apart by supporting ethnic and religious minorities in the country.

A historian and political scientist at South Carolina’s Clemson University, Arash Azizi argues that Iran may be on the cusp of change. It’s just that the change may come from within the regime rather than from the street.

The change is likely to involve a polishing of the sharp edges of the Islamic Republic rather than a transition to democracy. Even so Arash, the author of two books, a biography of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s notorious Quds Force who was killed in 2020 in an American drone strike, and a just published volume on the recent women’s protest movement argued in The New York Times that Supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s inner circle is populated by technocrats and pragmatists rather than ideologues and revolutionaries who want to perpetuate the status quo.

Few will challenge the notion that the eventual passing of the baton by 84-year-old Mr. Khamenei, who is believed to be in poor health, embodies the potential of change, even if the recent Assembly of Experts election was stacked against reformers who were banned from being candidates.

Counterintuitively, Arash sees a ray of hope in the eventual transition to a new Supreme Leader reason enough to welcome Aash to the show. Aash, it’s a pleasure to host you today.

Arash Azizi (00:03:09):

Thank you, James. It’s great to be with you.

James M. Dorsey (00:03:11):

Let’s kick off with you giving us a bit of your intellectual biography and your engagement with Iran. Allow me to note that links to Arash’s books will be at the bottom of the transcript of this podcast, which you will be able to find on my Substack newsletter early next week. Arash, the ether is yours.

Arash Azizi (00:03:33):

Thank you. My name is Arash. As said, I’m from Iran and when it comes to my intellectual biography, especially when it comes to Iran’s struggle for democracy, it’s really sort of inseparable from my life.

I was born in Teran in 1988, Iran is the country I grew up in, and I had the privilege of, and I really do see it as a privilege of growing up in one of the most fascinating periods in Iranian history in the late 90s.

When I was nine years old, Iran elected the reformist president Muhammad Khatami. And it’s not so much just about him or internal politics of the Islamic Republic, but this election really opened the new era in Iranian history where millions of people were seeking change. Millions of people really had beliefs that Iran could be democratized, that it could change very quickly. It was a time of artistic and cultural and journalistic excellence.

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There were tons of newspapers everywhere in the society. Everyone spoke about possibilities of change. It’s really exciting time to grow up in, and I was and am from early on I identified as a Marxist and I still see myself always on the left side of things.

But what definitely hasn’t changed is me being part of the Iranian quest, seeing myself as part of the Iranian quest to change things and to bring a freer and more democratic and more just Iran.

Now, I was a journalist for many years. I was a TV anchor. I then turned to academia, got a PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies from NYU.

But these are really all details. The broader picture remains, remains the same as I said with the broader reference, which is I am still really that Iranian citizen trying to imagine a different Iran and hopefully bring about a different Iran as part of a different world.

James M. Dorsey (00:05:46):

And yet you left Iran.

Arash Azizi (00:05:49):

That’s right. Yeah. I mean I’ve left Iran in 2008 actually. So, I haven’t been back like millions of Iranians. I unfortunately haven’t been back to Iran for that many years, close to two decades now.

And it’s funny, when I left in 2008, I couldn’t have imagined that I won’t be able to go back. I mean, I really didn’t imagine that at all. In 2009 we had a grand movement called the Green Movement that started from contesting a presidential election, basically contestation over the results, but really morphed into a grand anti-regime movement. And really a lot of us thought this is it, and the regime would be gone.

I remember, I lived in Canada at the time and I was renting a place and I told this landlord, ‘Oh, I can’t sign for another year because the regime would be overthrown.’ 40 years is over and I have to go back.

So, this is really kind of the perhaps naivete that you have also as to, I was 20 years old or something, but yeah, I left. I lived in many other countries. I lived in Malaysia, I lived in Britain, Germany, Canada, and now the United States.

James M. Dorsey (00:07:05):

And you seem to come to the conclusion that it won’t be popular revolts that provoke change in Iran. Tell us why you think change will come from the top rather than the bottom and what that change may look like.

Arash Azizi (00:07:22):

Yeah, it’s a very tough reality to sort of admit, if you will, and that sort of, I wrote this piece for The New York Times that you referred to where I’m talking about this, but also in the epilogue to my book, and this is a book that I wrote really with all my heart. It’s called ‘What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom.’

This is a book that on every page of it I wrote about people that I really consider my heroes. These are my fellow Iranians, trade unionists, environmental activists, feminist activists. These are people who really, this era that I spoke about from late 90s to now, they wage the heroic struggle over decades against the Islamic Republic. They embody all the wonderful ideas that the regime doesn’t…This book is really…a testament to them.

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The reason I wrote it is that I wanted Iran to not be reduced to what you usually have in the headlines of whether it’s a nuclear program or all the soldiers or the mullahs. And I wanted to see that there is a different Iran and much of the work that I do in fact is an attempt to ensure that there is this different Iran.

However, even in the epilogue of this book, when I’m trying to predict the future of Iran, if you will, I have to admit, one has to be honest, that it’s not clear that it’s these movements that will be the only ones who are calling the shots. I mean, it’s clear that that won’t be the case, right? And one has to be brutally honest.

Now, the reality is that the grand movements for civil liberties, for democracy that I talked about have had a basic failure in the last couple of decades, and that has been a failure to translate their power and their demands into a political channel.

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This is a very important thing and I think it’s an important ailment. Basically, I think we have a political deficit around the world. I often when in this conversation, I often point to this new book by Vincent Bevins about the missing decade of the  2010s.

This is a writer, a journalist, who goes and looks at all the different mass movements in the 2010s to show some of the reasons that they failed. I mean, he looked at it, whether the Arab Spring or a movement in Brazil and a lot of other places, even in Ukraine.

In some sense, actually what becomes clear is that there is a failure to translate these mass movements into a political channel, the political proper political channel, especially because there is a lack of a tradition of political parties, organized political forces that were very powerful in the 20th century.

And somehow by the end of the 20th century, we convinced ourselves, I might say we on the left and on the right, it’s interesting, there’s sort of convergence on the left in the name of Autonomism or Horizontalism, and on the right and the language of end of ideology and all that becomes  that this was sort of all the bad 20th century stuff and we don’t need anymore.

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All we need now are hashtags and it is spontaneous people coming together, but unfortunately you don’t get political change like that. So, unfortunately in Iran, for a variety of reasons, these movements that I am very proud to be a part of have failed politically to cohere into a political alternative.

And we have to be honest, right? Everyone loves to, whenever you lose in politics, everyone loves to say you scored a moral victory. Unfortunately, moral victories don’t change history. They don’t change people’s lives in politics. It’s about winning. It’s about being able to dislodge the dictators that are in power and there is no clear path for this sort of freedom movements in Iran to do so.

James M. Dorsey (00:11:36):

If I can interject, I think of course, just to sharpen what you’re saying, I agree with you. I think the problem that you see with popular revolts, and you see that going back to 1986 with People Power in the Philippines and certainly with the popular Arab revolts in 2011, it’s that there are two tensions. One is translating street action into backroom bartering and politics. And it’s always the question, at what point do you surrender the street? Because once you’ve surrendered the street, you can’t retake it.

Arash Azizi (00:12:20):

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a fascinating way of looking at it. It’s interesting that you brought up Philippines. I don’t know enough about it, but you look at it actually as a positive example in some ways, because at least in Philippines, they were able to, when I look at countries that have gone through some sort of a democratic transition, I mean I look at Philippines as one and that one in which an authoritarian system was replaced by a very imperfect democracy.

But at any rate, it is a democracy. People are electing their leaders in the polls, which would be a dream for Iranians, frankly, if we got to a place where we had anything like that. But I’m fascinated by the way you put it because that’s precisely the point though. Yes, you are right, that if when you give up the street to the backroom, then you cannot take it back.

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But also, you cannot keep the street forever, right? Absolutely. If you’re in politics, you either cash it in at some time or it dissipates because people…

Yes, if you are in your early 20s and you love going to demonstrations, this is a big part of your life, you come under the illusion that, goodness, wouldn’t this be great if this was life basically, right? That all the time we did was this.

But even leftists themselves who say this, usually they get to an age where they get a job and they get married, whatever, and they’re not interested in doing this every day.

Certainly, most people, they’re not trying to be political actors every day. They’re trying to live their lives. If they can help it, perhaps they like to even not think about politics as much, and we can be critical of that, but means that you have to work with new ones that you have.

So, I think the key thing is to know whether it’s for popular worlds or any sort of political action, it’s key thing to know what is your strategy and how you can channel it.

James M. Dorsey (00:14:12):

Yeah, let me just interject…. This is a fascinating discussion, but I do want you to come back to my question.

Arash Azizi (00:14:19):

Yeah, of course.

James M. Dorsey (00:14:21):

I co-authored a book several years ago, which compared political transition in the Philippines, sorry, in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. And what we concluded was that in the case of the Philippines, in the case of Indonesia, and in fact also in the case of Myanmar prior to the military coup, what worked was that there were three players in this. There was a strong civil society, but there also was a faction of the military that saw an advantage or an interest in supporting change. And so that’s what you really had in Southeast Asia, and that’s what in a lot of ways you lacked in the Middle East.

Arash Azizi (00:15:24):

Well, if there was ever a segue that said, yeah, that’s really fascinating. Exactly sort of what I’m trying to explore in regards to Iran.

James M. Dorsey (00:15:39):

Let’s go back to Iran. Indeed.

Arash Azizi (00:15:42):

Yeah, no, but I mean it’s exactly this question. To go back to your original question, which relates to this point about the comparison between Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the way I would put it, by the way as I write in The New York Times, it’s an op-ed, you need to always extend to it the point a little too much.

The way I would put it is not so much that, oh, the change will come from the top, not the bottom. Although there is also truth to that.

But let me put it here if I may. I basically think that a variety of, let’s call ’em civic movements, it’s pro-democracy movements. These people that I wrote this book about, these people who want democracy for Iran and who are idealists, I don’t mean that in a negative way, but I mean there are those who have ideals, right?

They want a different Iran, they have substantive ideas about gender justice, about social justice. They’ll continue to be a big part of future of Iran, and that’s sort of the camp that I consider myself part of.

In fact, whatever change happens at the top, I even do say whatever change happens at the top, they’re not going to stop fighting, they’re going to stop. They’re going to continue the struggles.

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But the thing is the Islamic Republic is not just that it falls short of these more substantive ideas of justice, but that it’s in a really moment of crisis in which it’s suffering from acute incompetency and acute sort of legitimacy crisis. It follows policies that seem to be in favor of no one really.

It’s funny, we often like to compare the late Islamic Republic as we call it, a bit hopefully with the late Soviet Union saying that, oh, there was an ideological crisis, there was an economic crisis. But when you look at the late Soviet Union, it’s doing rather great compared to the Islamic Republic.

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At the end of the day, whatever you say about the state socialism, it had some coherence. It was followed around the world. There were millions of people around the world who saw some hope. With the Islamic Republic, it’s really hard to see anyone really believing in it as an alternative model.

So, to make the story short, what I’m arguing is that Khamenei is going to be 85 next month. He is going to die and pass away at some point, and it’s not just that his passing is important, but at the moment he is really the only thing that holds together this highly disparate system of people who have sharp segments with each other. The vie forpower, and no one really believes in the ideals of this revolution anymore. The idea of 1979 revolution, it hasn’t been able to create even a coherent form of alternative. Iran is not more religious. Iran is ever more capitalistic.

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It really, you cannot look at this and say, oh, this is a sort of Islamic model of life. If you look at all these foreign supporters of the Islamic Republic who come to Iran, it is very rare for them to praise the domestic regime. The most they can do is say, oh, Iran is great because it’s supporting anti-Israel forces in the region.

So, my argument is that elements in the leadership of the Islamic Republic today and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, IRGC, see this militia as the ones who are most likely to come on top after the death of Khamenei.

I think popular movements will make their attempt, but frankly, I think it’s most likely that these other established forces will come on top, at least initially, and that I do believe that they will make some fundamental changes in Iran because they want to make the country less of a basket case, frankly less of a crisis mode. So that that’s sort of the root of this prediction or prognosis that I have for the immediate future of Iran.

James M. Dorsey (00:19:46):

This goes straight actually to my next question. You’ve described the technocrats among those people as military technocrats. In other words, if I read this correctly, and I think that’s what you’re saying, the post-Khamenei era would involve a transition to a greater role for the IRGC or the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which would drive the change, whereas the pragmatists that you also sort of point out within the regime and particularly within Khomeini’s inner circle, are largely former diplomats. Is that correct?

Arash Azizi (00:20:27):

Actually, the first part is definitely correct is that so there is a yes.

I believe that this militia, IRGC, is likely to have the upper hand in the post a period. Now, it’s a bit complicated because IRGC itself is not a united force. It has so many disparate groups, but people with different stakes in it. It’s also not just the military group effectively because yes, it’s a militia primarily, but it’s also a massive economic power. So, I think Iran, I imagine sort of Iran looking more like a Pakistan or Algeria in sort of a place where a military cast, if you will, they will have the important role.

Now, the diplomats that you mentioned are, to be clear, when I say pragmatists, I also actually do mean some of these military leaders are in fact pragmatist. They care about lining their own pockets and they care about economic growth and they don’t want Iran to be sanctioned and isolated and hated by everyone inside and outside Iran. So that’s what is going to drive some sort of a pragmatic politics on their part

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But the diplomats that you mentioned are one of the fascinating things for me looking at a variety of diplomats of Iranian diplomats, diplomats of the Islam Republic who are basically showing a lot of discontent with harmony. This is a very sort of delicate point because the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979, but Iranian diplomacy, if you’re a diplomat of Iran, you didn’t just become parrot of the regime immediately necessarily, and you weren’t just following this idol, ideology. Iranians, as you can see from me and others, we have a very strong sense of our nation, and I’m sure you’ve had this experience of seeing it with Iranians, right? Doesn’t matter whether you are a sort of dissident in Europe or you are someone in Iran, you have a strong sense of nation.

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So, the Iranian diplomats wanted to follow a traditional sense of Iranian national interest. And if you see, even during Islamic Republic, for example, let’s say in the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, I mean Iran has often played a role that you can’t say it’s ideological or in support of Islamist revolutionary ideas. It’s sort of traditional Iranian foreign policy sort of national interest rules, whereas they (the diplomats) see that that has dissipated on under Khamenei especially in the last years.

They’re not happy that Iran is a supporter of Hamas that is banking, not just that it’s supporting Hamas, but it’s banking so much on it that it is helping Russia against Ukraine, that they’re very unhappy about that. But this also shows you there’s sections of establishment who are unhappy about the results of Khamenei, and that’s why I sort of mentioned the diplomats. Now, yes, some of them, many of them, in the future of Iran can form a very different group than let’s say people coming out of IRGC, right?

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Javad Zarif, the former foreign minister eternally, you think, I mean, may want to have political ambitions, (even if) he always says he doesn’t. He would never run for anything, but if he was going to have political ambitions, I think frankly he probably would be good at it. He definitely has come with some, obviously a lot of us don’t buy much from him, but anyways, he definitely can come with some, yeah, so variety of former officials of the regime, whether it’s diplomats, whether it’s those who are in more economic positions or in politics can have some sort of a future in the post-Khamenei era as they vie for power. But those who hold the guns and power currently are the IRGC folks, so it’s likely that they’ll be the ones sort of running the game for a while. They’re the ones who are organized.

James M. Dorsey (00:24:23):

What’s also interesting is that the people you’re talking about are already now or for some time been publicly expressing their dissent and their criticism. So, it’s not just an assumption of what these people say. They’re actually willing to go out and say it.

Arash Azizi (00:24:44):

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean it’s very interesting in a regime like Iran, because there’s actually a lot of this discontent that’s being spoken about, so I’m not even talking about the circle of dissent. It keeps getting wider in a way the Supreme Leader permitted.

The opposition, people like me who oppose the Islamic Republic, obviously we are nowhere near power. There’s no way we can even publish newspapers and all that. In Iran, then those who are, let’s say reformists or loyal opposition critiques of the Islamic Republic, they’ve been effectively booted out of parliament. They don’t have a public political life, but inside the conservative and ultra conservative camp, no matter how much you exclude, right? Still, there’s a lot of fighting against the corruption of this or that individuals or for different policies. I mean, when things are so bad, you have to blame someone.

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The thing is, Iran has a declining economy, which I think is a key of everything.

By the way, none of the discussions we had really would’ve meant much, if I’m honest with you, if Iran was doing economically very well. People don’t like to admit that. I would ask my students, would you prefer to live in a poor country or democratic country? And a lot of them always say, oh no, I would live poor, but free.

But the reality is when the economy is bad, it really, that’s sort of fundamental change, and you realize how bad the Iranian economy is, right? The GDP per capita of Iran now in real terms, significantly less than, and I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but significantly less than 10 years ago by some estimates, I think it’s like a third of 10 years ago.

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This is crazy. Imagine you’re living  standard falling to a third in just 10 years, so you have to blame someone. So, yes, there’s tons of those who are always attacking each other and who are always expressing criticisms.

As I said, the foreign policy in support of Hamas or support of Russia and Ukraine is being critiqued by, not by people like me, but by leading former diplomats or establishment figures, public intellectuals, those types inside Iran, and this is after prisons are full of thousands of people who are there because they’re predicting, but still people are still making the criticisms.

And I think the other thing I’ll tell you is that look, just if you get outside of immediate sort of political common atheists, common that there are, if you are honest and sober, if you are someone Iran who really cares about Iran, Iranians care about their country. Usually they like to sort of have this state of Iran discussions often, right? It’s very clear to everybody that we are in some sort of a very deep crisis, I think, and many others agree with me that this is the worst Iran has been since easily a hundred years ago.

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So, naturally, when you’re in conditions like this, people are voicing critique publicly. It’s just that usually in order to not get into trouble, regimes like this, afford this, you can critique everything and be like, oh, of course the supreme leader would agree with me. He doesn’t want this, right?

Because that’s how you save yourself, himself also, this is one rule of dictators. Mao Zedong also did the same thing. I guess you control everything, and yet you always act as an opposition leader, right? So, in this Maoist moment, if you will, he is always waging a revolution against the regime like saying, we need to renovate things and things are not being done well, even though he is really micromanaging even the smallest decisions.

James M. Dorsey (00:28:38):

Presumably the notion of change will also depend on who the next supreme leader will be among those touted as potential successors. Are there those that would be more supportive than others?

Arash Azizi (00:29:01):

The next supreme leader is most likely going to be a very weak figure who won’t wield much power. That’s sort of my two cents or my guess. This is also a state of the art for the last few years, if you have Iranian analysts getting together after a couple of drinks or whatever, everyone likes to predict who will succeed.

So, my line here is that it basically, it’s going to be a weak figure or perhaps a leadership council. It would need to require constitutional change for that to happen. But in the first constitution of the Islamic Republic, there was a possibility of a leadership council, and then this was gotten rid of in the current version, but they can change it again. Let me tell you that the supreme leader is a very strange position, right? Political scientist Said call the Islamic republic’s constitution, the platypus of humanity’s constitutional development because it’s a very strange position.

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It’s closest analog. It’s the philosopher king in Plato’s Republic, right? It’s this idea that this wise man can rule over everything, but in effect, of course, it becomes a sort of broader indicator.

Look, the reality is there’s no one, there’s no cleric that has the charisma or political expertise or kind of figure who could replace Khamenei as a convincing supreme leader. All the major candidates died. So, the most likely thing in my opinion is that it will be very weak, clear, and others will run the show until eventually they might even get rid of the position basically.

So, I think Khamenei will be the last real supreme leader of the Islamic RepublicI should tell you that the hottest rumor for some years now, and especially in recent couple of years, is the possible candidacy of Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, and I personally don’t buy it.