Because of these limitations on who can run for president, and what the president can actually accomplish, many Iranians who want fundamental changes in their country will boycott the elections. Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and Nobel Prize winner, says she will not vote. Arash Azizi, a young Iranian journalist who recently immigrated to Canada, also questions the utility of voting for Guardian Council-approved reformists. “The idea that you can gradually change the Islamic Republic into something better might be popular inside Western circles and with Mr. Obama, but it’s not really so in Iran,” he said in an interview with Maclean’s.
“Our real hope for changing Iran, my real hope and the majority of people’s hope, is for overthrowing this government. Because I believe there is no such thing as a reformed Islamic republic.” Still, Azizi thinks presidential elections in Iran can make a difference. If a reformist were elected, “we would get our books published faster. We would get our newspapers—maybe—published faster.” He hopes these small changes would make society more turbulent and lead to protests demanding more radical changes, until eventually the whole theocratic system crumbles.
Saeed Rahnema, the York University professor, is sympathetic but doesn’t think attempting to overthrow the existing regime is realistic or even desirable. Iran’s ruling clerics are too entrenched and too powerful. They have their own militia and multiple power bases in mosques and community organizations that dispense money and patronage. “Anybody who thinks that a velvet revolution, an orange revolution, all these colourful revolutions, are going to work in Iran, they don’t know Iranian politics,” he says. The other alternative is foreign military intervention, which, he says, would drive even those most opposed to the Islamic regime to the side of the government.
Engaging Iran, on the other hand, might weaken hard-liners by taking away the spectre of a Western bogeyman against which all Iranians supposedly need to unite. Rahnema admits engagement confers legitimacy. “But what can you do?” he asks. “I think Obama was right, much to the dismay of all of us, when he called it the ‘Islamic Republic.’ It is the Islamic Republic, whether we like it or not. I mean, I don’t like it, but it is. They created this mess, and we should hope that gradually it will be improved.”
An improved relationship between Iran and the United States would rearrange some of the pieces on the Middle East’s chessboard. McGill’s Payam Akhavan says Iran’s sponsorship of Hamas is based on power politics rather than ideological affinity. Iran sees Israel as a competitor and threat and is using Hamas to destabilize it. “The idea that Iran and Israel are locked into some sort of clash of civilizations between Jews and Muslims is absolute nonsense,” he says, noting that Israel provided assistance to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. If Iran no longer felt threatened by the United States and Israel, he believes its leaders might agree to cut off Hamas.
Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia and political party, is a different story. Hezbollah is indispensable to Iran’s quest for regional influence and, unlike Hamas, its members are Shia Muslims, as are most Iranians. But Akhavan believes Iran might stop arming Hezbollah and limit itself to political support—which is essentially what Iran proposed in its 2003 “grand bargain” offer. “That tie is not going to break. But it might change,” he says. Iran’s nuclear program is also likely untouchable, at least in the short term. “I don’t think any political leader, unless he’s suicidal, would question Iran’s nuclear program, because it’s been made such a sacred cow.”
A thaw between the United States and Iran—even with an Iranian reformist as president—would be gradual, with incremental changes that might nevertheless add up to a critical shift. Iran’s leadership is pragmatic, Akhavan says, and the two countries share common interests in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. There is room for co-operation. The cost for America will be accommodation with the Islamic Republic and an end to a policy of regime change in Iran.
This would no doubt dismay those who would interpret such a concession by the United States as an abandonment of Iranian democrats. But, Akhavan says, regime change at the hands of the United States was never a practical policy. Change is more likely to come because of economic pressures and the discontent of young people in a country where 70 per cent of the population is under 30, and therefore far too young to even remember the Islamic Revolution of 1979. “The real threat to the regime comes from within,” he says. “It doesn’t have to do with the United States. It has to do with demographics, economic conditions, the emergence of civil society. I think the clerics understand they cannot indefinitely rule.”
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