Iranian Lessons

Michael Ignatieff, The New York Times:

In south Tehran there is a huge walled cemetery dedicated to the martyrs, the young men who died fighting in the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. This vast city of the dead, complete with its own subway station and shops, does not share Arlington National Cemetery's sublimely stoic aesthetic of identical tombstones, row upon row. In Tehran's war cemetery, each of the fallen is remembered individually with his own martyr's shrine, a sealed glass cabinet on a stand. The cabinets are filled with faded photos of men forever young, some in helmets or red bandannas, some carrying their weapons, others at home stroking the family cat or grinning during a meal with friends. Next to the yellowing photographs might be a Koran, or a faded copy of a Persian poem, or a set of plastic flowers, or one of the painted eggs that Iranian families exchange at their New Year. These little shrines seem to go on forever, each one a family's attempt to confer immortality on some young man who died in the trenches at a place like Khorramshahr, the pinnacle of Iranian resistance to the Iraqi invaders.

More than a million Iranians served in the war with Iraq. Three hundred thousand died and a larger number came home wounded. Although the conflict ended in stalemate and disillusion, it remains the Iranian revolution's defining moment of sacrifice. Accordingly, the regime still exploits the martyrs' sacrifices at every traffic roundabout in the country, with enormous posters of the bearded, unsmiling, very young men in uniform, heading off to battle and divine reward.

The religion of Iran, Shiite Islam, is a martyr's faith. Shiite culture has aspects of a death cult, including an obsession with blood sacrifice. For some surviving veterans, the camaraderie they experienced on the Iraqi front epitomized not only the patriotic virtues of the revolution but also the self-sacrificing virtues of their faith.

Any American neoconservative betting on the Iranian regime to crumble under the impact of isolation, blockade, sanctions or foreign condemnation ought to pay a visit to the martyrs' cemetery. Revolutionary regimes anchored in faith and blood sacrifice have good reason to believe they are impervious to outside pressure.

I visited the cemetery of the martyrs late last month, during a trip to Iran to lecture on human rights, mostly to reform-minded students and intellectuals. My arrival fell between rounds of the country's presidential election. In the first round of voting, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the son of an ironworker, a former Revolutionary Guard during the war with Iraq and, briefly, the appointed mayor of Tehran -- had come from nowhere to win about 20 percent of the vote. The former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the supposedly reformist candidate, was struggling to hold off Ahmadinejad's challenge in the second round. Ahmadinejad is an authoritarian populist with a base of support among the poor in the shantytowns and warrens of south Tehran. Unlike Rafsanjani, he is not a mullah, and he served in the war. This gave him access to the war veterans and the Basiji, the paramilitary popular militias created during the war, and he was using them to get out the vote in the poorest neighborhoods of south Tehran. He promised the poor justice, but most of all he promised the veterans rewards for their sacrifice. Immediately labeled a hard-liner by most American commentators, Ahmadinejad sent out more populist, inclusive signals at home, leading some Iranians to worry that quick American condemnations of him as a reactionary might only provoke him into becoming one.

At the beginning of the week that I arrived, there were few Ahmadinejad posters around Tehran for the presidential runoff. Thanks to the veterans, by the eve of the final vote, banners and posters were displayed everywhere. At night, cars would grind to a halt while Ahmadinejad supporters, with his picture plastered on their foreheads, danced around the traffic circles. In the end, Ahmadinejad easily defeated Rafsanjani in the runoff election, winning with about 60 percent of the vote. It was a victory so unexpected that some were already calling it the second Iranian revolution. [II]

Ahmadinejad had capitalized not only on his war service but also on gathering disillusion with the failure of the reformers -- nominally in power since the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997 -- to address popular grievances relating to jobs, housing, transport and, above all, the growing class divide. In leafy north Tehran, reformers were talking about human rights and democracy, while in dusty south Tehran, the poor were struggling to hold onto jobs in an economy in which unemployment was officially 15 percent and probably twice that. For the reformers, the victory brought home how out of touch with ordinary Iranians many of them had become.

''That was our chief mistake,'' Amir Hossein Barmaki, a middle-class Tehrani who now works for the United Nations in the city, told me. ''The reformers -- Khatami and Rafsanjani -- came to power after the war and they did nothing for the veterans. These boys from the poor districts came home, having saved the country, and we did nothing for them. There were some who are dying of Saddam's poison gas attacks who didn't even get a pension.''

''No,'' he went on. ''There was worse. None of us actually went to the war. All the middle class went abroad or stayed in university. We sent the poor instead. We could even buy our way out of military service. It is our shame.''

On the nights after Ahmadinejad's victory, the atmosphere among many of the liberal Iranians I talked with was reminiscent of another group of intellectuals: the Russian thinkers of the 1860's, Western-educated men and women who had to discover, painfully, just how out of touch their reformist ideas were with the poor and burdened of their own society. Barmaki told me mournfully, ''We reformers have lost five years.''

The political task ahead for the liberal thinkers of Iran is to find a program that links human rights and democracy to the poor's economic grievances. READ MORE

The author appears not to have noticed that the Iranian intellual class no longer believes in the utopian ideals of the regime: As Ramin Parham said, Iranian intellectual:

Dowlat-Abadi speaks of his brethren and himself as those "who have abandoned unreachable ideals and settled instead on a minimal average"

The Iranian intellectual class has greater similarities with the with the Soviet intellectuals near the end of the Soviet Union.