IRAN IN 2022

With the world headlines focussed on the war in Ukraine, media attention in early 2022 drifted away from close attention to happenings in Iran – in spite of US President Joe Biden’s moves to reinstate the Obama nuclear agreement nuclear with Iran. On a visit to Australia, sponsored by the Australia and Israel Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), Senior Fellow at the US Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Behnam Ben Taleblu addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 1 August 2022. In a comprehensive review of the Iranian political system, its personalities and strategies, Behnam Ben Taleblu explained how the dictatorship in Iran has tightened its grip on protest while modernising and improving its defence capabilities. The paper which follows is taken from an edited transcript of the talk given on the night.

IRAN IN 2022

Behnam Ben Taleblu

Thank you very much for that kind introduction and to everyone at The Sydney Institute for making this possible, as well as friends at AIJAC for helping host again. It’s a pleasure to see you all in person, especially at the tail end hopefully of the COVID-19 pandemic. And to the Zoom audience, we’re still going to thank you anyway. Last time, I had the audacity, in the pre-pandemic era, to wear an ascot. So, I thought the fashion statement I would show off today would be the braces. If I’m invited again, two years from now, who knows what item I should don, maybe a bow tie or cummerbund or something, but we can cross that bridge when we get there.

To a slightly darker, less jovial note, Iran in 2022, may not be at the tip of your minds – unless you focus on things like the nuclear deal or terrorism or non-proliferation or ballistic missiles or a lot of other fun topics. But I want to dig a little deeper about what’s been going on in that country, particularly since we last spoke in September 2019, and how that affects everybody.

In 2019, I arrived in Sydney in September, I think it was just a day or so after that historic strike by Iran at Saudi oil facilities which are probably the most important oil facilities in the world in Eastern Saudi Arabia. The attack took out quite a bit of that country’s oil export output for quite a while, using drones and cruise missiles launched from Iran’s territory or Iraqi territory. It’s still somewhat debated, but many do believe the attack was launched directly from Iranian territory.

About two and a half months after that, you had probably the largest ever mass protests against the government of the Islamic Republic. The largest in the entire history of the Islamic Republic. And that’s the theme I want to take you towards today, which is the cleavage in Iran that exists between state and society. You are more than likely to hear about the security threat posed by Iran, or the nuclear issue, or the Iran-Saudi, Iran-Israel, Iran-US tension. But I venture to guess that you may not hear a lot about the state versus society divide inside Iran, and where it’s going. And how, among the elites, the acceptable boundaries for speech and political orientation will also continue to shrink, making that regime even more hard line.

As the old saying goes, if you don’t bend you break, taking that regime ultimately in this direction after it’s been around for about four decades. Those protests in 2019 were part of a newer trend of protests. Protests are not new in Iran, protests against the Islamic Republic have been happening almost as long as there’s been an Islamic Republic. While there was a very broad and diverse coalition of groups, in 1979, that ousted the US supported Shah and ultimately generated the regime we now know as the Islamic Republic in that same year.

That was a wide group which included various kinds of leftists, communists, Marxists Islamist communists, Islamist nationalists, and a few others. And, in the four decades since, the regime has used inter-elite competition, factional disputes and also, perhaps most importantly, a whole series of foreign policy disputes to narrow that political spectrum. So, what birthed the regime through a very wide coalition or coalescence of voices, ended up becoming an ultra narrow, ultra hard line, cohesive set of voices. And every decade, you’ve seen figures rise and fall, you’ve seen many Western reporters, Western analysts, Western governments even, realise that the President in Iran is actually not the ultimate arbiter of foreign and security policy. The President is actually not even the most important political, economic or military religious official. That title goes to someone whose title is meant to be taken quite literally, that is the Supreme Leader of the country.

There have been about eight or nine presidents, in the Islamic Republic’s history, but there’s only two Supreme Leaders – Ayatollah Khomeini and Ali Khamene. And the second one is 83. He’s now thinking about his legacy. With that, you’ve seen Iran pursue an even more aggressive foreign and security policy. There’s also been more of this contraction that I have just described. And the best way you can understand this contraction is to draw a sharp contrast.

In 2013, there were a lot of Western reporters and Western analysts looking at the allegedly, “moderate” government of Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani. He was elected and inaugurated in the spring/summer of that year, and many were talking about the number of Western PhDs in his cabinet. It was a quite a large number of Western PhDs in his cabinet, not just American, but Western. You can contrast that with the government of the current president Ebrahim Raisi. He’s also someone who ran for president in 2017 and lost and ran again. Raisi has no organic political following. Many people say that he would be next in line to replace the current Supreme Leader so, potentially, he could be the country’s third Supreme Leader.

Ebrahim Raisi has distinguished himself through the letting of blood in the 1980s. He’s held multiple positions in Iran’s judiciary. He has no organic political following. Ultimately, he’s been failing upwards. Failing upwards through carrying out the Islamic Republic’s edicts on the home front, literally signing off on death warrants. There were several fatwas in the late 1980s, at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq war, basically used to clear out Iran’s prison system of political opponents. Under a very perverse litmus test, upwards of 5000 political prisoners were killed. And he was one of the four judges who had been signing off on these things. Ebrahim Raisi was about 29 years old when he signed off on them. There are audio recordings of them in which one of the potential successors of the founding father, if you will, of the Islamic Republic, is actually protesting and reprimanding these judges for the crime they were about to commit, to sign off on these certificates.

Ebrahim Raisi eventually fell out of favour and went into house arrest. But he continued to fail upwards when he became chief of the judiciary, in 2019. He was sanctioned by the US. And that brings us to the point of comparison. Whereas, in 2013, you had quite a large number of Western PhDs in the Iranian president’s cabinet, today in the cabinet of Ebrahim Raisi, you have only about 40 per cent. So just under half of that country’s cabinet is subject to some kind of foreign political or economic penalty. Some kind of sanction. And I’m not just talking about the US, I’m talking about EU, UK, UN and even Interpol. It’s a qualitatively different kind of cabinet.

And how does that relate to the political housekeeping and that narrowing boundary of political space and to the protests in 2019? Essentially it tells you that the aggressive foreign policy currently is also reflected towards an even heavier hand at home. And that’s the point I’d like to emphasise today. That there’s this increasing comfort with the use of force, an increasing comfort with the foreign aggression/ domestic repression paradigm. And what the regime is doing is continuing to use all the different disputes abroad together with inter-elite, inter-factional disputes at home, to narrow that spectrum, to make it ultra hard line, to make it more cohesive. And to make these things happen with greater regularity.

Thus, a clamp down after any exogenous shock to the system, like the protests in November 2019, and again in mid to late January into February 2020. Similarly, after the downing of that Ukrainian airliner that killed over 170 passengers, all innocent civilians; the protests throughout the COVID process, the way the regime dealt with COVID. That also was a political issue inside the Islamic Republic, rejecting some of the foreign aid, rejection of some vaccines; there was even drama, not just with the US, but even with the South Koreans more recently, who were offering face masks. That’s again, a source of tension in the regime.

There has been a series of protests inside Iran as long as there’s been an Islamic Republic. But with the November 2019 protests – the Aban protests or the November protests – there was an economic trigger. And that led many in the outside world to say, well, it was just protests over high gas prices, because gas prices had been surging. There’d been some subsidy cut issues in November 2019, and it lead many Western reporters, Western analysts, even Western government people to misunderstand the initial mass uprisings which did not begin in the capital unlike those in 1999 that were sparked by a political trigger, the closing of a reformist newspaper. Unlike those in 2009 that began in Tehran in response to a botched election, the 2019 protests began outside the capital.

Think of it as a nationwide protest that changed demographics, that changed geography, a shifting pattern in Iranian protests. Rather than beginning with more Western leaning youth in the capital, and then spreading out, the 2019 protests began with the urban and rural poor, with the generations of people that the revolution was allegedly supposed to have been for. The downtrodden and the dispossessed or, in the political parlance of the Islamic Republic, the mostafeen, the oppressed. They were supposed to carry out the next generation of the revolution. But they were the folks who were most aggressively protesting against the Islamic Republic.

So, contrary to that 1999-2017 paradigm, where a political trigger begets a protest starting in the capital with the onset of foreign pressure, particularly from the US, in 2019 you actually get a domestic nationalist protest from the urban rural poor. In 2017, in response to an economic price shock over the cost of eggs and through the first six to seven months of 2018, there were many different kinds of strikes, many different kinds of nationwide protests with the same dynamics, urban and rural poor, downtrodden and dispossessed. There was also some flooding in Iran. The trigger was environmental, social, but particularly economic. This was basically the Iranian people showing, in the lead up to that November 2019 protest, that they would use any available medium to signal their dissatisfaction with the current governing elite. And a willingness to use non-political issues, the environment, for instance. And a willingness to use the regime’s downing of the civilian Ukrainian aircraft in mid-January 2020, the one the regime shot down at the same time it launched ballistic missiles against two bases in Iraq after the killing of Soleimani – Iran’s chief terrorist mastermind. The US had killed him with a drone strike on 3 January 2020.

The Iranian people were using even foreign policy issues to discuss and publicly signal that they held a very different kind of value system from the governing elite inside of that country. You can see this represented in their slogans, for instance, from 2018. One slogan, about Iran’s involvement in Syria, begins to reprimand the regime for the blood and treasure and even national reputation spent defending a genocidal regime like the Bashar Al Assad regime, which had gassed its own people. All of which was particularly stark in the minds of the Iranian population who had suffered chemical attacks several decades earlier during the Iran-Iraq War.

One of these slogans was, “forget Syria and think about us”. In Persian it was سوریه را رها کن، به فکر ما باش. It had that nice rhyme at the end of it as well. Some of this sloganeering can be traced to 2009. One of the most famous was about Iran’s support for Palestinian terror groups and some of the proxy organisations that regime has in the Levant – “Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life for Iran”. Both slogans were repeated through multiple iterations of protest. And both were chanted for about six or seven days in 2019 in November when a surge in gas prices, right at the middle of the tail end of that month, had triggered that same exact combination of forces. Nationalist protesters against the Islamist regime, a post-revolutionary society coming out to protest a revolutionary government.

Looking at these variables, you have to also add in violence. The level of the state violence against these nationalist protests in the present was something relatively undocumented before. And relatively unseen before. For instance, there was a Reuters assessment at the end of 2019 that had three sources in Iran come up with the figure that there were 1500 people killed in the seven days of protests. And they were killed during those protests in November when there was a nationwide internet blackout. This is something pretty salient to take note of, because it’s an evolving state, or repressive kind of apparatus response to this shifting pattern of protest.

In the USA at the Washington Post they have a tagline, “democracy dies in the darkness”. Unfortunately, with Iran, it is not just democracy that dies in the darkness, it’s the Iranian people that died in the darkness. When they couldn’t coordinate their messages internally, when they couldn’t get videos out abroad of what they were doing, it became, again, a way for the regime to use that massive anvil, that massive hammer, use that surge in violence against protesters in a very overt and grotesque way without wanting to be seen as having to pay the cost for it.

So, with no media coverage, there was greater repression. And this is an evolving thing that we see in newer patterns of protests and something that we saw with the protests that began this May just as that new ultra hard line president Ebrahim Raisi was about to reach his one year anniversary this month. Earlier, in the spring, his supporters had talked about needing to perform something that they had labelled “economic surgery”.

This, in the proximate very short term period, they said was tied to the impact of the war in Ukraine on the Iranian economy. It could have been over wheat supplies, or vegetable oil shortages, or even shifting patterns of local trade that come on the back end of pandemic induced supply chain shocks for that country. The Iranian economy was in a pretty weak position. And, of course, the lingering or continuing effects of sanctions were still there but were diminishing. The Biden administration has retained many of the penalties it had inherited, although not actively enforcing them because it was seeking the resurrection of the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration, along with international partners, had agreed to with Iran.

So, there was a lingering economic effect, a pandemic effect, plus, of course, mismanagement at home. Then, the regime faced the food subsidy issue which arose from the regime drastically cutting subsidies in response to its brew of economic issues which had caused massive supply shocks and massive inflation. This involved, in the short to medium term, very significant price hikes in essential staples and new staples, even enriched grain products like pasta, well beyond traditional staples of rice and flour in the average Iranian diet. That had triggered several days of mass protests in Iran, beginning in Iran’s southwest, where there are two large, different ethnic minorities – the Bakhtiaris and the Arabs. The protests spread out from the country’s southwest to most of the nation. There were even some in Tehran. But again, the capital was not the focal point of this shifting pattern of protest.

The Iran revolutionary regime is an Islamist government ruling over a nationalist and basically post-revolutionary society. With every successive crisis that comes their way, the Iranian population is trying to signal, with admittedly immense bravery, that the regime doesn’t speak for them. That the value system is not their value system. That the foreign policy is not that of a more national or “Iran first” country – if you will, to borrow from the political parlance in Washington.

In this period of elite contraction, you have the government willing to coarsen, willing to narrow and even move the system further and further to the right. In the parlance of the country’s Supreme Leader, they talk about the “train of the revolution” or, in Persian, the qtar anqlab. Imagine a train leaving a station and shedding cars as the train goes along the track. It means that everyone who was part of that wide coalition that helped get the train into the system and get the train on the rail doesn’t stay there for the duration of the journey, doesn’t deserve to stay there. Because they’re insufficiently hard line. Ultimately, the train loses cars and speeds up towards the destination. What we’re watching with Iran in 2022, is this increased speeding up towards that comfortability with foreign overt aggression and overt domestic repression.

But the lipstick has come off. The regime used to try to feign moderation, used to have to put Western PhDs, or people who spoke great English, at the helm, just to be able to elicit foreign concessions. Now, it’s a fundamentally different equation. They believe that they can have their cake and eat it. They can advocate aggressively on behalf of the revolutionary values and continue to live and manage violently this dissonance between state and society. It is something that neighbouring countries about a decade ago demonstrated during the Arab Spring was basically a tenuous proposition, something that was not stable. But the Iranian regime believes that the one ingredient to keep everything together is force. Thus, there’s an increased willingness to use force.

Moving into the tail end of 2022, I suspect that trying to predict what the next crisis will likely be is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But we simply have to be ready, whether you’re a human rights advocate, a journalist, whether you’re a lay citizen or a policymaker, whether you’re someone who’s simply interested in this country, whether you have family there, whether you’re from there, whether you have friends who are from there. You need to know how relatively volatile the Iranian situation is. Sometimes, though, Iran may be seen in stark contrast to some of its neighbours. The situation of its eastern neighbour Afghanistan is, as you know, such that Afghan refugees and more migrants from some of those areas are moving  into Iran. On the western flank, there are migrants and refugees from the 2003 Iraq War. It’s a very tenuous situation, but it’s one that the regime feels increasingly comfortable in. That elite hubris, that comfort with using violence to manage and mitigate tension, is ultimately going to beget the next round of protests and ultimately going to beget that next cycle of violence from the state against the society.

I don’t come to you with great news today. Any picture of Iran in 2022 is not good. There are different macroeconomic indicators that we can talk about. For instance, some of what the regime is doing is generating revenue illicitly – at least illicitly in the face of the existing sanctions that remain, that the US Treasury continues to try to selectively enforce. At least since May 2022, the US has been trying to enforce some oil sanctions, some petrochemical sanctions – petrochemical sales are through the roof. But Iran is not feeling any impact from that. There is an increase in regional trade between Iran and some of its neighbours. But when you look at Iranian society, no one is actively feeling the trickle down effect of that. And this will ultimately mean that Iranian funds will go towards the things that have made and sustained this regime as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism.

Not so long ago, we laughed when Iran had downed a US drone, and some people said the drone had simply crashed in Iran. And people said Iran would never be able to develop such drones. Now you read in the press that allegedly Iran is going to be transferring drones to Russia to further underwrite Russia’s actions in Ukraine. For those of you who follow the Iran-Russia relationship or are familiar with one of the ways the Russians actually generate revenue abroad, the Russians generate a lot of revenue through arms sales and they have many clients who purchase arms. In the post-Cold War era, in the three decades since the end of the Cold War, the arms trade between Russia and Iran has been entirely one way. It’s been Russia selling and Iran buying. With changed Iranian capability, where they do have a robust drone power, now means that the pattern could go entirely in the opposite way.

We can unpack some of those threat vectors, changes in the nuclear program, and ask why is the regime saying no to a US deal so far, what’s going on at the missile front, what’s going on at the Israel-Saudi-US front? This is a change. And there will be more of these changes, because money is being invested in the missile program, which continues to be the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the region. And the drone program, which even the Russians are now allegedly interested in. Iran continues to impede maritime shipping and have a threat network the regime calls the Axis of Resistance or, in Persian the mehvar–e moqâvemat. These are proxy groups, partner groups, terror groups that they either created in jurisdictions where they don’t have state to state contacts, or they co-opted militants on a battlefield. The ultimate goal is to control these groups and then use them to contest the relationship with the state and reorient the foreign and security policy of that state.

This is where the illicitly generated revenues are going. It’s not going to help get people around a potentially new wave of an Omicron variant, it’s not going to help people offset some of the subsidy issues that have been triggered by these massive price spikes. It’s not going to, for instance, redo some of the infrastructure in places that are protesting on literally the geographic and social periphery of the country, so that those individuals can have a better life. It’s just a fundamentally dissonant world view of what is their priority. It’s pretty clear that that the regime is not at all interested in the public good or the national interest. And that is likely going to continue to be a driver of more protests.

While we may not be able to identify what those specific protests areas are, it’s pretty clear that to continue to signal their political dissatisfaction, and economic grievance, any social grievance, any environmental grievance, any foreign policy grievance, may well be the next trigger for another kind of mass uprising. All else being equal, this is the future under Iran’s constellation of hardened men at the helm who are more inclined to use violence to remain in power than ever before.