Iran: A Response to "What If the Green Movement Isn't Ours?" (The Sequel)

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UPDATE 1030 GMT: Interestingly Daragahi is now singing a somewhat different tune on Twitter, quoting a "Tehran analyst": "Youth seem determined 2 show up for 13 Aban. May not be huge number but significant and agile walk of youth will turn up. Numbers will be enough to make BBC Persian and VOA other news agencies [notice]. The way every official is warning the young [against gathering is going to be counterproductive."

Again, with apologies in advance, I am reacting to an article in a US newspaper about the Green movement in Iran.

I do not want to do this. It is only 24 hours since I wrote about themisinformation and (in my opinion, misplaced) priorities of Jackson Diehl's opinion piece in The Washington Post. And the focus, not only for 13 Aban but on every day, should be on what is happening in Iran rather than the diversions of the "Western" media.

However, this morning there is an analysis by Borzou Daragahi in the Los Angeles Times which is so partial, so distorting, so wrong that it verges on sabotage of the demands, aspirations, and ideas of the Green movement.

Daragahi, who has been one of the best journalists writing for a US newspaper on Iran, initially offers a straightforward "Iran Students Carry on Protests", depicting university demonstrations over the last week. In the sub-headline, however, there is an ominous sign of the real point of the article: "In the West, some analysts have begun to discount the opposition movement's power."

And so the piece dissolves into unsupported soundbites. Mark Fowler, "a former CIA analyst who now heads Persia House, a service run by the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm in Washington", declares:

Our view is that the regime has largely neutralized the opposition. It seems to us that they have pretty much decapitated the opposition in terms of leadership. I don't think the government is particularly worried about it.

And then, just to put the boot in if anyone was holding on to faith in the Green movement, Fowler pronouces, "Mousavi is not a liberal per se. When he was prime minister, he would have made the conservatives and the hard-liners proud." Like Jackson Diehl yesterday, Daragahi then invokes last month's visit to the Washington Institute of Near East Policy by Ataollah Mohajerani, "a confidant of opposition figure Mehdi Karroubi [who] refused to distance himself from Ahmadinejad's nuclear policies", as a high-profile representative of the internal opposition.

Daragahi twists the knife further by citing the articles of former US officials Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, calling on the Obama administration "to abide by the results of Iran's election and to engage with Tehran's current leadership". What Daragahi does not mention is that the Leveretts' initial proclamation of the legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad victory, offered within days of 12 June in an article with the University of Tehran's Seyed Mohammad Marandi, has been challenged by a wide range of analysts, let alone by the Green movement.

It should be noted that Daragahi also quotes the opinion of Gary Sick, another former US official, that some U.S. foreign policy hawks "regard any 'reform' movement in Iran as a distraction from further sanctions and the outright U.S.-Iran hostility that they favor as a way of clarifying and simplifying U.S. policy choices in the region". But, given that Daragahi has already portrayed Fowler and the Leveretts as neutral, objective experts rather than "hawks" --- and along the way questioned the credentials and strength of the internal call for reform and justice --- Sick's comment is no more than a whistle in the anti-Green wind.

Of course, Mark Fowler and the Leveretts should be free to express their opinions. But it would be useful if those opinions were supported, in a one-sided article, by some semblance of evidence. And it might have occurred to Daragahi to consult an expert source inside Iran --- despite the regime's determined efforts to shut down any notion of a live opposition, those analyses come out day after day --- or an analyst whose primary contacts are not with officials within the Iranian Government or economic elite.

At the end of the day, however, this considered approach is not Daragahi's because --- like Jackson Diehl --- his primary attention is not on the desires, concerns, hopes within the Islamic Republic: "Iran's nuclear program remains a top Washington priority. And few U.S. officials expect the opposition to cause any shift by the Iranian government on nuclear policy in the next year, a critical period in which many fear Tehran could move dramatically closer to gaining the capacity to build an atomic bomb."

Which is fine. It's not my concern, however, and I dare say that it is not the primary thought for those who are on the frontline, rather than filing from a bureau in Beirut (or writing in a living room in Birmingham, England). So it would be appreciated if Daragahi simply said, "Nukes First, Nukes First", rather than trashing the opposition movement to fulfil that agenda.

However, let me close with the positive rather than the negative. Having provoked disbelief and then anger, Daragahi ultimately --- and unwittingly --- gives hope and raises a smile. For there, four paragraphs from the end of his piece, is the line:

"The Iranian government itself has yet to write off the protest movement."

Quite right, because the Iranian government might have better information than a Mark Fowler and his consultancy or the Leveretts and their quest for engagement. And here, from another group with pretty good information, is the sentence that could be added:

"The protest movement has yet to write itself off."

It is less than 24 hours to 13 Aban.

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I want to be careful here. I don't want to be too emotive, and I don't want to be seen as taking a cheap shot at a US journalist. However, I have just read an opinion piece which is one of the most unsettling I have encountered since 12 June.

In today's Washington Post, Jackson Diehl frets about "Iran's Unlovable Opposition". This is his opening:

Iran has been controlled since June by a hard-line clique of extremist clerics and leaders of the Revolutionary Guard who believe they are destined to make their country a nuclear power that dominates the Middle East. It follows that their opposition -- a mass movement that has been marching to slogans such as "death to the dictator" and "no to Lebanon, no to Gaza" -- is bound to be a more plausible partner for the rapproachement that the Obama administration is seeking.

Or maybe not. The enduring nature of Iran is to frustrate outsiders who work by the usual rules of political logic or who seek unambiguous commitments.

What has disturbed Diehl to the point where he rejects the Green Wave? Apparently it is a single encounter "with one of the leading representatives outside of Iran of the 'green revolution', who seemed determined to convince would-be Western supporters that they were wasting their time".

That representative is Ataollah Mohajerani, a Minister of Culture in the Khatami Government and an ally of Mehdi Karroubi. In mid-October, Mohajerani was a speaker at the annual confernence of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where --- in Diehl's words --- "the mostly pro-Israel crowd was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and a promise of change by the green coalition".

Unfortunately, Mohajerani didn't deliver what many in his audience wanted. He condemned the US for its involvement in the 1953 coup in Iran. He said "the green movement has no expectations whatsoever" on Western support for its cause. Most importantly, he refused to concede that Iran should not have a nuclear programme, pointing instead at Israel's undeclared atomic weapons, and "asked whether Israel had a right to exist, he refused to respond".

The point here is not to defend Mohajerani on these hot-button issues. Instead, it is to ponder how this one speech can be re-framed as a make-or-break movement for Iran's opposition when it comes to American support.

I knew at the time, from discussions with colleagues and contacts, that many in Washington were disturbed by what they saw as the former Minister's brusque and undiplomatic approach. But I couldn't see how Mohajerani was a spokesman for the "Green movement". I especially did not see him as an envoy asking for the endorsement of WINEP, given that the agenda of that organisation can often be seen as Israel-first and that some of its leading members have endorsed regime change, rather than reform, in Tehran.

And Diehl's article doesn't change that perception. It is based on two and only two people. There's Mohajerani. Then there's Mehdi Khalaji of WINEP, who dismisses the speech's importance, "The true leaders of this movement are students, women and human rights activists, and political activists who have no desire to work in a theocratic regime or in a government within the framework of the existing constitution." That's an argument Diehl immediately dismisses:

The fact remains that, were Karroubi and fellow opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi somehow to supplant Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the main changes in Iranian policy might be of style.

I'm not sure how Diehl knows that, since he has not spoken to Karroubi or Mousavi or Mohammad Khatami or Alireza Beheshti or Ayatollah Dastgheib or Mohammad Ghoochani or anyone involved inside Iran. I'm not sure how Diehl knows that because there is no evidence that he has read any of the political positions of the post-12 June movement apart from "statements last week by green-movement leaders attacking the uranium swap plan".

But I don't think Diehl wants to spend all his time dealing with complexities such as Iran's judicial system and the abuses of detainees or the concept of clerical leadership under velayat-e-faqih or accountability for Iran's economic policies or even rights to free expression and assembly.

Because even though Diehl positions himself as a staunch advocate of "democracy", often criticising the US Government for putting other political and economic interests ahead of the promotion of freedom, in this case his priority has nothing to do with the concerns of the Green Movement. Instead he is fixed on 1) Iran's position towards Israel and 2) Iran's nuclear programme. All else for him is window-dressing.

I don't think Diehl is as well-connected with the US Government as his fellow columnists David Ignatius or Jim Hoagland and he is not as influential as a Thomas Friedman. Yet he is still writing for one of the weather-vanes of the American political mood.

And doing so, he brings out all my fears about those who feign concern for what happens inside Iran but who seem --- forgive me here, but I must be honest --- to have an apparent lack of knowledge, understanding, or even appreciation about and for Iranians. I worry that these writers of opinion, who are not "neo-conservative" activists but self-styled "liberals", reduce all that has happened before and after 12 June into a little box that fits political agendas far removed from Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, and Mashaad.

I worry that, for these defenders of freedom, Green is only a distracting colour.