No Middle Ground, Iran’s Dangerous Division

Context: The Crackdown Becomes Visible

Jason Palmer [00:01:02] But first... As Iran’s protests kept gathering pace earlier this month, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, had his security forces cut the electricity and fire their guns into the dark. Only now that the internet blackout has been lifted is the scope of the violence becoming clear. Torched shopping centers, upturned security vehicles, a university museum in ruins. Opposition sources say as many as 30,000, mostly young people, have been killed. Relatives sift through piles of body bags. They must pay what’s called a bullet tax to recover the corpses of their loved ones. Paying the regime for the material of murder. This brutality, this humiliation, is radicalizing a public that had already turned violent.

Nick Pelham [00:02:06] Ostensibly, the streets are calm, shops have begun to reopen, but there’s a real sense of mourning. People describe the smell of blood and ashes that still linger on the streets.

Diagnosis: “A Quiet Civil War” And Two Camps

Jason Palmer [00:02:19] Nick Pelham is a Middle East correspondent for The Economist.

Nick Pelham [00:02:23] And people that I’ve managed now to speak to in Iran are describing a state of things as a quiet civil war. That kind of variegated society, that dynamic society where you had many different ethnicities, people of all different sort of walks of life, rubbing shoulders with each other is kind of falling apart. The country ever more feels divided into two camps: the regime and the royalists, who want to restore the Shah.

What Each Side Wants (And How They Justify It)

Jason Palmer [00:02:49] So tell me about that division then. What are those camps aiming for, thinking about?

Nick Pelham [00:02:55] In many ways, they’re sort of two sides of the same coin. Both see a kind of hierarchical structure, both see the other as their inveterate adversary, both accuse each other of hiring mercenaries. The regime says that the protesters on the street are working with Israel and its agents on the ground. They accuse them of being terrorists. The protesters say that the regime has brought in Shia militiamen from Iraq and elsewhere in the region to shoot at them. And there’s a kind of sense that the only way out is through bloodshed: peaceful protests—which used to be a hallmark of a struggle for a new Iran—haven’t worked, and now the confrontation has to be a violent one. Both sides are ever more talking about resorting to arms to kill the other.

Who’s Leading (And Who’s Actually Driving Events)

Jason Palmer [00:03:44] And in so far there is this polarization, this division into royalists and regime-ists. What does that look like for politics at the moment?

Nick Pelham [00:03:53] In a sense, you have these two figureheads: the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the son of the last Shah, Reza Pahlavi, who were at the top of the pyramid of their respective camps, but in many ways also both somewhat absent from the scene. Khamenei is clearly afraid of the prospect of an American strike and is spending a lot of time in his bunker, leaving the day-to-day command in the hands of others. And I think that, to some extent, is true of Pahlavi: his calls to come out on the street or strike haven’t really been respected. It’s people who claim to be acting in his name who are really driving events on the ground, and so in many ways it looks as if Reza Pahlavi is a captive of the people running the royalist agenda rather than their commander.

Escalation: Protest Turns Existential

Jason Palmer [00:04:43] And when we spoke last time about Mr. Pahlavi, you were again saying this unrest really is on a different level from what we’ve seen before—that this really did look more existential for the regime.

Nick Pelham [00:04:54] I think this round of protest has just been so fundamentally different from previous rounds. It’s been so much more bloody, and it has to be said that blood has been spilled on both sides. There have been repeated reports of protesters with knives lunging at some of the regime’s own bully boys, the Basijis, and beheading them. There’s been torching of banks and shopping centers and really anything that is seen to be symbolic or emblematic of the regime. And those voices who previously were out on the street calling for change have very much been sidelined. There’s just so much more anger and so much more venom and fury and hatred. A sense of despair that protest itself isn’t going to really deliver a new Iran, and that it’s only going to be through force that change is going to come about. Even those who are kind of political prisoners and were seeking some form of constitutional, democratic reform and a republic—their voices have largely disappeared. This is very much a royalist-led demand for change, and increasingly a demand for change through force.

Jason Palmer [00:06:02] And that change in tenor —from protest to what you mentioned is being called a quiet civil war—seems very fast changing. Is this just because the scope of what happened during the protest, the brutality of it, has now become clear? Is that what hardened people into these two camps?

Nick Pelham [00:06:19] Yes. I think it isn’t just shock at the scale of the killing, which surpasses anything that Iran has seen in the history of the Islamic Republic. It’s also the way in which the regime seems intent on humiliating the memory of the dead. It is piling up bodies in morgues. It’s leaving families to go and search for the dead amid these piles of bodies. Charging families to pay for the recovery of their bodies is kind of limiting the scope of their funerals. It’s a censor which is actively humiliating and dishonoring the dead, and I think that’s just kind of so exacerbated the anger that you’re seeing—coupled with this economic crisis that precipitates these protests, which shows no sign of getting better. You’ve had the internet out; that’s crippled the digital economy. Prices continue to rise exponentially; you’re still having a plummeting rial. It is a really desperate situation in which nobody sees any peaceful way out. Part of that anger is being expressed in a revival of tribal demands for vengeance, particularly in the provinces and places like Laristan and Ilan where the protests erupted. You’ve had images circulate of tribal elders wearing fatigues and brandishing rifles, calling for revenge, calling on the tribe to rise up. And then you hear people in exile talking about how they’re going to mobilize, how they are going to try and get guns to their supporters in Iran. There’s even been talk of recruiting an army in exile. Much has kind of happened when Syria’s protesters turned to rebels. All sides seem to be planning for the next round of militant showdown.

The Wild Card: American Intervention

Jason Palmer [00:07:59] There is a certain sense of inevitability here in what you’re saying—that this is a powder keg and in one way or another it will be lit. Is there anything that could bring Iran back from this brink?

Nick Pelham [00:08:08] The wild card in all of this is President Donald Trump and the armada that he’s amassed on the shores of Iran, and an American military strike would clearly give the initiative to external actors—to the U.S. In the past, the West has engineered regime change in some ways remarkably successfully. There have been at least three attempts to change the leader in Iran over the last hundred years and, you know, on each occasion that handover took place without years and years of civil war that you saw in Iraq and in Libya and other places where the West has tried to bring about regime change. Whether or not you can have that sort of clinical surgical strike that many in the West seem to be talking about, I think it’s uncertain. It’s just really hard to see how you can satisfy all sides at the moment. I don’t think there’d be much love lost in Iran if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was to go. Even from inside his own camp, he’s seen as in some ways past his expiry date and is fending something of a liability. But it just has to be said: what is going to come the day after Khamenei? Is it just going to lead to the Revolutionary Guard taking control, in which case that’s hardly going to satisfy the protesters on the street? Is it going to lead to wholesale attempts at regime change, in which case it’s likely that the vestiges of the regime are going to continue to fight? So, you know, even with American military intervention, I think it’s really hard to see how you, at the moment, avoid a prospect of a descent into greater bloodshed and the prospect of civil war.