So far I have avoided talking about Iran because, well, because Iran is weird.
It is a country of seventy million people – about the same population as California, Texas, and Illinois combined – where a quarter of the population is under fifteen and nearly two thirds are under thirty (compared with the US, where 40% are under thirty), demographics brought to you by Islamic revolution, the Iran-Iraq war and an emphasis on reproduction, and presumably a lack of good late-night television.
Iran has roughly the GDP of Pennsylvania, which wouldn’t be such a problem if it did not have six times the headcount, and even this statistic – calculated off of 2008’s high oil prices – is rather misleading. You see, as best as anyone seems to tell, Iran doesn’t make anything. It extracts oil, and to a limited extent tries to refine it. It’s the love child of David Ricardo and Dutch Disease: there is no point devoting resources to anything other than oil e&p, so no one does anything else, so the entire country sits around and waits for the oil to hit the market.
The corollary of an oil-dominated economy is an oil-dominated government. The government only gets a third of its revenue from taxing its citizens, so by and large it ignores them – think Sarah Palin with different headgear. The oil resources are nationalized, so the government is used to controlling the bulk of the economy, so little things like rule of law are of mostly academic interest (memo to Obama, Bernanke, Summers, and Geithner – this is where your path ends). The state justifies its existence by taking the oil revenue and redistributing it to the people in the fashion it sees fit – veterans of the revolution and war, family members, really really good looking people, whatever interests them.
In good times it works, sort of, because of the same selection principle that has served Fidel Castro for half a century: the disgruntled and the talented are in Los Angeles and London, where they can run their mouths but don’t challenge the state. The folks who are left behind are the silent majority of all states, the people who like things simple and await their reward in the next life.
I have two hypotheses about the electoral situation:
- We just witnessed a coup;
- The leadership got complacent.
The first is probably too aggressive for someone who does not know the country, but what if we just saw something like the Cultural Revolution: the uprising by the armed forces against the party establishment. Ahmadinejad seems to control, to varying degrees, the Revolutionary Guard and their associated militias, plus the economic institutions that are controlled by the Guard. His nominal superiors, Khameni and the Guardian Council, probably control the uniformed army.
Suppose that as things got underway and it became evident that Ahmedinajad was going to lose, Ahmedinajad just said “I’m not going anywhere” and declared victory. Khameni would be in a hell of a spot. He doesn’t have firepower, he might not be confident the streets would side with him, he doesn’t want to get sideways with the establishment he leads. In essence, Ahmedinajad would have put him in the same situation President Muffley found himself after General Ripper launched a nuclear attack in Dr. Strangelove – recognize a fait accompli and commit to supporting it, or watch a counterattack destroy you.
The alternative is the simple answer: dictators get sloppy. There was no real contingency plan for an Ahmedinajad defeat. The ballots came in strongly against him, and some organ of government realized that even the act of counting the ballots would create too many witnesses. So they clumsily cut off the election and tried to make it sound definitive by attributing a landslide to Ahmadinejad. They never stuffed ballots – hell, they never even counted them – so they cannot very well get out of their situation by offering a recount.
Who knows how long the protests will continue? It can generally be assumed that if a repressive regime maintains control of its military it can put down any insurrection. Since in this case the armed force is the strongest supporter of the status quo, they are unlikely to defect en masse without some event that would shock even today’s senses. On the other hand, the focus on martyrdom the ayatollahs have cultivated for thirty years makes things a bit less obvious; if folks get the sense that the regime is unholy in the eyes of Allah, the government will fall.
But let’s suppose the regime wins this round. What next?
China managed to put down a revolt twenty years ago, and the CCP is probably as institutionally secure as it has ever been. Unlike Mao’s time, when the only unifying factor was fear of what Mao might do, or the 1976-1989 run to Tiananmen, when the Party was searching for a mission, the current crop has no ideology, just a focus on power. This focus led them through an enormous economic and cultural change. What was a nation where commerce was at best a necessity and every decade the people went on a rampage in the name of political philosophy became a place where you are free to say and do anything you want, so long as you do not in any way challenge the role of the CCP. The CCP was willing to challenge its individual members’ sense of security – it’s a lot easier running a state-owned steel mill when there are no private steel mills – to ensure its institutional security.
That was no easy task. Most regimes cannot liberalize and keep the reins at the same time. When the choice is pissing off someone in the inner circle or taking it out on the population at large, the typical answer is to let the people suffer. So what is Iran to do? If the Revolutionary Guards now own the place, more and more benefits will need to go their way. The religious legitimacy of the regime has been sorely challenged; suppose some money will have to go to Qom to heal the wounds. That leaves less and less money to make the grievances of the underemployed population disappear.
One way to distract the population would be to start a war. The nuclear card is always a strong one; virtually all Iranians want the bomb, so a Western attempt to stop the process brings out some nationalism. Should the regime be so lucky, an Israeli bombing attack would unify the nation. Failing either of those, there is always the old standby of making threats to close the Straits of Hormuz. Regain some global initiative.
Beyond conflict, though, the regime has to bank on the price of crude oil. $150/bbl oil covers a lot of sins. Tom Friedman may be a blowhard, but he makes a great point in the NYT that there is nothing better we could do for ourselves strategically than invest in a crash program to wean ourselves from oil. Ever barrel we do not consume is another barrel sitting on the world market and ultimately taking money from the ayatollahs.
I don’t expect us to be that smart or that strategic. We elected James Inhofe, after all. But if the world economy stays down, we might not need to do much. If oil spends much time below $40/bbl, I don’t expect Ahmedinajad to finish out his term.
