Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (49 page)

In 1994, the government introduced mandatory premarital family-planning courses; marriage licenses were not granted until a couple had completed the one-day course. I once attended a class with several couples, many of whom had only recently met because their marriages had been arranged by their families. In a room full of blushing brides-and grooms-to-be, a thoroughly uninhibited doctor took out a flesh-colored condom and demonstrated how to pull it over the model of an erect phallus. With maps of the male and female anatomies on the wall, he provided a graphic but fatherly lecture on human sexuality, then demonstrated other birth-control devices. To emphasize that men had equal responsibility in family planning, he went around the room to ask what the men planned to do about it.

The population problem had been the first issue on which the clerics demonstrated real pragmatism.

By 1998, the number of children born to the average woman had dropped from 7 children to 2.7, a change in just twelve years so striking that the chief of the UN Population Fund urged other Muslim countries with unsustainable population growth to look at the Iranian model. “It’s soundly planned, and it responds to people’s needs,” he said.
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A year later, Secretary-General Kofi Annan bestowed the world body’s highest award on population issues to the Iranian health minister who had designed the innovative program. By the 2005 election, Iran’s population had hit about seventy million, twice its size during the revolution a quarter century earlier. But the birth rate had slowed to 1.2 percent, a rate comparable to that of the United States.
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Ahmadinejad, however, wanted to reverse course. In 2006, he called for a new baby boom. It was vital, he said, as a tool to threaten the West.

“Westerners have problems because their population growth is negative. They are worried and fear that if our population increases, we will triumph over them,” he told parliament.” So I’m saying two children are not enough. Our country has a lot of capacity for children to grow in it. It even has the capacity for 120 million people.”
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His sentiment was not widely shared, particularly among women, the young, the educated, the middle class, many professionals and academics, and even senior clerics.

Despite government crackdowns on the press, the newspaper
Etemad-e Melli
dared to chastise Ahmadinejad for “ill-considered” comments.

“He stresses the necessity of population growth and the triumph of Iran over Western governments. He ignores the fact that what leads to such triumph is not population size, but knowledge, technology, wealth, welfare, and security.”

Change throughout the Middle East will be complicated by tensions with the outside world, both past and present.

Iran is the angriest example. Its 1979 revolution was almost as much about shedding a legacy of foreign influence as it was about abolishing the monarchy. Since then, the regime has also exploited tensions—and frequently fueled them—to rally support when the revolution was losing steam.

In the early days, Iran’s rulers prolonged the student takeover of the U.S. Embassy during internal clashes over a new constitution. Daily demonstrations by thousands of Iranians against the United States diverted attention from the unraveling of the revolutionary coalition and the opposition to an Islamic constitution. The clerics used the embassy seizure to consolidate their hold on power. The Imam even dubbed it “the second revolution.”

Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion, which sought to undermine the Islamist regime at a vulnerable early stage, again allowed the clerics to divert attention from their failings and mobilize domestic support.

Three decades later, the pattern had not changed. Iran had still not established equilibrium with the much of the world.

Ahmadinejad, a former Revolutionary Guard with no foreign exposure before taking office, played to Iran’s deep-seated fears of survival as well as Persian nationalism dating back millennia. Both resonated among proud Iranians—and united clerics of otherwise disparate views.

Since the fourth century
B.C
, legendary forces—from Alexander the Great to Joseph Stalin, from Genghis Khan’s Mongols to Tamerlane—have tried to occupy Iran because of its strategic position. The Turks invaded in the eleventh, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries. Britain and the Soviet Union occupied part of twentieth-century Iran. The Cold War had its origins in the Soviet Union’s refusal to pull its troops out of Iran’s northern provinces after World War II. President Harry S. Truman issued an ultimatum to Stalin to get out of Iran, and the standoff produced the first crisis of the then-new United Nations Security Council.

Ahmadinejad began his presidential Web site, “I was born fifteen years after Iran was invaded by foreign forces,” a reference to the Soviet presence.
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Iran today is twice the size of either Turkey or Egypt, with more than three times the population of either Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Yet Iranians still feel vulnerable. They are the odd people out on every border. Not one of their seven neighbors has historically been a reliable ally. Their longest land and sea frontiers are with the Arabs, including six countries across the Persian Gulf that formed their own security pact—largely to counter Iran. Turkey is a member of NATO.

A Shiite-majority country, Iran has lived for centuries surrounded by a sea of Sunni-ruled regimes, empires, and emirates. (Ironically, Persia did not embrace Shiism as the official religion until the sixteenth century, and largely to distinguish itself from—and resist—the emerging Ottoman Empire.) Shiites today are only some fifteen percent of the Islamic world. Two neighboring states represent the most rigid Sunni rule: To the south, Saudi Arabia is the guardian of Islamic holy places and ruled by followers of strict Wahhabism. To the east, Afghanistan is home to the Taliban and al Qaeda, both anathema to the Shiite clergy.

After the revolution, Iraq’s 1980 invasion—which sparked the longest and deadliest conflict in the modern Middle East—deepened the defensive mind-set. Iran suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties over eight years. The ghastliest deaths were from Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons. I covered the war on Iran’s western border and interviewed blistered, rasping, and emaciated victims of chemical weapons who were dying horrid deaths. The one thing they all recalled was the unusually enticing smell—of roses, or newly mown grass, or garlic—produced by chemical weapons.
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The outside world did little when Tehran first reported Baghdad’s use of the deadly gases in 1981. After United Nations experts verified the claims in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1986, the world body imposed no punitive sanctions and offered no humanitarian medical assistance. Indeed, by 1986, the United States, France, and key Arab countries were instead training Iraqi troops, advising Saddam’s army on strategy, or providing satellite intelligence about Iranian positions.

By the war’s end, more than 50,000 Iranians were victims of Iraq’s chemical weapons, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
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During the conflict, I often went to Behesht-e Zahra, or Zahra’s Paradise, the sprawling cemetery in Tehran named after one of the Prophet Mohammed’s daughters. One of the world’s biggest graveyards, it was a good place to judge public sentiment about the conflict. It stretched for miles and miles by the war’s end. A huge fountain in front spewed red-colored water to symbolize the nation’s martyrdom. One of my most enduring memories was traffic at the entrance to Zahra’s Paradise. It was often so congested that policemen had to frantically whistle directions to waves of funeral corteges for Iranian soldiers.

The human costs and public backlash against the war were among the reasons the Imam finally agreed to a United Nations–brokered cease-fire with Iraq; he compared the difficult decision to drinking hemlock. The war ended in 1988.

The conflict had many lingering consequences, reportedly including Iran’s biggest secret. In 1984, as the war raged into its fourth year, Iran allegedly revived a clandestine program to develop a nuclear weapon. The program was reportedly hatched by the shah but suspended after the revolution.
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It was still in an embryonic stage, experts concluded.

The motive may have been far more than just the war with Iraq.

Tehran had not launched a war in more than 200 years. Yet Iran found itself in the late twentieth century smack in the middle of the world’s largest nuclear zone. It was surrounded by five of the world’s eight nuclear powers—neighboring Pakistan and the Soviet Union, with China, India, and Israel nearby. Saddam Hussein reportedly had his own nuclear weapons development program too.

For the next eighteen years, Iran reportedly worked on acquiring pieces and technology for a clandestine program. In 2002, however, it got caught. An exiled opposition group exposed research and development at two sites, Natanz and Arak. The sprawling desert facility in Natanz included preparations for uranium enrichment. Enriched at low levels, uranium can fuel reactors in a peaceful nuclear energy program. At high levels, it can be subverted for bomb-making.

The dual-purpose technology presented a special conundrum for the outside world, as Iran definitely had been on a longstanding and legal quest for nuclear energy—a goal dating back to the monarchy. In the 1970s, the United States had actually approved Iran’s plans for twenty-two nuclear reactors. Germany began to build the first one in Bushehr.

“Petroleum is a noble material, much too valuable to burn,” the shah had said in 1974. The last Pahlavi king envisioned producing 23,000 megawatts of electricity a day from nuclear power.

Thirty years later, Iran’s population had doubled, putting a growing drain on utilities. But the Islamic republic was still struggling to open its first nuclear reactor—the Russians having taken over the German project—with a capacity of only 1,000 megawatts.

Whatever their differences on other issues, Iranians old and young, conservative and reformist, rich and poor, urban and rural, men and women, generally agreed on one thing: Iran needed nuclear energy. They have long seen it as key to moving out of the Third World club into the twenty-first century of modernizing, globalizing countries. It was inextricably wrapped up in self-image and the quest to be a great nation—through industry and development, not arms.

Nuclear energy was also becoming an economic necessity. By the mid-2000s, the world’s fourth largest oil producer used almost half of its daily oil output—1.8 million of 4 million barrels per day—for domestic needs. It had to import more than forty percent of its refined oil, some from as far away as Venezuela; its own refineries could not meet domestic needs. With its population surge, Iran faced the possibility of needing its entire oil output just for domestic consumption by 2025—in a country dependent on oil exports for seventy percent of its budget.

“This is the worst way of using our oil, especially since we won’t have oil forever,” Ali Alehi, Iran’s former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, told me in 2004. “If we did that, we’d be like the United States, which is the third largest producer of oil in the world, but also the first largest importer of oil.”

The economic and psychological importance Iran tied to its nuclear program was reflected in a new bank note issued in 2007. On one side was Imam Khomeini. On the other side of the 50,000-rial note, worth just over five dollars, was the nuclear symbol—electrons orbiting a nucleus—atop a map of Iran. It was accompanied by a quote from the Prophet Mohammed: “Men from the land of Persia will attain scientific knowledge even if it is as far as the Pleiades,” referring to the stars.
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Although attempts to enrich uranium were not technically a violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran’s denials and secret acquisitions for almost two decades led to widespread suspicions that it also wanted to become the ninth country with earth’s deadliest weapon. The outside world was willing to allow Iran to have nuclear power, but drew a red line at a nuclear bomb.

The tensions became an issue in Iran’s 2005 presidential campaign. Rafsanjani implied he would better relations with the United States as the solution to several problems. But Ahmadinejad stood firm, insisting that only Iran could control the controversial fuel cycle.

“If they accept our legitimate right [to enrich], we will cooperate,” he told supporters. “Otherwise, nothing will force the Iranians to comply with their demands. The world should know that it cannot contain this effort.”

Ahmadinejad meant it. The week after his inauguration, Iran began enriching uranium again after a two-year suspension. Although the president is just one member of the Supreme National Security Council, the results of Iran’s presidential election had altered the atmosphere. The hard-liners and ideologues dominated the internal debate. And they were far less willing to buckle to the West.

Tensions with the outside world quickly began building again.

In 2006, Europe and the United States crafted a carrot-and-stick compromise with broad incentives: Iran could keep its energy program, but Russia would control the uranium enrichment fuel cycle to ensure that the key process was not diverted for a weapon. The West would also throw in economic and diplomatic perks, including talks that would bring the United States and Iran to the negotiating table for the first time in decades. The alternative was the threat of increasingly punitive United Nations sanctions.

Tehran balked. It did not want to be dependent on the often hostile outside world.