TigerHawk

The spring 2006 issue of The National Interest has a bunch of interesting stuff about Iran, including an article by Ray Takeyh subtitled "Being Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." Takeyh examines the roots of Ahmadinejad's election and ideology, and in so doing reminds us that Westerners who hope that the reform of Iran's government may mitigate the threat it poses may have to wait the better part of a generation:

After 27 years, the complexion of the Iranian regime is changing. An ascetic "war generation" is assuming power with a determination to rekindle revolutionary fires long extinguished.

For Ahmadinejad and his allies, the 1980-88 war with Iraq defined their experiences, and it conditions their political assumptions. The Iran-Iraq War was unusual in many respects, as it was not merely an interstate conflict designed to achieve specific territorial or even political objectives. This was a war waged for the triumph of ideas, with Ba'athi secular pan-Arabism contesting Iran's Islamic fundamentalism. As such, for those who went to the front, the war came to embody their revolutionary identity. Themes of solidarity, sacrifice, self-reliance and commitment not only allowed the regime to consolidate its power, they also made the defeat of Saddam the ultimate test of theocratic legitimacy. War and revolution had somehow fused in the clerical cosmology. To wage a determined war was to validate one's revolutionary ardor and spiritual fidelity--the notions of compromise and a "ceasefire" were anathema to this point of view.

Suddenly, in August 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the conflict to be over. After eight years of brutal struggle and clerical exhortations of the inevitability of the triumph of the armies of God, the war ended without achieving any of its pledged objectives. For veterans like Ahmadinejad, not unlike post-World War I German veterans, there was a ready explanation for this turn of events. It was not the inadequacy of Iran's military planning or the miscalculations of its commanders, but the West's machinations and its tolerance of Saddam's use of chemical weapons that had turned the tide of the battle.

And although many Iranians wanted to forget the war, for people like Ahmadinejad the war, its struggles and its lessons are far from being a faded memory: They are constantly invoked. In his much-discussed speech in front of the UN General Assembly in September, Iran's new president used the platform offered to him to pointedly admonish the gathered heads of state for their shortcomings:

For eight years, Saddam's regime imposed a massive war of aggression against my people. It employed the most heinous weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons, against Iranians and Iraqis alike. Who, in fact, armed Saddam with those weapons? What was the reaction of those who claim to fight against WMDs regarding the use of chemical weapons then?

A pronounced suspicion of the United States and the international community would come to characterize Ahmadinejad's perspective. After all, neither America's human rights commitments nor the many treaties prohibiting the use of weapons of mass destruction saved Iran's civilians and combatants from Saddam's wrath. The lesson that the veterans drew from the war was that Iran's independence and territorial integrity could only be safeguarded by its own initiatives and not by international legal compacts and Western benevolence.

The postwar direction of the Iranian society also disturbed the returning veterans. Despite its duration, Iran waged the war largely with volunteers; only in the latter stages of the conflict did it have to rely on conscripts. As such, the war touched only a narrow segment of the populace, usually religiously zealous young men from traditional, lower-class families. As with America's own current war in Iraq, vast numbers of young men from affluent families were unaffected by the carnage of the conflict and unharmed by the vicious nature of the war. Even more disturbing, the postwar society treated the returning veterans with a degree of indifference and seemed determined to discard the revolution and its exalted values. The lure of Western culture, the focus on accumulating wealth and calls for cultural freedom preoccupied Iran's youth. For those who suffered the war and took its religious claims seriously, such callous disregard was contemptible. While much of Iran had moved on in the 1990s, the austere veterans nursed their grievances and, more ominously, assumed important positions in the security services and the Revolutionary Guards. The move to political office was natural, even inevitable.

"We must return to the roots of the revolution", proclaimed Ahmadinejad during his many campaign stops. It seemed like yet another empty slogan by yet another politician brandishing retrogressive shibboleths in the hope of mobilizing his constituents. A theocratic state that is riddled with corruption and a clerical elite that has long abandoned sublime pursuits of faith for temptations of power have generated a degree of popular cynicism. Even genuine expressions of revolutionary convictions are treated with skepticism. Ahmadinejad in many ways seemed an anachronism, as he genuinely believed that the "government of God" still had relevance. And he was earnest in his perception that somehow all the problems could be resolved if only Iran went back to the roots of the revolution.

As with his presidency, Ahmadinejad's candidacy was a rebuke of the establishment and a challenge to the elders of the revolution who had grown cautious and complacent. For Iran to be revitalized and reawakened, its leaders had to capture the moral cohesion and the stern discipline of those who bravely confronted Saddam's war machine. The instrument of Iran's redemption had to be Islam--not the passive, indifferent, establishment Islam, but the revolutionary, politicized and uncompromising devotion that launched the initial Islamic Republic under the leadership of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini. A united Iranian populace would once more redeem its faith from the transgressions of the West and the stagnation of a corrupt ruling class. By appropriating Islam's sacred symbols and invoking the history of struggle against foreign infidels and their domestic enablers, Ahmadinejad sought to transform religion once more into a revolutionary ideology. Such a faith would galvanize the masses to reclaim their lost republic and defend their patrimony.

Iran, a country of contradictions and paradoxes, elected to the presidency a politician that pledged to turn back the clock. "Today we should define our economic, cultural and political policies based on the policies of the imam's return. We should avoid copying the West's political systems", he announced. Ahmadinejad's vision for Iran constituted a mixture of statist economic policies, the reimposition of Islamic cultural strictures and the reversal of the limited political freedoms that Iranians had come to enjoy during the reformist interlude. A populace struggling with persistent economic dislocation and offended by the rampant corruption of the men of God seemed to have hoped that a humble politician with limited taste for material wealth would somehow bring about the revolution's pledge of social justice and economic equality. However, it would be on the international stage that Ahmadinejad would garner the greatest attention and cause considerable alarm and anxiety among both his countrymen and his larger global audience.

If Takeyh is right, then the puzzle of Iran is deeper still. Whether or not Ahmadinejad is a tool of the mullahs, if his rise to power reflects the political coming of age of the "war generation" -- or, in our terms, the "embassy generation" -- Iran's confrontation with the West may be more popular with Iran's fortysomething movers and shakers than is appreciated in the West, and that may make Iran less susceptible to geopolitical "reason." Put differently, the zealots in the "war generation" may be even less willing to work pragmatically with the West than the architects of the revolution, who did, after all, deal with both Israel and the United States when it was propitious to do so.