Peace Matters Index

ONLINE contents

- barbarians at the gate
- non sibi sed patriae
- chancers crooks and con men
- wanted: a new global paradigm
- iran in a calmer light
- human rights


- compled issue pdf

‘Iraq,’ said George Bush, ‘is now a different place’ but according to research conducted by one of Britain's leading polling groups more than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
The latest survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes.
Estimates of deaths in Iraq have been highly controversial. Medical journal The Lancet published a peer-reviewed report in 2004 stating that there had been 100,000 more deaths than would normally be expected since the March 2003 invasion, kicking off a storm of protest.
The Iraq Body Count currently estimates that between 80,699 and 88,126 people have died in the conflict, although its methodology and figures have also been questioned.

Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely and suddenly altered a foreign policy debate as the UN National Intelligence Estimate partly released on 4 December 2007. The Estimate is a synthesis of the findings of 16 US intelligence agencies, of which the CIA is the best known. The Estimate concludes that there has been no on-going nuclear weapons program in Iran since the fall of 2003 two years prior to the election as President of Muhmoud Ahmadinejad.

As Director General Mohamed El Baradei of the IAEA noted, the Estimate should help to defuse the current crisis in which there was talk of a US or an Israeli attack on nuclear facilities in Iran. By reducing the agitation around Iran’s nuclear programme, it helps to see Iran in a calmer light, though the internal politics and foreign outreach remain complex. Maryam Panah’s The Islamic Republic and the World is a useful guide. The book was originally a PhD thesis at the London School of Economics as part of the on-going research of Fred Halliday on the evolution of revolutionary governments.

It is useful to have read some of Fred Halliday’s work, such as Rethinking International Relations (1994) or his Iran: Dictatorship and Development (1979). It is also useful to look at Nikki Keddie’s Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran (1981) as Panah also studied with Keddie. There are also echoes of Immanuel Wallerstein’s Marxist-influenced analysis of national development within the context of the capitalist world economy. This book is a case study of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the post-revolutionary development embedded in a theoretical framework based on the wider context of capitalist development and its implications for revolution and social upheaval. Panah is particularly strong in her analysis of social class and its political expression. Thus, it is better to look for an analysis of Shia theology elsewhere.

Maryam Panah sets out her aim clearly: ‘To explain Iran’s current political order, we must understand not only the revolutionary movement of 1979’ its social bases, discourse and rhetoric ‘but importantly also the formation of the post-revolutionary state during the 1980s, a period marked more than any event by the long Iran-Iraq war. The Islamic Republic is, in this sense, not just a post-revolutionary state. It is a state formed both by revolution and by war, and the resurgence of militancy since the 2005 election is a manifestation of a 25-year-long contradictory process of post-revolutionary and post-war state formation’.

The book starts with the 1941 forced abdication of Reza Shah who had failed in his efforts to play Soviet, British and Nazi German rivalries against each other. His son, Mohammad Raza, became Shah when Western interests were well re-established, although there remained a strong, Soviet-dependent Tudeh Communist Party. The Shah was confronted by an ever-more diverse socio-economic reality. He tried to give something to everyone, but reforms were late and the Shah never had a broad base of supporters. Thus, as Panah writes ‘The Revolution was made possible by the participation of a broad coalition of social classes, each with its own interests and motives for the overthrow of the old order. Ultimately, the Revolution was made possible by the strike activities of the working class, among them most effectively the oil workers, supported by the bazaar, combined with popular demonstrations and the eventual breakdown of the shah’s military and security apparatus. Thus, the old regime thus gave way to the new in February 1979’.

Subjectively, revolutions create changes in attitudes and values. The leaders of the Iranian revolution were anti-capitalist and against an international system structured by the Cold War divisions of the USA and the Soviet Union. As Panah notes ‘The subjective formation of the participants in the Revolution was influenced both by a history of intervention of great powers and by the specific international conjuncture. The historical experience of foreign involvement in Iran buttressed the prevailing global worldview of revolutionaries, who saw the root of the problems of their society in imperialism and dependency. The articulation of these concepts, combined with religion in Iran, constituted the populist politics of the Revolution and regime: Khomeinism. In particular, it reinforced the hostility of the new post-revolutionary regime to the international status quo. Elites in power in neighbouring countries were starkly aware of this reality. The perils of the Iranian Revoultion included an immediate threat both to their political power and to the broader global social power of extraction and exploitation which their political position conserved. With the complicity of the United States and other Western powers, regional responses to the Revolution ranged from the assistance of the Iranian exiled opposition, economic sanctions and political isolation to outright military invasion in 1980 by neighbouring Iraq.’

The 1980-1988 war with Iraq, followed by continuing international pressure has been used by the Iranian leadership as a justification for the suppression of internal dissent. The government has also been able to use the international context of hostility to centralize some of the economy. However, subjective changes in attitude do not produce objective changes in socio-economic structure.

Although Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is less well dressed than Mohammad Reza, there has been little change in the basic socio-economic structure. There has been a certain circulation of elites as some people of wealth left the country and certain religious establishments increased their holdings, but there have been few fundamental changes. The economy remains dependent on oil - around half of government revenue and the vast majority of export earnings. The currently high price of oil is bringing in revenue but does not modify the economic structure. The internal and external position of Iran today is little changed from that of the Shah. By the size of its population and wealth, Iran is a regional power. The government has revenue to support political allies and movements but not to alter the regional context. Change will come from within as social and economic structures become more diverse. There is growing dissatisfaction among the people with the economic failures of the government. Will the current government be better able to initiate reforms that that of the Shah? At least by getting rid of the ‘nuclear weapon threat’, we may be able to follow economic and political evolution in a calmer light.

The Islamic Republic and the World: Global Dimensions of the Iranian Revolution. Maryam Panah. Pluto Press, 2007

Rene Wadlow