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The 'War Nerd' on Iran

Released on 2013-02-13 00:00 GMT

Email-ID 1292937 Date 2009-06-25 16:38:47 From mike.marchio@stratfor.com To fisher@stratfor.com

The 'War Nerd' on Iran





http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-irans-cedar-show-aka-dont-get-excited-the-protestors-are-just-letting-off-some-steam/all/1/



War Nerd: Iran's Cedar Show, A.K.A. Don't Get Excited, the Protestors Are

Just Letting Off Some Steam

By Gary Brecher



It took me a while to figure out why everybody was nagging me to do a

column on the Iranian elections. Everybody seemed to think it was all

mysterious and world-shaking. Finally I realized, you're all het up

because every news service in the US and England has been selling these

riots like a new Star Wars episode, and people are just trying to figure

out what's going on and what it all means.



Well, I can answer that in one note: nothing much is going on, just

letting off steam; and what little is happening isn't mysterious at all.

Basically, this is simple steam release, something the Mullahs have to

allow now and then when the kids, and there are a lot of young adults in

Iran, need to remind everybody they're tired of being bossed around.

There's a huge, huge difference between that kind of "revolution" and the

kind that has a real foundation in tribal differences or religion or

city/country, the real fault lines. What's going on in Iran now is a lot

like the big fizzle in Lebanon after Hariri's assassination in 2005. So if

y'all will permit me to digress, let me take you back to the Cedar

Revolution that supposedly "gripped" Lebanon. All that really happened was

that some of the few Christian/Sunni elite Lebanese kids who hadn't

emigrated yet got so pissed off at the Syrians for just blowing Hariri

away in broad daylight that they came out and waved the Lebanese flag-the

one with the Cedar tree on it. Well, you'd have thought the Berlin Wall

had fallen all over again. The same Anglo news networks that are declaring

an outbreak of democracy in Iran now were screaming into microphones all

over Lebanon, just so touched by these rich Christian/"Phoenician"

Lebanese kids announcing that no durn Hezbollah Iranian-puppet thugs were

gonna repress their craving for freedom...and discos, and wearing about a

quart of perfume, and all the other accessories that go with what they

call a Western orientation in the Middle East.



These are the kind of people Anglo news crews glom onto like horny

refrigerator magnets: young, well-dressed, a lot of them speak English,

and they talk about nice familiar stuff like "freedom" and "democracy."

They make great TV. But they can't win a war. You win wars with poor

people, numbers and toughness and discipline. Hezbollah proved it had the

numbers by producing counter-demos with a million people cheering the

Syrians and asking Allah to zap the West and Democracy and that Cedar

Tree. If democracy means "we got more people with us than you do," that

should've proved Hezbollah beat the Cedar All-Stars, but that story never

came out much. Hezbollah's demonstrators weren't the kind of people the

BBC or CNN really felt comfortable around. It's hard for a Western news

crew to relax with a huge crowd of agitated lower-class Shia. Their way of

making a point is by getting bloody, showing off wounds and cuts and

shaving nicks, whatever they've got. Nobody at CNN wants that to be the

future; nobody wants to go to commercial with a bunch of shrieking Shia

mothers like hysterical Hefty Bags proudly saying they hope their 14 or so

sons become martyrs, and the sooner the better. No, what you want for an

upbeat TV story is a bunch of taller, skinnier, paler, English-speaking

rich kids.



Which brings us to Iran. Iranians aren't Arab, but they are Shia, and

excitable. Keep that in mind. Different countries explode at different

temperatures. There are places where yelling is a declaration of war. If a

Norwegian raises his voice, Hell is about to break loose. If a Canadian

yells at you, get a restraining order. But Iranians will scream at each

other over how to cook an egg, and be all chummy and laughing the next

minute. They used to keep that hysterical side in control with opium-the

whole country was on the pipe until the sixties-but it's harder to get

now, so they just keep yelling.



So when Iran has a national election, it's going to be loud. People are

going to yell in the streets, people are going to shoot guns off,

sometimes in the general direction of the opposition, and anybody who gets

hit is going to tweet his bloodstains, Youtube his bullet-holes, and send

it all over the world.



And if the people doing the demonstrating are mostly that same Cedar-Rev

demographic: rich young city kids-then duh, they're also the ones who are

going to be web-savvy tweet freaks. In fact, Iran has probably the biggest

dissident blog network in the world. I don't read Farsi-I wish I did-but I

read this pretty decent book, I Am Iran, about the anti-mullah blog scene

there. Check it out if you want a better idea of who the opposition is,

the people flooding the streets in Tehran. They're sick of it, which is

easy to understand; living in the Islamic Republic of Iran must be a lot

like going to a Catholic school where you never, ever graduate, where

kissing is a felony and not wearing the uniform is a crime against God.

Hell yes, they're sick of it, and they have every right to be.



But, to get coldblooded about it, so what? They're not going to overthrow

the state. I don't usually like that word, "the state," but I'm using it

here because it works better than "Ahmedinajad." He's the official bad guy

here, the classic bigmouth runt who wants Israel turned into a gravel pit

and America turned into a colony of Venezuela. Hell, he's all kinds of

obnoxious, down to the ratty beard and beady eyes and the way he dresses

like a hungover Soviet janitor.



But he's not the Islamic Republic of Iran.



He's only the president. The way the Iranian government is put together,

the Prez is more like a noisemaker, official annoyer-of-the-Anglos, than a

decider. Way, way above him is the "Supreme Leader," sort of an Ayatollah

version of the Pope, Khomeini's official successors. Right now the Supreme

Leader is Ali Khamenei. He doesn't talk to the press, or make official

trips to hug Chavez. He just sits there in his big black turban and says

"No" every time somebody asks for a little relaxation of all this pious

crap. He's seen'em come and go, these reformer types; he crushed

Rafsanjani, Khatami, anybody who even suggested that the way Khomeini laid

it down in 1979 might not be good enough for all eternity.



See, that's the pattern I'm talking about: the people who matter in Iran

won't talk to foreign news crews, and the people who will, the ones in the

streets right now...well, they may be brave, noble people, but they don't

have a chance in Hell.



That's because the IRI government is a bunch of rival militias,

intelligence agencies, and religious committees. There's even a

legislature, although nobody takes that seriously. If you remember the way

the Iranian side was organized in the Iran/Iraq war, you might have a

better idea how the people at the top like things to run: always with

rival forces competing for power. That's because Khomeini was thinking

coups in 1979. So alongside the regular Army he set up the Revolutionary

Guards, hardcore jihadis loyal to the Supreme Leader, not the Army Brass.

To make sure the Revolutionary Guards weren't vulnerable to a sudden

decapitation by the army or anyone else, their cadres were placed with

every agency, like Islamist commissars, and they set up militias in every

city in Iran.



You get the same thing in any new militarized state, even tiny Hellholes

like Duvalier's Haiti, with the Ton=ton Macoutes balancing the army,

bypassing the official channels so they could kill at Duvalier's command.



Then there's the Basij, a million or so amateur thugs who do what the

Revolutionary guards tell them to do. When you see cop types firing into

demonstrating crowds in footage from Tehran, it's usually the Basij. The

hottest hate of all right now is between the city kids, sick to death of

being whacked around by Shia nuns, and the Basij, a bunch of redneck

bigots with guns and clubs. That's not to take away the amazing suicide

courage they showed when they fought the Iraqis. I mean, the Pasdaran

elite used the poor Basij suckers as human landmine detonators: "Here, go

walk across that field for us please. You can't lose; either Allah

welcomes you to Paradise or you live and get to do it again!".



Lots of people are brave, after all. Most young male humans are brave,

when they've got a gang leading them on and backing them up. The Basij are

brave and so are the kids marching in the Tehran streets. Like a lot of

people in the same tribe who hate each other, they've probably got more in

common than they wanna think about right now, starting with that whole

martyrdom thing the Shias get off on. The Basij died like flies in the

minefields, and the demonstrators are on twitter right now showing off

their bloody wounds. Iranian to the core, both of them.



But they don't feel a lot of common ground right now. There's what you

might call a culture clash between these pious thug dudes and the city

people, the marchers and tweeters and bloggers. If you want an idea how

snotty this kind of Iranian feels about the other kind, read that woman's

comic book (whoops, you're supposed to call them "graphic novels")

Persepolis. There's her and her high-school friends slipping Iron Maiden

LPs under their chadors.



Kind of a sixties thing, kind of a hippie thing, if Kent State was

happening ten times a day. But then Iranians are tough, brave people; you

couldn't scare them with just one Kent State. The problem is, not that

many people were actually willing to die for the hippies. They all grew up

and went into real estate.



That kind of divide doesn't cut deep enough to make a war. Even those

Lebanese Cedar Revolution camera hogs had a real ethnic/religious grudge,

but from what I've been reading about Iranian election demographics, the

divide between rioters and loyalists is pretty damn blurry. Here's a link

to the best of the articles I've found on the way the elections break down

in class, ethnic, regional, and age terms. I warn you though, it's written

by a professor, and they train those bastards to write as bad as possible.

It's worth checking out, though, if you can slap yourself awake.



https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/esfahani/www/IndexFiles/Esfahani-Resume.pdf



He takes 45 pages to say that Ahmedinajad won in 2005 because he was the

`populist' candidate, meaning he promised to bring the oil money home to

ordinary people, instead of opening it up for a scary free-market

scenario. It wasn't an ethnic divide; it can't be, in Iran, because the

ethnic Persians are way bigger and stronger than the other groups (Kurds,

Azeri, Arab) put together. Kurds barely even vote-their rate is 20% lower

than Persians', just like "minorities" here. The people who back

Ahmedinajad are mostly Persian, and so are the protesters who want him

gone. You can't even call it a city/country divide, which I've been

tempted to do, because according to this Iranian professor Ahmedinajad got

a big vote in the cities as well as the villages. The only dividing lines

he can find are pretty shallow ones, like hippie/straight back in the day:

Ahmedinajad's supporters have larger family sizes, and a cluster of other

things that go along with conservative attitudes no matter where you are.

And that's about it; he says you can't even claim that education levels

matter much, because-and I love this bit:



The most visible impact of higher education is a sizable increase in the

share of invalid ballots, implying that the educated are more likely to

display their disenchantment with the systemthrough invalid ballots than

through non-participation.



That's the key here, if you ask me. This isn't a revolution, it's a lot

bummed-out, frustrated people writing "Fuck You Goddamn Mullahs!" on their

ballots in their best overeducated handwriting. They've got good reason to

be pissed off-imagine being stuck in a giant Catholic school where girls

have to wear black ghost sheets every day when you're hitting 30-but it's

not the kind of fault-line that makes revolutions. What we're seeing only

looks big or historical for two reasons: one, it's fuckin' Persians, damn

it, and they live large. They fight like this over whether rose-water ice

cream is what Allah eats in Paradise or tastes like grandma's cologne

spilled on freezer scrapings (my vote, cuz I've tried the filthy stuff).

Persians are like that amp in Spinal Tap: they go to eleven. And on the

Persian scale, this is a two or a three, fun for a while but no biggie.



The other reason this seems big is that a lot of people on our side of the

world have been waiting a long, long time to see Ahmedinajad take a big

fall. They're hyperventilating just thinking about what a great movie this

is, with the people rising up to send the loud-talking shrimp back to

midget wrestling. They're so desperate they're putting cellphone videos on

the nightly news, desperate for some sign that Iran's having its democracy

rapture.



It ain't gonna happen. Hell, for all I know Ahmedinajad actually did win

the election. I admit it's kinda weird how they counted almost 40 million

paper ballots in a few hours, but who knows? Maybe they hire a better

class of precinct worker there, math teachers or something.



Even if he fell, the IRI, the real system, would barely wobble. The

President is a mouthpiece; the real power is purposely divided up by a

half dozen creepy Islamic gangs that never talk to the BBC or CNN. All of

them are seriously armed; they're mixed up in everything from religious

seminars to land deals; they're sleazy but smart, a bunch of mean old

survivors.



So the yelling will die down, the daredevils will get laid, if you can get

laid in an Islamic Republic, by showing off their riot scars, and da

regime, if you want to call it that, will let the pressure ease, release a

little steam. If things get serious, and I doubt they will, somebody will

take the big fall for Allah and the team. It might be Ahmedinajad, even.

But there are about a million guys like him waiting for their chance to

step up. The IRI will last a long time, whether the BBC or CNN face that

fact or not.



It's good discipline for a war nerd, facing depressing fact like that,

reminding yourself that these people, whoever you're looking at, don't

want what you want, don't think like you do. Me, I thought the Shah was

pretty cool, with those F-14s and trying to revive the great days of the

real Persians, before Islam dulled them down. (And by the way, the Pagan

Persia/Islamic Iran thing is still a sore point: on the government soap

operas, the bad guys always have old-Persian names like Darius and the

heroes are always something totally Arab/Quranic like Mohammed. Then

there's the Nowruz traditions, jumping over a crypto-Zoroastrian fire,

also very cool and very frowned-on by the Islamic hicks.)



The point is, the Iranians disagreed with me: they kicked the Shah's ass

out, set him adrift with his cancer and picked Khomeini, who to us looks

like Dracula's mean uncle. To them, that freakin' Nosferatu was comfort

food for the soul. I can't see it; if there was a poster of that old demon

on my bedroom wall I'd sleep with a garlic necklace and a shotgun. But

they got their own world. Some of them may be pissed off with the mullahs,

but what if some of them like it? I don't know, CNN doesn't know-and for

every dissident blogger or tweeter they interview, there might be ten

silent-majority types wanting those damn hippies in the streets of Tehran

gassed.



Imagine the other way around; imagine Iranian Islamic tv covering, say, a

classic culture-war US election like Nixon in 1972. You'd see Persians in

expensive turbans blanket-covering every demonstration, every love-in

(well, maybe not those so much), every draft-card burning...and then the

US government announces that Nixon just stomped McGovern in the biggest

landslide ever. Who'd believe it? That is, unless you knew that for every

loud camera-hog hippie you saw on tv there were about a hundred fat

nobodies wishing Kent State was a daily event.



Until those Ahmedinajad silent-majority hicks start tweeting, we'll never

have a clue what they think. And like Nixon's people, or Forrest's

dragoons, they're not really the Twitter type.



--

Mike Marchio

STRATFOR

mike.marchio@stratfor.com

Cell: 612-385-6554









