The Revolution was born in Iran – will it end there?

The headlines from Iran have been especially bleak these days, which is saying something for a nation that pioneered state-sponsored Islamic extremism 30 years ago and has been at its forefront ever since.

Tehran, according to a UN report published on February 20, is now believed to have enough enriched uranium to build a simple nuclear weapon. On January 31, Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist, was suddenly arrested on vague charges of “illegal activities” and imprisoned without trial. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a ballistic missile in the guise of a statesman, has begun campaigning for a second four-year term in June’s national elections.

Yet it’s a mistake to conclude that the belligerent nation we see in the dark wings of the geopolitical stage is the only Iran today – or the most likely Iran of tomorrow.

The developments mentioned above should deeply trouble us. But in substance, they are an old story, recent landmarks on a road mapped out in the 1970s by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who fathered the Iranian Islamic revolution and exported its violent impulses.

Behind the headlines Khomeini’s revolution is graying, well past its prime, and viewed with contempt by a growing number of Iranians. Its wane could have as great an impact on global peace as its birth did on global tensions.

GENERATION GAP

The tilting point is demographic. Iran is a young society, with a median age of just 26. The radical Islamists who participated in the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy, the revolution’s defining moment, are now in their mid-fifties or older – while 67 percent of Iran’s population is under 30.

Almost every visitor is struck by the vast gulf, in dreams and expectations, between the Islamic Republic’s youthful majority and its dour and hawkish leadership. Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who filed a perceptive eight-part series in February from Iran, calls it “a land of competing currents.”

The gulf is even more telling just beyond Iran’s borders, where young middle-class Iranians flock by the thousands on vacations and weekend holidays, outside the reach of the puritanical Revolutionary Guard.

On assignments not long ago in eastern Turkey and Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, I watched as fleets of crammed buses pulled in from Tehran and the provincial Iranian city of Tabriz. Their women passengers made a beeline for public bathrooms, where they stuffed veils and austere black dresses into their baggage and donned skin-tight Levis and blazingly colorful t-shirts. Then they left in search of taverns and discos with their boyfriends. The scenes spoke volumes about the yearning for a modern, secular lifestyle – and about where the main Iranian current seems headed.

A second crucial factor in the rising demand for change is economic crisis, which is simultaneously frustrating the hopes of Iran’s restless young and draining the foreign policy budget of its elders.

From the revolution’s very beginnings, there has been a direct correspondence between Iran’s overseas ideological reach and its possession of the third largest oil reserves on Earth. With the market price of oil down from $145 per barrel in 2008 to a current $44 – and some analysts predicting a bottom of less than $25 – the bankrollers of Islamic radicalism are seriously short of cash.

The upshot is a regime less able to project its influence abroad, and an unhappy constituency at home that wonders where all the wealth went.

Finally, there is the impact of changes elsewhere, most notably in the United States – long the source of music, Internet sites, sports teams and fashions with an immense following in the new Iran, and now the home of a charismatic 45-year-old president.

In a popularity poll of the young majority, Barack Obama would crush Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to Dr. Ali Ansari, an expert in Iran’s politics at St. Andrews University in Scotland. “I don’t think there would be much of a contest,” he told David Blair, a correspondent for London’s The Telegraph.

When a Tehran news magazine ran a photo of the the newly elected U.S. president on its cover in November, under the headline “Who is Iran’s Obama?”, it was quickly banned by the regime.

The hardliners were well served by the inflexible hostility of the Bush Administration, which loudly consigned Iran to the “Axis of Evil” in 2002 – sabotaging a fragile reform movement under then-president Mohamad Khatami. Whatever Washington’s intentions, the action immeasurably bolstered the anti-Western Iranian right, and ushered Ahmadinejad into power three years later.

Now, say many analysts, Ahmadinejad’s own government has been thrown off balance by a U.S. leader willing to sit down and talk. This weekend, two senior Obama envoys are scheduled to open formal discussions in Damascus with Syria, a close ally of Tehran, in what is widely viewed as a precursor to negotiations with the Iranians.

In Iran itself, one sign of the times is that the moderate Khatami has returned to the political arena as a presidential candidate in the June, with a reasonable chance of unseating Ahmadinejad. Another is that the regime is so worried about the election’s outcome that it has blocked Internet websites supporting Khatami.

THE DIVIDENDS OF CHANGE?

A few years ago, in an off-the-record briefing in Riyadh, a high-ranking Saudi official told me that Iran’s 1979 revolution had “set back the clock for the entire Muslim world.”

The official, a member of the Western-educated liberal faction in the ruling Saud family, said that “the agenda for progress was on track until then. But when Khomeini took over in Iran, it stopped us cold. After that, the government of every Islamic nation was under massive pressure to outdo Tehran in ‘piety’ and traditional values.”

Would continued erosion – or full-fledged collapse – of Khomeni’s revolution make similar waves abroad?

At the least, it would probably bring a significant drop in material support for fundamentalist militants such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which have pitted Shi’a-dominated Tehran against Sunni Riyadh and won backing from both.

The emergence of a more tolerant Iran would, almost certainly, allow Saudi Arabia to ease the oppressive weight of its own own dated orthodoxy. Indeed, trends are already moving in that direction. King Abdullah issued surprise proclamations in January curtailing the intrusive Saudi religious police, removing a dogmatic chief judicial magistrate from office, naming a woman to head a government ministry and increasing the independence of the Majlis, the national legislature.

Lower ideological temperatures on the Persian Gulf also promise trade benefits, not the least of them flowing from an eventual resumption of commercial links between the energy-hungry West and oil-rich Tehran.

Meaningful change is more likely to come from the ballot box than the barrel of a gun. By most independent accounts, Iranian elections are remarkably above-board. With patient encouragement from abroad, they might accomplish peacefully what the Bush Administration claimed to seek in war: expanded space for democracy in the autocratic Middle East.

Far less likely, however, is an abrupt end to Tehran’s nuclear research and development. The nuclear program defies the generational and ideological divides. Like Pakistanis and Indians before them (and also like Israelis) Iranians of all ages see it as a necessary defense measure, and a symbol of maturity as an important nation-state – whatever nervous outsiders may think.

“It is doubtful that a bombing campaign would end Iran’s nuclear ambitions,” says the Times’ Roger Cohen. It would produce enormous destruction and chaos, he points out, while only “putting off an Iranian bomb — or mastery of the production of fissile material — by a year or so.”

In any case, younger Iranians contend, the nuclear program would lose its threatening edge in a new Iran. The decisive question, they insist, is not whether their country will change, but how soon.

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5