A green wave of protest has swept through Iran since the contested presidential election in June 2009. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of Iranians have assembled to protest a fraudulent electoral process—even by the Islamic Republic’s low standards. While the Green Movement seems as robust as ever under the leadership of former presidential contenders Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Hojat al-Eslam Mehdi Karrubi, and former President Hojjat al-Eslam Mohammad Khatami, the future of the protest movement is tenuous, at best, under this unlikely alliance.
Mousavi, Karrubi, and Khatami are natural rivals. Their recent alliance is a tactical one, designed to counter the regime’s oppression of the elite groups they represent. Absent a foundation of shared values, the threat of defection and opportunism within the alliance is real. Earlier this year Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei successfully “persuaded” presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai and Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—the mastermind behind the 2009 political front against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—to “return to the bosom of the revolution.”
There is also a widening gap between the leaders of the alliance who desire to reform the Islamic Republic within the frameworks of the regime and those who don’t. Should Mousavi, Karrubi, and Khatami maintain that the Islamic Republic is a fundamentally sound model, and in need of only light housekeeping, the revolutionary movement will abandon them and seek out more progressive leadership. If the alliance alternatively seizes the momentum of the revolutionary movement and more pronouncedly opposes the ideals and practices of the sanctified Khomeini, the threesome risks being ousted from Iran.
In order to operate legally in Iran without alienating the revolutionary movement, Mousavi, Karrubi, and Khatami have acted in calculating fashion to embrace Khamenei’s radical ideology. In direct opposition to their main rival Ahmadinejad, reformist leaders are now accusing the Ahmadinejad government of selling out Iran’s “nuclear achievements”—a reference to early reports of an Iranian agreement with the 5+1 Group negotiations in Geneva and Vienna. Meanwhile they condemn Ahmadinejad’s “secret negotiations” with the United States as an act of betrayal. Such tactics, however, are unlikely to impress Khamenei, who likely sees the motive behind such rhetoric as obstruction of Ahmadinejad’s policies. The rank-and-file members of the Green Movement have also had their fill of deceptive anti-American and “anti-imperialist” rhetoric.
The Green Movement also finds itself wrestling with the strong arms of the revolution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Basij people’s militia. The IRGC has successfully exploited the divided civilian leadership of the Islamic Republic to extract ever-greater concessions from Khamenei, such as authorization to loot Iran’s economy and seize formal positions of power in government. CNN’s footage of protesters tearing down and trampling Khamenei’s picture have likely driven the Supreme Leader to invest more in his praetorian IRGC than ever before. The Green Movement has chosen civil disobedience and peaceful demonstrations as its methods of countering the IRGC and the Basij. But the Green Movement must recognize that unlike the Shah’s Army in 1979, the IRGC and the Basij have a major political and economic stake in the Iranian status quo.
The revolutionary dynamics underlying the Green Movement are bound to endure with or without the leadership of Mousavi, Karrubi, and Khatami. But revolution can’t easily be attained without significant struggle. The revolution of 1979 was the result of several decades of revolutionary activity beginning in the 1950s, accelerated through the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, 2009 is not the beginning of the end for the Islamic tyranny in Tehran. But it could be the end of the beginning of the necessary revolution.