Tara Mahtafar

WASHINGTON/TEHRAN—Iran’s internal crisis has done more than thrust the legitimacy of the Islamic political system under the leadership of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei into the public spotlight. It also has begun to chip away at one of the ruling hardline elite’s few successful policies in recent years—its high-stakes gambit with the West over nuclear power and its implied threat of developing a nuclear bomb.

Since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, the ascendent hardliners have proven adroit at rallying the Iranian public behind their nuclear agenda. An opinion poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland in May 2009 found that the Iranian public “broadly agrees” their country should develop nuclear energy.

My own observations, during my stay in Iran from 2005 to 2009, support this finding. I never heard any Iranian—of any stripe or background—say they were not pro-nuclear. Virtually all Iranians defended the country’s entitlement to a civilian nuclear program, even as they rankled against sanctions and the worsening economy.

Now, however, there are signs that this once-solid landscape has shifted under the feet of Ahmadinejad and his allies in the wake of the crisis triggered by the tainted presidential elections in June. To understand how and why this shift occurred, and evaluate its future direction under Ahmadinejad’s contested tenure, a brief overview of the government’s representation of its nuclear program to the public, and resulting public perception toward it in the last four years, is necessary.

Ahmadinejad rose to power in 2005 on a welfare platform that appealed to members of Iran’s lower-middle class and the rural poor. At that time, a great part of Iran’s large middle class and upper-middle class, feeling disillusioned after eight years of Khatami’s reformist presidency—which had promised much but delivered little—either grew indifferent to the polls or actively boycotted the vote. Sensing this vacuum, Ahmadinejad, then mayor of Tehran and relatively unknown, threw himself headlong into a candidacy that spoke to the economically disadvantaged. He promised economic justice—“oil shares on the kitchen tables” for all. His populist rhetoric won him 61 percent of the vote, although turnout was just under 50 percent.

As soon as Ahmadinejad was in the presidential house on Pastor Street, his talk of “oil-shares” evaporated. Instead, he coined a new mantra to rally public support: “Nuclear energy is our inalienable right.” Before then, the nuclear issue had barely existed in public discourse, but state media and government officials now proceeded to drill it into public consciousness the notion that nuclear energy was imperative for national progress.

By elevating Iran’s nuclear agenda to a matter of sovereignty and patriotism, the president diverted attention away from the sagging domestic economy. Three rounds of UN sanctions bolstered his position, allowing him to blame the West for Iran’s double-digit inflation and to position himself as a stalwart defender of Iranian national interests.

In a country with a strong nationalist streak and a proud notion of cultural identity, this carried a powerful appeal across the politicial and social spectrum: from Ahvaz to Tabriz; south to north Tehran; regime loyalists and opponents; irreligious and pious alike. Very few Iranians—perhaps only a handful of scholars—failed to support the country’s nuclear drive; even those most bitterly opposed to Ahmadinejad approved of his performance on this front.

During June’s televised presidential debates, reformists Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi both endorsed the nuclear program and assured the public they would stay the course to safeguard Iran’s rights to develop nuclear power under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If either of them had won, public backing for Iran’s nuclear policy likely would have remained unchanged.

But the June 12 earthquake hit, and in its aftermath, the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader was irreparably shattered for a majority of Iranians. Domestic politics surged to the forefront of public attention and pushed the nuclear issue into the background.

It came back into focus when the new Qom facility made headlines around the world. As the Ahmadinejad administration geared up for nuclear talks in Geneva, newly emboldened opposition leaders released a first-ever anti-nuclear statement. Addressing “citizens of the world” and especially “the people and government of America,” Mousavi’s spokesperson Mohsen Makhmalbaf announced that the opposition “shares international concerns about a nuclear-armed Iran.”

The statement was delivered on September 23, the day Ahmadinejad spoke at the UN General Assembly, and was timed to present an alternative stance that a moderate government in Tehran would take. The sentiment was echoed by Karroubi and Mousavi a few days later when they denounced the regime’s nuclear adventurism and pronounced it detrimental to Iran’s national interests.

Abbas Milani, co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution, wrote in this regard:

Though the leaders of the Green Movement have previously questioned the strategic wisdom of a nuclear bomb, these recent statements are the clearest and most fevered rejection of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. They know the current regime, besieged at home by tensions in its own ranks and a citizenry who continue to defy it, seems willing to make short-term nuclear concessions to the West in exchange for assurances that the West will not press human rights issues—a similar grand bargain made with Libya. But the Iranian opposition is warning that, unlike Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, Khamenei and Ahmedinejad have no intention of actually ending their pursuit—only buying enough time to ride out the current domestic crisis.

A Tehran-based analyst close to former president Mohammad Khatami whom I spoke to in early October confirmed that opinion toward the nuclear program among opposition supporters has turned: “People are realizing that the nuclear issue was just a propaganda tool used by the Revolutionary Guard-backed Ahmadinejad administration to take focus off the country’s real political and economic problems. They sold the nuclear program to the public as a vital interest, but after the electoral coup in June, it is obvious for many that the hardliners only care about their own interests and hold on power.”

From now, at least, the two greatest issues facing the Islamic republic today—its legitimacy in the eyes of its people and its nuclear stand-off with the West—are tightly bound together. If, as appears to be the case, the considerable swathe of the Iranian public that has rejected the presidential polls as illegitimate withholds support for an expanded nuclear program, then the domestic crisis cannot help but spill over into the foreign arena for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, opposition leaders Mousavi and Karroubi, as a matter of necessity, have differentiated their foreign policy from that of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, partly for their domestic audience—but also as a clear message to the West that strong foreign support for moderating voices in Tehran offers the best long-term prospect of keeping Iran from pursuing a nuclear bomb.

Tara Mahtafar is a journalist working in Tehran and Washington.