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Ken Pollack: It is wonderful to be back here at MEI. It is wonderful to be here on this panel. I have an interesting role on this panel. I have been asked to serve as both moderator, to keep the pace moving, and also to be one of the speakers. So I am going to try very hard to perform both.

I am delighted to be associated with this panel because the truth of the matter is it is all about intentions when it comes to Iran. Yes, we spend a lot of time debating capabilities. But the simple fact of the matter is that the reason we spend all this time debating capabilities is because we are so concerned about Iran’s intentions. Think back, for those of you in this room who can do so, to 20 to 25 years ago when Pakistan was at a similar stage in its pursuit of a nuclear capability. I remember at least one book, “The Islamic Bomb,” that tried to raise alarm about what this might mean for Israel and the United States but there certainly was not the overflowing bookshelves that we have today of people warning of the dire consequences of Iran’s acquisition of this capability. And that is because of our fears of Iranian intentions.

Of course it is easy to take counsel of your fears when it comes to Iranian intentions because we know so little about them. The Iranian regime is both labyrinthine and badly opaque. We have a terrific panel today who I think is going to do as well as any in trying to pierce the veil that surrounds Iranian decision-making but I think all of us would start out by saying that you need to take everything that we say with a grain of salt. This is a very, very difficult regime to understand. I have always believed that if we could somehow get Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the most establishment figure of Iran – if we could tie him up to a chair sitting right there and pump him full of sodium pentothal and get him to speak for 12 hours about the Iranian regime, he could not tell us exactly what was going on. The simple fact is that it is a very complex set of interactions that guides Iranian decision-making. It is very hard even for insiders to fully grasp all of its complexities, let alone to be able to predict what this regime is likely to do next.

I am joined by a wonderful group who I am delighted to be here with. I am going to give some very brief introductions and then launch into a very quick talk of my own. Immediately to my right is Gary Sick, who is currently Senior Research Scholar at SIPA’s Middle East Institute at Columbia University. I think Gary is well known to all of you. He was at the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan. Among his many other achievements he wrote the superb book “All Fall Down,” which just a few years ago I had the opportunity to re-read. All I can tell you – and I have no reason to say this, I could just as easily have skipped over it – it is such a remarkable achievement. For those of you who have not read it or have not read it recently, it is worth going back and reading through that to get a sense of what was going on at the time both here and in Tehran.

To Gary’s left is Hooshang Amirahmadi. Hooshang is founder and president of the American-Iranian Council. He is also a professor at Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. He has served as Director of Rutgers’ Center for Middle East Studies and he is also an extremely well-known and well-regarded commentator on Iranian affairs.

Finally is John Limbert. John is currently at the US Naval Academy but John was our ambassador to Mauritania as a capstone of a long career in the Foreign Service, which included most famously a 14-month posting to Tehran as a guest of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Finally there is me. I am Ken Pollack, I am Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. I guess my greatest achievement is that eventually I succeeded Gary at the National Security Council.

With those brief introductory remarks, let me say a little bit about my own thoughts about Iranian intentions. Again, we have a very broad writ on this panel and I welcome my panelists to talk about any aspect of Iranian intentions they want to. I thought I would actually talk a little bit about Iran in Iraq. I would do that both because it is an important topic and I do not know how much we are going to get into it today and I think it is important on the table. But for me it is also a very nice little case study of Iranian intentions that I think is worth thinking about, and thinking about what it may mean about Iran’s broader intentions towards the United States, towards the region, towards its own future.

Before the invasion of Iraq, it is worth remembering, the Bush administration and the Iranian government had a very extensive back channel relationship. It was developed after 9/11 as a result of the Afghan war, in which the Iranians were extremely helpful to the US government – extremely helpful in providing intelligence and assistance before the war; extremely helpful during the war itself. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, in particular prior to the “axis of evil” speech, the Iranians gave every indication that they saw that the United States was now turning its attention to Iraq, that we were thinking hard about an invasion of Iraq and the Iranians indicated that if we were going to do that they wanted to help with that as well.

Obviously the people who were working with our own folks – it is not entirely clear what writ they had from Tehran, how much they were pushing the edge of the envelope, and to what extent they were actually authorized to make these suggestions to the Americans. But that is clearly what their American interlocutors took away from these different meetings. The way that I might phrase it is that whatever the debate was in Tehran, and I think we can assume that there was a rather rowdy debate in Tehran because there seems to be a rowdy debate in Tehran over every issue under the sun, but at the very least it seems to have been the case that the Iranians were no more fearful of a US conquest and the creation of a democracy in Iraq than they were desirous of Saddam’s removal. They were in fact more desirous of Saddam’s removal than they were fearful of the execution of American power, the demonstration of America’s ability to topple Middle Eastern regimes and install a democracy in Iraq. I am sure there were Iranians who were afraid of that but they do not seem to have been winning out at that point in time.

That was also manifested in the actual invasion and the early days of the occupation of Iraq. Early on during the invasion itself, the Iranians minded their Ps and Qs and did pretty much exactly what the Bush administration wanted them to do, which was to sit on the sidelines, not make trouble – which they certainly had a tremendous capacity to do, both overtly and covertly, had they chosen to do so. And then beyond that, the Iranians actually were quite helpful to the United States. Again, I think it is worth keeping that in mind.

In early years of the reconstruction there was a split pattern – and I am going to talk about the other half of it in a second – but at the end of the day a lot of what Iran did in Iraq was actually very helpful to the United States. Of greatest importance, they seem to have told all of their allies inside Iraq – and I think that is the right way to think about them; it is a mistake to think of the various Shi’a groups as proxies or puppets of Iran. These are independent groups but they are allies of Iran in some way, shape or form. Even there, the closeness of the ties varies greatly both from group to group and even within groups. But it does seem very clear, all the information we had at the time was that the Iranians were telling their various allies inside Iraq: go along with what the Americans are doing. We have no problem with what the Americans say they are going to do in Iraq – the creation of a democracy in Iraq, which inevitably the Shi’a will dominate simply because of their demographics. That was extremely important. That brought key groups who we were very afraid might not participate, who might in fact oppose our efforts in Iraq that brought them into the process as full partners. That was actually critical in making the progress that we made in those early years. As bad as it was, it could have been infinitely worse.

By the same token though, the Iranians were up to other things (as they typically are). In particular we saw the Iranians immediately begin to build a very extensive intelligence network inside Iraq. Large numbers of Iranian intelligence officials moved into Iraq and began setting up safe houses, communications networks, arms conduits and arms caches, buying agents of influence, soliciting greater assistance from various Iraqi forces, making overtures to more and more Iraqi groups – doing everything that you would need to do to wage a covert war in Iraq except actually pulling the trigger.

My read at the time was that this reflected both a debate inside of Tehran and probably a debate in the minds of many Iranian policymakers, and it probably also reflected a desire on the part of the Supreme Leader to placate what were probably the two most likely sides of the argument in Tehran. One group who was saying chaos is the greatest threat in Iraq and we cannot allow Iraq to descend into chaos. And what’s more, if the Americans do what they say they are going to and build a democracy in Iraq, the Shi’a will inevitably be ascendant and whether or not they are our best friends they certainly will not be our enemies. They certainly will not attack us the way Saddam Hussein did and that is probably good enough. That is probably the best we can hope for in Iraq. There were of course no doubt others in Iran who were probably arguing for a much more aggressive policy: a much more aggressive policy toward the Iraqi Sunni population, a much more aggressive policy to put their own people in charge and a much more aggressive policy against the United States, arguing that the American presence in Iraq was what was the most damaging and threatening to Iran. In my mind, this explained the split that you saw. On the one hand Khamenei was saying: go along with the process. If the Americans do what they say they are going to we can live with that. But at the same time giving a sop to the hardliners but also creating what I felt was Iran’s Plan B. In case the Americans either do not do what they say they are going to do and launch some kind of invasion or they are not up to the job, we have a Plan B. We can wage covert war in Iraq if we need to do so.

In the fall of 2006 all of that seemed to change. As Iraq descended into chaos, Iran’s involvement in Iraq greatly escalated. In particular, Iran’s provision of weaponry, of EFPs (explosively forged projectiles, which are nothing but American-killers) skyrocketed. You saw a much more aggressive Iranian move and by and large the activation of this intelligence network which had been established starting in 2003 but which had lain dormant through most of 2004 and 2005. When I was in Iraq in the summer of 2007 I had a number of people, as part of this change in Iranian strategy, who used this wonderful phrase that the Iranians are “putting money on every number on the roulette wheel” in Iraq. They are supporting every single militant group in Iraq. They put more money on some numbers than others but they are supporting every single number on the roulette wheel.

There were many things that happened at that time. There was the chaos in Iraq but this was also the time when Ahmadinejad’s star seemed to be most on the ascent. There were any number of events that occurred that seemed to indicate that Ahmadinejad and the radicals were increasingly in control of Iranian policy, not least the replacement of Ali Larijani by Saeed Jalili, a much more hardline figure; stiffing the international community on nuclear negotiations and a series of other things. So it is hard to know exactly what was going on because there were many things going on.

In the fall of 2007 that seemed to change again. The last three or four months, the US military is reporting that Iranian support for those same groups is diminishing just as rapidly as it ascended in late 2006. Four things have happened in the last six to eight months, all of which may have contributed to that change.

First, you had the beginning of US-Iranian talks in Baghdad over this issue of the future of Iraq. Second, the US military took much more aggressive measures to physically prevent the Iranians from providing these weapons and other supplies to the various Iraqi groups. Third, there were a series of threats by the Bush administration toward the Iranians that if they did not cease and desist in Iraq there would be bigger trouble. Fourth, there was a very important shift in the conditions on the ground in Iraq, to a point where Iraq went from spiraling out of control into utter chaos to the point where at least half the country has largely stabilized. There is reason to believe that it may actually be on the upward ascent.

What that says to me is that what happened in 2006 probably was a combination of all four of these events. Again, it is extremely difficult for us to know exactly what is going on in Tehran, for us to discern Iranian intentions. But as I read it, I think the decision-makers in Tehran probably were influenced by all of these things. That said, I would argue that the last point I made was probably the most important and in my mind reinforces this early perspective that I had on Iranian involvement there. What happened in 2006 was not just the rise of the hardliners and therefore their greater ability to push their own program but also the fact that there was a sense in Tehran, just as there was a sense in Washington and every other capital in the world that in 2006 Iraq was going down the tubes.

If Iraq was spiraling out of control into utter chaos then there was no particular reason not to activate Plan B, to not simply do whatever Iran needed to do to defend its interests. If that meant coming into greater conflict with the Americans, so be it. We need to remember that while we talk a lot about Iran’s ability to positively influence things in Iraq, and they certainly have some ability to do so, they have the greatest ability to do harm in Iraq – something that is true for all of Iraq’s neighbors, a much greater ability to do harm than to do good. I think a lot of what was happening in 2006 was simply the Iranians trying desperately to buy influence with the different Iraqi groups to save their own specific interests in the context of a situation in Iraq that was spiraling out of control. When we stabilized the situation in 2007 that fundamentally changed the context and that allowed some of these other things that were going on, in particular the combination of threats and a greater willingness to bring Iran into the process, perhaps gave those pragmatic elements in Tehran that we love to talk about a little greater purchase to be able to carry the argument once again.

So to sum up, what do I take away from all this? If my read is correct, and all I can tell you is that I believe my read, so what I take away from it is that Iran’s intentions are a work in progress. They change, like the intentions of many countries, based on the circumstances that they encounter. I do not think that Iran’s intentions are immutably fixed and it is incapable for the United States or some other actor to change them. I think the Iranians are opportunistic. I think they are a bit paranoid. I think they are very concerned about protecting their interests, just as we saw them do in Iraq. But they are not irrationally aggressive. They calculate, make decisions. They have their own internal politics to take into account. Last but not least, while it may be the case – and I think that this is the case – that the United States is their greatest adversary, we may not necessarily be their greatest threat. Thank you.

Gary Sick: Thank you very much, Ken. It is a real pleasure to be here today, among other things, since I spend most of my time in New York, catching up with a lot of old friends who I do not see that often. It is always wonderful to come back to the Middle East Institute. Although many of you probably suspect that I am simply doing email up here – that’s what my students do in class and I am always suspicious of them – actually I am not doing email or trying to keep up with Gulf2000 or something.

What I want to talk about is what we can learn about Iranian intentions, and our own intentions to some degree, by looking back and thinking about how we got here and what we have learned along the way. US policy since the Iranian revolution has tended to regard Iran as a totally new creature and mysterious and unpredictable. In some respects that has absolutely been true. Certainly Iran has changed dramatically since the days of the Shah. But I would argue, and I think many people are starting to realize, that maybe the radical change is not as radical as it appeared at the beginning and we are beginning to see Iran moving back into a situation that it was in before.

Let me start by pointing out that Iran is in fact emerging as the leading regional power in the Gulf. The reason for that is really quite simple – it is us. “We have met the enemy and it is us” – Pogo’s famous line. In reality after 9/11 the United States quickly went into Afghanistan and took out the Taliban, which was Iran’s worst enemy to the east. Then before that job was even over we turned around and attacked Iraq and took out the Saddam Hussein government, which was Iran’s worst enemy to the west. Then we were kind enough to oversee the establishment of a Shi’a government in Baghdad for the first time in history. At the end of that game Iran was a lot stronger than they had been before. Although I agree completely with Ken that Iran had shown some willingness to cooperate with us along the way, the reality is that we gave them that. That was our gift to Iran and our problem since that time has been trying to figure out what do we do about it now that we have created it.

That makes me think back, as someone who has been around this whole business longer than I probably should have been – I can actually think back that far, most of you cannot – the two-pillar policy that the United States had adopted as the British were withdrawing from the Persian Gulf. In that period the United States was actually responsible for promoting Iran to a position of primary. We called it the two-pillar policy but everybody who knew the policy realized it was one pillar and a small pillar for Saudi Arabia on the other side. The Arabs remember very well that we were the ones who actually promoted Iran as the regional hegemon, if you like. They were the country that was supposed to protect our interests in the region and we designated them as our supporter. The Arabs, as they look at the present situation and see what we did after 9/11 and see Iran emerging once more with our assistance directly, are perhaps entitled to wonder if we are not up to our old tricks.

I think most of the Arabs actually suspect that that is in fact what is going on, that we are in fact promoting Iran to a position of primary. We say we are out to take them down but then when you look at what we actually do it does not seem to compute. They would think back, and I think all of us would be wise to think back, to the Reagan administration, which was also extremely anti-Iran, and the Iran-Contra affair, where we ended up suddenly changing sides and selling them arms, cutting a secret deal behind the backs of the Arabs and at the end of the day creating a new set of circumstances on the ground. The Arabs certainly do remember that whether you remember it or not.

So from the Arab perspective we simply could not stay away from Iran. We were attracted back to them in each case.

What does Iran actually want? I am going to focus particularly in terms of their nuclear strategy and also think back a little bit for that point of view.

First of all, I think it is important to point out that although Iran is in fact building a nuclear infrastructure – and there is no question about that – they have been remarkably slow in that process. Most countries that have attempted to devise and build a covert nuclear capability, from the time they took the decision until they actually had some kind of a device in hand usually was five to six years, something in that neighborhood. Iran made its decision to go for a nuclear infrastructure in about 1985. Now it is 22 years and counting and what have they got? They have got roughly 3,000 centrifuges turning, with a lot of people in the room watching what they are doing. The point here is not that they have not made progress; the point is that they have not been progressing nearly as fast as most other countries have that in fact decided to go for a nuclear weapon.

Iran is aware, as Mr. El Baradei has said on a number of occasions, that there are approximately 40 countries in the world that are capable of going from a peaceful nuclear program to a military program in a certain amount of time. They have the capability to do it; it is just a matter of whether they decide to do it or not. Iran fully intends to join that club of 40 countries. There are certain countries, like Japan, who are said to have the capability, if they wanted to go for a nuclear weapon it would be a long weekend to be able to produce it. Other countries, like Taiwan or Brazil, it would take longer. But there are lots of countries that have that capability. We live with that every single day. As Ken pointed out, it is all about intentions. If you are not worried about that other country being aggressive or attacking, you do not see it as an immediate threat, then you can live with the fact that they have a nuclear infrastructure that would permit them to go for a bomb. You can live with that on a regular basis and we do in fact around the world.

I would take you back however to the Shah’s policies before the Iranian revolution. We have now the memoirs of many of the people who worked most closely with him at the time. We have a pretty good idea of what he was up to. There were a lot of suspicions that the Shah was in fact building a nuclear capability and that is what he was secretly doing. His closest advisors now say that yes, he was in the sense that he was going to create a nuclear infrastructure that would give him the capability of deciding to go for a bomb and that he would be able to produce one in about eighteen months. That was the nominal period that he had in mind. He called that a surge capability, interestingly enough – that was the Shah’s own terminology for it. But the reality is that he wanted to have the ability and the flexibility that if in fact somebody threatened Iran in a way that he felt that they needed to brandish a larger stick, that he would be able to brandish that stick – that he could have a bomb in a relatively short period of time and stop and think about that.

Nobody can prove it precisely but it is my own view that that is exactly what Iran is doing today. They are putting in place the infrastructure they would need and I think the amount of time between the decision to actually build a bomb and when it would actually be available to them varies a lot. The latest NIE says that it is three to seven years. Probably if you had the intelligence community do an examination of the Shah’s program back in the mid-1970s they would have said about three to seven years is what it would take for the Shah to get a bomb if he decided to go for it. The first time I heard three to five years was in fact in 1991 when the US secretary of defense was visiting Israel and the Israelis were saying three and we were saying five, in terms of a press conference. That is a number that has remained all the way through. I do not take that as a joke. I think it is an important number. But we have now gone for more than thirty years and Iran has not taken that decision to use up those three to five years, to actually produce a nuclear weapon. In one way that is not entirely comfortable for many people, because we would rather they not have that capability at all. But if they are determined to get it, it is going to be very hard to prevent them from getting it.

So what should the US objective be under these circumstances? I think our objective is quite clear: we want to keep them as far as possible from a bomb. If it is going to be three to seven, we would like to have it more like seven years before they can actually do it. I think we would like to be in the position to know when they take that decision very shortly after they take it, that we would know that is in fact what they are doing. That means a lot of transparency.

Other people are going to be talking about this in the course of the day and I am not going to belabor the point but I do think it is important.

Let me touch very briefly on Iran’s policy in Iraq. Ken, I agree with you very much on your take about the way Iran has proceeded on this. Let me cast your mind back however, thinking about Iran’s policy in Iraq, to 1972-73, when President Nixon and Henry Kissinger did a deal with the Shah to destabilize Iraq by supporting the Kurds. That process, which has never been fully covered but is quite well known, continued very vigorously until 1975 – two to three years that it was in full force running. The Shah ran into Saddam Hussein on the edges of an OPEC meeting in Algiers. Saddam made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: we will settle our border disputes and resolve our outstanding problems but you have to stop this support for the Kurds up in the north. The Shah came home, stopped it immediately and Barzani was forced to flee the country, and there was not really anything we could do about it. He did not consult us in advance and he saw an opportunity to support his own stability, his own security. He grabbed it and he did not care what we thought about it. We had to live with it basically.

There are a couple of morals one can take from this. The main one is that Iran’s objectives in Iraq have been and continue to be driven by security concerns much more than ideology. When we think about creating a policy involving Iran we should think about that and take it seriously. It puts a different cast on the way you think about policymaking.

My own homily here, the bottom line, is that throughout this history, going back to the days of the Shah right up through the present, on both sides of the US-Iran divide domestic policy trumps foreign policy. Both sides are driven by their own domestic concerns and the policies that we make in regard to each other are in fact much more a function of our own domestic situation than they are the actual foreign policy problems of trying to deal with each other. Under the Shah, we forget – he was supposed to be our great friend but on oil prices he was not our friend at all. It was domestic issues that made him a hawk on oil prices. The hostage crisis – and we have one of the world’s greatest experts on the hostage crisis sitting at the end of the table – was driven by domestic issues. The reason that it went on so long was not because we were incapable of negotiating or because there was nobody to talk to. It was because it was serving Iran’s domestic political purposes to keep it going. When those objectives were accomplished the problem was resolved. The missed opportunities that we talk about a great deal between the United States and Iran are also in most cases created by domestic concerns. It is domestic politics that prevent us from doing the kind of deal.

Finally, I am seeing some signals in the presidential election right now that at least a couple of the Democratic candidates are talking seriously about whether and how they might talk to Iran. That is a new sign. I have not heard people talk about that in public before and it suggests that maybe our domestic politics are at a point that would actually permit that to happen. As a result I think that 2009 is likely to be a really fascinating moment because we are going to have a new president and Iran has a presidential election in that same spring. I am going to be very interested to see how that plays out. Thank you.

Hooshang Amirahmadi: Good morning. Thanks to the Middle East Institute for the invitation. It is an honor to speak here. I have been given this job to explain the structure of power in Iran. As Ken said, Rafsanjani would not be able to do it in twelve hours and I am supposed to do it in fifteen minutes. But what I am going to do is get some help from my assistant to put up an outline of the structure but please listen to me and do not try to read that – it is a very complex situation.

I would say the one area where we have really understudied Iran is the structure of its power. The question of who speaks for Iran and what are the intentions of Iran really in the end come to the point of who really runs the country. In a nutshell, that country is run by a person called Ayatollah Khamenei. Let’s put that on the table at the very beginning and I will explain to you how that power structure at the end of the day ends up there, but then it also flows from there into so many other places that really constraint it in certain ways. But if there is one person to listen, the one person to talk to, that would be Mr. Khamenei. Whether we like him or do not like him is a different issue. That is the person to talk to.

One good news about Iran is that it does have a structure, the power has a structure. It is not like some of our allies in the Middle East that when you look at them you only see a few people. This system has a structure of power in place and that structure is way beyond reformist vs. conservative, hardliners or pragmatics. Those are the people around that we see. These are not structures that we want to look at. Because we have not seen the structure close up we have tremendous misconceptions about Iran and we are always surprised about developments in that country – suddenly Ahmadinejad is president, suddenly Khatami is president – because we really do not understand what really is happening inside that political system.

To understand Iran’s political structure you have to start with the goal of the 1979 revolution. That revolution had three goals, simply: Islam, democracy and independence. Islam was the religious or ideological backbone. Democracy was put up against the dictatorship of the Shah. Independence was something against the United States of America in a way. The constitution that was defined and written in those days reflects these three goals. In fact the guys who wrote the constitution made sure these three goals of the Islamic Republic are somehow built into it. For example, a very important aspect of this constitution is to reconcile Islam with democracy. If you look at the whole structure of the constitution you will see that the constitution is struggling between Islam and democracy.

On the one hand you have religious authorities, on the other hand you have popular. The very name of the Islamic Republic – Islam is the religious, theocratic side of it and Republic is the popular, people’s side of it. It is God sitting here and the people sitting there. Then the question was how God and the people work together. That is what the constitution tried to do, to define the relationship – at the end of the day, the people cannot be over their God. The people have to follow God. But the people are not just a set of subjects that have no say, even in Islam. So the people say things but at the end of the day it is the God that rules. It is the God that will decide. The God is represented by velayet-e-faqih and the people are represented by the other institutions.

So in a way there are two sets of institutions built within the Islamic constitution, the institutions we call unelected or non-elected and the institutions which are elected. If you look at it carefully, always the elected institutions come back to the unelected but under it. So always the circuit of power is the unelected rules over the elected. In the unelected you have the leader, the House of Leadership, the velayet-e-faqih – Ayatollah Khamenei now, originally Khomeini. Then you have the Guardian Council, the Expediency Council and a set of other unelected institutions that even in this country are unelected, the judicial system and so on.

Then there are elected. There are three major elected institutions built into the constitution: the presidency, the parliament and the Assembly of Experts. The way these institutions are connected to each other is fascinating within the constitution and in practice. Let’s take the Assembly of Experts. The Assembly of Experts is to decide who should be the leader of the Islamic Republic. Theoretically that Assembly decides whether Ayatollah Khamenei can continue as leader. The question is the people who would make that decision are already decided by other institutions and therefore it is made certain that they will not be in a position to do what they are supposed to do. For example, there is the Guardian Council who will vet the people who run for the Assembly of Experts. The Guardian Council itself is appointed, 50 percent by the leader and the other 50 percent is nominated by the parliament but actually appointed by the judiciary system. The head of the judiciary then is appointed by the leader. So the leader already decides who should tell the leader to stay or not. That is how the system works.

Still, within that system the power structure does indeed allow for certain democracy or certain democratic processes. As I said, the struggle within the constitution is always how to maintain the dominance of Islam in a society where the population is also given some voice. For example, you see that the constitution creates a series of parallel – and not just parallel but multiple – centers of power to deal with that issue.

Therefore to understand the structure of power in Iran, the first thing you have to do is read very carefully the constitution. It is not an irrelevant document. Certainly it is the place to start. But if you were just to stay with that document you would miss a lot in the structure of power and how the Islamic Republic is run. There is the formal structure of power – which is there actually, I just explained to you the way the system works. You have the people who are in the streets electing a president, for example, but the president himself is being vetted (in terms of who can run) by the Guardian Council, who is appointed 50 percent by the leader and so on.

The Iranian system is a unitary system of government, versus let’s say federalism. The difference between federalism and a unitary system is very important to understand. Under federalism it is the territory that rules, it is the function, that is at the top – it is the territory versus the function. It is not the circle of ministers that are very powerful, it is the governors, for example, the states. In Iran the structure of power is such that it is the function that is important. The ministers are more important than the provincial governors. It is a vertical system. It is a system that is centered in Iran, all the way to the village – that is territorially. Functionally it starts with the leader all the way to the people in the streets. So it is important to understand that that system operates the way any system that is unitary, such as France and so on.

But most recently there is a major trend in Iran that we cannot miss. That trend, actually Ahmadinejad has started, is to strengthen the territory versus function -- basically, empowering the governors against the ministers. That is a major issue that I do not have time to go through but that is where we need to also put our attention to.

Aside from the unelected and elected officials in the Islamic Republic, you have a set of other institutions that whether they are elected or not elected, they are very important and actually becoming more important. One of that particular group is what I call military security institutions of power. That includes the National Security Council, the Army and most importantly IRGC and the Qods Forces, the basiji forces, the police forces and so on. There is a securitization and militarization of that power structure. The power structure in Iran is becoming increasingly not just politicized but also security and military-related. Of course this is the byproduct of the United States’ counterproductive policies toward Iran because the environment around which Iran now lives or the environment inside Iran is a military/security environment. Within a military/security environment people like me, with ties and nice suits, will not be operating there. Under that particular environment you have military people, the people who have guns, people who have secret information, rule the country. That is what is happening actually.

Just like any other power structure, the Iranian power structure does include a lot of what I call ideological apparatuses of power, from the mosques to Friday prayers, the schools and universities, the media and so on. Many of these are being controlled by the government and directly by the leader.

There is another thing we need to consider as we look at the power structure and that is the informal power structure in Iran versus the formal structure that I tried to explain. In fact the power in Iran is organized into a few concentric zones of power. There is what I call the elite makers center, or the zone right in the middle of the center. These are people like Khamenei, Rafsanjani, Khatami and others who really are not elite – they are elite makers. They make presidents. They make ministers, deputy ministers. There is obviously the core elite, the ministers, the people who are close to the system and usually ideological, and then, of course, peripheral elites and civil society and the opposition to the regime. You have to understand that next to the formal structure there are informal groupings of various centers of power that come together.

Let me conclude with a few observations that are very important. First, as I said, this system has a structure, a constitutional structure, from elected to unelected, formal and informal. You can think in terms of the horizontal and vertical or unitary system. It is basically a data system: go through and look and see who is where.

Second, this system is changing significantly. What we see is basically the continuity. Unfortunately what we have not seen is the change that is taking place. For example, in Iran the soft power of the regime is increasingly in decline versus the hard power. That is one reason why most people see Iran as a rising power.

Iran is not actually a rising power – let me put it on the table for you. Look at Iran’s economy, look at Iran’s politics, look at Iran’s democracy. Iran is not a rising power. What Iran shows to us is the awkwardness of that rise. Besides, every country in the region is rising. Every country in the region is putting more military machines in operation. There are more economies – the Arabs have built more military hardware than the Iranians have. Every country is rising and Iran is rising in that sense. But Iran is not a rising power in the sense that it is now to dominate the region and so on. I do completely disagree with it and I would like to sit with people who agree and ask them to show me what is it that really makes it rising. Iran has the most difficult economy that any country in the region can have. It is a very tough situation in the country.

Second, clergy is increasingly losing power to non-clergy forces. Still Khamenei is in power but believe me, within ten years most first-generation leaders of the Islamic Republic are not going to be there. I would say five years perhaps. The bad news for the regime is that this theocracy has not generated enough theocrats. There are very few that can really follow the original leaders of the revolution.

The next is that the civilian forces, whether turbaned or otherwise, are increasingly losing to the military forces and security forces because of the military securitization of the environment.

It is increasingly important to understand that Iran’s power is being diffused into the society. It is not like there is an increasing power in the hands of one but there is a decreasing of that power centrally and increasing decentralization and diffusion of the power across the Iranian political landscape.

Finally I would say that I see the future of the leadership more in terms of not an individual but as a council of leaders. This is very important because this follows from the fact that the Islamic Republic has failed to generate theocrats that could really deal with that house.

Finally, US-Iran relations: I think we have two options to go here. One is to continue the path and increase the military/security environment in a way that would serve the military/security forces, or to change gear and move in the direction where the more open-minded people can operate in a peaceful environment in Iran. Thank you.

John Limbert: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am very glad that all of my colleagues here have spoken so eloquently of the connection between the intentions, and particularly the foreign policy intentions, and the internal conditions in Iran. I would like to second Ken Pollack’s comment about the grain of salt. I am going to talk some more about internals but in speaking to this topic, before anything else I would certainly admit how much I do not know about either intentions or the internal situation. Speaking personally, I have lost count of the number of times that I have been wrong about Iran in the last 40 years. Sometimes in the political debates you hear about consistency; in that way I can claim that I have been consistent. I stopped counting my misreadings of Iran a long time ago.

Also to echo another good statement from Ken Pollack, he used the words “opaque” and “murky.” When someone asks me about understanding Iran, I am reminded of something that maybe some of you in this audience will remember – the old radio show “The Shadow.” The hero of that was Lamont Cranston. Lamont Cranston, somewhere in the east, had attained the power to cloud men’s minds. I do not know where in the east that was but I suspect it was somewhere in Iran, because Iran seems to have that power and still does. In particular that power seems to increase as you get inside the Beltway. It seems to have that ability to cloud men’s minds.

That is a pretty pessimistic introduction. Surely we must know something about Iran and what it is going to do and what is happening. In the interest of full disclosure, I approach this topic as a medievalist. My heart is somewhere back in the 14th century. So I would like to take a somewhat longer view of what may be happening internally.

There is one thing we can say for certain on this subject: the turmoil, ferment and the changes that followed in the wake of the Islamic revolution – which I should note celebrates its 29th birthday this week – are still not over. They continue. I was glad to hear Hooshang speak of goals for the revolution. If I had to summarize it in one I would say that the revolution was about Iranians at long last becoming masters in their own house. But 29 years later, two basic questions remain unanswered surrounding this goal. First, which Iranians should be masters in this house? Second, in what kind of house should they be masters? Today we still see raucous debate, sometimes violent struggle over the answers to both these questions. So let me discuss them both.

First, who should be masters? The members of Iran’s current elite – and it is that same aging inner circle of about twenty-five men – these people have run Iran on their own for the last twenty-nine years, since the earliest days, February 1979. Today they do not rest easy. Of course they are beset by old age – no one can do much about that; even they cannot do anything about that. But they are also beset by opponents on two sides. On one side there is a new generation coming up that wants their jobs. These people generally are veterans of the Iran-Iraq War and veterans of the fierce political battles of the 1980s. Many of them were students at the time of the revolution and they are now claiming their share of power and privilege. They are demanding that the old guard, which they say has grown corrupt and tired from being in power too long, should step aside for the next generation, which is sick of waiting and which is still imbued with the original popular spirit that brought victory in the revolution. On the other side the old guard is beset by the demands of the many, what the Iranians call gheyr-e-khodi – the outsiders, those who remain outside the few and their supporters who still occupy the inner circles of power.

The insiders, the so-called khodi, would like to exclude the outsiders, the gheyr-e-khodi, from the political process in the hope that this large group of outsiders will remain quiet or satisfied with being stuck on the margins of Iran’s political and social life. Until now these outsiders have in fact been kept busy just trying to survive, struggling with a system that excludes them or perhaps emigrating or otherwise being marginalized. This large group, and particularly the huge numbers of newly educated Iranian women – and I will get back to this subject in a minute because I think this is causing huge change – these people are not going to remain silent.

So let’s look at the second question: who should be masters in what kind of Iranian house? So far attempts to impose by force an austere and narrow-minded ideology on a very creative and alert population has meant that kind of indirect resistance that Iranians have perfected. They are experts in dealing with misrule by bigots and thugs. They are used to it and they know how to deal with it. But in an effort to build their particular style of house, the authorities of the Islamic Republic have arrested, intimidated, murdered and otherwise attempted to silence writers, translators, researchers and other gadflies who insist on thinking for themselves and insist on asking inconvenient questions.

The authorities’ ham-handed efforts – please excuse that metaphor – will bring temporary silence and an outward conformity but beneath that surface silence and conformity Iran’s own traditions of creativity and tolerance and a love for the unorthodox – whether it is religion, politics, art, anything else – has proved and will prove too strong for the efforts of the extremist and the fanatic to stamp it out. After all, everyone remembers the glorious verses of the poet Hafez but who remembers anything about the bigoted ruler of Hafez’s Shiraz, the brutal Mubariz ad-Din Muzaffar? No one remembers him but we all remember Hafez.

The official architects and builders of the Islamic Republic – to continue my house metaphor – simply cannot eliminate in the name of their personal design preferences all the traditions that make Iranians who they are. Despite their efforts at exclusion in the past few years here is what we have seen. I just cite two examples. We have seen an explosion of women’s higher education. I think the figures now are 60-65 percent of the university population in Iran is female. This explosion, ironically enough, was aided by or caused by the Islamic Republic’s imposing compulsory veiling. It opened higher education to people for whom it was off-limits before. Second, we have the seen the creation of a world-class Iranian film industry. We see young directors – people like Tahmineh Milani, Mohammad Shirvani and others – with very limited technical means and under restraints of censorship, they have created powerful films that have captivated world audience. Some of us in this room may be old enough to remember the trashy [films] of an earlier era and these new creations are an enormous source of pleasure but also a reaffirmation of an Iranian creative spirit that simply will not be extinguished.

So in conclusion, I look at Iran today and to me the 29-year-old revolution is like a train. It has gone into a tunnel and it is still there. It has not come out yet. Maybe it has not come out because the engineers and the passengers are still arguing about its ultimate destination. Thank you.