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Professor Tarek Masoud joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the Government of Iran. Is it wrong to call Iran a dictatorship? What is actually the best future for Iran? What’s one thing about the current Iran war that people are misunderstanding? Answers to these questions and many more await on Iran Politics Support.
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TechTranscript
00:00When this war ends, protest in Iran will not.
00:03I'm Professor Tariq Masood from Harvard University.
00:06Let's answer your questions from the internet.
00:08This is Tech Support Iran.
00:16Denunzio1919 asks, is it wrong to call Iran a dictatorship?
00:19The Islamic Republic of Iran absolutely is a dictatorship.
00:23But it also has some electoral features that they're not quite enough to make Iran a
00:29democracy, but they're not totally meaningless.
00:32Article 5 of the Iranian Constitution says that the leadership of Iran must reside in
00:40the form of a religious cleric of great knowledge and virtue, the supreme leader.
00:47But then Article 6 of the Iranian Constitution says that the affairs of Iran will be governed
00:51according to public opinion expressed through elections.
00:54And so they have an elected president who serves four-year terms.
00:58They have an elected parliament.
01:00And they even elect the body that is supposed to choose the supreme leader.
01:05The supreme leader is definitely on top.
01:09Everybody reports to him.
01:10He sets policy.
01:12He hires and fires the heads of the military apparatus.
01:16He sets the direction of the country.
01:19Everybody looks to him.
01:21But the president is in charge of day-to-day management.
01:23The president gets to set things like social policy.
01:26It's a system that really does have these hybrid features.
01:30So the first supreme leader of Iran, the guy who came up with the whole system, was this
01:35man, Ayatollah Khomeini.
01:36And he was the supreme leader until his death in 1989.
01:40He was replaced by this man, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
01:44This guy, by the way, was the president under Khomeini.
01:48He's also the person that we killed in February of this year.
01:52And he was replaced by his son, Mushtaba, although nobody has seen him since he assumed power.
02:00And many of the senior leadership of that country have been killed in Israeli airstrikes.
02:06Could we say that the political system in Iran is about to crumble?
02:10They've managed to hold on so far.
02:13And some people might say that the regime is built precisely to withstand this kind of stress.
02:20It can't be denied that the regime now is under the most serious strain that it has ever faced
02:26in its nearly 50 years of history.
02:28Megan Has Hemorrhoids asks, Explain like I'm five.
02:33What are Iran's Revolutionary Guards?
02:36I'm sorry about the hemorrhoids, Megan.
02:37Um, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, or what is known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,
02:43or the Pasdoran after their Persian name, are one of two armed forces that the Islamic Republic of Iran has.
02:51It's basically a full-fledged military.
02:53It has an army, a navy, an air force.
02:56It also has a kind of special forces slash covert operations arm called the Quds Force,
03:03or the Jerusalem Force.
03:05And it also has a group called the Besij-i Mustadafin that the Iranian regime relies on
03:11mainly for mobilization, maintaining order on the streets.
03:16And that IRGC sits alongside a standard military called the Artesh.
03:23If you think about it, the standard military are more nationalist.
03:27Their job is basically to defend Iran's borders.
03:30The job of the IRGC, in contrast, is to defend the Iranian regime.
03:37They are the ones who play a major role in cracking down on protest.
03:42They're also the arm of the state that supports all of the proxies across the Middle East,
03:49like Hezbollah and like the Houthis.
03:52The IRGC, by the way, is not just a military force.
03:56They actually have a serious role in the Iranian economy.
03:58And you can see estimates that they control anywhere from 20 to 60 percent of the Iranian economy.
04:04And they're involved in all kinds of industries like construction and media and even sports.
04:09Part of the reason that this regime is considered to be so strong and so durable in the face of
04:16repeated
04:17public protest is that they have a very ideologically committed group in the form of the IRGC
04:23who are willing to go to great lengths to defend the regime even against their own citizens.
04:28Here's a question from John Q. Adams in 28.
04:31How was Khamenei chosen as supreme leader when he wasn't in Ayatollah?
04:35That question is about this gentleman, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
04:39And it is true that when he was chosen to be supreme leader to succeed Khamenei, he wasn't an Ayatollah.
04:46An Ayatollah is a very senior religious cleric in Shia Islam.
04:52Shia Islam differs a little bit from Sunni Islam in that if you are a Shia Muslim,
04:58you are supposed to pick a very senior Ayatollah as your source of religious knowledge and religious authority.
05:06A Khamenei, when he was chosen as supreme leader, actually wasn't widely thought of by other Ayatollahs as one of
05:13them.
05:13And he certainly wasn't thought of as one of the most senior Ayatollahs who has the status of what is
05:19called
05:19a Merja At-Taqlid or a source of emulation, somebody who Shiites can choose to follow.
05:26So, why was he selected?
05:28He was basically selected because he'd been president for eight years and he was a regime insider.
05:34They even changed the Iranian constitution to make sure that he could come to power.
05:40The rationale then was political and not religious.
05:43A natural follow-up question that somebody might ask is, how come he was succeeded by his son?
05:48This was not like a monarchy or a dynastic succession.
05:52Again, just like with the selection of the father, the selection of the son was political.
05:57Mushtaba Khamenei is very close to the IRGC.
06:02And the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are the kingmakers in Iran today.
06:09WonderfulFox7959 asks, Iran has major protests every few years, yet nothing happens. Why?
06:15Iranians do often protest their regime. In 2009, for example, you had something called the
06:21Green Revolution, where Iranians, particularly young people, took to the streets to protest
06:25an election that was rigged against a moderate reformist presidential candidate and in favor
06:31of a conservative presidential candidate named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
06:35Ever since 2017, the Iranians have basically had one protest a year.
06:41And some of those protests are about economic issues, but some of them are about political issues.
06:45One of the big ones happened in 2022. It was called the Women, Life, and Freedom protest.
06:50And that was after a young Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini was killed by the religious police
06:55for not wearing her headscarf properly.
06:57So what happens to all these protests?
06:59The main thing is that they get repressed brutally by the regime's thugs.
07:05It's difficult to exaggerate just how willing the Islamic Republic's regime is
07:10to mete out violence against its citizens.
07:13But another factor also that ends up maybe mitigating some of the protests is that Iran does have elections.
07:20It has elections for parliament and it has elections for president.
07:24And sometimes in these elections for the presidency, moderates get elected.
07:29And so sometimes that soaks some of the energy for reform.
07:34People channel it into voting for a candidate that they think can change things.
07:39For example, the current president of Iran, Masoud Pazeshkian, is just such a reformist candidate.
07:45But here's something I know for a fact.
07:47Iranians are going to continue to protest.
07:49And when this war ends, protests in Iran will not.
07:53Taylor Pink asks,
07:55What's one thing about the current Iran war that most people are completely misunderstanding?
08:00One of the things about this war is that it's as much an information war as it is a war
08:06on the battlefield.
08:07And in the information war, the battle space is actually a lot more level.
08:12The Iranians have access to all of the tools that we might have access to.
08:18They can make glitzy AI videos that make it look like they are scoring dramatic battlefield victories.
08:25And they can also make really arresting viral propaganda videos.
08:30They made this one video called One Vengeance for All, in which they presented themselves as getting
08:36revenge for all of the victims of American aggression, going all the way back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
08:43and even to the genocide against Native Americans.
08:47And one of the reasons that the information battle space is much more even is not just because
08:53the Iranians can also use all the AI tools that we use, but that the soldiers in the information
08:59battlefield are not just necessarily located in Iran.
09:02Basically, anybody who's unhappy with this war can make a viral video and circulate it online
09:08and then get boosted by their networks.
09:10We have to be very careful about believing what we see on the internet about what's happening in this war.
09:17The second thing I would say that people are misunderstanding about this war
09:22is that the regime could survive this bombardment, and President Trump could make a deal with them
09:28that would allow them to come out and wave the flag of victory and say,
09:32we survived a sustained bombing campaign by the great Satan and the little Satan,
09:37the two greatest air forces in the world.
09:39But they could still lose, because the Iranian people have protested this regime in the past.
09:45And it may be that the capabilities of the regime, and particularly of the IRGC,
09:51will have been so degraded after this war that the balance of power between the people on the street
09:57and the regime shifts in the people's favor.
10:00The last thing I would say that people should pay a little bit more attention to
10:04is the fact that when we started this war by assassinating the supreme leader of Iran,
10:10we really crossed into some uncharted territory.
10:13And it remains to be seen whether that ends up being a good thing for the United States
10:17by making our rivals more compliant and pliable,
10:21or a bad thing by making our leaders less safe and us less safe.
10:26OKBreadfruit4005 asks,
10:28What do you think is actually the best future for Iran?
10:31Americans typically think that the best future for any country is for them to have
10:35a liberal, multi-party democracy like we have.
10:39And after our experiments in building democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan,
10:45we've become a little bit more modest about that view.
10:49That said, I really do think that in Iran, the best outcome is a democracy.
10:55It's not just the best for them.
10:57It's something that I do think the Iranians would actually be able to sustain.
11:02It's a real tragedy that the images that we see of Iranians tend to be of these bearded
11:08clerics with very stern faces.
11:10Because that is a very deep and rich and sophisticated society.
11:15It has a very high rate of literacy.
11:17There's a very high rate of education for women in Iran.
11:21Indeed, by some accounts, women achieve more educational attainment than men in Iran.
11:27And so there's lots of reasons to believe that if Iranians got the chance to lift the boot
11:32of the IRGC and the Islamic Republic off their neck,
11:36they'd be able to build a democracy and to keep a democracy.
11:39And that democracy wouldn't just be good for the Iranian people.
11:43It would also be really good for the world.
11:45I mean, I cannot exaggerate how extraordinary the Persian people are.
11:50You know, the Persians who come to the United States have made enormous contributions.
11:54The first woman to win a Fields Medal in mathematics, which is like the Nobel Prize for math,
11:59was an Iranian woman who won it in 2014 named Miriam Mirzakhanian.
12:03There are major Iranian engineers and architects and string theorists.
12:07I mean, this is a society that has made enormous contributions to science and technology
12:13and to human civilization.
12:15And you can't help but think that if somehow the Iranians could be liberated from an oppressive regime
12:22and also from a situation in which the world's greatest superpower squeezes them,
12:27that the benefits to them and to the world civilization would be incalculable.
12:33You know, there's this poem by the Persian poet Rumi.
12:37I've only read it in translation.
12:38I don't speak Persian.
12:39But something like, you know, somewhere out there beyond ideas of right and wrong and good and evil,
12:45there's a field.
12:47I will meet you there.
12:48I really hope that field exists.
12:50And I really hope that sooner rather than later,
12:53the Iranian people and the American people can meet there.
12:56Because I think only good things will happen.
12:58So those are all the questions we have for today.
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