cc  >> Kevin Check: Good afternoon  and welcome to today's  Global Hot Spots lecture.  My name is Kevin Check, Senior  Director of School and College  Relations at the Wisconsin  Alumni Association.  We're very pleased to continue  our partnership with the  Division of International  Studies, and PLATO  and Continuing Studies to bring  this programming to you.  Today we're excited to welcome  professor David Morgan as our  speaker.  He's been a professor in History  and Religious Studies at the  university since 1999 and served  as director of its Middle East  Studies program from 2002 to  2006.  He specializes in the history of  Iran and central Asia during the  Islamic period.  While at UW Madison he has  taught many courses on subjects  including the Crusades, the  History of Afghanistan, Jihad  and Islamic History  and Islam in Iran.  He has also authored numerous  books and articles on these  subjects.  Professor Morgan as a BA  from Oxford and a PhD from  the University of London,  and was on the faculty of the  School of Oriental and African  Studies, University of London,  for 24 years before coming  to UW Madison.  Please join me in welcoming  Professor David Morgan as he  presents Reflections on the  Situation in Iran. 

 [APPLAUSE]  >> David Morgan: Well, thank  you, very much, Kevin.  I must say I'm extremely  impressed that you're all  prepared to come out to this  global cold spot...  [LAUGHTER]  to hear about a Global Hot Spot.  In the summer of 1999 my wife  and I were packing up the  contents of our house in England  in preparation for moving to  Madison.  While my wife was going through  a cardboard box in the garden  shed, she came across an  envelope containing a letter  that didn't seem to be opened,  addressed to her in early 1955.  She opened it and it turned out  to be a handwritten letter to  her from 10 Downing Street from  the then prime minister, Winston  Churchill, thanking her  for her contribution  to his 80th birthday present.  That has no relevance whatever  to this lecture except just to  introduce Winston Churchill who,  as far as I'm aware, only set  foot in Iran once when he was  there in 1943 for the Tehran  conference with President  Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin.  He did, of course, have  involvement in the Middle East  earlier.  He was perhaps more than any  other politician responsible in  the early 1920s for the  invention of Iraq.  Possibly in the benefit of  hindsight, not one of his  brighter ideas. 

 In 1939 he said this  about Russia.  "Russia: It is a riddle wrapped  in a mystery inside an enigma."  Well, in my view, Stalin's  Russia was a model of  transparency compared with the  Islamic Republic of Iran.  I've been studying Iran and its  history for about 40 years now  and I was beginning to think  that I was perhaps understanding  it a bit, but I was still  surprised by the June  presidential election in Iran.  As far as I can make out,  everyone else was equally  surprised.  What was I usually do when I  want to know about contemporary  Iran is I consult the leading  academic expert in Britain who  is professor Ali Ansari of the  University of St. Andrews,  who, as it happens, 20 years ago  was a student of mine in London.  He has enormous knowledge and  understanding of contemporary  Iran and very strong connections  there, particularly with the  reformist elements.  But even he didn't see this  coming.  So what I'm going to do is to  try and see what we can make of  it and, indeed, of the  subsequent events in Iran after  the June elections.  Let me begin with two paradoxes.  First of all, Iran is probably  the most pro-American major  country in the Middle East. 

 I refer, of course, to the  people of the Iran, not to the  government of Iran.  Secondly, Iran is probably the  least religious major country in  the Middle East.  Neither of these facts are as  widely known as they should be.  Let me illustrate this.  The first point about  pro-Americanism.  After 9/11 in 2001,  the atrocities of 9/11 were  condemned unequivocally and  publicly by Ayatollah Khamenei,  the head of state in Iran,  the supreme leader.  The Mir and the chief of Tehran  sent messages of sympathy to  their opposite numbers  in New York.  And the city streets of Iran  were full of spontaneous  candlelight vigils of sympathy  for the American people.  The Iranians provided very  significant help in the  subsequent campaign against the  Taliban and al Qaeda in  Afghanistan and in setting up  the quasi government which,  at the time, seemed like  a very good idea.  And Iranian's are very good at  distinguishing between  Americans, as people and as  individuals, on the one hand,  and on the other the  United States government, and  its policies which they  may well not like. 

 I'll give you an example.  An old friend of mine is now a  professor at the University of  Hawaii, very obviously American,  happened to be living and  working in Tehran in 1979 and  was there during the embassy  hostage crisis.  And he told me he used to go up  there every day to the embassy  because it was more or less the  only free entertainment  available in Tehran at the time.  And there he was day after day  in the midst of crowds chanting  death to America, and of course  this was showing on our  television screens and yours as  well, giving the impression that  this was an extraordinarily  anti-American people.  No one ever offered him the  slightest discourtesy however,  though obviously American he  was.  And I remember him telling me  how on one occasion he was  standing next to a man who was  fiercely chanting -- death to  America, who then stepped back  on his toe.  Oh, I'm terribly sorry.  Oh, dear, I hope you weren't  hurt.  They're better at distinguishing  the general from the particular,  I think, than we are.  The second point about it not  being as religious a country as  we think. 

 The country is full of half  built mosques and even those  that are built are, except for  the ones that you see on the  television, to a very large  extent empty on Fridays.  And why is this?  Well, I think one reason is that  the people of Iran have now  endured 30 years of rule by    clerics and they don't like it.  This was predictable and  predicted.  Most of the Grand Ayatollahs,  the most senior character in  1979, except Khomeini, warned,  they said look if we take direct  political power, which we've  never done before, our role has  been to advise and warn the  government, not to run the  government, if we take direct  political power and it doesn't  work out, we'll get the blame,  won't we?  And of course, is exactly what  happened.  Now turning to the background  and framework of the  presidential election.  The Constitution of the Islamic  Republic of Iran is a very  strange artifact.  The Iran of the Shah, up to 1979  when I lived in Iran for a  while, this is a dictatorship,  no question.  Though it was a more benevolent  dictatorship than people often  say, and it doesn't look quite  so bad in retrospect as it did  at the time.  For example, executions in the  Shah's Iran were very few indeed  by the standard of Khomeini once  he'd taken power.  There was a parliament, but that  was a complete farce really. 

 It had a government party and an  opposition party.  The Iranian people, who are not  idiots, knew what it meant.  And conventionally the  government party was known to  people as the yes party, and the  opposition party was known to  people at the yes, sir, party.  [LAUGHTER]  And towards the end of the  Shah's reign, he even abolished  them and instituted a one-party  state called Rastakhiz party,  resurrection party.  The Islamic Republic of Iran is  a theocracy, as you know, in  which the supreme authority is  vested in the velayat-e Faqih,  the rule of the jurist.  That is to say the ultimate  authority in a selected senior  theological lawyer.  Who is appointed by a body  called the Assembly of Experts,  at least in theory.  Khomeini, of course, occupied  this position for the first 10  years until his death in 1989  and his successor, confusingly  similarly named Khamenei, ever  since for the last 20 years.  But the president, of course  the president remember is  subordinate to the supreme  leader, to Ayatollah Khamenei,  this sometimes confuses  Americans and Brits and other  people, the president and the  parliament, the Majlis as it's  called, are elected and they are  elected by total adult suffrage  including women.  This surprised people. 

 People expected the --, once  they'd taken power, to take the  vote away from women.  They didn't.  It was the Shah who gave the  vote to women.  It was a faintly comic instance  in the 1960s when he held a  referendum on an element of his  so-called white revolution, his  reform plan.  And he declared women would have  the vote.  The mullahs protested; they said  this is un-Islamic.  And so he said I offer you a  compromise, the women can vote  but their votes won't count.  And the mullahs scratched their  turbans and said oh, well, all  right.  But of course the point was that  the principle was established  that the women did vote.  And despite the mullahs  opposition there, Khomeini did  not attempt to reverse that. 

 Not least because in 1979, I  think, a good deal of the  support for the revolution  actually did come from women.  Now, the president and the  Majlis are elected, as I say.  But that doesn't necessarily  mean you can be a candidate.  There's a body called the  Guardian Council which  disqualifies candidates it  doesn't consider suitable or to  have appropriate views or to be  sufficiently pro-Islamic  Republic and that usually rules  out most candidates.  But once you're accepted as a  candidate, elections, until this  year, until 2009, were actually  fairly free, though some fraud  went on.  Iran, until this year, was  really rather usually in the  region in that the results of  elections were not known in  advance.  Which was by no means the case  under the Shah, as I indicated.  The most extreme example of this  was the election in 1997, the  presidency of Khatami, the  reformist Khatami.  Khamenei, the supreme leader,  told the people of Iran to vote  for the establishment candidate  a man called Nateq-Nouri, and,  massively, the population did  nothing of the sort and voted of  Khatami.  But the population as a whole, I  mean I think it's often been  pointed out that Khatami's  majority was so huge that a good  many of, for example, the  revolutionary guards, the  backbone of the regime, must  have voted for Khatami. 

 And there's a persistent rumor  that Khatami gave some of his  votes to his opponent so it  wouldn't look so awful.  Whether this is true I don't  know, it's the sort of story  that goes around in Iran.  And this was repeated again when  Khatami was reelected in 2001.  And this was quite unexpected.  Nobody saw this coming.  Certainly the establishment  figures in Iran, the permanent  establishment figures, didn't  see that coming at all.  So there's a democratic element  in the Constitution.  It's not a democracy but there's  a democratic element there.  Which is difficult to remove  because it was put there by the  revered Ayatollah Khomeini.  So what are you going to say?  Khomeini was wrong about that. 

 This is a difficult one if  you're a member of the  establishment of the Islamic  Republic of Iran.  The election in June, therefore,  this year, was something of an  anomaly.  Now, the eight years of  Khatami's presidency had not  seen the changes that people had  envisioned when they elected  him.  Khatami was, he's a decent and  intelligent man, but he's also a  very cautious man, and it's also  important to remember that  although he was the reformist  candidate, he was still very  much part of the system.  He's a cleric, middle-ranking  cleric.  He wasn't from outside some sort  of secular figure who had had  nothing to do with Islamic  revolution, far from it.  He had moved very cautiously and  whenever there was serious  opposition from the conservative  factions in the regime, he  tended to back down.  He did make more achievements  perhaps than he's sometimes  given credit for, but there was  a lot of disillusionment with  the failure of the reform  movement to make anything like  the progress that had been hoped  for and anticipated in 1997.  So in 2005, Ahmadinejad was  elected for the first time.  There was some fiddling with the  vote there I think too, but it  was still unexpected. 

 He was not expected to win in  2005 but he did.  And that was, it was widely  thought to a sustainable extent,  because people who had  previously been enthusiastic for  reform and change were so fed up  with the whole thing that they  just stayed at home and didn't  bother to vote at all, so he  won.  Now, it was a perfectly possible  that he would have also have won  in a straightforward fair  election in 2009, in my view.  There are some, for example  there's a recent very  interesting book by William Polk  just published a few weeks ago  called Understanding Iran.  He knows a lot about Iran.  He was a historian at the  University of Chicago for many  years.  Polk thinks that Ahmadinejad did  win and that the notions, both  in Iran and over here, that  there was a total fraud are  simple wishful thinking because  we can't really think that  people would have voted for  Ahmadinejad.  I don't buy that.  The result was announced, I  think, really before the voting  papers could even been got out  of the boxes, let alone counted.  And Ahmadinejad's majority was  quite implausibly large. 

 This was obviously bogus, it  must have been.  And it was obvious to everybody.  So why did they do it?  Why were they so stupid?  This seems to me to be the big  question about that election.  These people have been running  Iran for 30 years.  Khamenei has been the man in  change for 20 years, and  whatever you may think of him  he's not a fool or at least he  didn't appear to be before then.  Not a nice man, maybe, but an  idiot, no.  So why do they behave  idiotically.  They must, I think, have been  very nervous indeed about the  possibility of Ahmadinejad  losing, and they must have  decided that whatever it took,  they're going to make sure that  he didn't lose.  Now, if I'm being the supreme  leader of Iran, I'm not a  candidate for that position, but  if I had been this is what I  would have done.  I would have waited for a week,  I wouldn't have bothered to  count the votes, of course. 

 If you want the result you want,  then you don't want  complications like votes.  I would have waited a week and  then I would have announced that  Ahmadinejad had won with 52% of  the vote.  That is to say, enough to avoid  a runoff election because he had  to have more than 50%, but an  entirely plausible result,  perfectly possible that  Ahmadinejad would have won 52%  of the votes of those voting.  But that's not what they did.  And that, of course, is what  caused the -- that erupted  immediately afterwards.  Now we should note that I  mentioned the sort of the  screening of candidates by the  Guardian Council and so forth,  this meant that all the  candidates who were actually  candidates in the election were  establishment figures at first.  They were all from inside the  system.  Even Khatami, the former  president who had originally  been a candidate but who  withdraw before the actual vote  so as to not split the reformist  vote, he too, as I mentioned, is  really someone who emerged from  the system.  The strongest of the candidates  apart from Ahmadinejad, Mir  Hossein Mousavi.  He had been prime minister of  the Islamic Republic in the  1980s during the Iran/Iraq war. 

 At which time, he had been tough  and efficient and left a very  good reputation for knowing what  he was doing and for being a  competent administrator.  Not an inspiring speaker but a  very competent administrator.  And he was far from liberal at  that point, very far from  liberal.  After 1989 when the war with  Iraq ended and Ayatollah  Khomeini died, he left politics  and has been out of politics for  20 years now.  The position of prime minister,  which he'd occupied, was  actually abolished at that  point, and most of its powers  transferred to the presidency.  The other candidate who is still  around Mehdi Karroubi, a cleric,  also about the system.  Former speaker of the Majlis,  speaker of the parliament, who  had been a candidate in 2005.  And Ray Takeyh who is one of the  best writers on contemporary  Iran, is on the Council of  Foreign Relations, I think,  thinks that it's possible he  might have won in 2005 if the  election then had been  completely above board rather  than at least party fraudulent.  Very hard to know.  He certainly was a reformist, no  question. 

 And then the third alternative  candidate, a former commander of  the Revolutionary Guards.  Obviously the ultimate absolute  insider, though he's faded away  since.  He didn't get very many votes,  and he's not been prominent in  the troubles since the election.  So the election then was not  designed by any of the  candidates as a challenge to the  Islamic Republic of Iran as  such.  They all wanted it to succeed.  They wanted to make the Islamic  Republic work better.  Nobody wanted to abolish the  Islamic Republic of Iran.  There was no constituency for  what is called regime change in  that election.  And until June, until that  election, this was probably the  view of most Iranians in Iran.  Regime change is very popular  with exiled Iranians but has  never been popular with people  who are actually living in Iran,  many of whom, if you ask them,  will tell you that one  revolution per lifetime is quite  enough, thank you, very much. 

 So looking a bit more at why the  panic, why did the establishment  lose its nerve and produce an  obviously fraudulent result in  the election.  I think perhaps this also has  something to do with the nature  of politics in the Islamic  Republic of Iran.  Within that big tent of the  Islamic Republic, there are  numerous factions, numerous  individuals who have varying  degrees of influence.  There were shifting alliances  between these individuals and  these factions.  Such that it's very difficult to  say precisely where ultimate  authority lies at any one time  or on any one issue.  There are wide areas of  disagreement, even, for example,  among the clerics.  The most conspicuous instance of  this, though unusual perhaps, is  Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, who  is perhaps now the most senior  and widely revered religious  figure in Iran.  But he's a man who's been  alienated from the regime ever  since just before Khomeini's  death in 1989.  He was Khomeini's designated  successor as supreme leader.  And was fired by Khomeini  shortly before he died because  he had been making incautious  remarks about wouldn't it be  nice to have some democracy,  listen to the people and not  massacre prisoners who had been  locked up. 

 At the very end of the  Khomeini's life, at the end of  the Iran/Iraq war thousands were  people who were in jail were  simply executed, they were just  cleared out.  And Montazeri thought this was  appalling and said so.  So he was fired.  And this was why the regime was  obliged to resort to having  Khamenei as successor to  Khomeini.  Khamenei is called Ayatollah  Khamenei but it's entirely  bogus.  He's not a real Ayatollah at  all.  He's never jumped through the  various scholarly legal hoops  that people are expected to do  in order to merit the title of  Ayatollah.  In real terms the only Ayatollah  I know, who is a professor at  Princeton, must in religious  terms be really senior to  Khamenei.  Khamenei was declared by the  government to be an Ayatollah.  This has never happened before  and he's never been taken  seriously as a religious figure. 

 That was the dilemma they found  themselves in when Montazeri  wouldn't play according to the  rules.  And I don't know if you read the  New York Times but very  recently, I think a couple of  weeks ago, there was a long  piece about his recent remarks  in which he denounced the regime  in very vigorous terms indeed.  He lives in --, a great  religious -- south of Tehran.  And at times has been under sort  of house arrest.  But he can't really be touched;  he's just too senior and too  revered.  So he still has a degree of  freedom of speech within limits  and he makes good use of it.  That's the extreme end of the  opposition amongst the clerical  class, but there are many other  opinions which by no means  coincide with the ones that  you'll hear from Khamenei, let  alone Ahmadinejad and his  supporters.  Khamenei is not supposed to be a  dictator.  That's not the job of the  supreme leader.  The job of the supreme leader is  to be really the final arbiter. 

 If there's a problem and a  dispute, he is the person who's  supposed to rule on what the  answer is to be, and his word  and supposed to be final there.  And after the June election when  he came down very firmly on one  side, that is to say the bogus  reelection of President  Ahmadinejad, this cost him a  good deal of prestige.  People respected him less for  that because he had become a  partisan figure, a party  political figure, if you'd like,  rather than this sort of final  arbiter who is above politics.  Khamenei was indeed a final  arbiter.  He didn't run of the details of  the government.  If he spoke on an issue, that  settled it.  But Ayatollah Khomeini, the  founder of the revolution, the  founder of the state, had  enormous prestige, and that was  not transferable to anybody  else.  Certainly it would have been  difficult to transfer it even to  Montazeri, I think.  Certainly it was not possible to  transfer it to Khamenei who just  didn't have the credentials or  the record of opposition to the  Shah.  Khomeini was unique in that  respect. 

 But the other thing about  Khomeini is that during his 10  years, and indeed previously  before the revolution, he spoke  in such a way and at times with  such ambiguity that ever since,  all sides in political disputes  in Iran had been able to quote  him in support to their  position.  It's a bit like the bible.  If you want to support for your  view, you can probably find  something in the bible that  supports it if you wrench it  suitably out of context.  And I dare say the same thing is  true of the Koran.  It's certainly true of the works  of Ayatollah Khomeini.  Nevertheless, with all the  limitations on the supreme  leader, as now is Ayatollah  Khamenei, his authority still  trumps the authority of the  president, the elected  president, whose powers for the  last 20 years, and indeed for  the duration of the Islamic  Republic, have been rather  limited, traditionally.  The limits on the Khatami's  success during his eight years  as president I've already  mentioned as a good example as  the problem that the president  finds.  It's the supreme leader who has  the last word.  Maybe it was felt in the circles  that if Ahmadinejad lost, having  been backed by the  establishment, that this would  weaken the supreme leader,  possibly, I'm just speculating  here, because Ahmadinejad and  the supreme leader Khamenei had  to considerable extent during  the previous few years become  identified with each other.  Maybe that. 

 Maybe it was a fear that there  would be a shift away from that  faction towards other factions.  But other factions within the  system.  And not at that stage, I think,  there doesn't seem to have been  any real fear that there was a  danger to the Islamic Republic  of Iran itself in this.  Now, there is another point of  view on what was going on here  which I should mention.  There is a view, and I've heard  and read it expressed quite  widely in recent times, that the  governmental system in Iran is  actually changing.  Changing from a clerical regime  to a military regime.  This is predicated on the  assumption that Ahmadinejad is  in fact more influential than  his predecessors were.  The theory then is that the  country is gradually being taken  over by the Revolutionary  Guards.  And the clerics are being  sidelined.  The Revolutionary Guard was  founded after the revolution in  1979 as an alternative to the  possibly unreliable ordinary  army. 

 Every government in Iran fears  the man on horseback, the  military figure who will seize  power.  It's happened often enough, they  have every reason to fear it.  And the Revolutionary Guard is  among other things a way of  guarding against that.  Now the Revolutionary Guard was  very important in the 1980s  during the long war with Iraq.  And it's that generation, the  war generation, the people who  fought in that war, that's now  becoming prominent.  Ahmadinejad is exactly that, he  was a Revolutionary Guard  soldier during the war with  Iraq.  The founding fathers of the  revolution, and there are still  some of them there, Khamenei,  former President Rafsanjani,  Grand Ayatollah Montazeri I  mentioned, such as are left,  they're old, not that being old  is usually an obstacle to being  an influential Ayatollah around  the country, but they are  obviously, in the nature of  things, gradually leaving the  scene.  So the view would be that in  Ahmadinejad's first term as  president, 2005 until this year,  he had moved many of his old  Revolutionary Guard cronies  into influential positions in  the government.  Permanent positions, perhaps.  And the fear was if he lost the  presidency, this process would  have ground to a halt or at  least would have been opposed. 

 And this wouldn't be risk.  Now if this view is right, it  assumes that the process is  backed by the supreme leader,  Khamenei, and it may be.  Though on the face of it, it  would seem that shifting power  away from the clerics towards  the military would be rather  against the interests of  Khamenei and his class.  So I don't know.  It does seem to be the case that  the Revolutionary Guards have  taken over more and more of the  economy and have become a rich  and powerful organization, not  just militarily, in that respect  perhaps not dissimilar from the  SS in Nazis Germany.  Well, there were protests.  And they have been ruthlessly  attacked but they continue.  You would have seen news of this  week's demonstrations on and  after student day on Monday.  These were certainly the most  serious antigovernment protests  that have occurred in Iran since  the revolution in 1979.  At first, the protests seemed to  have been just against the  fraudulent election, and the  losing candidates, Mousavi and  Karroubi, were very happy to  support that. 

 But since then, since there have  been no concessions from the  regime, we've seen a questioning  of the entire system.  This week, you see protesters  have been waving Iranian's flags  from which the word Allah has  been removed.  It was put on there after the  revolution.  The symbolism of that is very  clear, I think.  People have been chanting death  to the dictator, presumably  meaning Ayatollah Khamenei.  And direct attacks on the  legitimacy of the supreme leader  had never really occurred before  2009 inside Iran.  You could attack the government,  the president, the Majlis, but  you kept off attacking the  supreme leader.  Not anymore.  It's not clear to me that  Mousavi is in sympathy with this  or supports it.  Remember he's a regime insider. 

 But many of these insiders are  concerned that the regime may be  endangering it's viability but  the way it's reacting.  Rafsanjani, for example, the  ultimate insider, a founding  father of the revolution, a  former speaker of the Majlis, a  two-term president and still to  this day he chairs two important  bodies the Expediency Council,  which is supposed to resolve  disputes between different  branches of the government, and  the Assembly of Experts, which  is supposed to appoint the  supreme leader and,  theoretically, can remove the  supreme leader.  Never happened, not likely to  but it could, in theory.  Rafsanjani supported the  opposition at the time of the  election.  Then he went rather quiet.  What he was doing behind the  scenes, of course, nobody knows.  But this week again, however, he  was publicly denouncing the  actions of the government  against the protesters.  So, what's likely to happen?  I'm prepared to offer you my  guess with this health warning:  Beware of historians when they  start dressing themselves up as  prophets.  We're no more reliable than  anybody else when it comes to  predicting the future and  sometimes actually less.  My favorite example of this,  there was a very celebrated  English historian among Europe  called AJP Taylor. 

 He was one of my academic  grandfathers, as to say he was  the tutor at Oxford of the man  who later became my tutor at  Oxford.  Nobody knew more about the  history of modern Europe than  Alan Taylor.  He died in 1990 and one of his  last public utterances was that  the one thing you can be  absolutely certain of as a  result of the post-World War II  settlement in Europe is that  Germany will never be reunited.  Now, you see what I mean.  On the historical evidence this  was an entirely reasonable  deduction.  There was nothing the matter  with it at all except that it  was wrong.  So with that warning, here's my  guess.  Things are beginning to change  in a way that they haven't  before in 30 years.  But it still could go either  way.  Don't hold your breath in the  hope of this sudden flowering of  the Jeffersonian democracy in  Tehran. 

 It may happen but it will take a  little while.  The regime has the Revolutionary  Guard.  It has the militia and we've  seen them in action against the  protesters, and it will use them  to retain power.  People running the present  regime, unlike the Shah, don't  mind killing people.  One of the Shah's problems.  If you're going to be a  despotic, corrupt dictator, it's  very important that you  shouldn't mind killing people.  And this was one of the Shah's  weaknesses; he didn't like  killing people.  They don't mind at all.  They will if they have to, if  they feel they have to.  But splits, which certainly  exists as I've indicated, in the  upper circles of the  establishment may herald gradual  change. 

 Unless the Revolutionary Guard  do indeed take over and people  like Rafsanjani cease to matter.  But that will change the whole  basis of the legitimacy of the  regime.  Lastly, a word about the nuclear  issue.  First of all, it's important to  realize that this is not a  controversial issue amongst  Iranians.  All, I think with virtually no  exemptions that I've ever heard  of, agree that Iran should have  nuclear power.  And even on the notional  question of nuclear weapons,  what you'll here is, well, if  it's all right for India,  Pakistan and Israel, why isn't  it all right for Iran?  Well, if a logical flaw in that  argument, I can't see it.  Why not us?  It's quite complicated business.  The recent agreement which was  eventually turned down to send  three-quarters of Iran's nuclear  material abroad for enrichment,  who backed this in Iran?  Ahmadinejad backed it.  He was in favor of it, but he  was denounced by others  including the reformists.  So we have to be careful about  pigeonholing these people too  readily. 

 Not that simple.  The Iranians say that their  nuclear program is intended for  electricity not weapons.  Now it's possible that this is  true, I mean it's not unheard of  for the Iranian government to  tell the truth.  I wouldn't put money on it but  it's possible.  We might, for example, not that  after 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini  downgraded the Shah's nuclear  program.  Whereas the supporters of the  nuclear program after 1979, the  most prominent, were Rafsanjani  and Mousavi, current leaders of  the reformist opposition.  Other Ayatollahs more recently  have declared that nuclear  weapons are against Islam.  My guess is that they would like  to move to near a nuclear  weapons capability without  taking the final step.  Which is probably what the Shah  was doing in the 1970s according  to the evidence with the -- of  the United States in those days.  Why are they doing this if  that's what they are doing?  Well, the purpose of nuclear  weapons is not to use them. 

 After all, no one ever has  except the United States in  1945.  It's partly a matter of  prestige.  It's an exclusive club to join,  but mainly I think they're  intended for deterrents.  The Iranian's have noticed that  Iraq, which did not have nuclear  weapons, was invaded, whereas  North Korea, at least as awful a  regime as Saddam's but one that  has nuclear weapons, was not  invaded.  They've drawn a lesson from  that.  And Iranian's can't be dismissed  as being paranoid.  The United States has for many  years under administration of  both parties sponsored,  supported and financed regime  change in Iran.  No secret about that.  Not to mention earlier  interventions in Iranian  internal affairs which are still  resented, such as the deep  position of the coup that  overthrew Prime Minister  Mosaddeq in 1953 which is  attributed to the CIA that  there's still a lot of  discussion about what exactly  went on in 1953.  And one little footnote I might  throw in there is it's quite  clear from the documentary  record that the original idea  for overthrowing Mosaddeq and  how to go about it came not from  the CIA but from a woman,  who 20 years later became my  PhD supervisor in the University  of London. 

 After all, looking at it from  the Iranian point of view,  Saddam had used chemical weapons  in the 1980s against them and  used weapons of mass  destruction, not nuclear but  chemical, and there hadn't been  a lot of protest from the west  about Saddam's actions then.  If I was running Iran, I would  want to have a nuclear  capability to deter invasion  just like North Korea.  Now Israel's expressed fears I  would consider at the very least  grossly overstated.  Bear in mind that the Islamic  Republic of Iran, although it  gets up to some extremely  undesirable activities involving  supporting Hamas in Gaza,  Hezbollah in Lebanon and so  forth, has naturally never  invaded anyone.  Which is more than can be said  of a lot of other states.  In fact, I think I'm right in  saying that the last time Iran  invaded any foreign country was  in 1856.  Iran, on the record, is not a  bellicose country.  There are present Ahmadinejad's  anti-Israel remarks.  But bear in mind that at least  for now final authority over the  nuclear program, as well as over  most other things, rests with  the supreme leader who's been  there for 20 years, who is well  aware that any Iranian missile  sent towards Tel Aviv will have  a clearly legible return address  on it.  And Ayatollah Khamenei is not  suicidal on any evidence that  I've seen. 

 Even so, it's clearly, to my  mind, undesirable that Iran  should obtain nuclear weapons  mainly not because they'd use  them but because of the risk, a  very serious risk, if they had  them this would touch off a  nuclear arms race in the Middle  East.  Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey  would think well we better join  in too.  There's some evidence that this  is being thought through at  least.  In my view, the nuclear state to  worry about, and I've been  saying this for years and it's  now become conventional wisdom  but it wasn't a few years ago,  the nuclear state to worry about  is not Iran but Pakistan.  Which, after all, already has a  great many nuclear weapons  together with a weak and  unpopular government and an  ample supply of radical  extremists.  So my last sentence is this:  Iran can't be considered  in isolation  from the rest of the region.  Thank you.  (applause)