Tehran has trouble identifying enemies

Governments that fear their adversaries imagine the end of their hold on power in a variety of ways. In democracies, where elections make or break governments, the threatened elite's nightmare is about massive swings in voting patterns against it.

Where there are no elections, or elections are not the determining factor, regimes try to prepare for other scenarios.

One scenario, popular in 19th century Europe as it was negotiating the historic bend from despotism to democracy, envisaged a bomb thrown at a golden coach or a gun pulled in the direction of a crowned head.

Another scenario centred on a palace coup with the Praetorian Guard switching allegiance to a dynastic challenger.

A third scenario, still relevant in many countries, has foreign armies marching on a nation's capital to impose regime change.

To be sure, regimes also change through mass insurrections, popular revolts and, ultimately, one of those rare revolutions in history.

In most cases, the threatened regime seldom succeeds in developing a correct vision of the threat.

Take the case of Iran.

The Shah's regime often saw itself threatened by determined enemies. However, in hindsight the worst-case scenario, upon which the Shah's strategists worked, appears almost laughable.

The Shah's regime believed that the real threat came from the Communist left, never from the right.

Its worst-case scenario worked something like this: Marxist and allied leftist guerrillas succeed in plunging the country into insecurity, frightening the middle classes into neutrality and the poor into cooperation.

The guerrilla groups would then go on to control pockets of territory and provoke conventional battles against the armed forces. In the chaotic situation that would ensue, the Soviet Union, using two treaties under which it had the right to intervene in Iran, would land troops in the country and help its local allies seize power in Tehran.

An alternative scenario was that the United States, Iran's principal ally at the time, would revive its pro-Mohammad Mossadeq networks in a bid to remain a player in a new Iran dominated by pro-Soviet forces.

As we now know, none of that happened or could have happened. There were not enough Mossadeqists to fill a telephone booth in Tehran.

As for leftist guerrilla groups, from the late 1960s until the 1979, when the clerics seized power, Iran did suffer at the hands of a dozen or so of them, often practising the most brutal forms of terrorism. They robbed banks, killed police officers, kidnapped officials in remote villages, and provoked gun-battles with the security forces in parts of Tehran itself. At no point, however, did those groups acquire a popular base significant enough to help them make a serious bid for power.

The total number of individuals involved in that type of activity was below 10,000, and, yet confronting those groups absorbed 90 per cent of the regime's security and intelligence resources.

Iran's present government appears to be making a similar mistake. Last month, the head of security forces announced the discovery of "a series of plots" supposed to prepare Iran for "velvet revolution".

The term was first used in the 1980s in Communist-dominated Czechoslovakia, which went on to achieve regime change without bloodshed. Since then, a number of countries, among them Ukraine and Georgia, have also experienced 'velvet revolutions'.

Talk of a 'velvet revolution' in Iran has been present in the media since 2005, when fears of an American military intervention all but evaporated.

During the past four years, the authorities have claimed to have uncovered numerous 'velvet revolution' plots and arrested scores of people, including some with dual Iranian and American citizenship, on charges of anti-state activity and political subversion. Right now three women with dual Iranian and American nationalities are in prison in Tehran, facing trial for espionage or sabotage.

The government may be as wrong in identifying its enemies as the Shah's regime was.

The idea that a few dual nationals funded by the financier George Soros or American think tanks could lead Iran into 'velvet revolution' is as childish as the belief that a few guerrillas could have undermined the Shah's regime.

There is no doubt that the government feels threatened. However, the most serious threat to its survival comes from its steady loss of legitimacy combined with the disaffection of substantial segments of its original support base.

The Shah's regime began to weaken when many of its supporters started to distance themselves from it. This is apparently happening to the present rulers as well, a fact highlighted by the deep divisions revealed in the current presidential election campaign.

Opposition to the government is not coming from the outer margins of the urban middle classes. It is coming from the bazaars, the working class, the poor masses and even disgruntled clerics who fear a backlash.

The threat that Tehran faces may have nothing 'velvety' about it.

Amir Taheri is an Iranian writer based in Europe.