When do they shoot? Why do they shoot? Posted by Shadi Hamid

The success of any mass opposition movement is premised on the fact of numbers. It is easier for a regime to shoot when the crowd is small than when it is large. But it is also the case that, from the standpoint of an authoritarian government, there is greater reason to shoot when the crowd is larger than when it is smaller. After all, it is fairly easy to disperse a small crowd. There may not even be a need for the government to even intervene. After all, a small protest is not, by itself, threatening.

So the question remains: “when does a government shoot?”

Generally, when the masses take over the streets, hardliners, considering how to respond, are likely to hesitate when faced with the prospect of bloodshed. This explains, for example, the half-hearted nature of the 1974 Spinola coup in Portugal. In the event of mass mobilization, the costs of suppression tend to be higher than the costs of toleration, making a brutal response on the part of the regime less likely.However, in contexts of sharp ideological polarization, the equation can change, as regime hardliners begin to see the unfolding conflict in stark, binary terms. The conflict takes on an increasingly existential tone. And when politics becomes a zero-sum game, then the perceived costs of toleration come to be seen as greater than the perceived costs of suppression. And so the regime moves to suppress.

I’m not sure if we’ve gotten to this point in Iran. While the Iranian government’s response to the protestors has been brutal, it has not reached the level of brutality that we've seen elsewhere in the Middle East, particularly in countries like Syria (1982) or Algeria (1991-2), where the opposition was literally massacred en masse or rounded up and put in desert concentration camps. The Syrian regime practically wiped out an entire city, in the Hama massacre of 1982, with some putting the death toll between 10,000 and 20,000.

The Syrian and Algerian regimes were willing to resort to this kind of brutality, in part because the ideological divisions were much starker than they currently are today in Iran. These conflicts were between Islamists and secularists, the latter of whom were convinced that the former threatened its very way of life. There was no room for negotiation or compromise (at least from the standpoint of the secular governments. Many in the Islamist opposition, at least in Algeria, were open to power-sharing agreements). In Iran, it would be a mistake to assume that Ahmedinijad and Moussavi are ideologically similar. That may have been the case two weeks ago, but Moussavi is no longer the person he was then. He has become a vessel for the aspirations of a movement, and so he must be judged within this changing context. Still, Moussavi is not a liberal, nor a secularist. He is - for now at least - part of the same revolutionary family as his newfound adversaries. For this reason, it is harder for the hardliners to advocate an “Algerian solution.”

Comments

[J Thomas]

The government sees crowds in the streets setting fires and breaking windows and destroying automobiles and refusing to disperse.

What can they do, they must restore order or accept anarchy. Those are their choices.

US states have faced that, at Watts and Detroit and DC, at A&T university in Greensboro NC and at Kent State. Back then they had no better choice than to send in the National Guard.

Now we are better at crowd control. Our police are better trained in how to disperse crowds, to cut them into small groups fleeing in different directions. They have better nonlethal technology -- foams that prevent people from standing, sonics that panic them, corona-discharge devices that pain people in scary ways without permanent harm, etc etc. It isn't just tear gas and firehoses any more.

But iran is behind on that technology so they get a propaganda black eye. If we'd only had a video of that girl dying at Kent State and anybody could look at it whenever they wanted, it would have changed a lot.

But that sort of thing won't happen here. We lay back and left the 2000 and 2004 elections uncontested. We still have the voting machines that maybe can be invisibly rigged and that don't allow any possibility of a recount. And we just put up with it.

[Zathras]

The analogies here are questionable, for several reasons, but for three in particular that go to the nature of the Iranian regime.

The first is that the public face of that regime has always been clerical. Prominent senior clerics in Iran are now divided about the election and the events afterward, and suppression of demonstrations with lethal force would likely make those divisions permanent. Moreover, reliance on armed force would make it difficult for Khamenei and other clerics aligned with him to maintain the appearance that they, rather than the Revolutionary Guards, were running the government -- a serious matter for a regime that created the Guards to serve Islamic Republic, not to usurp authority to run its government.

The second involves the adequacy of the forces available to the regime for the kind of work Hamid discusses here. The basiji are willing, but have evidently been equipped and organized for intimidation, not combat. The Revolutionary Guards are probably willing enough, but might not be numerous enough to suppress mass rallies at multiple sites around Iran. The regular army and police forces might or might not be willing to obey orders to slaughter civilians. Arab governments (the two Hamid mentions, plus the Iraqi regime in 1991 and at other times) and of course the Chinese government in 1989 were able to call on forces both large enough and willing to do what was necessary to crush what was seen as an existential threat to the regime. The Iranian regime today may be in some doubt as to whether that is the case today. In an historical irony, the Shah's regime faced a very similar problem in 1978.

The final aspect of the Iranian situation involves the recent past, in which clerical conservatives and the security services thwarted reformist challenges to their rule without much difficulty. Just because the explosion of protests after the Iranian elections came as a surprise to those of us outside Iran does not mean that country's government was any better prepared, or that it is convinced it now faces a population committed to fundamental change in the system (something that, to be fair, isn't clear to anyone at this point). The Iranian regime may not have ordered suppression of demonstrations with lethal force yet because it hasn't been able to believe this would be required, any more than it was before.

[J Thomas]

Mousavi is an insider. But Ahmenijad's faction accused his faction of corruption, a very serious charge. So now his faction has accused Ahmenijad's faction of vote-tampering, also a very serious charge.

If Mousavi says that the whole government apparatus is corrupt to the point that he can't get a fair election, that he can't trust anybody to investigate the vote-counting fairly, then he isn't an insider any more at all. At that point he's an enemy of the government, he's banking to start a new government that won't include any of the people he thinks can't be trusted to do the right thing. Then the government is split, his faction and their allies against the rest. No telling where it leads.

But if he agrees that he can get a fair recount, and he's accepted back into being an insider, they give him an important government job and only prosecute the guys who're actually corrupt, at that point the people who're protesting become enemies of the state. There's his faction and the people who voted for him, and Ahmenijad's faction and the people who voted for him, and then there are the people who oppose the revolution and who want a secular government or to bring back the shah or whatever. They are enemies and nobody who's for the government should care too much what happens to them. But they'll be pretty much OK if they hide.

If the government is really splitting up then it's hard to predict what will happen. Maybe they'll have a big long internal fight like algeria did, maybe 10% of the population will die and iran won't particularly have a government for a good long time. Maybe most of their nuclear physicists and technicians will die in the chaos.

If the government gets welded back together then it might all blow over even now.