Harvard Professor Answers Iranian Government Questions

When this war ends, protest in Iran will not.

I'm Professor Tarek Masoud from Harvard University.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Tech Support, Iran.

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DAnnuzio1919 asks,

Is it wrong to call Iran a dictatorship?

The Islamic Republic of Iran absolutely is a dictatorship,

but it also has some electoral features

that they're not quite enough to make Iran a democracy,

but they're not totally meaningless.

Article 5 of the Iranian Constitution

says that the leadership of Iran must reside

in the form of a religious cleric

of great knowledge and virtue, the supreme leader.

But then Article 6 of the Iranian Constitution says

that the affairs of Iran will be governed

according to public opinion, expressed through elections.

And so they have an elected president

who serves four year terms, they have an elected parliament,

and they even elect the body

that is supposed to choose the supreme leader.

The supreme leader is definitely on top.

Everybody reports to him.

He sets policy, he hires and fires

the heads of the military apparatus.

He sets the direction of the country.

Everybody looks to him.

But the president is in charge of day-to-day management.

The president gets to set things like social policy.

It's a system that really does have these hybrid features.

So the first supreme leader of Iran, the guy who came up

with the whole system was this man Ayatollah Khomeini,

and he was the supreme leader until his death in 1989.

He was replaced by this man, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This guy, by the way, was the president under Khomeini.

He's also the person that we killed

in February of this year.

And he was replaced by his son Mojtaba.

Although nobody has seen him since he assumed power.

And many of the senior leadership

of that country have been killed in Israeli airstrikes.

Could we say that the political system in Iran

is about to crumble?

They've managed to hold on so far,

and some people might say that the regime is built

precisely to withstand this kind of stress.

It can't be denied that the regime now

is under the most serious strain

that is ever faced in its nearly 50 years of history.

MeganHasHemorrhoids asks, Explain like I'm five.

What are Iran's Revolutionary Guards?

Sorry about the hemorrhoids, Megan.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards

are what is known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

or the Pasdaran after their Persian name

are one of two armed forces

that the Islamic Republic of Iran has.

It's basically a full-fledged military.

It has an army, a navy, an air force.

It also has a kind of special forces

slash covert operations arm

called the Quds Force or the Jerusalem Force.

And it also has a group called the Basij-e Mostaz'afin

that the Iranian regime relies on mainly for mobilization,

maintaining order on the streets.

And that IRGC sits alongside

a standard military called the Artesh.

If you think about it,

the standard military are more nationalist.

Their job is basically to defend Iran's borders.

The job of the IRGC in contrast

is to defend the Iranian regime.

They are the ones who play a major role

in cracking down on protest.

They're also the arm of the state

that supports all of the proxies

across the Middle East like Hezbollah and like the Houthis.

The IRGC, by the way, is not just a military force.

They actually have a serious role in the Iranian economy,

and you can see estimates that they control anywhere from 20

to 60% of the Iranian economy,

and they're involved in all kinds of industries

like construction and media and even sports.

Part of the reason that this regime

is considered to be so strong

and so durable in the face of repeated public protest

is that they have a very ideologically committed group

in the form of the IRGC

who are willing to go to great lengths

to defend the regime even against their own citizens.

Here's a question from johnqadamsin28.

How was Khamenei chosen as supreme leader

when he wasn't an Ayatollah?

That question is about this gentleman,

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,

and it is true that when he was chosen to be supreme leader

to succeed Khomeini, he wasn't an Ayatollah.

And Ayatollah is a very senior religious cleric

in Shia Islam.

Shia Islam differs a little bit from Sunni Islam

in that if you are a Shia Muslim,

you are supposed to pick a very senior Ayatollah

as your source of religious knowledge

and religious authority.

Khamenei, when he was chosen as supreme leader,

actually wasn't widely thought of

by other Ayatollahs as one of them,

and he certainly wasn't thought of

as one of the most senior Ayatollahs

who has the status of what is called a marja' al-taqlid

or a source of emulation,

somebody who Shiites can choose to follow.

So why was he selected?

He was basically selected

because he'd been president for eight years

and he was a regime insider.

They even changed the Iranian Constitution

to make sure that he could come to power.

The rationale then was political and not religious.

A natural follow-up question that somebody might ask is,

how come he was succeeded by his son?

This was not like a monarchy or a dynastic succession.

Again, just like with the selection of the father,

the selection of the son was political.

Mojtaba Khamenei is very close to the IRGC,

and the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,

are the king makers in Iran today.

Wonderful_Fox_7959 asks,

Iran has major protests every few years,

yet nothing happens.

Why?

Iranians do often protest their regime.

In 2009, for example,

you had something called the Green Revolution,

where Iranians, particularly young people,

took to the streets to protest an election that was rigged

against a moderate reformist presidential candidate

and in favor of a conservative presidential candidate

named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ever since 2017,

the Iranians have basically had one protest a year,

and some of those protests are about economic issues,

but some of them are about political issues.

One of the big ones happened in 2022.

It was called the Woman, Life, and Freedom protest,

and that was after a young Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini

was killed by the religious police

for not wearing her headscarf properly.

So what happens to all these protests?

The main thing is that they get repressed brutally

by the regime's thugs.

It's difficult to exaggerate

just how willing the Islamic Republic's regime is

to meet out violence against its citizens.

But another factor also that ends up maybe mitigating

some of the protests is that Iran does have elections.

It has elections for parliament

and it has elections for president.

And sometimes in these elections for the presidency,

moderates get elected.

And so sometimes that soaks some of the energy for reform.

People channel it into voting for a candidate

that they think can change things.

For example, the current president of Iran,

Masoud Pezeshkian, is just such a reformist candidate.

But here's something I know for a fact.

Iranians are going to continue to protest,

and when this war ends, protest in Iran will not.

taylorpinkk asks, What's one thing

about the current Iran war

that most people are completely misunderstanding?

One of the things about this war

is that it's as much an information war

as it is a war on the battlefield.

And in the information war,

the battle space is actually a lot more level.

The Iranians have access to all of the tools

that we might have access to.

They can make glitzy AI videos that make it look

like they are scoring dramatic battlefield victories.

And they can also make really arresting

viral propaganda videos.

They made this one video called One Vengeance for All,

in which they presented themselves

as getting revenge for all of the victims

of American aggression going all the way back

to Hiroshima and Nagasaki

and even to the genocide against Native Americans.

And one of the reasons that the information battle space

is much more even is not just because the Iranians

can also use all the AI tools that we use,

but that the soldiers in the information battlefield

are not just necessarily located in Iran.

Basically anybody who's unhappy with this war

can make a viral video and circulate it online

and then get boosted by their networks.

We have to be very careful

about believing what we see on the internet

about what's happening in this war.

The second thing I would say

that people are misunderstanding about this war

is that the regime could survive this bombardment

and President Trump could make a deal with them

that would allow them to come out

and wave the flag of victory

and say, We survived a sustained bombing campaign

by the Great Satan and the Little Satan,

the two greatest air forces in the world,

but they could still lose because the Iranian people

have protested this regime in the past.

And it may be that the capabilities of the regime

and particularly of the IRGC

will have been so degraded after this war

that the balance of power between the people on the street

and the regime shifts in the people's favor.

The last thing I would say

that people should pay a little bit more attention to

is the fact that when we started this war

by assassinating the supreme leader of Iran,

we really crossed into some uncharted territory.

And it remains to be seen

whether that ends up being a good thing

for the United States by making our rivals more compliant

and pliable or a bad thing by making our leaders less safe

and us less safe.

Ok_Breadfruit4005 asks,

What do you think is actually the best future for Iran?

Americans typically think

that the best future for any country

is for them to have a liberal,

multi-party democracy like we have.

And after our experiments

in building democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan,

we become a little bit more modest about that view.

That said, I really do think

that in Iran the best outcome is a democracy.

It's not just the best for them,

it's something that I do think the Iranians

would actually be able to sustain.

It's a real tragedy that the images that we see

of Iranians tend to be of these bearded clerics

with very stern faces, 'cause that is a very deep and rich

and sophisticated society.

It has a very high rate of literacy.

There's a very high rate of education for women in Iran.

Indeed, by some accounts,

women achieve more educational attainment than men in Iran.

And so there's lots of reasons to believe

that if Iranians got the chance to lift the boot of the IRGC

and the Islamic Republic off their neck,

they'd be able to build a democracy and to keep a democracy.

And that democracy wouldn't just be good

for the Iranian people,

it would also be really good for the world.

I mean, I cannot exaggerate

how extraordinary the Persian people are.

You know, the Persians who come to the United States

have made enormous contributions.

The first woman to win a fields medal in mathematics,

which is like the Nobel Prize for math,

was an Iranian woman

who won in 2014 named Maryam Mirzakhani.

There are major Iranian engineers

and architects and string theorists.

I mean, this is a society

that has made enormous contributions to science

and technology and to human civilization.

And you can't help but think that if somehow the Iranians

could be liberated from an oppressive regime

and also from a situation

in which the world's greatest superpower squeezes them,

that the benefits to them

and to the world civilization would be incalculable.

You know, there's this poem by the Persian poet, Rumi.

I've only read it in translation. I don't speak Persian.

But something like, you know,

Somewhere out there beyond ideas of right and wrong

and good and evil, there's a field.

I will meet you there.

I really hope that field exists

and I really hope that sooner rather than later,

the Iranian people and the American people can meet there,

'cause I think only good things will happen.

So those are all the questions we have for today.

Thank you for watching Tech Support, Iran.

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