Chris Brazier | ukwatch.net

To Fly or Not to Fly

Ellie Keen — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:53:44 +0000

The plane is over the English Channel when the pilot’s voice crackles over the loudspeakers.

‘Just to warn you that there’s been a bit of trouble at Heathrow with people protesting about the impact of air travel on climate change. Nothing to worry about, but when we land you may see a bigger police presence at the airport than you would normally expect.’

The tone is jocular and clearly intended to draw us all together into a kind of community of ‘sensible’ travellers who might have to suffer the disruption of ‘extremist’ campaigners.

So what exactly am I doing here, in August 2007, given that I feel a much greater sense of kinship with the Climate Camp protesters down below than with the pilot’s cosy set of assumptions? It’s a good question. I’m on my way back with my family from a holiday in Italy. Last time we went, a few years ago, we drove there and back, via Luxembourg and Switzerland, taking our time and making many stop-offs on the way to break the journey. This time when we booked, almost a year in advance, we knew our time would be squeezed between work commitments and being back for our daughter’s exam results. So, not without qualms, we took advantage of ludicrously cheap flights that would get us there within a couple of hours rather than a couple of days.

I tell you this to indicate my starting-point when I began to research this magazine – for all that I bike to work, compost like crazy and am vegetarian, I am far from being in the environmental vanguard, and certainly don’t feel able to lecture people about what they should or should not do.

Given this, I was not exactly burning to pick up the topic of Ethical Travel. I had no problem considering the effects of tourism on the Majority World. But since most tourism depends on air travel I knew I was likely to find myself in the unenviable position of having to offer readers some guidance as to when flying is acceptable and when it isn’t.

And the more I sounded people out, the more my suspicions were confirmed. People are concerned and looking for guidance on an issue which has leapt to public attention in recent years – at least in Britain, where the debate about flying rages much hotter than it does in Australasia or North America.

Mind-boggling statistics

My earliest research left me shocked by the statistics on aviation emissions. Put simply, jet aircraft not only emit carbon from vast quantities of kerosene fuel, they also do it at high altitudes, where it has a much greater warming effect than it would in the lower atmosphere. In addition, jets emit other greenhouse gases, including nitrous oxide and water vapour (‘contrails’). The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates the net effect of all these emissions from jet aircraft at 2.7 times the carbon consumed in the fuel. The chart below shows that an individual’s share of carbon emitted on a return flight from London to New York exceeds the carbon used up by a full year’s modest driving of an average car.

How such statistics are calculated is always a contentious issue. But the exact numbers are less interesting than the broad-brushstroke comparisons: you can easily dump more carbon into the atmosphere from one return flight than from the gas and electricity you use in your house for an entire year. This was, to be frank, a quite mind-boggling discovery for me, which couldn’t help but challenge my attitude to flying.

Travel has played an enormous part in my life. I cannot easily conceive what kind of person I would be had I not been able to board an airplane. But I do recognize that the profound implications of climate change (and the fight to prevent it) are going to force us all to take stock of our lives, to challenge all our assumptions. Just how far, I wonder, are we prepared to go in challenging the flying culture?

My tentative proposal to the NI editorial team was that we should oppose the expansion of aviation – especially the development of new airports or runways – and encourage readers to reduce the amount they flew. But we should stop well short of calling for an end to all holiday flights.

A great deal of heat was generated in the discussion that ensued, but not a lot of light. It soon became plain that the issue of flying is a particularly thorny one, in which emotions are perhaps too readily engaged. And this was despite the fact that, perhaps surprisingly, there was no-one in the room arguing that the magazine should rule out flying for leisure or experience altogether. One or two people argued that it would be so impossible to pin down reliable estimates of the emissions of various forms of transport that we would be treading on dodgy ground even to enter the flying debate.

Adam Ma’anit

I DEFINITELY AGREE with the need to deal with aviation’s impact on climate change. My worry is about the focus on individual consumption, on individuals taking flights. I think the emphasis needs to go back towards political, economic and environmental policies. Too much of the flying debate is about individual one-upmanship and not about real substantive change. It’s natural for the environmental movement to go down that path because it’s easier to appeal to their base – environmentally minded folk who will accept the wisdom of flying less and peer-pressure each other – but the movement shouldn’t shy away from the difficult questions.

Lifestyle politics may be a hit with the hairshirt crowd, but it’s small fry compared to the huge socio-political changes needed to avert the worst excesses of climate change. Just as telling people to eat better won’t solve the obesity crisis, so too will the ‘you fly, we die’ message fall on deaf ears. And let’s not forget the importance of building up the alternatives. Telling people to fly less and travel by train instead when the rail system in many countries is so mind-boggingly expensive, over-crowded and unreliable is hardly a convincing argument. Rather than solely appealing to people’s better consciences, let’s focus our energies on the big wins that can be made with modest political will.

Aviation’s growth is very worrying and that does need to be curtailed. The big target is short-haul flights to destinations that could easily and comfortably be serviced by rail, bus or ferry. But those services need to run well, they need to be just as heavily scrutinized for their environmental impacts and they should be reasonably affordable and safe. At the moment, they’re often not, so it’s no wonder people take to the skies. But not flying has become an iconic badge of environmental commitment and I think that’s misguided.

If there were the political will to do something about climate change so much could be done in so little time and aviation would play a relatively small role in reducing the global footprint. For example, if government said tomorrow we’re going to ban all electronic devices with standby mode it would reduce electricity consumption by a huge amount at a stroke. How many people factor the standby mode into their purchasing decisions? Not many. But if you deal with it at a macro level you actually take it out of the equation.

Same with government-sponsored housing insulation, combined heat and power units for residential blocks, support for micro-renewables. Stopping the war would deliver massive carbon savings and free up resources that could be used to steer us away from climate disaster. There are lots of things that simply can’t be done at an individual level and have to be done by society as a whole – reining in corporate power and wasteful energy transmission, decentralizing energy grids and promoting renewables, stopping subsidies of fossil fuels, ending aviation’s tax-free fuel ride. And that’s just for starters… There is so much we can do now. So let’s stop the incessant navel-gazing and agonizing over our personal carbon ‘footprints’ and build the momentum for real change.

Mark Lynas

It’s worth looking at work travel as well as holidays because that’s probably the largest component of most people’s carbon footprint. When people fly for their work, are the ethical considerations their own responsibility or their employer’s?

None of these things are completely black and white and it’s finding a way through the greys that has become an ethical minefield. There’s a cultural value shift going on and things haven’t quite settled yet when it comes to what’s moral and what isn’t. But in the mean time there are a lot of accusations and counter-accusations.

Is there a danger that focusing individuals on their own carbon footprint is a distraction?

You need to know where you stand in terms of what your contribution is to the collective problem. Of course, simply doing things at an individual level is not going to be enough – it’s got to be a collective approach to a collective problem and that comes down to politics, to building a movement. That’s more important than what you do at home but you’ve got to do both – they’re complementary.

When a right-wing group in the US got hold of Al Gore’s [massive] electricity bill it played well for them because it sowed cynicism and that in turn has an effect in paralyzing social action. I wrote defending Gore because it does strike me that this ‘green hypocrisy’ argument about individual behaviour has gone too far. Some people’s aggregated impact on the climate should be seen as positive despite their air miles.

I make the calculation – we all do. And it’s not just flying, though that has become symbolic because of the big numbers attached to it; it’s everything – every time you turn on the heating in your house it’s worth a certain amount of CO2.

But flying consumes much more carbon even than heating…

It does, but only when you look at it from an individual point of view. When you look at it from an aggregate point of view, the flight component of a national carbon budget is still very small because most people don’t take trips to New York. The biggest source of carbon is still space heating, which is a lot less interesting but is much more important than flying. On the other hand, flying is a relatively easy thing not to do. Here in Wolvercote [his village] we’re going low carbon and we’ve found that most behaviour hasn’t really changed except that people have been taking fewer holiday flights.

Don’t you find it problematic, saying people shouldn’t fly when you’ve travelled so much yourself?

I can’t imagine how I would have been had I not spent a lot of my life in the South. I’m happy to rule out future holiday travel for myself – I’d felt yucky about being in places as a tourist for a long time, so that’s easily done. But it’s such a big sacrifice for other people to make and that’s why I think aviation is the one thing for which we need a ‘technofix’. We’ve got a totally globalized world with families all over the place and you just can’t unpick all the threads.

The low-hanging fruit is insulating your loft [attic]; stopping aviation is the highest-hanging fruit there is in terms of the bang people get for their carbon buck.

Say to the industry: ‘Look, you’ve got 15 years to do this or you go out of business’ and I think they’d come up with something. There has to be a role for technological innovation and Manhattan Project-type approaches to this.

George Monbiot

It’s possible to have a technological effect on almost every other area of climate change apart from aviation. You could run almost the entire energy system on renewable power if you did it in the right way. Aviation is the one area for which there is no available technological solution in the foreseeable future. We’re not likely to see battery-powered jetliners.

It’s not just a question of blocking future airport expansion; we have to reduce what’s already there. We have to cut aviation emissions by 95 per cent if we’re going to keep overall emissions to the level we need to. That means people can fly only 5 per cent of the amount they are now – and that’s a maximum.

People shouldn’t be flying for leisure or tourism purposes at all. They also shouldn’t be flying for business. If you’ve got a pressing family obligation, a relative who’s sick or dying, then fair enough. And if you’re doing something important with human rights or raising awareness of the environmental threat and there’s no other way of getting there, you might be able to justify it. But even then you have to think very carefully because it’s going to be rare that the importance of the work will outweigh the damage done by the flight.

What about damage done to communities in the Majority World that are currently dependent on tourism?

I do accept that some communities are going to be hit hard by this. But you have to set that against the enormous and much greater damage that will be done to other communities all over the world by climate change. We have to make it a priority to help those communities and countries to develop better ways of surviving and thriving that do not depend upon transporting 150 pounds of human halfway across the planet and back.

What would the world be like without the intercultural exchanges that derive from air travel?

Cross-cultural international connections don’t depend entirely on flying. You can travel by boat or by train almost anywhere – it just takes a lot more time. So travelling without flying is still possible.

And in terms of bringing about change, it isn’t really necessary to travel to become an internationalist. At the time of the Make Poverty History campaign most of the people in the West who became deeply concerned about Africa had never visited there but had been moved by what they had seen on television. You don’t become an internationalist by travelling – just as travelling in itself doesn’t make you an internationalist.

You started as a travel writer, though – you’ve benefited in all kinds of ways from international travel that have helped make you the person you are. How can you deny those benefits to young people now?

I do feel bad that I’m having to say to young people now that they cannot have the opportunities I had for guilt-free experience of other lands and cultures. But there’s no alternative. That experience of travel is simply not available to people now. It’s another example of how the sins of one generation have been handed to the next generation who have to pay the price.

There was also an argument that for the New Internationalist to concentrate its attention on individual behaviour – when and whether people should be travelling by plane – would be a mistake. There are much more important battles to be fought than this in the war on climate change, ran this strand of thought, than encouraging people to think about their ‘carbon footprint’. I invited one of my editorial colleagues, Adam Ma’anit, to lay out this position (see box, above).

There is no doubt that the primary need is for governments, rather than individuals, to take action.

Climate change is the greatest issue of our time, yet politicians the world over continue to funk it, fearing that if they derail the globalized consumer bandwagon it will cost them their jobs. Given how huge is the task in front of us, the primary requirement has to be to campaign, to do all we can to change the political landscape so that it reflects the real (planet-)burning issues rather than the pre-eminent concern with the dollar in our pocket.

But I still felt it was important to include in the magazine some recognition of the dilemma faced by individual readers concerned about the ethics of flying in an overheating world. Those of us who try to reduce or constrain our carbon footprint are not likely to be distracted from campaigning for the big-picture political changes. One can reinforce the other. Don’t we all feel much more comfortable campaigning for a cause if we are doing our bit? That way at least we can’t be charged with hypocrisy. And our own individual actions may have a ripple effect, whether by inspiring others or by contributing to a statistical trend. Changing our lifestyle could reinforce pressure on politicians to pull us out of this tailspin. After all, we know more clearly than ever that every kilogram of carbon we propel into the atmosphere is doing some very dirty work.

Consulting the oracles

One of the main proponents of the ‘carbon footprint’ way of looking at this problem is Mark Lynas, author of High Tide, Six Degrees and Carbon Calculator: Easy ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

When I met Mark, he was just back from a mammoth journey by boat to Norway. ‘It took 10 days – it was a disaster,’ he said ruefully. ‘If I’d done it in a plane trip in a day it would have been a hell of a lot easier than dragging the whole family out there for 10 days. You can go a bit too far in terms of being puritan on this. Mind you, it always plays well because people always ask how you got there. And it’s nice to be able to say: “Well, train and boat!” It even makes headlines in the papers because people don’t expect it.’

While he has ruled out holiday flights for himself, he readily acknowledges the moral complexity of the issue – as well as stressing that he too sees individual effort as secondary to the vital job of building a movement that will shift governments. And he hankers after a technofix (see box, below), even though, he added: ‘George will kill me for saying so.’

The George in question is Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and author of Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning. The chapter of Heat on aviation (‘Love Miles’) lays out very starkly the damage done by air travel – and the impossibility of meeting any meaningful emissions targets if we continue our love affair with it.

‘A 90-per-cent cut in carbon emissions means the end of distant foreign holidays, unless you are prepared to take a long time getting there… It means that journeys around the world must be reserved for visiting the people you love, and that they will require both slow travel and the saving up of carbon rations… If you fly, you destroy other people’s lives.’

Ulp. You can’t get much more categorical than that. Reading my interview with George (see box, overleaf), you might wonder why I didn’t ask him the most obvious follow-up question: how many times have you yourself flown somewhere in the last year? Actually I didn’t need to ask him – he was so primed for that question that he misheard one of my others and answered that he has taken two flights in the last 18 months, both to climate-change events where he judged that he could make more of a difference by attending in person than by not flying.

I was more concerned to probe how he, who began as a travel writer and has benefited in all kinds of ways from experiencing other countries and cultures, feels able to say that young people now should not avail themselves of the same opportunities. His answer is pretty much that, however bad he feels about it, the problem is so huge and so all-trumping that there is simply no alternative.

I cannot bring myself to say the same. As I write, my daughter is experiencing her first day of teaching in a village in Malawi, having just spent a week of ‘orientation’ in the capital, Lilongwe. I am proud that she has chosen to spend her gap year before university working in Africa. What she learns about the world and its injustices and inequalities will reverberate through her entire life and will give her a connection with Malawi, and with Africa as a whole, that no amount of book reading or film watching could have achieved. Should I really have said to her, at a time when the rest of the world seems to be leaping on a plane at the drop of a hat to sun themselves on a beach or to go shopping, that she should forego the whole experience because we have just begun to understand the climate-changing contribution of aviation? I don’t think so.

What would happen in a no-fly world?

What would happen at New Internationalist if we introduced a no-flying policy? The issue has already caused some soul-searching within the co-operative. People travelling to the Frankfurt Book Fair, for example, have had to weigh the environmental impact against the cost (since the advent of budget airlines, ridiculously enough, it is actually cheaper to fly from Britain to Germany than to go by train) and the significant extra time involved. Even if a company has a policy that supports (and is prepared to pay for) an employee wishing to go overland, there are often family or work reasons why that person is loath to be away longer than need be.

Given that we have editors in Canada, Australia and Holland, and that we focus on the concerns of the Majority World, eschewing flying altogether would not look to be an option for us as an organization. Certainly the need for editors to be in touch with the realities of everyday life in Africa, Asia and Latin America – on which the magazine’s reputation stands – depends upon their being able to hear ordinary people’s testimonies first hand rather than just relying on printed reports or local journalists.

And New Internationalist is, after all, only the tip of the ‘One World community’ iceberg, which has been founded upon international travel in both directions – on people visiting and migrating to our own countries from far-flung locations, and on our learning from and adjusting to other peoples and cultures.

What would happen to a world in which the only people who travelled by plane were those most committed to its rapacious exploitation? Would airways become the de facto province of the most unscrupulous corporations? Besides, where is the sense in rejecting one aspect of international aviation (tourism) while accepting other aspects (air-freighted goods and foodstuffs, air mail and so on)?

No more new runways

But in the context of an ever-warming world, if we continue to fly for our pleasure and education, we need to ensure that such tourism is not itself damaging, and that it genuinely benefits the host communities at the other end. In the articles that follow I’ll look at what is wrong with most tourism now and whether more sustainable forms of travel that benefit local communities are actually possible.

It also means we have to increase pressure on policy-makers to contain and reduce air travel. Governments all too readily point the finger at individuals rather than demonstrating leadership on the issue. I encountered an example of this recently when, at a Christmas party, I got talking to a civil servant working on transport issues. I was explaining why I thought the British Government’s intention to build a third runway at Heathrow to meet anticipated demand was the purest folly. ‘It’s not up to the Government to take a lead on this issue,’ he said, ‘it’s up to individuals to stop taking advantage of cheap flights.’

As an evasion of responsibility, this takes some beating. Yet it mirrors the approach of most Western governments, which simply put a blind eye to the telescope and continue to chase economic growth whatever the environmental cost. Pointing to booming demand, they plan for new runways and new airports that will soon fill to capacity just like the extra lane for cars on an expressway. As a result, air travel is growing at a rate of some five per cent a year, meaning that air passenger kilometres are set to triple by 2030.¹

Air travel urgently needs to be contained – and physical limits (not enough runways to meet demand) are actually a very practical, sensible method of containment. It also doesn’t take an expert to see that the current convenient practice of excluding international air travel from all national emissions targets is absurdly ostrich-like. Besides, the boom in air travel cannot be accounted for by ‘ordinary hard-working people taking their one holiday a year’, which is the routine claim of the media and the travel industry. British Government statistics show that 62 per cent of adults did not make even one return flight in 2006. Among the richest 20 per cent of the population, 61 per cent took one or more return flights. Only four per cent of people took four or more flights.²

So even in the rich world we are talking about a tiny minority of people who may be flying an insane amount.

The spread that follows this article suggests ‘Ten steps to reduce flying’ – and some of these will affect only that tiny minority. But others will apply to you and me as well, because even if the primary focus has to be on forcing governments into action, we still need to do our individual bit.

In a way, putting this issue together has been a gesture in this direction since, three trips to London by train and bus aside, I have made a point of avoiding travelling (always, depressingly, the most ethical course of action of all). On the home front, my family has already decided to holiday this year in Cornwall, on the English coast, rather than further afield. But, on the other hand, the following year we have long planned to revisit friends and familiar places in Canada – we lived in Toronto for a year in the mid-1990s. And now my brother’s family is on the verge of emigrating to Australia – without one or other of us flying we would never see each other again.

It’s a tangled web, as this article – if it has done nothing else – has made plain. Good luck to all of you as you try to sort out what you think about it.

The View from Iran

Alex Doherty — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 12:56:24 +0000

‘I feel cold when I think about the possible war against my homeland,’ wrote an Iranian in his blog recently. ‘During the bloody conflict between Iran and Iraq I was witness to many victims in our cities… I am really scared when I hear the US has a plan to attack my country during the coming 16 months. My picture of war hasn’t come from Hollywood movies: I have seen the pain, the kids’ tears, bloody streets…’ The six billion of us who live in the rest of the world should not have our political priorities dictated by the US election cycle. But when, in November 2006, the Bush Administration was given a bloody nose by the US electorate – punished for its prosecution of deeply unpopular wars – it seemed for a comforting week or two that the democratic process might have done its job. The long-standing rumours about the Administration’s interest in extending its ‘war on terror’ to Iran could surely now be discounted. Donald Rumsfeld had been forced to resign as Defense Secretary and the Iraq Study Group was counselling, amongst other things, that the US talk directly to Iran.

But the instincts of the Bush-Cheney White House do not tend in that direction. Crazy though it may seem, there are persistent reports that the Administration continues to talk about ‘regime change’ in Tehran. Bush characterized Iran as part of an ‘axis of evil’ in his State of the Union speech in 2002 and contingency plans were subsequently developed for taking out Iranian nuclear installations with air power.1

More worrying still, there are indications that the Bush Administration is still infected with the delusion that an attack on Iran would lead the public to rise up and overthrow the religious leadership. The neoconservative David Wurmser is among those on Vice-President Cheney’s staff who are said to argue that there can be no settlement of the Iraq war without regime change in Iran. ‘It’s a classic case of “failure forward”,’ a Pentagon consultant cited in the New Yorker said. ‘They believe that by tipping over Iran they would recover their losses in Iraq – like doubling your bet. It would be an attempt to revive the concept of spreading democracy in the Middle East by creating one new model state.’2

This kind of thinking long predated the election of hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. But his inflammatory pronouncements about Israel – though these were widely mistranslated* – swiftly followed by his denials that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, have certainly done little to discourage US officials looking to take a confrontational line.

Nuclear contortions

Crudely put, part of the impulse to war derives from horror at the idea that an Islamist firebrand like Ahmadinejad might wind up with a nuclear weapons capability. The idea of Iran with nuclear weapons is indeed terrifying – particularly for Israelis who would be within easy range of them. But, to be frank, so too is the idea that nuclear weapons are already at the disposal of the Bush Administration, the Israeli military and General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. No state should possess nuclear weapons and the first concern of the world at the end of the Cold War should have been to move speedily towards their elimination. Like handguns in the US, the more nuclear weapons there are, the more likely it becomes that they will one day be used. For that reason alone, Iran’s alleged intention to develop ‘weapons of mass destruction’ should be a matter of profound concern to us all.

But the idea that war should be waged in order to stop such weapons being developed is an absurdity. According to Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an attack on Iran ‘would be absolutely counterproductive, and it would be catastrophic’. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in January, ElBaradei said diplomacy is the only way forward, and talk of military action would backfire because it ‘strengthens the hands of those in Iran who say “let’s develop a bomb to protect ourselves”.’3

Given the poor quality of the intelligence on Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that helped drive the US and Britain to war, you would think there might be great caution about claims that Iran is on the verge of developing its own nuclear capability. Even the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is cautious this time around. It has circulated its own classified draft assessment, based on satellite pictures and on measurements of radioactivity in suspected areas, and ‘found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons programme running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency’.2 The CIA assessment has so far been dismissed by the Cheney-dominated White House but, based on what has (not) been found so far, Iran may be telling the truth when it says its uranium enrichment is in the service of developing its own civil nuclear power programme.

But even if weapons were being covertly developed, what right would Britain, France and the US have to deny Iran weapons that they hold themselves? The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is not only designed to prevent new states from going nuclear, it also places obligations upon the existing nuclear powers to dismantle their own weapons over time. Far from doing so, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has recently announced his intention to upgrade the Trident weapons system, locking the country into a nuclear future for decades.

The moralistic lectures about nuclear non-proliferation emanating from Washington, London and Paris smack of hypocrisy. None of the existing members of the ‘nuclear club’ developed their weapons with the permission of the international community. They all did so covertly because they thought it served their own national interest. And if Iran were to look at the examples of Iraq (a pariah state with no nuclear weapons that has been torn apart) and North Korea (a pariah state with nuclear weapons that the US has no thought of attacking) it could be forgiven for drawing its own conclusions about what its own national interest might be.

The acknowledged civil nuclear-power programme has become a source of national pride in Iran, and were that research to extend into weapons production it is, sadly, likely that this would be seen in a similar light, as it already is in India and Pakistan.

‘Why doesn’t America stop enriching uranium?’ President Ahmadinejad is said to have asked in a meeting with a US Middle East expert, before laughing and adding: ‘We’ll enrich it for you and sell it to you at a 50-per-cent discount.’2

Isolated leader

As this exchange suggests, Ahmadinejad is more astute than Western characterization of him as a loony tune usually allows. His defence of Iran’s rights is often couched in terms of legitimate resistance to US power that he knows will play very well in many quarters of the world. He knows he is on much firmer ground in terms of Iranian popular support on the nuclear issue than he is on almost any other. And were Iranian nuclear-research facilities to be bombed – whether by Israeli or US planes – Ahmadinejad knows full well that Iranians would rally behind him and he would become an overnight hero, not just at home but throughout the Muslim world.

The West misconstrues Ahmadinejad in many other ways. Because he has a higher profile than any Iranian leader since Ayatollah Khomeini, he is automatically assumed to have a similar hold on power. This is far from being the case. Power within the Iranian constitution resides not with the elected President or Parliament but rather with the Supreme Leader – Khomeini’s former position, which is now occupied by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Were there to be an Iranian ‘commander-in-chief’ with a finger on the nuclear button, it would be Khamenei – and he, incidentally, has issued a religious decree against the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.

Ahmadinejad’s political position is, if anything, even weaker than was that of his reformist predecessor in the presidency, Muhammad Khatami. When Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, it was widely interpreted in the West as a vote for the religious repression of the 1980s. But Ahmadinejad ultimately won support not because of his hardline Islamism – during his campaign he took care to play down his religious and social conservatism – but because he was a maverick outsider to the clerical establishment who also promised to fight poverty. Effectively a vote for Ahmadinejad was seen as a vote for change.

Change of a sort has certainly ensued. Not in terms of the economic fundamentals – poor people are already becoming restive at the lack of progress on that front, as the interviews on page 12 show. But where the President can have an influence is on the social atmosphere. Khatami was unable to get his legal attempts at reform past the clerics, but he did manage to preside over something of a ‘Tehran Spring’ – a wide range of books could again be published, reformist newspapers gained a modicum of confidence, there was an explosion of blogging on every subject under the sun, women could show a bit of hair beneath their hejab, and young men and women felt able to be seen together on the street, sometimes even holding hands.

Ahmadinejad’s most significant impact has been to shut all this down. Reformist newspapers have been closed and journalists arrested or warned. A directive from Iran’s National Security Council has forbidden negative reporting of the country’s nuclear disagreement with the West. Even the once-unconstrained blogosphere has become inhibited. Those who write under their own names use self-censorship and their observations bear no resemblance to the old unbridled writing in their archives. Anonymous bloggers who cross the red line are blocked or shut down.

Because Ahmadinejad sees himself as guardian of the original spirit of the Revolution, it has often been assumed in the West that he has the full support of the clerical establishment. On the contrary, he is loathed by them almost as much as by the liberal intelligentsia. In part this is on theological grounds – Ahmadinejad is thought to adhere to the radical Hojjatieh movement, which was banned as heretical by Khomeini in 1983 and is still opposed by most clerics. In recent years the clerics have made outrageous use of their veto power to reject progressive candidates on the grounds that they are ‘incompatible with Islam’. But when it came to the elections in December 2006 for local authorities and for the Assembly of Experts (see Facts on page 10 for an outline of the Iranian constitution), many candidates aligned with Ahmadinejad and his guru Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi were also disbarred.

The elections overall turned out to be an embarrassing blow to Ahmadinejad. Not only did he fail to carve out a significant power bloc within the Assembly of Experts, but his allies failed to win control of a single local council.

The democratic tide

Notwithstanding the clerical interference and screening of candidates, the level of democratic participation in Iranian society far outweighs that of its Muslim neighbours. It is the most educated country in the region and its women have benefited particularly from this – whereas 90 per cent of women in rural areas were illiterate in 1975, today there is 97-per-cent literacy nationwide among girls aged 15 to 24. Two-thirds of the students at university are women. A third of all doctors, 60 per cent of civil servants and 80 per cent of teachers in Iran are female. Although one of Khomeini’s earliest acts following the Revolution was to rule that women must cover their hair, and vigilantes then beat up those who did not strictly observe this, even the most reactionary clerics have not thought it possible to force Iranian women into the kind of straitjacketed existence endured by their sisters in many other Muslim countries. A Western visitor writing as long ago as 1912 considered Iranian women to be ‘the most progressive, not to say radical, in the world’.4 Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, has written: [the] ‘Islamic Republic has hidden this history of progressiveness, leading people to erroneously lump Iran together with Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, people have not yet started to fight for these rights. In Iran, people are fighting to gain back rights they once had.’ 4 The courageous current campaign to gain a million signatures for a petition protesting against the laws infringing women’s rights (see pages 8 and 20) is a sign that, far from withering in the face of state and religious repression, women are in the forefront of the movement aiming to build a new, democratic Iran.

This is the most important thing for Western observers and policy-makers to digest: Ahmadinejad and his cohorts are swimming against the tide rather than riding it. An increasingly educated population in which around 65 per cent are under 30 has every reason to wish for the revitalization of the moribund Iranian economy and to seek a closer relationship with the outside world. Mosque attendance continues to plummet and, according to a recent poll conducted by Iran’s own Ministry of Intelligence, only 25 per cent of Iranians now consider religion an important factor in their lives.5

The underlying trend in Iran remains towards reform and greater democratic health. The danger is that this will be undermined by military confrontation. The position of Ahmadinejad and the hardliners is strengthened by confrontation – which is precisely why he struts his inflammatory stuff on the international stage. There are emerging signs within Iran that Ahmadinejad will not be allowed to continue this posturing for much longer. In January, a majority in Iran’s Majlis (parliament) sent a letter to the President criticizing him not only for the dire state of the economy but also for his high-profile foreign travel. In addition, two key newspapers, one of them owned by Supreme Leader Khamenei, rebuked Ahmadinejad over the nuclear issue.1

These developments are not unconnected with the UN Security Council resolution of December 2006 imposing sanctions on Iran for its refusal to halt the enrichment of uranium. The UN resolution emerged from a multilateral diplomatic approach led by governments in Europe which have been quietly working to keep channels open with Tehran ever since its nuclear programme became a cause for international concern in 2003.

Notwithstanding the sanctions, it is desperately important that those channels remain open – and ideally that talks between the US and Iran begin on all areas of disagreement, from Iranian support for Hizbullah in Lebanon to its alleged role in Iraq. Even Tony Blair has declared that Iran should now be offered ‘a clear strategic choice’ that could include a ‘new partnership’ with the West. Economic carrots would be much more productive than military sticks.

As the Security Council resolution passed, the Russian Ambassador to the UN, mindful of what happened in Iraq, stressed that it did not authorize the use of force. Nor is it likely that military action would gain UN approval – the greater danger is of a unilateral strike by the US or by Israel, where the more overheated voices routinely compare Ahmadinejad with Hitler. President Bush has just sent another aircraft carrier to the Gulf; this is a very dangerous time.

‘I am convinced that the only way forward in Iran is engagement,’ said IAEA chief ElBaradei. ‘We have to invest in peace,’ he said, because if the international community fails to do so ‘the consequence will be 10 times worse’. He added: ‘I hope we will stop speaking about a military option and focus on finding a solution.’

Amen to that.

*He was translated as saying Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’ , when in fact he said: ‘the regime occupying Jerusalem should vanish from the pages of time’, a rather high-flown Persian way of talking about the need for ‘regime change’.

1.Howard LaFranchi, ‘West Iran plan shows gains. Will US stick to it?’, Christian Science Monitor, 23 January 2007.

2. Seymour M Hersh, ‘The next act’, New Yorker, 27 November 2006.

3.Stella Dawson, ‘IAEA chief says attack on Iran would be catastrophe’, Reuters, 25 January 2007.

4.Nasrin Alavi, We Are Iran, Portobello Books 2006.

5.Ali M Ansari, Confronting Iran, Hurst & Co, 2006.