Fast Times in Tehran

(4 of 5)

Of course, the mullahs still resort to heavy-handed means of suppressing disgruntlement. About two years ago, I watched as an unmarked Iranian Paykan drove up to the curb outside a meeting of student activists. Plainclothes agents of the hard-line judiciary jumped out and dived at the organizers standing outside. In broad daylight, in front of journalists, the agents dragged the students along the ground, tearing their clothes and bloodying their faces. The agents dumped the activists in an idling car and then peeled away. It took about five minutes for the students to disappear into the recesses of the system. On this trip, I went to a fashionable cafe to see Amir Balali, a former student activist who had spent time in prison for his organizing. In the middle of the afternoon, young couples are bent over banana splits while the speakers purr French lounge music. Balali, 25, is an urbane young man wearing an Umbro shirt and jeans and carrying a Nokia digital camera phone. In 2002 he was arrested. While in prison, he says, he was kept standing--sleepless, facing a wall--for 72 hours straight and was beaten.

Balali describes Iranian society as "an utter catastrophe" and explains that his peers have become used to behaving as though the unresponsive regime doesn't exist, bypassing it entirely to solve their problems. He considered organizing a protest around a candidate for next week's election but then realized that no one was particularly worked up, including him. "No one is interested in coalescing around anything beyond themselves," he says with a shrug. "Their idols aren't Che Guevara anymore. They're Bill Gates and Angelina Jolie." He predicts that the Islamic republic will eventually crumble and that change here will be chaotic and painful. "The lawful, peaceful approach didn't work," says Balali. "Young people can only tolerate this for so long."

When you try to view the future through the eyes of a young Iranian, it seems clear that there is no easy route to a new Iran. The government of outgoing President Mohammed Khatami initially raised hopes for political change but didn't deliver. For many young Iranians fed up with clerical rule, the possibility of U.S.-sponsored regime change in Iran once offered the distant hope of a simple and quick solution, but with an insurgency boiling next door in Iraq, it's now clear that that would be neither a solution nor pain-free.