Between the mullahs and Bush: Iranian student movement loses its place.

On December 6, a crowd of more than 1,000 rambunctious students booed and heckled and mocked Iranian President Mohammad Khatami in an auditorium at Tehran University. "Khatami, Khatami, where are your promised freedoms?" they chanted. "Khatami, Khatami, shame on you!"

Eight years before, Khatami caught the students' imagination when he brandished a miniature copy of Iran's constitution and vowed, in the same speech, to uphold the rule of law. Now, the president has become something of a tragic joke among many Iranian students. "The students are very disappointed because they paid a heavy price for supporting Khatami," said student leader Abd Allah Momeni, "but in return they got nothing."

Emboldened by Khatami's promises after the 1997 campaign, the students grew less intimidated by the hardliners. On the morning of July 9, 1999, a group of militant vigilantes, Ansar-e Hezbollah, sought to crush the students' optimism by storming Tehran University's dormitory complex, beating students in their sleep and throwing some from second- and third-story windows. At least one was killed, and twenty injured. For the next eight days, thousands rioted in Tehran and eighteen other cities across the country. They waited for Khatami's backing. It never came.

Back in Washington, Iran-watchers described the protests as the first step toward a counterrevolution in the Islamic Republic. Since the events in July 1999, and encouraged by periodic bursts of student dissent on Iran's campuses, an influential cast of foreign policy advisers in Washington has grown infatuated by the likelihood of Iranian university students doing Bush's long-desired dirty work--enacting regime change in Tehran. Leading this pack has been the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen. With the right blend of moral and financial support from Washington, Ledeen contends, the students can overthrow the regime. In June 2003, when a small demonstration against rumored tuition hikes led into another round of violence, Ledeen wrote, "[The students] smell tell-tale odors coming from the undergarments of the doomed leaders."

In his inauguration speech colored by assumptions of the regime's frailty and the students' strength, Bush pledged to support "democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile everywhere." It was a thinly veiled reference to Iran. But the students may not want Bush's support.

I arrived in Tehran the first week of July, hoping to catch the student movement in full stride. But on the highly anticipated day marking the dormitory incident five years before, I did not smell any of the telltale odors Ledeen described--and there were plenty of mullahs on the street. On the single most significant day for the student movement, Tehran University was quiet. Lined up just outside the university walls, beefed-up numbers of police, military, and Revolutionary Guards carried nasty weapons at their sides. But the students, following requests from university officials who feared a reprisal of violence, kept away. No stones were thrown, no tires were burnt, and no signs were held reading "Death to the Dictator," as they were in summers past.

Two weeks later, Siamak, a student leader involved in the reform movement from its infancy in the early 1990s, agreed to see me. In 1994, Siamak was arrested after writing a few dozen articles and jailed almost a year in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. "We have no student movement," he said repeatedly. "There are different groups [of student activists], but without a common objective." Frankly, he admitted, the student movement in Iran is dead; the hardliners have won.

The student movement failed in Iran for a handful of reasons. The students I interviewed consistently cited a lack of organizational focus, an aging and divided leadership, and an overall sense of intimidation by the government or its squads of fundamentalist goons as the main reasons for its failure. But arguably the greatest factor to determine the present fate of Iran's student movement has been the students' misjudgment of President Khatami. "After 1997, the students dropped their state of fear," explains Tehran University political science professor Hadi Semati. "But they underestimated the clerics as being just a bunch of old guys whose time was over." Anxious over the prospects of change, the students overestimated their constitution-toting president and his ability to implement the rule of law in Iran. What they failed to realize in 1997 was just how little power Khatami had.

Soon after the July 1999 crackdown, and Khatami's unsympathetic reaction to the hundreds of jailed students, the president's weaknesses became evident. Two weeks after the last protesters were corralled into Iranian paddy wagons, Khatami crushed the hopes of thousands of students in a speech in the city of Hamadan. Rather than expressing his solidarity with the demonstrators, as many expected, he trashed their efforts. "It [the unrest] was an ugly and offensive incident," Khatami said, "which marred the image of our dear, patient, rational people. It had nothing to do with this honorable nation or the university students."

But the students also overestimated themselves. They grew convinced that the system was theirs to change, and jumped ahead of what the wider population was ready to accept. While a majority of people agreed on the need for reform, not everyone foresaw the need for drastic change. "The student movement tried to be the only factor to fill the vacuum of civil society," said Bijan, another student leader and veteran of the movement. "It tried to carry the hopes of everyone; even a horse can't bear this weight."

Nearly ten years younger than Siamak, Bijan spent the five years prior to Khatami's election attending small meetings at Tehran University with former student activists who orchestrated the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in 1979. They are all now leading reformists and act as the ideological guides for the students. But they are also balding, and not likely to lead any other big stunts. Even Bijan, in his mid-twenties, is past his prime. He is getting more interested in raising a family than overthrowing the government. "Iran has become a country of young adults," said Semati, "and an age bracket not so susceptible to revolutionary activities."

But for Bijan, age is not an excuse for apathy--there are plenty of other reasons for that in Iran. The tough economy, the false impression of democracy, and the government's willingness to use force on its people to suppress dissent are just a few examples. The first time we met, at a park in northern Tehran, I asked him what happened to the movement since 1999. "The students don't know what they want, and they have forgotten their real role," Bijan said. "Instead of being a movement, they sometimes want to be a political party. Other times they want to be rioters." The main role of a movement, he claimed, is to be the "eyes and ears" of the people. "We can't hope to do more than that," he said.

Without strong leaders, many of whom either remain in jail from past demonstrations or have since taken themselves out of politics, the movement's focus is muddled. In the 1970s, removing the Shah became the raison d'etre for millions of Iranians. Nowadays, some seek to affect a similar fate upon the mullahs, while others seek only to realize the democratic potential of a constitution that has, according to Semati, "relatively liberal potentials."

"One-fifth of university students want nothing changed," said a Tehran University law student. "Three-fifths want more democracy. And one-fifth is totally reliant on outside powers--they support all measures to correct the 'current situation.'"

Looking back, some think that the mullahs' perception of outside support eventually crushed the movement in 2003. In June of that year, the students clashed with authorities once again. As anti-government protests picked up, George W. Bush mouthed support for the embattled students.

"We don't want Bush's support," Bijan said, becoming angry. "Did you know that 4,000 people were arrested the night after Bush's statement? It only gives them [the regime] another reason to crack down."

But the regime has not restricted itself to using sticks. During the week marking the fourth anniversary of the 1999 protests, the authorities, offering an alternative, licensed a pop band to perform seven nights of outdoor concerts. Given the likelihood of violence, detention, and potentially long prison terms if they attended the protests, many young people opted for the concert. Since then, no one has heard a peep from the once-threatening student movement.

Many students, Siamak said, are wising up and learning a valuable lesson--stay out of politics. Sure, he said, there is, and will always be, a core group of ultra-political students rearing to change the government.

Bijan regularly attends meetings for various student groups where the energy and excitement of reform remains heady. But students beyond this core who, five years ago, joined the protests, are now consumed with more tangible goals. "The student movement is starting again from zero," Siamak said. Instead of contemplating the possibilities of Islamic democracy, students dedicate themselves to finding a job, or better yet, a green card. Tehran University's most popular department is not political science or philosophy or religion, but engineering. In August 2004, a handful of Iranian students competed in the Global Physics Challenge in Beijing. They finished second, only to China. "If the public feels its pockets are being served," Semati explained, "they are ready to forgo democracy and freedom." Sharp, young technocrats are much less threatening than radical democrats.

With Bush's belligerent rhetoric toward Tehran on the rise, many students have turned to embrace Iranian nationalism, their country's nuclear aspirations, and, by a twist of irony, the mullahs they have long despised. The population, Semati said, "has come to identify the nuclear program [and their support for it] with the folks in charge." In November 2004, thousands of students formed a human chain around the Atomic Energy Organization building in Tehran, not to protest the government's gangbusters-like approach to pursuing nuclear technology, but their apparent willingness to compromise.

"Pakistan and Israel have nuclear weapons," one student said to me while we walked on the former Shah's palace grounds in northern Tehran. "Why does Bush not allow our country to have them? We are not crazy dinosaurs."

In a country where foreign meddling in Iranian affairs is cast as the greatest bogeyman of all, the impression of American interference only plays into the mullahs' hands. Bush's belligerence may leave the mullahs still firmly in charge--clean undergarments and all.

Nicholas Schmidle is a graduate student and freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C.