When is a government a regime?

If you’re like me, and you read a fair amount about politics, you usually focus on the essence of the story without paying too much attention to the words that are used, unless of course they themselves are the story, or you find the choice of language to be offensive.

The other day I read a piece about the Iranian government in the London Times, in which it was referred to as a “regime”.

The word regime, at least in the Western press, is mainly used to describe a government that, for one reason or another, the publication thinks we might not like. The reason is usually the authoritarian flavour of the entity in question. If a new entity has come about as the result of a revolution, the one that succeeds it, if it meets our approval, is usually referred to in the media as a government. But if it comes about through a coup d’état, it’s usually a regime.

Only after an unspecified period and under certain circumstances does the regime in a smallish country mutate into a government. That usually happens after it has held elections judged by the West to be free and fair. Until then, it’s a regime.

However, in a large and powerful country, the ruling political entity gets to be a government more or less immediately after it comes into being. We don’t, for example, refer to the governments of Russia and China as regimes.

In the case of Iran, when did it get to be a regime rather than a government? Was it when the Islamic Republic started locking up and executing people, which was more or less from the beginning of its life?  Or was it when it turned into something that other governments would like to change? Perhaps through the eyes of the West it was always a regime.

So here’s a thought. Since Donald Trump and his administration are displaying increasing authoritarian tendencies, should we call his administration a regime? Likewise the government of Narendra Modi in India?

And what about Saudi Arabia? It’s had the same government, uninterrupted by coups or revolutions, since 1932. Over the past 70 years it’s been a friend of the west. But it’s not a democracy, and it locks up dissidents and executes them through an opaque legal system. Does it deserve to be called a government or a regime? The answer, seems to be that when it buys lots of arms from us, it’s a government, and when its agents dismember Jamal Khashoggi, it’s a regime.

And Turkey? Since President Erdogan started locking up large numbers of journalists, has his government morphed into a regime?

On one level, this is unimportant. After all, newspapers are all talk. On another level, it is important, because the words they use influence us, often without our even being aware of it. Regime is a word with a slightly bad smell. It has the whiff of illegitimacy. It’s frequently used as part of a compound noun, as in “regime change” or “regime overthrow”.

So when newspapers – and politicians for that matter – refer to a government as a regime often enough, this conditions us to regard it as illegitimate, and worthy of being overthrown.

In the case of Iran, Donald Trump seems intent on encouraging the people of Iran to protest, and ultimately to overthrow their government. That is presumably the purpose of sanctions – squeeze until the pips squeak. He probably doesn’t care that a revolution in Iran would be violent, and that the outcome would not be guaranteed to produce a more benign alternative. One could hardly say that the governments of Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Russia have left their citizens happier than their predecessors.

Before Trumpland, politicians with an ounce of nuance would point to other countries whose revolutions looked more like evolution, and whose citizens have benefited accordingly – East European countries for example. As a consequence, nobody refers to the governments of Poland, Latvia and Hungary as regimes.

If I was Iranian, and I sat watching nervously as outside my window protesters are being arrested and gunned down, I reckon I would far prefer to see incremental change rather than yet another revolution. And this, surely, was one of the things Obama was looking to achieve with his nuclear deal.

So when we sit down with the London Times, the New York Times, the Daily Mail or the Washington Post, and we see a government being referred to as a regime, it does no harm to stop and ask ourselves who has made that determination, when and why. And in whose interest it is that the government in question be tarred with the brush of illegitimacy.

Most important of all, who would have to suffer in order for it to be made legitimate?

I don’t doubt for a moment that the Islamic Republic is controlled by ruthless people who care little about the lives of its citizens, just as Saddam Hussein was prepared to sacrifice countless Iraqis in order to keep his grip on power.

So under what circumstances is Iran likely to change for the better, by which orthodox opinion in the West usually means an apolitical military, an independent judiciary, laws that guarantee freedom of expression and an end to the stifling orthodoxy imposed by the Supreme Leader and his theocratic institutions?

I would suggest that barring an externally-generated regime overthrow, such changes will only come about under two alternative circumstances. The first is a violent revolution that would most likely be costly in lives and infrastructure. The second would be if the rulers felt secure enough to make changes without feeling their power threatened.

The latter scenario is very far from the current reality. By all appearances Iran’s rulers are deeply insecure. To make concessions through internal pressure would be seen as an act of weakness that in their view might invite more pressure.

If, on the other hand, Iran could be persuaded to give up its imperial ambitions and withdraw support from its various armed proxies in the region – in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq – such a move would pave the way to a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the United States. Not only that, but the money it would thereby save would be available to improve the lives of its own citizens.

By this logic the removal of General Soleimani would provide Iran with an opportunity to move in that direction, were it not that his assassination by the United States is seen by many Iranians as both an infringement of sovereignty and a national humiliation. And indeed, putting morality and legality aside, a more emotionally intelligent American president would perhaps have opted for a covert, deniable hit.

Even if Iran did roll back funding and direction to its proxy militias, it wouldn’t necessarily be the end of them. Given the instability in Syria and Iraq, some would look for other sponsors, and rivalry between militias might lead to yet more hostilities – a situation ISIS would undoubtedly exploit. But a period of adjustment might at least bring an opportunity to move towards a peaceful settlement.

There would still remain the little matter of its nuclear ambitions. But the JCPOA nuclear treaty remains as an option if Trump, or his successor, chose to reinstate it.

There have been some commentators who point out that in the various debates on the future of the region conducted in the Western media, the voices of the people within it are rarely heard. I agree with them. Most of what you read on the subject concerns the geopolitical aspects of the various rivalries, despite the efforts of some journalists and relief organisations to highlight the human costs.

Perhaps if we started looking at the conflicts from the perspective of those most affected – the powerless citizens of the region – different solutions might present themselves. We in the West have become numb to the suffering. You could argue that most of us only care when the victims arrive on our doorsteps seeking refuge, or when a film like For Sama intrudes on our daily diet of more prosaic concerns.

We are days away from the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. If you follow the Auschwitz Museum on Twitter, every day you will see a picture of one of the victims, along with a brief description of their lives. It’s part of a campaign to ensure that we never forget the crimes committed there. Yet while strenuous efforts are made to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, do we pay enough attention to the suffering of the living and recently departed of the Middle East? Perhaps in a similar way we should be able to remember the victims of the wars in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and beyond.

So back to the original question: when is a government a regime? Try listening to the opinions of those who have lost everything. I doubt if they’d care. But their views matter as much as those of the people who stand to lose their power, or of people like me, who sit in safe distance away from conflict that seems never to end.

For in the despair of the dispossessed lies the seeds of conflagrations to come.