We are now six days into the Iran
protests, and the questions that seized Washington during the 2009
pro-democracy movement have now once again come to the fore. Should the
United States try to help Iran’s protesters? Can we help them?
Barack Obama’s answers to those questions were clear: No, not really.
His position, the one now echoed by many Western liberals, is based on a
deeply misguided premise that the current regime can be reformed or
moderated. It can’t — and that premise should be abandoned if we want to
do right by Iran.
When you read comments about Iran it’s helpful to mentally substitute
the names of other disreputable regimes. On Sunday, for example, former
Secretary of State John Kerry tweeted the following about the Iranians
who have taken to the streets to protest their theocracy: “With humility
about how little we know about what’s happening inside Iran, this much
is clear: it’s an Iranian moment and not anyone else’s.”
Would Mr. Kerry have said the same about Poland under Communism or black
South Africans under apartheid? Would anyone in good conscience or with
any strategic insight have recommended that the correct approach for
Washington toward Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski or Prime Minister P.W. Botha
was to remain quiet and do nothing?
What explains this glaring moral incongruity on the part of so many
Westerners when it comes to Iran?
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For American liberals, it usually goes back to the C.I.A.-supported 1953
coup against the Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. That is the
paralyzing original sin that limits the possibilities of American action
or even strong rhetoric. Harry Truman’s ultimatum to the Soviets to
leave Iran after World War II and John F. Kennedy’s policy of pushing
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to adopt reforms are usually overlooked. The
failure of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to restrain the shah’s
delusional ambitions when it mattered most aren’t cited as examples of
“Iranian moments” where Washington was right to do nothing.
This reflexive belief that the United States is more apt to do wrong
than right in Iran is today reinforced by a palpable anxiety on the
American left that any serious support for the pro-democracy
demonstrators could slide into new sanctions that could threaten Mr.
Obama’s nuclear deal. To put it another way, a (temporary) suspension of
the clerical regime’s nuclear ambitions is seen as more important than
the possibility that democratic dissidents might win their struggle
against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his religious dictatorship.
Fear for the survival of the nuclear deal dovetails with an entirely
mistaken idea about Iran that has driven much American and European
policy since the 1990s: that the Islamic Republic can evolve from
theocracy to a more traditional, nonthreatening authoritarian regime or
even to democracy. This hope reinforces the view that Washington needs
to keep its distance from dissidents or risk compromising their position
in Iranian society. “Authentic” politically viable Iranians are thus
anti-American since they have to negotiate with and cajole the
hard-liners into accepting reform.
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This awful Western analysis has Iranian progenitors. In the 1990s, the
Iranian left hoped that the Islamic Republic’s theocracy could give way
gradually to something kinder and democratic. They were exhausted but
still faithful revolutionaries, tired of the internal violence and the
war that had birthed the Islamic Republic’s police state. The
intellectuals of this movement often retained much of their
revolutionary, anti-American fire.
The unexpected triumph of the mild-mannered, bookish, Occident-curious
Mohammad Khatami in the 1997 presidential election fueled the
possibility of change. But the regime’s attack on student demonstrators
demanding free speech in 1999 — Mr. Khatami failed to defend them, while
Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s current “moderate” president, threatened them
with death — brought an end to any organized reform movement.
The longing for change among the Iranian people hasn’t abated, however.
The 1979 revolution had two contradictory ambitions: clerical Islamism
and democracy. As theocracy has lost its appeal, the attraction of
democracy, ever more secular in its expression, has spread from the
college-educated to the working class.
The Obama administration, like so many well-intentioned Western
journalists and scholars, locked onto this hope for gradual
transformation from theocracy to democracy even though within Iran it
had been shattered. The death of this dream was the electoral triumph in
2013 of Mr. Rouhani, a founding father of the regime’s dreaded
Intelligence Ministry. Iranians, who would surely down theocracy in a
free vote, have a political system that gives them the option of voting
for Mr. Rouhani or even more distasteful candidates.
Many Americans still want to believe that the Islamic Republic can
peacefully evolve into something less malign. After all, American
foreign policy is much more difficult if Iran remains an aggressive
theocracy. The nuclear deal seems less astute if, when the sunset
clauses kick in and the atomic restrictions start coming off in six
years, Iran has tens of thousands of loyal Shiite militiamen spread
across the Middle East and has increased the capacity of its long-range
ballistic missiles.
But as Misagh Parsa of Dartmouth has written in “Democracy in Iran: Why
It Failed and How It Might Succeed,” a depressing but essential read,
gradual change isn’t in the offing. The demonstrators in the streets of
Iran today instinctively know this, which is why they rail against the
system, chanting: “Death to Khamenei! Death to Rouhani!”
These brave men and women deserve America’s rhetorical and material
support. They expected in it 2009 after President Obama’s Cairo speech,
in which he called for human rights in the Muslim world, but it never
came.
This time around, the Trump administration can do better. The
president’s tweets in support of the protesters were a good start.
Washington should also let loose a tsunami of sanctions against the
Revolutionary Guards, the linchpin of Iran’s dictatorship. Policy-wise,
that would be a good place to start.
Contrary to received wisdom, the absolute worst thing that the United
States can do for the Iranian people is to stay silent and do nothing. |
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