IRAN: A MIDDLE EASTERN TINDERBOX

• First, some historical background.  The Islamic revolution in Iran was launched by Ayatollah Khomeini, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown.  As Middle Eastern specialist Reuel Marc Gerecht has argued, that revolution encompassed two incompatible ideas:  “That God’s law—as interpreted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—would rule, and that the people of Iran had the right to elect representatives who would advance and protect their interests.  When Khomeini was alive and Iran was at war with Iraq, the tension between theocracy and democracy never became acute.”  However, when Khomeini died in 1989, the tension began to mount.  With the 1997 presidential campaign of Mohammad Khatami, that tension increased and Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, began to experience the tension.  The entire theocratic structure is now in 2009 at stake.  The critical question is whether the Iranian theocracy and democracy can co-exist.  That is what we are seeing right now.  The touchstone of modern Islam (Sunni or Shiite) is “commanding right and forbidding wrong.”  Since the beginning of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the mullahs have played that role.  But what Khamenei now faces is a democratic triumph that “would allow men, not God and his faithful guardians, the mullahs, to determine right and wrong.”  That is why this election and the subsequent demonstrations because of the obvious voter fraud are so important:  They threaten the very foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  That Republic was to foster the model that “Islam has all the answers,” at least enough to construct a modern state and make its citizens moral children of Allah.  Gerecht writes:  “Millions of Iranians said in the presidential election, and more powerfully on the streets since, that they want out of Ayatollah Khomeini’s dream, which has become a nightmare. . . As Iranians have come to know theocracy intimately, secularism has become increasingly attractive.  Iran now produces brilliant clerics who argue in favor of the separation of church and state as a means of saving the faith from corrupting power.”  Rather amazingly, Gerecht maintains that “Whether he intended it or not, Mr. Moussavi [the candidate who has challenged Ahmadinejad and Khamenei]—and indirectly Ayatollah Khamenei because of his crude determination to keep the former prime minister from power—has probably begun the final countdown on the Islamic Republic.”

• Second, why have so many of the Muslim mullahs and clerics been supporting Moussavi?  In one sense, Iran has moved from a crude theocracy to a military dictatorship.  With the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad four years ago, there was some hope that he would bring about significant reform from the corrupt and inefficient mullahs and their regime.  Ahmadinejad is a former officer in the Revolutionary Guards and he has spent the last four years elevating his brothers in arms.  Of the 21 cabinet ministers, 14 are former members of the Guard or its associated paramilitary, the Basij.  Many of these people are thought to have supported terrorist operations in the 1980s.  Danielle Pletka and Ali Alfoneh of the American Enterprise Institute report that “this creeping militarization has not been restricted to the central government:  provincial governors, press commissars, film directors, intelligence officers and business leaders are increasingly former members of the guard.  The elite force controls much of the economy either directly—the Basij has rights to oil extraction—or through proxy companies like Khatan al Anbiya, which dominates construction throughout Iran.”  There is every evidence now that Ayatollah Khamenei has forged a powerful alliance with Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard to preserve this military dictatorship.  This explains the crudeness of the vote rigging in Iran and the unusually speedy certification of the election as a “divine miracle.”  As Pletka and Alfoneh so correctly argue, “the transformation of a theocracy to an ideological military dictatorship. . . neither needs nor wants accommodation with the West.” 

• Third, what then should the United States do?  Given the true nature of what is occurring within Iran, President Obama is making a huge mistake in not siding with the democratic elements within Iran.  There is zero chance that Iran will end its nuclear program.  So afraid of a charge of “meddling” from the Iranian government, our president is in effect siding with the Revolutionary Guard terrorists who now control Iran.  Obama wanted to restore America’s moral standing in the world.  Is this the way to do so?  The simple fact is that, as David Ignatius, the columnist, has argued, “Iran’s repressive rulers have overplayed their hand.  By manipulating the election results, they have created a popular backlash.  Iranians are now voting with their feet and with their blood.”  And America is not standing with them?  As Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace contends, “[Obama’s] strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government’s efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition’s efforts to prolong the crisis. . . [His] policy now requires getting past the election controversies quickly so that he can soon begin negotiations with the reelected Ahmadinejad government.  This will be difficult as long as opposition protests continue and the government appears to be either unsettled or too brutal to do business with. . . His goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it.”  This is profoundly startling because there is simply no chance that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard lackeys will ever abandon their goal of nuclear weapons.  I am amazed at the naïveté of our new president!  Columnist Tom Friedman observes powerfully that “having voted with their ballots, Iranians who want a change will have to vote again with their bodies.  A regime like Iran’s can only be brought down or changed if enough Iranians vote as they did in 1979—in the street.  That is what the regime fears most, because then it either has to shoot its own people or cede power.”  Obama cannot negotiate with the thugs that support Ahmadinejad.  The only hope is regime change in Iran—and that is up to the people of Iran.  The 1979 revolution was decided in the streets.  Perhaps the 2009 revolution will be also.

See Thomas Friedman in the New York Times (21 June 2009); Robert Kagan in the Washington Post (17 June 2009); David Ignatius in the Washington Post (19 June 2009); Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post (19 June 2009); Danielle Pletka and Ali Alfoneh in the New York Times (17 June 2009); and Reuel Marc Gerecht in the New York Times (21 June 2009).

Print