A lot of columnists at the Washington Post are writing about Iran today. Fareed Zakaria notes:
Iran has the ingredients for a revolution. More than half of the population is younger than 30, many youths are educated yet unemployed, almost 50 million Iranians have smartphones with which they can learn about the world, and reformers have consistently raised expectations yet never delivered on their promises. But the regime also has instruments of power, ideology, repression and patronage, all of which it is ready to wield to stay in control. What appears likely for Iran is a period of instability — in an already volatile Middle East.
The Iranian government’s problem is no longer a matter of performance but of legitimacy. Routine corruption, vicious oppression and economic mismanagement are increasingly seen as essential to the regime itself.
The breadth of this sentiment is what distinguishes the current revolt from the Green Movement of 2009. Instead of mainly involving the upper-middle class, discontent has taken root in the lower-middle class — in the labor movement and among the unemployed. Instead of being concentrated in Tehran and a few other cities, the current unrest can be found across the country in smaller cities and rural areas. (If it comes to it, this would complicate the imposition of martial law, because Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps would need to be deployed more thinly.)
The West certainly should be careful about statements that encourage Iranians to open rebellion. There’s moral hazard in such cheerleading. But silence is wrong. The West should urge Iranian protesters to remain peaceful (they’re more likely to succeed that way) and also warn the regime that it will be held accountable for violence against its citizens. If the government cracks down hard, as it did during the 2009 Green Movement, it must face real consequences.
They’re all missing something basic. Iran isn’t comparable with France at the end of the 18th century, with Poland in 1989, or with Egypt in 2009. It’s more like Russia in 1930 or the Soviet Union in 1954. Its rulers are successful revolutionaries. They have an army, supporters, the will to use them, and no Plan B. Those demonstrating in the streets have none of those things and most don’t remember any rulers of Iran other than the mullahs.
It will be another 10-15 years before the regime that put itself into power in 1979 but had been planning for it for decades can be replaced. Rather than preparing for an imminent overthrow of the mullahocracy, we should be trying to ensure that when the mullahs who overthrew the Shah die, the regime that replaces them is better than they were. That’s a task hard enough. Sufficient to the day, etc. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
In terms of time it’s more like China in 1987, or the US in 1824 . which is to say the last leaders of the revolution are about to kick it and the next generation will take the reins.
The revolutions did not collapse, but the politics and interpretation of the meaning of the revolution changed significantly.
Think the distance traveled between James Moeroe to Andrew Jackson.
My point is that there is no way the “protesters” in Iran are going to overthrow the mullahs. In particular it’s not like the color revolutions of 1989. Gorbachev was a bureaucrat not a revolutionary. The regime isn’t just going to collapse.
But like China of 1987 but particularly China of 1989, yes. The protests didn’t bring the regime down. The regime brought the protests down.
Rather than preparing for an imminent overthrow of the mullahocracy, we should be trying to ensure that when the mullahs who overthrew the Shah die, the regime that replaces them is better than they were.
Do you have any advice on how to do that?
By working so hard to isolate Iran, we have no tools that we can use without the very strong risk of a very bad blowback. Anything we do or say to try to favor anyone could be used to undermine them inside Iran.
Mullahs overthrown for corruption by hungry people in ten years time could easily be replaced by stricter Mullahs who want a harsher interpretation of Islamic Law to deal with corruption and helping thy neighbor. And if the more secular alternatives are viewed as American stooges, that’s a lot more likely.
I think that our best course of action is to sit on our hands — to go out of our way to not do anything.
I agree the protests is very unlikely to overthrow the government; but it could lead to very significant changes.
1989 is a tragic example. The protestors were killed, but it also marked the final rejection of Maoism / Communism as a guiding force in the CCP. Deng and his successors concluded they had to abandon revolutionary ideology to survive.
If the protests leads to Iran cultailing it’s adventurism abroad, treating its own people better, that would be something to cheer about.
I agree. It might also be helpful if we devoted more energy to being the best U. S. we can be rather than trying to turn the rest of the world into bad imitations of the U. S. We should be using pull power rather than push power.
If our economy is growing robustly, our citizens are happy, and we’re behaving ourselves, we probably don’t have to do anything else to encourage the attraction of liberal democracy.
I watched Walter Russel Mead on Zakaria’s show last Sunday and his main point was that oil prices are putting pressure on Iran and other petro-states that are going to compel some sort of reformer sooner or later. He points to fracking, and I wonder if Trump’s announcement on opening off-shore drilling is part of that. And part of the reason I suggest this is that I don’t think there is going to be a lot of interest in off-shore right now.
Interesting points here. What strikes me is there are things a revolution can’t change. The Iranians are Iranian, and the US doesn’t like Iranians and has spent 40 years just about making sure Iranians know this. The Iranians are mostly Shiites in a sea of Sunni Moslems, and Sunnis and Shiites have been quarreling for over 13 centuries. The Iranians are primarily Persians and Turks, and thus emphatically not Arabs. The Iranians sit in the Middle East and since Ottoman days they have long standing rivals in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. They’ve fought wars in recent memory with their neighbors, encouraged resistance movements in other nations, and generally kept their hands dirty in turbulent Middle East politics. Also, the Israelis don’t like them.
There isn’t any part of this that’s going to change even after militant Iranian rebels behead the last mullah, and even if successful revolutionaries promised changes in Iran’s behavior — vowing to become a secular state, for example — almost no one in the world would believe them, or think such changes significant.
So, barring conquest by outsiders, the Iranians are stuck with each other. I think this makes revolution very unlikely.