Op-Ed Contributor
Iran, Beacon of Liberty?
By REUEL MARC GERECHT
Published: February 10, 2010
ON Thursday, the birthday of the Islamic Republic of Iran, we will see whether the democratic opposition movement has been driven underground by the increasingly brutal harassment from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian society has become like molten rock under high pressure: more eruptions are inevitable. And if the dissidents can take to the streets, they will.
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In any case, the fraudulent June 12 presidential elections and the subsequent internal tumult ought to make us wonder what would happen if Iran actually went democratic. President Obama and his advisers — still devoted to engagement and the hope that Iran’s nuclear-weapons program can be peacefully derailed (despite
Tehran’s stepping up of its enrichment program this week), and probably skeptical that Ayatollah Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards Corps could lose power — have likely spent little time envisioning a region where the Islamic Republic as we have known it no longer exists. At least, nobody from the administration’s foreign-policy brain trust has laid out any plans for that contingency.
But given the troubles facing Ayatollah Khamenei, the near certainty that the clerical regime is going to get a lot nastier soon and the momentous possibilities of a democratic Iran, the White House should give it some thought. Mr. Khamenei is confronting a democracy movement that has grown larger despite an almost total lack of organization and charismatic leadership.
Iran’s militarized theocracy will survive or perish depending on the strength of the Revolutionary Guards, the praetorian branch of the military that has become a self-sustaining fundamentalist conglomerate. Yet many guardsmen and their children, like the children of the clerical elite, are graduates of Iran’s best universities. And if there is one factor that has inclined Iranians toward the opposition, it has been higher education — a point the regime has surely noted when it comes to the probable loyalties of the country’s nuclear physicists.
In fact, many rank-and-file guardsmen voted for Mohammad Khatami, the reformist candidate, in the 1997 presidential election, even though their senior officers detested him. It’s likely this schism remains.
The funeral in December of the regime’s bête noire, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, where hundreds of thousands turned out, suggests the regime may also be encountering resistance from the clerical establishment.
The senior clergymen of the holy city of Qum have never had any regard for Ayatollah Khamenei’s religious credentials and political pretensions; their quiescence has been achieved through intimidation by the regime and their inability to see any political alternative. But part of Ayatollah Montazeri’s appealing dissent, which has been echoed by other Shiite clerics since his death, is that the Islamic Republic doesn’t have to change much for the differences to be telling. Just freeing the Parliament from unelected clerical oversight would be a revolutionary step.
We will likely know in the coming months if the opposition can draw into the streets larger numbers of the mostazafan, “the oppressed poor,” who have been the popular bedrock of the regime since the 1979 revolution. The economic “reforms” that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has planned will probably worsen Iran’s already debilitating inflation and unemployment. An opposition combining the young mullahs, college-educated bureaucrats within Iran’s bloated civil service and a significant slice of the urban poor could be too diverse for the guards, a partly conscripted force, to suppress.
The guards rose to prominence defending the homeland against an Iraqi invader; they have not yet shown that they have the fortitude to kill their countrymen like the Russian secret police or the Chinese Red Guards. Note how much time and effort the regime has spent to deflect blame for the killing of one young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, in the post-election rioting last summer. A self-confident regime would have killed unapologetically. Senior guardsmen may want to unleash a bloodbath to preserve the status quo, but Ayatollah Khamenei, who lacks the cold-blooded will of the state’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, doesn’t seem to want to slaughter Iranians or make himself a hostage of his henchmen.
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Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
