Today’s Green movement mobilization came a day after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei bluntly rejected US overtures for engagement.
Now that Iran has “rebuffed all entreaties,” President Obama “should understand he got a ‘No’”, said Congressman Mark Kirk, R-Ill., today in a speech in which he called for a new strategy to promote democracy and human rights in Iran, invoking the example of US support for Soviet dissidents.
The protests that erupted after the fraudulent June 12 election prompted what one former State Department official called a “perceptible deflation of hope” within the administration at prospects for engaging Iran. Supreme Leader Khamenei’s dismissal of any potential rapprochement as “perverted” may demand a strategic shift.
“The Iranian nation will not be deceived by ostensibly conciliatory remarks and will never comprise on its independence, freedom, national interests, and rights,” he told students in Tehran.
The United States should not pin its hopes on “certain incidents” that occurred after the June 12 presidential election because the Islamic Republic can weather much heavier storms, he stated. Iran would continue to challenge “the global arrogance”.
“Arrogance means that a power or certain powers interfere in other countries’ internal affairs through their financial, military and propaganda apparatuses as if they own these countries,” the official Tehran Times helpfully explains.
The Cold War was won “because we never lost our moral compass,” Kirk said in a speech at the US Institute for Peace. “We never lost the conviction of our own convictions.” He criticized cuts in funding for democracy and human rights groups working on Iran, including the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center and Freedom House.
The Obama administration has been criticized for failing to support the Green opposition, even refusing confidential meetings with exiled Green movement representatives.
“The administration has avoided discussion about the prospects for liberalization in a country that exports radical Islamist ideology throughout the Middle East and beyond,” write Akbar Atri and Mariam Memarsadeghi. “In regressive realpolitik fashion, it has grown increasingly reticent about the Iranian people’s struggle for human rights, apparently viewing it as irrelevant to U.S security interests.”
The former student leader and democracy activist call for a new approach based on solidarity with Iran’s emerging democratic movement:
In practical terms, regaining the trust of young Iranian democrats will require: publicly pressing the Iranian regime to respect human rights; integrating discussion of the regime’s treatment of its opposition in all formal negotiations; reviving U.S. government funding to support the Internet, free media, people-to-people exchanges, and training on civic engagement; and leveraging the popular Voice of America and Radio Farda broadcasts to directly express American solidarity with the Iranian people.
Cuts in funding for human rights and democracy in Iran should be reinstated, Kirk said, while overall funds for Iran democracy promotion should be increased.
Dismissing the arguments of “regime sympathizers like the National Iranian American Council,” which some observers feel has a disproprtionate influence in Washington, he insisted that the administration should openly meet with Iranian dissidents and members of the Green movement.
Tehran’s hardening stance can be partly explained by high oil prices, some analysts suggest, noting the “extraordinary correlation between the regime’s taste for antagonism and the level of oil futures”.
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