Need for ‘new balance’ in Iran policy

Yesterday’s protests confirm that Iran’s pro-democracy “Green movement” has not been crushed, but the West risks making a major strategic error by engaging the regime on the nuclear issue while neglecting the forces for change, a leading analyst warns.  

Its latest mobilization shows that the opposition is as strong as ever, writes Mehdi Khalaji. Despite widespread arrests, show trials, torture and rape, the Green movement has demonstrated its resilience and, despite internal divisions, appears “on the verge of having a new, unified opposition party.”

The movement is outgrowing the ostensible leadership of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mohammad Khatami, and Mehdi Karroubi, former officials who want to reform rather than transcend the Islamic Republic. The protesters, “motivated by the notion of human rights and citizenship, both absent in Iran’s Constitution” aspire to “bring down the very system of which their leaders are a part.”

Recent events confirm that Iran is a deeply fractured state, a regional analyst suggests, but the purported Green leadership is unprepared to form an official opposition to the Islamic Republic and its positions on the nuclear issue prove that “to be anti-Khamenei is not necessarily to be pro-West or anti-revolution.”

But the Green movement’s “true leaders”, Khalaji writes, “are students, women, human rights activists, and political activists who have little desire to work in a theocratic regime or in a government within the framework of the existing Constitution”. Their movement is already “much broader than the reform movement of the 1990s” and they share a vital conviction: “Democracy in Iran will emerge only through a rupture with the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideals and Islamic ideology — concepts to which the accidental leaders of the green movement are still loyal.”

The Obama administration has been criticized for downgrading democracy promotion and human rights in an effort to placate the regime in Tehran.  Now, a former State Department Iran adviser believes, a policy change is due.

The U.S. “must balance its proliferation concerns with its moral responsibilities”, writes Ray Takeyh, hitherto a forceful advocate of engagement:

The persistent mistake that the West has made is to place the nuclear issue above all other concerns. The Iran problem is not limited to illicit nuclear activities, and it is somewhat incomprehensible that the United States and other nations can contemplate nuclear transactions with a regime that maintains links to a range of terrorist organizations and engages in brutal domestic repression.

Takeyh suggests that regime hardliners are planning to violently purge the opposition.

Similarly, Congressman Mark Kirk, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, said yesterday that the regime has developed the capacity to organize a Kristallnacht against regime opponents. He fears “genocide being prepared” against the country’s Baha’i minority whose identities and addresses have been compiled on a sophisticated government database.

Iran is already finding it relatively easy to skirt sanctions, writes Avi Jorisch of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. 

The West risks making “a strategic blunder of tragic proportions”, writes Emanuele Ottolenghi by neglecting the democratic forces within Iran:

If internal change can create a new, benign and regionally responsible Iran, how can the West ensure that Tehran’s “velvet revolution” clock ticks faster than its nuclear clock? While the West is continuing to engage the regime to solve the nuclear standoff, it should also talk over the ayatollahs’ heads and address the population.

When engagement fails, he argues, “we’ll discover that the Iranian people remain our best ally and our only hope to emerge from this crisis.”