With this week’s protests confirming the resilience of opposition to Iran’s Islamic Republic, the regime will inevitably react with its familiar narrative that the green movement is a tool of the hostile West and, more specifically the Great Satan itself.
While this narrative has lost much of its appeal inside Iran, it appears to have seduced U.S. policy-makers, writes Abbas Milani, evident in the administration’s “reluctance to voice solidarity with the green movement or to loudly protest regime abuses, for fear that any criticism from the United States will be perceived as the latest installment in this history.”
The U.S. pushed the Shah to democratize, says Milani, director of Stanford’s Iran Democracy Project: “Both the CIA and the State Department, which clearly preferred the Shah to any alternative, openly worried that the country would succumb to revolution absent substantial steps toward democracy.”
But the truth is that U.S.-Iranian relations, including the politics of the 1953 coup against nationalist premier Mohammed Mossadegh, are more complicated than the narrative suggests. Indeed, it was “the clerical establishment’s animosity towards Mossadegh that laid the groundwork for his ouster.”
When the Shah did initiate the “White Revolution” reforms, including women’s suffrage, land reform, and a modernized bureaucracy, they were opposed by Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerical allies.
The impetus for reform fell victim to the Nixon realism currently in vogue in Washington when President Richard Nixon “ostentatiously stopped pressuring the Shah to move toward democracy.” The Shah’s subsequent 1975 fiat – that Iran would become “a one-party state, replete with pseudo-fascist trappings” – provoked the turmoil that led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Rather than validating the administration’s acceptance of Tehran’s narrative, the real history of US-Iranian relations provides an “object lesson of the cost incurred when it fails to stand on the side of democracy,” Milani suggests:
Negotiations with the clerics that ignore human rights and democracy are indeed a form of appeasement. When the Obama administration speaks to the mullahs about nuclear weapons, it must bring these concerns to the fore–just as the Reagan administration did in its later dealings with the Soviets. It can use these meetings to send a profoundly inspiring message of support to Iranian democrats.
Milani’s concerns echo those of another leading Iranian analyst who fears that engaging Tehran would legitimize “a regime confronting a very deep crisis of legitimacy”. Prioritizing nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic while neglecting the growing opposition threatens to “alienate a democratically-inclined and growing opposition movement, which expects moral support from all democratic nations,” argues Hossein Bashiriyeh, a former fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
Recent Comments