Now is the “worst time” for Obama administration to pursue a policy of engagement with the Islamic Republic, says one of Iran’s most influential analysts. Engaging the regime would not only “grant legitimacy to a regime confronting a very deep crisis of legitimacy”, but also “alienate a democratically-inclined and growing opposition movement, which expects moral support from all democratic nations,” argues Hossein Bashiriyeh in a must-read analysis.
The real significance of the June 12 election aftermath lies in the fracturing of the Islamic Republic’s ruling bloc, he believes. Revolutions occur when regimes experience crises in their ideological legitimacy, administrative efficiency, elite cohesion, and coercive capacity. But the “authoritarian electoral theocracy” has not yet lost the capacity or willingness to use force and there are no apparent rifts in the armed forces.
The U.S. administration’s equivocal approach “may have contributed” to the regime’s willingness to repress the protests, says the currently exiled Bashiriyeh, a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. By contrast, in 1978, in the run up to the Islamic Revolution, the Shah of Iran “vacillated between repression and relative toleration” because of the Carter administration’s assertive human rights policy.
Events may yet take a revolutionary turn, he believes, as the opposition has the benefit of politicized mass discontent and a robust organizational network. Although it currently lacks a coherent ideology and leadership, he highlights dissident cleric Ayatollah Montazeri’s “very significant statement justifying rebellion against the theocracy and suggests that the “gradual replacement of more moderate by more radical leadership would also mean an escalation in the ideology of the movement, from questioning the election results to questioning the very legitimacy of the whole power structure.”
The nascent Green Revolution has several profound consequences, exposing the true nature of the power structure, shattering the Supreme Leader’s pretense of impartiality, and revealing the contradictions of the Islamic Constitution based on the irreconcilability of its Islamic and republican elements.
The alliance of fundamentalists or principle-ists and traditionalist conservatives that made up the ruling power bloc since 2004 has fractured. That bloc successfully marginalized or neutered the reformists, but hard-liners now appear intent on suppressing them altogether, as evidenced by the mass arrests, show trials and calls for the main reformist parties to be banned.
But the “most important impact of the current upheaval,” he argues, “is the increasing disappearance of the feeling of fear, which has been the main basis of the political order; a feeling of courage to express long pent-up grievances is the hallmark of the current developments.”
After 25 years’ teaching at the University of Tehran, Bashiriyeh was dismissed in the summer of 2007, a move attributed to the “Committee of Cultural Revolution and Purges of Universities” responding to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s demand that university students “scream” and mobilize against “liberal and secular professors”. He currently teaches at the University of Syracuse, New York.
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