“If the U.S. thought relations between the United States and Iran were strained after the Mossadeq coup, just wait until Washington betrays the Green movement.”
Those cautionary words from an Iranian activist were heard on Capitol Hill yesterday at a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing addressing the issue of how the United States can best support Iran’s Green movement for political reform.
They were cited by J. Scott Carpenter of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy to highlight the case for a “shift in the gears” of the Obama administration’s approach. He called for more assertive public diplomacy, including revamped broadcasting efforts; fresh approaches to democracy assistance and programming; and targeted, punitive sanctions.
Recent cuts in funding for Iranian democracy and human rights groups “send powerfully negative messages to those our rhetoric of solidarity is meant to reassure,” he said.
“The administration should publicly relaunch a revitalized Iran Democracy Fund and/or bolster the National Endowment for Democracy’s ability to support democrats inside Iran and elsewhere,” he said.
Furthermore, the White House “should strongly consider having the president give a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy echoing President Reagan’s original speech in Westminster in 1982, but this time focused on Iran and the democratic aspirations of its people.”
The Green movement “aims to rely on itself without asking for foreign help” and its activists “do not expect any direct help from the United States or any other foreign power,” said Mehdi Khalaji, his Washington Institute colleague.
But external actors can play a role, whether it is internet companies helping Green activists bypass the regime’s internet censors or governments and consumers pressuring those Western firms supplying the regime with technology of surveillance and suppression.
The international community has prioritized Iran’s nuclear program over support for the reform movement but, notes Khalaji, “the threat to regional peace and Iranian democracy are the same: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
“The two parallel tracks — the international community’s effort for peace and the Iranian people’s democratic movement — naturally reinforce each other, because they fight with the same enemy,” he said.
Contrary to suggestions that key Green movement leaders were ready to cut a deal with the regime, two major figures have called for supporters to rally around next week’s February 11 mobilization marking the anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Even if the most prominent leaders were to compromise and reach an accommodation with the regime, “it would certainly be a blow to the movement—but it would hardly be its death knell,” writes Abbas Milani.
Contrary to misleading reports that he was willing to compromise with the regime, Mehdi Karroubi demanded the abolition of the Council of Guardian’s power to oversee elections and veto candidates, a direct challenge to Council’s hard-line head, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who recently likened the Green opposition to defiant “Jews” who should be executed.
A staunch supporter of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Jannati reflects the entrenched power of the ultra-conservative “Third Force” or Abadgaran coalition that is striving to revive the Islamic Revolution’s ideological purpose.
Its ascendancy coincides with what Hossein Bashiriyeh, Iran’s leading political sociologist, calls the militarization of the theocracy, marked by the growing political salience of the IRGC and paramilitary Basij.
The ideological aims of the revolution – to build an Islamic state – were frustrated by factional divisions, the Iran-Iraq war, postwar reconstruction imperatives and social trends which precipitated the emergence of Khatami reformism.
But efforts to restore the Islamic Revolution’s élan and drive are likely to be abortive, writes Bashiriyeh, a former Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. Thirty years after the revolution, the “increasing secularization of society under a theocratic regime” constitutes “the most unfavorable grounds for the implementation of the revolutionary project.”
The nascent Green Revolution has several profound consequences, he has argued, 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.
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