Posted on 06/20/2003 7:45:52 PM PDT by freedom44
Continued civil disorder and mismanagement in Iraq have disappointed those who hoped the country would quickly become a beacon of secular democracy in the Middle East. Battered by 20 years of war, despotism and sanctions, Iraq is a shell of a nation that will have difficulty holding itself together in the coming months.
The key to a bright future for the Middle East lies not with Iraq but with its larger and more vibrant neighbour to the east. Iranians elect most of their leaders in free and fair elections for the president, parliament and thousands of local village councils. Iran is the only Muslim nation whose people successfully staged a popular revolution against a brutal dictator. This revolution has often been characterised as "Islamic". This is inaccurate. While Ayatollah Khomeini did become the symbol of the 1979 revolution, Iranians were united more by their opposition to the Shah than by any shared religious devotion. As often happens with popular revolutions, after the Shah's regime fell the mullahs outmanoeuvred other opposition groups to impose their authoritarian theocracy on Iranians.
It is this long experience with imposed Islamic governance that makes Iran unique in the Islamic world. After decades of corruption, mismanagement and repression by a clerical ruling elite, "mullah" is a dirty word for most Iranians. Islam has failed to live up to the ideals of the 1979 revolution and Iranians are poorer and less free today than they were under the Shah. Even respected members of the Iranian clerical establishment are openly calling for a retreat from politics and a return to the mosque.
Strip away clerical authority in Iran and what you have left is secular democracy. What is more, you have democracy based on institutions that, unlike in Iraq, are considered indigenous and established by popular mandate, instead of by an occupying power. Iran could be the paradigm for religious reformation and democratic renewal across the Muslim world.
The Iranian experience contrasts sharply with the situation in Arab countries, where political Islam has never ruled and has never been tested and de-clawed. Repressive secular regimes in countries such as Egypt and Jordan ensure that fundamentalism will remain a potent force of popular opposition. While much of the Muslim world still clings to vague promises by Islamic groups of a return to the ideal community of the Prophet in seventh-century Arabia, Iranians look at their situation and know better.
So how do we harness Iran for positive change in the region? The US administration has recently resorted to tough talk to dissuade Iran from supporting terrorism, developing nuclear weapons and meddling in Iraq. But threats alone will probably backfire, forcing moderates to close ranks with hardliners - as happened after President George W. Bush included Iran in his infamous "axis of evil" last year - or giving the mullahs the excuse to crush an emerging civil society.
A more sophisticated strategy of subtle but continued pressure on the Islamic regime, combined with a vociferous effort to encourage the overwhelming opposition to clerical rule, could work. Indeed, the Bush administration has openly applauded the recent wave of student-led protests across Iran. Some maintain that such a strategy will endanger Iranian moderates by associating them with the US, a nation Iranians have mistrusted ever since the coup in 1953, directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, that removed an elected government. But Iranian moderates have been in danger for some time as the ruling clerics have perfected the art of branding proponents of freedom as foreign stooges and rounding them up. The time to fear guilt by association has passed and the US will lose little by increasing its support for Iranian civil society as a whole. But it should do so openly, for the world to see.
If the US believes its troops fought for any worthwhile ideals in Iraq, it should pursue those ideals in Iran, albeit by peaceful means. After all, the country is poised for radical change. Seventy per cent of Iranians are under 30; they have more in common with the MTV generation than with their clerical rulers. They are among the more pro-American populations in the Muslim world and the US needs them if it is to rehabilitate its image in the region. For the sake of their future - and the emergence of pluralist civil societies in the Middle East - the US must act now.
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