What a difference a few days can make. Last week, ahead of Iran’s
presidential elections, I
wrote here that the outcome would matter little in the
grand scheme of Iranian politics. I may have spoken too soon.
Since Friday, that country has descended into political turmoil
of a type not seen since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The
cause is a rigged election that has catalyzed widespread outrage
among ordinary Iranians and threatened the legitimacy of the
ruling regime in Tehran.
Ordinarily, clerical interference would be par for the course —
a function of the pervasive influence of Iran’s powerful
religious institutions. This time, however, things appear to be
different. The wildly popular campaign of populist challenger Mir
Hossein Mousavi, with its promises of economic revitalization and
greater enfranchisement for Iranian women, had captured the
imagination of ordinary Iranians. So when, mere hours after the
polls closed, Iran’s Interior Ministry certified incumbent
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the overwhelming victor, defying both
unofficial polling and conventional wisdom, Iranians took to the
streets in protest.
They have remained there ever since, despite mounting pressure
from the Iranian government. Over the past three days, the
Iranian regime has authorized a massive mobilization of security
forces. It has also instituted a virtual electronic embargo,
revoking the work permits of foreign journalists, blocking
broadcasts by the BBC’s popular Persian service, limiting
Internet access and stopping SMS text messaging. There are even
reports that it has enlisted foreigners to help control restive
crowds in a sure sign that Iran’s ayatollahs are nervous about
the mounting social discontent on the Iranian “street.”
They should be. By any yardstick, Iran is a country in the grip
of massive socio-economic malaise. Inflation now stands at nearly
30 percent. Unemployment is rampant, officially pegged at over 10
percent but unofficially estimated to be as much as
two-and-a-half times that figure. Nearly a quarter of the Iranian
population now lives under the poverty line, and both
prostitution and drug addiction are rampant. Add to these
Ahmadinejad’s gross mismanagement of the national economy over
the past four years, and it is easy to see why Iran’s leaders
fear that outrage over a stolen election could spiral into
something more.
How events in Iran will play out in coming days is anybody’s
guess. Iran’s ayatollahs may well blink in the face of
unprecedented public opposition. Indeed, Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei has publicly expressed his willingness to reexamine the
election results, while parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani has
created a commission to investigate possible excesses by regime
security organs. Just as easily, however, Iran’s theocracy could
return to its thuggish roots, using its feared clerical army, the
Pasdaran, and its ruthless domestic militia (known as
the basij) to crush the protests violently and
decisively. Nor is a more fundamental transformation out of the
question, if Iran’s various opposition forces manage to coalesce
into a coherent, sustained challenge to the country’s clerical
elite.
So far, the silence from the Obama administration has been
deafening. The White House has adopted a “wait and see” approach
to the current turmoil, refraining from weighing in decisively on
the political turmoil engulfing Tehran. In doing so,
Administration “realists” hope to avoid having to make hard
choices about who, exactly, the United States supports.
But Washington does have a dog in this fight. For years, the
United States has been preoccupied by the growing threat of an
Iranian “bomb,” with little attention paid to the domestic
opposition within Iran. Those two things, however, are intimately
related. The threat posed by Iran’s atomic program has little to
do with nuclear technology, and everything to do with the nature
of the regime that will ultimately wield it. The United States
therefore has a vested interest in the emergence of a more
pluralistic, moderate Iran — one that can be a mature nuclear
custodian, and which won’t see itself as irreconcilably in
conflict with the West.
To that end, President Obama can and should use his tremendous
political capital to put Iran’s regime on notice that its place
in the international community hinges on how it treats its
political opposition during the current crisis. And, in the
longer term, his administration would do well to recognize that
its safest bet lies in engagement with the Iranian people, rather
than their repressive, unrepresentative government.
