I think it’s important to mention the sudden surge of support from more traditional Iranians shocked and appalled at the treatment of the Montazeri’s time of mourning by the government but more importantly by the fact that it killed people on Ashura. As Ashura is one of the central Shi’ite Holy Days andit is specifically about villains killing a man who didn’t deserve to be killed. It has some resonance.
Previously, part of the problem was that it was kind of progressive university student youth against the more traditional backdrop of the nation, and as such they simply couldn’t get the popular support above a certain threshold. If the Green Revolution starts to get popular sympathy amongst the more traditional conservative elements, that’s very significant. Particularly if you keep in mind that there is a huge age gap in Iran. When the Revolutionary age group starts to die off, the Government’s ranks as well as the ranks of the Revolutionary Guard and other institutions will trend further and further into the generation that is now in their 30s or younger.
Should we want any upheaval in Iran? One of the lessons we should have learned from Iraq is that, sometimes, brutal dictatorship is better for a country than any plausible alternative. Iran is just as volatile as Iraq, and five times as big. It is divided into many different ethnicities/nationalities other than the Persian majority – see this map. Also between Islamists and secularizers, between Shi’ites and Sunnis, and, like everywhere else, between social classes. Even the ruling elite is increasingly divided between the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Guardian Council. If I were Iranian – even if I were an oppressed victim of the Islamic Republic – revolution is not something I would wish on my country. And as an American, I can’t see how a revolution in Iran could happen without sending oil prices to the skies. Worse, it might turn into a general regional war. Balochis in both eastern Iran and western Pakistan would revolt against their respective governments to get their own independent Balochistan. Kurds in northern Iraq and northwestern Iran would do the same. Likewise Arabs in southwestern Iran, maybe even Azeris in northern Iran. It would be like post-Tito Yugoslavia on an even vaster scale. Even a nuclear-armed Iran under its present government is less dangerous to regional stability than an Iran riven by civil war.
I don’t know how much weight to give this considering the source, but, according to this Free Republic thread, something call the “National Iranian Armed Resistance Forces” has just declared its existence, and its opposition to the government.
Iran has been volatile before, and aforementioned by you in previous threads, a democratic state in 1953 before it was overthrown, why should now be any different?
Plus it’s not our decision to make, it’s been historys point that whenever a state or an empire want to break up, it’s pretty hard for anyone to prevent that. If they want the Iranian theocracy broken up, so be it, who says that they have to have a tyrannical government forever promoting fake stability just so the country doesn’t break up? Why should they allow that to continue?
Because now the whole region is more volatile. No imperial powers in the neighborhood keeping things stable – except for the U.S., and we’re not very good at it. Various nationalisms have had time to grow. Perhaps Mossadegh’s democratic regime could have channelled them into a peaceful accommodation, but I’m afraid it’s too late now. When all those ethnic and religious hatreds are kept seething under the lid of an authoritarian regime, and that lid is suddenly removed, the pot boils over.
There is no such thing as “history,” in the deterministic sense you are using the term. That’s the mistake Marxists have always made.
Because it is preferable to any plausible alternative, as the experiences of Yugoslavia and Iraq horrifically demonstrate.
That freeper thread was nauseating… lots of folks saying things like “Islamic Usurpers everywhere (White House?) pay attention!”
Christ those guys are insane.
ANYWAYS…
What is going on there now? The Freep thread seemed like the place is halfway to civil war. Has any other news agency posted about the “National Iranian Armed Resistance Forces” or their manifesto?
Iran might not be a candidate for a dictatorship. Many of the people are westernized. They follow our music , clothes and culture closely. They are not happy with the oppression. That is why an overthrow just might be beneficial for the west.
In addition, ever since the fall of the Shah, there are lots and lots of Iranians around the world who will gladly support and finance anything that might help bring down the current leaders. The Shah was far from perfect, but many Iranians still consider those the “good old days” when Iran thrived on tourism and was considered a friend of Europe and the US. My guess is that in Beverly Hills alone you could probably scrape up several million dollars in a few hours to help in anything that would bring about the end of the current government in Iran.
Ok, so why didn’t that happen in 1979? Also, you seem to ignore the fact that Iranian Kurds set up their own state after the Soviets withdrew in 1949.
It’s been my view that regardless of how many times an authoritarian empire or regime is put in place, it will eventually dismember as it always never has the ability to overcome simmering ethnic tensions, but that’s not a bad thing, because usually, the regime which has been overthrown deserved to die anyway.
Who’s this person who decides which ethnicities get to have self determination, and who doesn’t? Those states imploded because they had tensions which were there even with an authoritarian government in place, postponing the ineviatable is not a good strategy, more a framework of establishing themselves as viable states afterwards, a better one.
I think the only people who believe that are the former plutocratic elites that were part of the Shah’s support structure. Many ended up in the U.S., a very few with wealth intact and there is still an apparent undercurrent of royalism in that group. Unfortunately for them these were the people my old Islamic history professor, an Iranian from a middle-class Tehran background, referred to as “mental masturbators” ;). They’re fairly deluded.
Support in Iran proper for such a regime appears pretty minimal. The educated professional classes in Iran ( from which many of the Iranian leftists that played such a large role in his overthrow were drawn ) despised the Shah with a fervor equal to that of the pious shopkeepers that backed the clerical factions and as far as I can tell, still do. Nor were the urban lumpen proletariat or the rural peasantry much more fond of him. They may all hate the clerics ( well, they don’t ALL do ), but turning back the clock to an oligarchic monarchy is unlikely to get much traction outside of the rather rarefied class of expatriate ex-oligarchs.
It seems like the basic western presumption is that there cannot be reform as long as the Theocratic regime exists. Not all Theocrats are created equal. Ayatollah Montazeri might have been quite preferrable to Ayatollah Khameini.
For some reason there is a small (but very wealthy) ex-pat Iranian community right here in Salt Lake as well; I know that many of these families would support any coup that could get rid of the current regime, which they loathe.
