People Power in Iran

People Power in Iran

Anyone who has lived during the past half  century has watched many popular uprisings against authoritarian or fascist governments. Some, like the nearly miraculous collapse of East Germany and other Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe in 1989 or the ousters of Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines  and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier from Haiti in 1986, were successful and relatively peaceful. So were the more recent “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine.

Others, like the “Prague Spring” of 1968, the Tiananmen Square events in Beijing in 1989, or the Shiite intifada in Southern Iraq in 1991, were blood-soaked failures.

Whether a popular movement succeeds in peaceful transfer of power or is brutally repressed depends entirely on the nerve of the regimes leadership and the loyalty of its enforcers, the security forces or army.

In 1989, East German police and border guards stood aside and allowed jubilant crowds to rip down the hated symbol of their repression, the Berlin Wall.  In 1979 the ailing Iranian Shah lost his nerve and fled the country amid street protests and clashes. But in 1956 the Central Committee of the Soviet Union didn’t hesitate to send tanks and troops to annihilate the poorly armed Hungarian revolutionaries, and the elderly Communist rulers in Beijing didn’t flinch at sending troops from the provinces to mow down the flower of Chinese youth in Tiananmen.

Its too early yet to know what the outcome of the remarkable and dramatic events in Iran over the past week and a half will be. However, the forces of reaction in Tehran– the turbaned ayatollahs and their basiji henchmen– don’t seem like the type to flee or quail at the prospect of spilling their fellow Iranians’ blood.

One crucial difference between the Iranian protests and past popular uprisings has been the inability of the Iranian authorities to control the images and the information. Back in 1989, when I spent some time in Beijing following the Tiananmen square massacre, there were no cell phone cameras, Bluetooth connections or twittering.  The people in Iran have much, much greater access to information flowing from outside the country or being relayed from within Iran itself that did the Hungarians in 1956 or the Kurds in 1991. The Iranian regime cant hide its acts.

The horrific, close-up image of Neda Agha-Soltan shot and bleeding, the life fading from her eyes, surpasses in its power even the unforgettable picture of a Chinese citizen blocking a Peoples Army tank in Beijing in 1989.

The impulse among many politicians here in Washington is for the US to get more deeply involved, somehow, on the side of the Iranians protesting the apparently fraudulent election outcome. I think that would be a mistake. As reprehensible as the mullah’s crackdown on their own people may be, President Obama is playing this one right. He said in his press conference on Tuesday, “The United States is not going to be a foil for the Iranian government to try to blame what’s happening on the streets of Tehran on the CIA or on the White House.”

Stephen Walt, the distinguished professor of international relations at Harvard, makes a succinct argument in his Foreign Policy magazine blog. I’ll quote the final paragraph:

“In fact, we actually do know precisely how to deal with this sort of situation. As we learned during the Cold War, the proper response to thuggish authoritarian regimes is containment via deterrence, combined with hardnosed diplomacy on specific security issues and a sustained effort to win over their societies by showing them that we know how to produce a better way of life. That strategy won the Cold War without the manifold dangers of preventive war, and probably saved millions of lives in the process. The clerics and their front man may hang on for now, and they might even get a few (unusable) nuclear weapons one day. But time is on our side, and we can afford to be patient.”