Saturday, 20. June 2009, 07:38:36
The EconomistTHE sight of a million-odd demonstrators on the streets of Tehran, the like of which has not been seen since the revolution that unseated the shah in 1979, is bound to stir the hearts of freedom lovers the world over. That is especially true when the chief butt of popular anger, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Holocaust-denying bully who seems bent on getting his hands on a nuclear weapon. Yet outsiders tempted to shout their support for the protesters should tread carefully for fear of achieving the opposite of what they intend.
After holding the country in a tight grip for 30 years, Iran’s clerical rulers are in disarray. The presidential candidate who was supposed to have come second in last week’s ballot, Mir Hosein Mousavi, seems likely, judging by all the chicanery, to have won (see article). The establishment is divided, with some stalwarts of the revolution siding with the demonstrators. Even the supreme leader, too spiritual to submit himself to popular ballot for the near-omnipotent post he has held for the past two decades, has become embroiled in the squalid electoral fray. He may ultimately even face the question of his, and the regime’s, survival.
No one can see into the back rooms of the clerical establishment or into the bunkers of the Revolutionary Guard. No one knows the real results of the vote. No one can predict how long the street protests will last or how ready the regime is to use force and the price it would pay in its own people’s blood. Yet something momentous has happened in a pivotal country in the most combustible part of the world. Having fatally misread its own people, Iran’s government must now decide whether to back down or to crack down.
The judgment of history
Iran is the fulcrum of an unstable region. If it behaved responsibly, the world would naturally look to it as the local power. Instead it meddles, often malevolently, with its neighbours.
That is not surprising, for it has been the victim of much meddling. The country has been buffeted between imperial rivals—Russian, Turkish, British and American—for more than a century. The West once took Iran’s oil for itself. Britain and America sabotaged its brief experiment with democracy in 1953, as Barack Obama admitted in his admirable speech to Muslims in Cairo earlier this month. A generation ago Iran was assaulted by an Arab army headed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, leaving a million dead. Persian prickliness, even paranoia, is understandable. Iran feels ringed by the forces of what it sees as its main enemy—America. The eagerness of Iran’s rulers for a nuclear capability, which they swear is only for civilian use but which most outsiders reckon would lead inexorably to a bomb, is shared by nearly all Iranians, even those on the streets, as a national birthright in a hostile world.
But an external threat cannot justify the crass debauchery of the presidential poll. Iran is not a democracy, but its system, which combines unelected religious authority with a subordinate elected civilian one, was designed to give people a chance to let off steam from time to time within carefully set electoral limits. And today there is a head of steam to vent. The young are bored and rebellious and short of work, women are oppressed, bazaaris fed up with economic bungling. Even some clerics reject Mr Ahmadinejad for his populist brand of Islam.
For this election, the limits were set very narrow. The supreme leader, abetted by largely unelected councils, allowed just four out of more than 400 candidates to face the voters in the presumption that his populist incumbent protégé would stroll to victory. Instead those disparate groups of discontented Iranians united behind the main challenger, Mr Mousavi. The ballot-rigging turned that support into a mass protest against the system itself. Given that all four official candidates were sworn to keep the largely theocratic system going, the government’s performance was stupid as well as pernicious.
Iranian demonstrators are a determined lot. Before the shah’s fall, protests went on for months. But what happens now will be decided as much by the depth of divisions within the ruling clerical establishment as by the stamina of angry crowds. The clerics are faced with a desperate dilemma. By letting air into a system that has stifled even basic freedoms, yielding to the demonstrators could undo the regime; and yet to use force risks turning Iran into any other cheap dictatorship. A regime that has long sought to claim both legitimacy and a monopoly on power may soon have to choose which of the two it most desires.
The best of all possible worlds
Watching Iranians pour onto the streets to demand change, those in the outside world who wish Iran well must hope fervently that it comes. Iranians are too sophisticated to be ruled for ever by a clutch of old men in turbans. The regime has been illiberal and authoritarian. It is often vicious in its suppression of opponents and its disregard for human rights. Iran has the highest rate of judicial executions per head in the world. Women are second-class citizens. Even so, Iran is nothing like the totalitarian, mass-murdering regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. However many votes he rigged, Mr Ahmadinejad has a big constituency behind him.
The West must tread carefully—as Mr Obama has done (see article)—in its response to Iran’s unfolding crisis. It should condemn abuses of human rights and electoral malpractice, but it should avoid taking sides. Given Iranians’ understandable hostility to outside interference, endorsing Mr Mousavi would only strengthen Mr Ahmadinejad. And whoever ends up running Iran, the West will have to talk to its leaders about its nuclear programme.
A new president and a kinder regime in Iran would be a valuable prize. It would lower the regional temperature. In Iraq, where Iran meddles, blood is still being copiously spilt, albeit far less so than a few years ago. In Palestine and Lebanon, both zones of Iranian interference, it could help tilt the protagonists towards compromise. It could even improve Afghanistan. So, as Iran splutters and seethes, the world must watch and wait—and keep its offer of goodwill on the table.
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