Full of caveats, and a long shot, but still the most hopeful and plausible scenario I've seen in decades (which admittedly isn't saying much)...
-- Ernie P. Iran Revolution's End Will Be Heard Around World - WSJ.com http://bit.ly/aZAUxB Anti-government demonstrators showed up as scheduled on Iran's streets Thursday, commemorating in their own defiant way the 31st anniversary of the nation's Islamic revolution. Government forces, meanwhile, worked overtime, and apparently with some success, to clamp down on the protesters. Important as the day's efforts by the dissidents may be, though, their significance transcends one day, or one anniversary. It is simply this: The Iranian revolution in 1979 was the biggest event of the last generation in the Middle East, spawning wars and radicalization that have reshaped the region and, to some extent, the world. If we're now watching the slow unwinding of that revolution, the consequences will be equally momentous. To be sure, this is a long-term question, not a short-term one. Iran's Islamic government in its current form is well-entrenched, and the Revolutionary Guards that sustain it are by far the country's most powerful force. The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shown that it possesses the most important attribute of any imperiled regime, which is the willingness to use brute force to quell rebellion. So it may take years rather than months to know the end result of today's grass-roots opposition to the Ahmadinejad government, and there is a distinct limit to what the U.S., or any outside force, can do to affect the course of opposition within Iran. Yet slowly, things appear to be changing. For one thing, the world increasingly views Iran's mistreatment of its own dissidents as a problem on a par with its nuclear program. One small sign of this came Thursday in the U.S. Senate, where a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a bill that would compel the Obama administration to target economic sanctions on Iran at officials who abuse their citizens' human rights, not just at those involved in the country's nuclear program. "The scheme of the bill is straightforward: targeted sanctions against human-rights abusers in Iran," said one Senate aide involved in drafting the legislation. Without doubt, the stakes are enormous. The best way to grasp the consequences of a potential unwinding of the Islamic revolution in Iran is to consider how fundamentally that revolution altered the course of history in the first place. The 1979 revolution was the event that, more than any other, inspired a rise of Islamic fundamentalist sentiment across the Middle East and the larger Islamic world. That rise has shaken governments across the region, prompting them to alternately accommodate fundamentalists, giving them new power, or to suppress them, generating a backlash of sympathy among the populace. Most notably, the government of Saudi Arabia, in response to both the forces unleashed in Iran in 1979 and to an uprising by Islamic radicals at the Grand Mosque in Mecca that same year, granted new power, money and freedom to the kingdom's conservative clerical establishment. That allowed the most conservative elements of the Saudi theocracy to better spread their fundamentalist philosophy not just within the country, but to places such as Pakistan and Yemen as well, sowing the seeds for troubles that continue to erupt. The rise of Islamic power in Iran also led both the U.S. and rich Arab states to bulk up Saddam Hussein in next-door Iraq as a bulwark against the spread of Iranian-style revolution. This empowering of Iraq led to the massively destructive and expensive eight-year Iran-Iraq war—and also to the cultivation of a monster in Saddam Hussein that took two more wars to eliminate. Further abroad, the Iranian revolution led directly to the creation of the Hezbollah armed Islamic movement in Lebanon, which has become a military threat to Israel more real than that posed by any surrounding Arab state. Iran's revolutionary government also has provided at least inspiration, and some funding, over the years to Hamas, which has undermined the secular Palestinian movement in the Gaza Strip and threatened it in the West Bank. More broadly, it's not a stretch to say that the rise of Iranian-inspired fundamentalist sentiment in the region led to the growth of the al Qaeda extremist movement. Direct relations between Iran and al Qaeda have ranged from distant to hostile over the years, because the former is a Shiite Muslim state and the latter a Sunni Muslim-dominated Islamic movement. Still, the U.S. government's official commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks reported at least some minor Iranian assistance to various players in the plot. The point is this: Imagine a world in which an unwinding of Iran's regime produced an unwinding of all those ripple effects. Of course, even the leaders of the Iranian opposition don't want to actually undo the Islamic revolution, but rather to reform and democratize it, raising questions about how much would really change if they succeed. Yet the question for U.S. policy makers increasingly will be whether it is realistic or mere wishful thinking to suppose Iran's opposition can persist and grow. Put another way, what matters most right now isn't precisely how many demonstrators turned out in the streets of Tehran on Thursday, but whether the tide of history has turned against the Islamic government of Iran, at least in the form it has taken for the past 31 years. —Write to Gerald F. Seib at [email protected] in The Wall Street Journal, page A2 Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit _______________________________________________ Centroids mailing list: [email protected] http://radicalcentrism.com/mailman/listinfo/centroids_radicalcentrism.com Archives at http://radicalcentrism.org/pipermail/centroids_radicalcentrism.com/
