Strategic Paradigms by Ehsan Ahrari

“Where is my vote?”  That was the question on signs held by hundreds of irate Iranian voters.  The world media zoomed in on those signs.  They will be long remembered in the same way as the lone courageous protestor who blocked a rolling tank during the Tiananmen Square protest in June 2003.  After weeks of protests and repression of protestors in Iran, the prospects for a U.S.-Iran dialogue are as remote as the potential nullification of Ahmadinejad’s reelection.

Iran’s presidential election 12 June 2009 will be remembered for the gross injustices done to its people by the Ayatollahs.  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner within less than two days, creating widespread charges of election fraud.  The Ayatollahs know that more than sixty percent of their voters are under the age of thirty and crave political change.  They were afraid of Mir Husain Moussavi, who was not even a long-standing reformer.  With him in the presidency, the Iranian revolution could have used the fervor and zeal for change that made the revolution of 1979 a success.  That spirit is in desperate need for resurgence. 

The sad part of this episode is that by depriving Moussavi of the presidency and by ensuring the rule of the extremist candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian revolution is signaling to its own people that it also is undergoing the same state of rottenness as the Shah’s regime that it replaced.

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, did blink by agreeing to allow some sort of a review of Moussavi’s charge that the election was stolen from him.  However, the same Supreme Leader was quick to label Ahmadinejad’s alleged “victory” as a “sacred” one.  But later, he endorsed the election and raised the potential of a “conspiracy” by foreign powers behind the widespread political turbulence in Iran.  Even the 12-member Council of Guardians, after admitting quite a few irregularities, refused to nullify the result of the election.  That was to be expected. 

There is no way to know how many foreign powers are involved in financing the Iranian turbulence.  Among the global skeptics, the names of U.S. and Israel are frequently mentioned.  The example of the 1953 coup sponsored by the CIA and British intelligence is seared into the collective memory of Iran as a nation.  Then, the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, was depicted by the West as a “crying fool” and an “irrational” person.  And the Western-sponsored chaos in the streets of Iran became the chief tool for regime change.  Today, Iran’s Ayatollahs are depicted along a similar rhetoric of irrationality but with considerable sophistication, and in the name of liberty and freedom.  It seems that the Western way of conjuring up the image of a “villain” when it comes to the world of Islam has remained well intact.

In response to such fears, the Iranian regime is equally brutal.  The use of the Basij and then the Revolutionary Guards to brutalize the Iranian dissidents into submission pushes the Islamic Republic toward being labeled as another “republic of fear.”  The kind of major change that Mousavi’s presidency promised to bring about in Iran would have created a new era of a rapprochement toward the United States.  The emergence of that era still appeared problematic even under Mousavi.  Now there is no hope that it will materialize anytime soon.

One wonders why the Islamic Republic has not learned any lesson from the regime of Mohammad Reza about not suppressing dissidents.  It operates as if no institutional memory even exists of what happens to regimes that turn against its own people.  The regime may not be aware of it, but it is facing the power of the same spirit that defied and successfully ousted Mohammad Reza.  That spirit is being heard in the ululating cries from rooftops:  “Allah-u-Akbar” (God is Great).

The United States knows the meaning of those cries.  Even the young protestors want an Islamic Republic, but a transparent and inclusive one, and a republic that will not waste its time in meaningless diatribe regarding the holocaust.