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June 25, 2009
It is increasingly obvious that the Islamic regime in Iran is transforming into a dictatorship as it increasingly turns to repression to deal with civil disobedience, and clamps down on the opposition. The attempted silencing of dissent is now Iran’s everyday currency. As Juan Cole states:
By stealing the election for Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has effectively made a coup on behalf of the clerical sphere in alliance with lay hard liners, which threatens to virtually abolish the sphere of popular sovereignty. That is what Mousavi and Karroubi and their followers are objecting to so vehemently. The reformers are saying that the regime has just moved toward really being a totalitarian state and is now removing any space for dissent.
Though this is the largest popular uprising that country has seen since 1979, it does not herald the imminent collapse of the current theocratic regime.
Martin Rowson
The neocons are arguing that the protesting Iranians we see on our TV screens and computer monitors have gone far beyond demonstrating about a stolen election. They want to dump the current regime, turn their backs on radical Islam and install a Bush-era Middle East secular democracy. Bush redeemed. 'Something Must be Done' they say.
These calls for a more proactive U.S. stance by the Right ignore that the memories of the U.S. role (CIA) in the Mossadegh coup--ie helped the UK to overthrow the elected government of Iran in 1953 over oil nationalization----fresh in the national consciousness of almost all Iranians still. The neocon account implies that Obama should proclaim that Moussavi was America’s candidate, and that the US is firmly pitching its tent alongside his.
What would that do for the protesters on the ground, and the larger reform movement in Iran? In nationalist Iran today, if someone is successfully tagged as an agent of foreign interests, it is the political kiss of death.Moreover, as Juan Cole points out:
Obama will likely be as helpless before a crackdown by the Iranian regime as Eisenhower was re: Hungary in 1956, Johnson was re: Prague in 1968, and Bush senior was re: Tiananmen Square in 1989.George W. Bush, it should be remembered, did nothing about Tehran's crackdown on student protesters in 2003 or about the crackdown on reformist candidates, which excluded them from running in the 2004 Iranian parliamentary elections, or about the probably fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad in 2005.
What is unclear is whether the clerical regime of Ayatollah Khamenei as a totalitarian state can generate change from within. The rhetoric at this stage is that the "enemies" of the Islamic republic are threatening its existence; that "resistance" to these is essential; and that President Ahmadinejad and his allies represent the strongest force to defend the regime.
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Francis Fukuyama, one of the original neocon icons, disowned neocon foreign policy partly because of the stupid assumptions it made about what other people think/want. Luckily for Iran and the US, the neocons are now irrelevant.