America’s Silence Empowers the Mullahs
Few Americans have followed Iran and the Iranian resistance more devotedly than Michael Ledeen. In books and articles he has explained the confrontation between Iran and the United States – and the coming crisis of the mullah regime. In his important and urgent new book, Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West, he deploys a lifetime of insight and experience to illuminate one of the modern world’s most dangerous crises. Over the next days, we’ll post here some short extracts from the book – but no extract can do justice to Michael’s work. Read the whole thing, and read it as soon as you can.
Click here for part one and part two of this series.
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The Iranians do not believe they can do it on their own; they think a successful revolution needs American support, and they are waiting to see some kind of real action by the U.S. to support them against Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, the Basij, and the Revolutionary Guards Corps. They know that if we do not actively support them, they will be slaughtered. What would active support entail? Basically, the same strategy we used to support Soviet dissidents and groups like the Solidarity trade union in Poland.
• Above all, this means open political support from top American officials for the dissidents, and open calls for a change in the nature of the regime. Some American president is going to have to call for an end to Iranian Islamic fascism.
• It means accurate radio and television broadcasting into Iran about events inside Iran itself. This seems counterintuitive, but it is actually easier for Iranians to get information about events in Washington and Los Angeles (they are big Internet surfers; Farsi is the number-four language online) than about what’s going on in their own country.
• It means getting revolutionary technology to them, above all, the instruments of contemporary communication: cell phones, satellite phones, phone cards, laptops, servers, and perhaps even BlackBerrys.
• It also means demonstrating the impotence of the regime against American power by taking out the terrorist training camps just across the border from Iraq, and the assembly sites for the lethal explosives the Iranians have been providing to Taliban, Mahdi Army, and al Qaeda killers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are many arguments against this strategy: that there is no longer time for a revolution, since Iran will soon have the bomb; that you cannot expect a Muslim country to risk all on behalf of democracy; that there are no leaders inside the country; that the regime’s instruments of repression are too powerful. Finally, the skeptics add, anything we do to support the dissidents will only make their lives worse. Repression will increase if we push the mullahs against the proverbial wall, and they will lash out against their opponents.
I am not convinced by the arguments. To take them one by one:
“It’s too late.” Nobody knows how much time revolutions require before they erupt. There is no science of revolution, and we are usually very surprised when revolutions happen. Given proper support, the Iranians could move very quickly. As for the “deadline,” Iran’s nukes are hardly a deterrent to revolution. And if anything, if Iran were seen to have nuclear weapons, it would add greater urgency to the need to bring down the regime.
“The Muslims aren’t capable of revolution.” But Iran had three revolutions in the twentieth century! If there’s any country about which it can truly be said that revolutions are “normal,” it’s Iran.
Furthermore, there’s a barely concealed premise of cultural superiority in the objection, assuming that “they” can’t carry out a Western-style democratic revolution. When people say, as they often do, with a glint of ethnic or cultural superiority in their angry eyes, that Arabs or Africans or Persians or Turks just aren’t “ready” for democracy, that such people prefer tyrants, or that they have no history of democracy and are hence incapable of it, or they have no middle class, without which no stable democracy can exist, or they believe in Islam, which brooks no democracy, they need to be reminded that some of the worst tyrannies came from highly cultured Christian countries with glorious democratic and humanistic pedigrees, while Iran already had a good constitution in 1906. They also need to remember that Periclean Athens decidedly did not have a large and flourishing middle class, and that the world’s biggest Islamic country, Indonesia, is impressively democratic.
Finally, it’s silly to claim that a society without long-standing democratic traditions can’t create a democracy; if that were true there would never have been any democracies at all, since no society has been democratic forever. All were once governed by despots.
“Lack of leadership.” There are certainly dissident leaders. We don’t know them all, for the simple reason that they’d be tortured or killed if they were publicly identified. We’ve seen that happen to student leaders like Batebi or labor leaders like Osanlou or religious leaders like Boroujerdi. But the ongoing demonstrations don’t happen all by themselves; each of them has leaders. Indeed, I rather suspect that Iran may have a surfeit, rather than a shortage, of talented leaders.
“The instruments of repression are too powerful.” How do you think Iran’s security services compare to the KGB? Or the Stasi? Yet revolution succeeded right under their noses.
“Anything done to support the dissidents will only make things worse.” We heard this a lot during the Cold War, and it was proven false. After the fall of Communism, the dissidents told us they had drawn great strength from our support, and that their oppressors had constantly tried to convince them that America wasn’t really supporting them at all.
Dissidents know what they’re getting into, and for us to refrain from supporting them is to betray them. They are fighting for our common values against an evil that threatens us all. If America stands for anything, it’s the struggle against tyranny. This is not just an academic or moral question; tyrants hate America, and will invariably try to kill or dominate us. We need to shed all illusions about the nature of such regimes, above all the nonsense that they are, after all, “just like us,” and the false prophecy that whatever differences we have can be resolved by patient negotiation, or cultural exchange, or simple deterrence. We should have learned by now that they are implacable enemies of all free societies, and that the very nature of those tyrannical regimes compels them to attack us as best they can.
We’re morally and strategically obliged to support those fighting for freedom within tyrannical societies. It’s morally right and strategically sound.
To be sure, revolutions do fail. There are no guarantees. But we live in an age of democratic revolution, and tyrants have been falling with remarkable regularity all over the world for more than thirty years. Revolutions have succeeded in some very unlikely places, from Russia to Ukraine and Georgia, from the Philippines to Lebanon and South Africa. Why not Iran?
Support for revolution is by far the best policy option, and it would be the right thing to do, even if Iran were not the world’s leading terrorist sponsor, and were not hell-bent on acquiring an atomic bomb which they say very loudly they intend to use against their satanic enemies.
If we do not bring down the Iranian regime, we will inevitably face the terrible choice so well described by French president Nicolas Sarkozy: bomb Iran, or Iran with the bomb. If we do arrive at that Hobson’s choice, it will be a fitting testament to the great failure of the West to deal with this generation’s most dangerous and most evil enemies. It will truly be Hell to pay.
Courtesy of St. Martin's Press