Call Me
Obama, Please Stand Up!
For about a week now, we have seen real (and sometimes scary) demonstrations in Iran over the recently concluded elections. I am sure that most people have been following the coverage wherever they are, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to ascertain the real nature of things on the ground with the massive government-sanctioned crackdown on international reportage. Nevertheless in countless twitter streams and other outlets, Persians are voicing their sore displeasure with what has been perceived as a massively rigged election in favor of the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
I am not going to bore you with some lengthy analysis. Nevertheless, since I am blogging from the US, it needs to be pointed out that many people are altogether ignorant of America's ill-advised positions on Iran and how it has helped to foster years of enmity and distrust.
To refresh minds, I wish to start by reminding some disinterested sections of the American public not to forget the not-too-recent past when the US effectively carried out a coup of sorts ousting a democratically elected government in Iran to install an American puppet (the Shah). A few years later, Iranians reacted to this breach of their sovereignty by means of a revolution—one which ushered in an Islamic theocracy governed by Islamic Jurists. Since then, the US has sponsored different means of destabilizing the government of Iran if only to install a government that was favorably disposed to the United States. It was the US that aided Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran. Also it was the US that supplied Saddam Hussein with the sort of deadly weapons he used against Iran in that war. The above would indicate that if Iranians have a reflexive distrust of US policies, there are abundant historically verifiable precedents upon which to anchor this apprehensiveness.
But it has been 30 YEARS since that revolution, and in that space of time, a new and more educated generation has replaced the generation that rebelled against an oppressive Shah. In the intervening years since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has witnessed waves of progressive-mindedness that has made the Islamic clerics of Iran frankly uncomfortable. You can chuck it to the effects of globalization and how it is helping to reshape popular opinions or to encourage the human spirit to rebel against authoritarianism in whatever guise it might assume. Many Americans are used to thinking of Iran as a monolithic country inhabited by fanatical extremists of the religious kind who despite their internal administrative shortcomings are only too eager to unite behind some zealot's rage and finger-pointing of the USA.
This is clearly not the case as many people are beginning to find out. I'll suggest that this view in the US is helped by the media which have fallen into the convenient attitude of simply replaying the actions and stances of Iran's hard-line government on tough questions like the nuclear issue. But let's not beat up on the media as usual. They deserve a break sometimes, don't they?
Looking at Iran, one can see that Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the reformists of Iran are beginning to take a stand against the authoritarian dictates of the ruling elite. It used to be that the clerics and other lower state-level/cabinet-level actors were able to effectively cripple and paralyze any opposition or challenge to their rule. The youth, the educated, the business-oriented and the reform-minded Iranians, as one can see from the massive revolt and challenge of Ahmadinejad's election are clearly voicing a distance from the status quo. They are a force that cannot be ignored or wished away and so, one must realize that brute force and state repression is not going to bring any lasting peace for the current ruling elite.
Therefore the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's wholesale support and backing of Ahmadinejad despite widespread claims of rigging and his rhetoric that implied state-sanctioned terror against peaceful demonstrations and clamor for change is exactly the wrong policy. I am not saying that another revolution has happened, but if the Supreme Leader is perceived as an enemy of the Iranian people, no amount of force will stop what is now clearly a popular and steadfast uprising against the rule of Iran's Mullahs and their accomplices in government.
What roles then does the US have to play in all of this? The Obama administration has kept mum over the proceedings. But is the Obama administration expected or required to make a comment about the election?
This is the main point of this write-up. Many people are of the opinion that Obama should maintain a studied silence because they've inferred that any expression of solidarity by his administration for the reformists would be seized upon by the ruling hardliners in Tehran to recast the upheavals as another conscious American effort to derail the peaceful exercise of Iranian sovereignty. Some have also surmised that since the Supreme Leader who wields enormous power seems to favor the incumbent, the demonstrations will ultimately yield no kind of results that would please the US and much of Western Europe. Such outspokenness, they reason, would have an incendiary effect on already combustible Persiano-American relations.
However, I see it differently. America's interests are not served by her leaders being timid, ambivalent or detached on issues concerning freedom, human rights or even minority rights. Now, if it is not clear to anyone already, Ahmadinejad, with the blessings of the Ayatollah, is not going to ever compromise on the nuclear issue. They are much closer to their goals now than ever and they are not prepared to cede any ground. The Obama administration has moreover concurred that Iran has a legitimate right to nuclear power even if it adds a caveat that might suggest such rights fall slightly short of the weaponization of nuclear material. The important point here is that if this administration has already granted that Iran does indeed have a right to domestic nuclear power, there is not much the Obama administration can gain additionally whether they denounce the intransigence of the government in Tehran or not; nothing much would change whether they court the pleasure of Iran's current government or not.
Indeed, at no other point in time, after that misadventure in Iraq, has there been such urgency for the US to reaffirm its commitment to democracy, freedom and human rights. It is the reason why the millions of Iranians expressing their dissatisfaction with the status quo have to be made to understand that this administration supports their rights to see an Iran that is not designed by intransigent Mullahs to be an enemy to many countries; or their desire to see the end of any semblance of dictatorship.
Unlike some pundits, I have not asked for any American military force to be sent into Iran or any fantastically idiotic imaginations of some elements of the extreme right wing to take center stage. I have merely called that Obama should reassert America's commitment to freedoms everywhere. I have merely asked for Obama to engage from a position of strength. Speaking up for freedom-loving people in the turbulent Middle East—especially when the sort of change we want in that region is secured by the force of populist uprising and not by the barrel of a gun—is a must. The credible and growing opposition to the hardliners in Tehran must be emboldened. This is the sort of unilateral military non-interventionism but unapologetic and uncompromising level-headed solidarity with international populist uprisings against dictatorship, despotism and misrule that the USA must learn to practice. Thus, Obama needs to speak now or risk going down a path where he is perceived to be especially weak in foreign relations. For if he cannot speak and act boldly and fearlessly when the US sits on a moral high ground, I am not too convinced he'll be able to do so on matters in which global consensus is tilted heavily against America.
Welcome back! Bloggerville missed you. Really good to read from you.