In reaction to our commemoration of the Green uprising, a reader quotes Machiavelli:
How vain the faith and promises of men who are exiles from their own country … so great is their desire to return to their homes that they naturally believe many things to be true, and add a great deal of others on purpose, so with what they say they believe and what they really believe, they will fill you with such hopes that if you attempt to act on them you will incur a fruitless expense or engage in an undertaking which will involve you in ruin.
Every time I read a post you have written about Iran, or the disputed 2009 elections, somehow this Machiavelli quote finds its way into my mind. Whether it is because the Twitter threads you post are in English rather than Farsi, or due to the amount of deference you give to the opinions of the Westernized sons and daughters of the former Pahlavi officials who fled Iran with its national wealth in 1979 never to return, I do not know.
To be clear, I have no love for the Iranian regime. But I do have a love of clear-eyed, intelligent analysis.
Americans return, again and again, to sources of information that have produced arguably the most ineffective policy towards a foreign government in US history; as a State Department official said last year, "we have an almost perfect 30-year track record of being wrong about Iran."
It is remarkable how little you quote someone like John Limbert when it comes to Iran. Limbert was an English teacher in Shiraz during the Shah's reign and one of the diplomats taken hostage by Iranian students. He was the most seasoned Iran expert under Obama, but retired after a fruitless year-and-a-half serving in a subordinate role to Dennis Ross. He is one of a handful of Americans who truly understand Iran. But he is also a proponent of rapproachment with Iran, and so he goes ignored.
I know you find Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett to be vile. But they are two of a tiny handful of American officials to ever work directly with Iran, during our peak of cooperation in Afghanistan in 2002. They are also the only people in America to have put forth predictions about Iranian politics and be right, over and over again. Yet they, too, go unheeded.
The Leveretts' most recent post sums it up perfectly: "No matter how much energy Americans and others devote to it, the future of Iranian politics will not be shaped by wishful thinking." What Iran hobbyists and others never seem to appreciate is the importance of Iran's national independence. Of course the Iranian people wish to be free, or at least freer. That's an obvious given. But the fierce, nationalistic pride of a people being ruled by an indigenous, independent Iranian government for the first time since the Saffavid Empire is never taken into account. As Robin Wright said, "To understand Iranian nationalism, think of a proud, chauvinistic Texan – and then add 5,000 years". Iranians, in general, will never risk their national freedom for personal freedom.
There are people in the Iranian government who are open to relaxing restrictions on Iranian freedom and moving towards a truer form of democracy. Moussavi did not appear out of nowhere – he was Prime Minister during the Iran-Iraq War, and was allowed to campaign for President by the restrictive Guardian Council. Rafsanjani did not appear out of nowhere – he has been Iran's principal, behind-the-scenes power broker for decades. Ayatollah Khamenei wouldn't even be Supreme Leader without Rafsanjani. And Iran is not a monolithic dictatorship; Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are now bitter political rivals.
But I guarantee you that during the height of the Green Movement, official minds drifted back to 1953, when a "popular" movement rose up to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Mossadeq and install the Shah. Of course we now know that the movement in 1953 was fomented by the SAS and CIA. I highly doubt we even had the necessary assets in place in Iran to try that in 2009 (sanctions and no relations means no diplomatic or commercial cover for American case officers), but surely there were people within the Iranian government who legitimately believed that to be happening. And surely there were common Iranians who legitimately believed that to be happening.
My point is that Iranians will never be able to reform their system of government so long as there is a hostile relationship between the US and Iran. There are too many people, officials and common Iranians, afraid to support something like the Green Movement when it could be a CIA plot, and too many people willing to capitalize on that fear to remain in power. And ironically, every English-laden Tweet, every angry insult to Iran that you post, every anti-Iran op-ed in a newspaper – anything that furthers the gulf between the US and Iran – is a lead pipe to the kneecap of the reform movement.
I am happy to publish my critic's email. But for the record, many tweets were in Farsi, the millions of Iranians in the streets were not an illusion, and this blog has never published "angry insults" to Iran, only criticisms of its disgusting regime. There is a distinction.
The Dish 