An Attack on Iran Would Be a Tragedy for its Democrats

An Attack on Iran Would Be a Tragedy for its Democrats

by Una Hardester, Senior Political Analyst, Americans for Informed Democracy
The Internationalist
April 9, 2007

News about Iran is dominated by that country’s nuclear ambitions, demagogue president, and recent detention of fifteen British sailors. These stories are important, but they are only a few pieces of the larger picture. There is a great deal of political activity taking place within Iran that the West should take note of. Last month, dozens of women’s rights activists were arrested in Iran for demonstrating peacefully on International Women’s Day. Last week, two women activists were arrested and detained for planning to gather signatures for the One Million Signatures Campaign, a campaign to end discrimination against women in Iranian law. These women are the Iran we should see and hear more of. They are also the principal reason we should oppose military action against Iran by either the United States or Israel.

An attack on Iran would be a disaster for the entire Middle East, but most of all for Iran’s pro-democracy forces. All hope of peaceful democratic change would be destroyed for the foreseeable future. The tremendous risks and sacrifices of thousands of students, human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, academics, and other members of Iran’s courageous, besieged civil society would be rendered worthless. This does not have to happen.

More than seventy percent of Iranians are under age thirty. These young Iranians desire greater freedom, and a society free of the kind of violence the ruling hard-line theocrats inflict on them, but they do not, in any way at all, want regime change to come through outside military action. This is not to say they themselves are not willing to take action.

University students have stood up to riot police and heavily-armed militia to protest the closure of newspapers and the arrests of student leaders. Hundreds of students have gone to jail in recent years. No one knows exactly how many dissidents have been killed. Many have been tortured. Tehran’s Evin Prison is infamous for its cruel treatment of political prisoners. This past summer, a former student pro-democracy activist by the name of Akbar Mohammadi died in his cell, chained to a bed in his final hours. Mohammadi never advocated military regime-change. He believed peaceful change would bring about a better Iran.

This belief is shared by Iran’s surviving pro-democracy activists, including Akbar Ganji, a journalist who, along with Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, has become one of the most internationally recognizable faces of Iran’s pro-democracy movement. Ganji spent six years in Evin Prison for writing articles that linked senior regime members to the murders of prominent dissidents. After he was released in 2006, Ganji went abroad to speak about human rights and the pro-democracy movement in Iran. When he visited the United States, he was invited to the White House. Ganji declined the invitation. Worried by the United States’ increasingly hawkish rhetoric against Iran, Ganji said, “You cannot bring democracy to a country by attacking it.”

Though great personal suffering was inflicted on him by the Iranian regime, Ganji still believes that change must come from within the Iranian population, even if that means more slowly than Israel and the West desire. We may curse its incrementalism, but this is how organic liberal democracy emerges.

But what about the bomb? If Iran’s current government develops nuclear weapons, it will kick off an arms race in the region, and threaten the security —even very existence— of Israel, the worried pro-attack voices say.

To them, I say; things are not as dire as they seem; cooler heads must be allowed to prevail. The apocalyptic threats from Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are just the blathering of a crude populist. Contrary to his portrayal in American media, Ahmadinejad is a figure-head, not an autocrat. And he doesn’t control the military.

Even if the Iranian regime creates a handful of small nuclear weapons in the next few years, it is unlikely in the extreme that it will use them against Israel. It is equally unlikely to hand them off to terrorists (another doomsday scenario widely discussed in policy circles), knowing that this would result in retaliation almost as surely as a direct attack would. More probably, Iran would use its nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip in international politics. This is, after all, the primary purpose of having nuclear weapons today.

Unfortunately, this means Israel would have to live with a nuclear Iran, something its leaders have said they will never allow. But Israel would not have to live with this threat forever. The Iranian regime consists of individuals who have been in power since the revolution of 1979. They are aging and paranoid, and, above all else, concerned with staying in power as long as they possibly can. They understand that they are surrounded by a vast sea of reformist youth, and sheer demographics ensure that their days are numbered.

The bulk of today’s young Iranians were born shortly after the revolution their parents took part in, and they have grown up with its consequences; the Iran-Iraq War, international isolation, and intense repression, but, despite efforts to the contrary by those in power, they have not grown up with an abiding hatred for the United States or the West. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not their president because they voted for him. He is their president because they did not vote at all. After turning out in massive numbers to elect a reformist in 1997, Iran’s young people then spent eight years being bitterly disappointed, and many boycotted the latest, highly unfair presidential election.

The United States and Israel must recognize this, and not buy into Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric. He does not speak for Iran. Iran’s young people lack access to international forums, to mass media, and to sympathetic ears in the West. Thus, their voices are not heard. This is more than a shame, it’s dangerous. It allows elites, who would like to see Iran’s nuclear sites bombed, and its government deposed by military means, to paint the entire Iranian population as genocidal, anti-Semitic fundamentalists bent on ushering in a new age of nuclear war —in other word's, a people deserving of whatever they get. This terrible notion will be best challenged by Western media giving as much attention to the frequent demonstrations by Iranians fed up with their regime as to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s doomsday rants.

Iran is a country of contradictions and appalling injustices. The gap between the policies and opinions of its rulers and the beliefs of its people is yawning. If the West wants a democratic and non-nuclear Iran, it will have to wait, and not intervene militarily to stop Iran’s nuclear production process. Even Western governments funding opposition groups isn't the solution, as it will simply give credence to the regime’s claim that dissidents are tools of the United States and other foreign powers.

The best thing for Iran’s people is for Western governments —in fact, all governments— to stay out the regime-change process altogether. The Iranian regime will fall, but it will fall at the hands of the Iranian people, who genuinely desire solidarity and moral support from the outside. For the Akbar Ganji, Shirin Ebadi, and all the Iranians who continue to fight for human righst and democracy under one of the world's worst regimes, Americans, Israelis, and everyone else should loudly oppose any military strike against Iran.

Una Hardester is a political analyst for Americans for Informed Democracy. She writes about current issues in human rights, European affairs, and international law. She can be contacted at una@aidemocracy.org