Iran: brave protestors bringing down the regime could be a game changer

Since the latest protests against the theocratic Iranian regime began, at least 22 protestors have been killed. The clashes began in Iran’s second biggest city, Mashhad. They seem to have been driven by discontent over collapsing living standards, inflation, unemployment and the regime’s focus on foreign entanglements.

The extent of the uprising has come as a surprise to analysts, with working class and lower middle class Iranians, usually regarded as more loyal to the regime, taking part. Indeed, the fashionable view – the Team Obama position – has been that President Trump’s aggressive rhetoric had only strengthened the Iranian government at home, driving moderate opinion to align with the hardliners in a regime that is divided. As recently as late last year the New York Times bureau chief in Tehran, Thomas Erdbrink, was making that case confidently.

“Iran’s urban middle classes have been swept up in a wave of nationalist fervor… Mr. Trump and the Saudis have helped the government achieve what years of repression could never accomplish: widespread public support for the hard-line view that the United States and Riyadh cannot be trusted.”

History has a habit of making fools of politicians and pundits. Indeed, there are echoes in the Iranian surprise of the rapid end of the Cold War.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall hardly anyone saw the collapse of the Soviet Union coming either. Until the Wall was torn down, the idea of German unification had been a distant dream, discussed in terms of it being theoretically possible but highly unlikely, and even then only at some date several generations in the future, until… it happened.

The West’s victory in the Cold War had not been predicted, although plenty of the Reaganites thought it would happen eventually because of the inbuilt flaws in freedom-crushing socialism. Then the end of the Cold War had profound consequences we are only beginning to understand. It made the US complacent, about its own security, and smug with regards to the superiority of its financial system and technological abilities. The shock of 9/11 produced a violent reaction, and the combination of war and financial failure that followed damaged faith in established political structures and personnel. While the divided West busied itself with a series of expensive wars, China built and built. The end of the Cold War also accelerated the European elite’s push for integration. And defeat gave the most ambitious and ruthless Russians new and profitable outlets for all that energy, via free movement of capital. Both Putin and Trump are products of this post-Cold war tumult.

Could this Iranian uprising mark a new turning point? Iran is the pivotal state in the region and the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the establishment of a theocracy with ambitions that go well beyond conventional borders was a pivotal event. With a confused America in retreat since Iraq and then Libya, the Iranian regime looked unbeatable until its habit of making its people much poorer caught up with it.

Consider the potential implications of a gifted country such as Iran getting a much better government that does not want to export its own brand of Islamo-fascism. There are numerous upsides.

1) The single greatest threat to Israel’s security goes. The theocrats are sworn to destroy Israel, via terrorism or a nuclear device if they can get it.

2) A successful rebellion would be bad news for terrorists. The current Iranian government is a major funder of terrorism. As the US State Department reported in 2015: “Iran has historically provided weapons, training, and funding to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, including Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). These Palestinian terrorist groups have been behind a number of deaths from attacks originating in Gaza and the West Bank.” It had expanded its efforts, the report said, to Africa, Asia and Latin America, and to other groups in the Middle East.

3) A change could supercharge the extraordinary events in Saudi Arabia, with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud attempting a modernisation effort at breakneck speed. The Iranian regime is the sponsor of the bloody war in Yemen. A settlement there, or at least a lessening of the intensity of the conflict, would change the atmosphere and make young MBS look  in the eyes of his advocates even more like a winner.

4) If there is a change of regime in Iran, Trump supporters will say that their man is vindicated by his opposition to the Iranian government and Obama – who signed the controversial deal with the old regime – was wrong. They will have more than a point.

5) The disappearance of the old regime would present Russia’s President Putin with problems, which is ironic, considering the Trump/Russia investigation. In November last year Putin presented himself as the facilitator of a potential peace deal in Syria, as the binding link with Iran, Turkey and Syria. This came after a Russian/Iranian axis saved the Syrian regime. Lose Iran, or the current leadership, and Putin would have to recalculate, and Assad too. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Putin in October that Tehran and Moscow should increase their cooperation to freeze out the United States in the Middle East.

6) A Middle East without Iran trying to wipe Israel from the face of the earth and fight endless proxy wars, with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel capable of co-existence would hardly be utopia, but it could be a major improvement in terms of stability and prosperity.

The rebellion in Iran may fizzle to nothing, of course, and the rebels so far seem to lack a leader or organisational structure. The protests have momentum, but the sketchiness of the reporting (a function of the regime impeding communication) makes it hard to tell with any certainty. Paul Mason has a useful and insightful bullet point assessment of the situation in Iran.

But as Sohrab Ahmari, an American writer of Iranian descent, makes clear in his latest piece for Commentary, this is the big chance for change. It would also be a mistake, he says,  to think of the rebellion in narrowly Western terms as a demand for liberal democracy. There is a strong nationalist component in the rejection of the theocrats.

“After nearly four decades of plunderous and fanatical Islamist rule, Iranians are desperate to become a normal nation state once more, and they refuse to be exploited for an ideological cause that long ago lost its luster. It is a watershed moment in Iran’s history: The illusion of reform within the current theocratic system has finally been shattered. Iranians, you might say, are determined to make Iran great again.”