As tens of thousands marched in
the streets of Tehran on Wednesday in support of the regime, the head of the
Revolutionary Guard Corps assured Iranians the “sedition” had been defeated.
Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari
is whistling past the graveyard.
The protests that broke out a
week ago and spread and became riots are a fire bell in the night for the
Islamic Republic.
The protesters denounced
President Hassan Rouhani, re-elected last year with 57 percent of the vote, for
failing to curb inflation or deliver the benefits he promised when Iran signed
the nuclear deal.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, commander in chief and head of state, in power three decades, was
also denounced, as were Iran’s interventions in wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,
Gaza and Yemen.
In 2009, the uprising of
millions in Tehran was driven by middle-class rage over an election stolen by
the populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This past week’s protests began in
the working class, in what might be called Iran’s “fly-over country.”
The protesters were Red State
and Tea Party types, demanding their own version of “Come Home, Iran” and “Iran
First!”
The charge against Rouhani is
that he has failed to deliver the good times promised. Against the ayatollah
and the mullahs, the charge is that what they have delivered — power and wealth
to the clerics, social repression, foreign wars — are not what the Iranian
people want.
The greater long-term threat of
the protests is to the Islamic regime.
For if the protests are about
people being denied the freedom and material goods the young enjoy in the West,
the protesters are demanding what theocracies do not deliver. How could the
ayatollah and the mullahs, who restrict freedom by divine law, accept
democratic freedoms without imperiling their own theological dictatorship?
How could the Republican Guard
surrender its slice of the Iranian economy and end its foreign interventions
without imperiling its reason for being — to protect and promote the Iranian
Islamic revolution?
Half of Iran’s population is 31
or younger. This new generation was not even born until a decade after the
Revolution that overthrew the Shah.
How does a clerical regime
speak to a people, 40 million of whom have smartphones connecting them to an
outside world where they can see the freedom and prosperity they seek, but
their government cannot or will not deliver?
The protesters are also telling Rouhani’s “reformers,” in power now for five years, that they, too, have failed.
The protesters are also telling Rouhani’s “reformers,” in power now for five years, that they, too, have failed.
Rouhani’s dilemma? To grow
Iran’s economy and improve the quality of life, he needs more foreign
investment and more consumer goods. Yet any surge in material prosperity Rouhani
delivers is certain to undermine the religious faith undergirding the
theocratic regime.
And as any transfer of power to
the elected regime has to come at the expense of the clerics and the Guard,
Rouhani is not likely to get that power.
Thus, he and his government are
likely to continue to fail.
Bottom line: The Islamic
Republic of Iran was not established to create a materially prosperous and
socially free society, because, in the ayatollah’s theology, such societies,
like the USA, are of the devil and corruptive of the people.
Social freedom is
irreconcilable with Iranian theocracy.
And Iranian hard-liners,
clerical and military, are not going to permit protests demanding Western
freedom and material goods, to cause them to commit what they believe would be
ideological suicide.
Yet the U.S. and President
Trump also face a dilemma.
If as Trump says, we wish the
Iranian people well, how do we justify scraping the nuclear deal in which
Iranians have placed so much hope, and reimposing the sanctions that will
restore the hardships of yesterday?
How does America proclaim
herself a friend of the Iranian people, if we are trying to persuade Europeans
to abrogate the nuclear accord and reimpose the sanctions that impoverish the
Iranian people?
Will we urge the Iranians to
rise up and overthrow their regime, as we did the Hungarians in 1956, which
resulted in their massacre by Soviet tanks sent into Budapest? Ike’s response:
He sent Vice President Nixon to greet the surviving Hungarian patriots fleeing
across the Andau Bridge into Austria.
After Desert Storm in 1991,
George H.W. Bush urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. When the
Shiites did rise up, they, too, were massacred, as our Army from Desert Storm
stood by in Kuwait.
If there is an Iranian uprising
and it results in a Tiananmen Square slaughter in Tehran, do we really want the
U.S., which would not likely intervene to save the patriots, held morally
accountable?
The Iranian protests suggest
that the Islamic Revolution, after 40 years, is failing the rising generation.
It is hard to see how this is not ominous news for the Iranian regime.
As it was not on the side of
the Soviets, time is not on the side of the ayatollahs either.
We need not go to war with
them. Time will take care of them, too.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the
author of a new book, “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”