Roger Cohen: Iran in Its Intricacy
[Roger Cohen is a columnist for the New York Times.]
A year has passed since President Obama’s groundbreaking Nowruz offer to Iran of engagement based on mutual respect. Iran is now a different country, its divided regime weaker and confronted by the Green movement, the strongest expression of people power in the Middle East and a beacon for the region.
Obama’s outreach has achieved this: the unsettling of Iran’s revolutionary power structure. That alone was worth the gambit. But the 31-year gridlock in Iranian-American relations endures. Sarah Palin, no less, is now urging Obama to “declare war on Iran” to save his presidency. She’s not alone. Daniel Pipes, the conservative commentator, called a recent National Review column: “How to save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran.”...
But the war option remains unthinkable, a potential disaster for the United States and Israel. It’s therefore worth outlining, before the drumbeat intensifies in the run-up to the mid-term U.S. elections, [some] truths about Iran....
Attacking Iran has known consequences. Saddam Hussein did so in 1980 — and thereby cemented Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic revolution by uniting diverse factions (socialist, liberal and others) in national defense.
Because the United States and Europe armed Iraq in that war, and Saddam then gassed the Iranians, resentment runs deep: I’ve often been shown war wounds in Tehran on arms and legs as a single word is uttered, “America.” The generation of young officers in that war, like Ahmadinejad, now runs Iran and constitutes the New Right. (Blowback is not limited to Afghanistan.) But most Iranians are under 35 and drawn to the United States.
The one sure way to defeat the Green movement, frustrate Iranian youth, unite Iranians in patriotic defiance, reinforce the New Right, put Iran on a crash course to a bomb, and buttress the regime — as in 1980 — is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. As Gates has said, “There is no military option that does anything more than buy time” — and not much, at that....
The shifts since the June 12 elections are seismic. A vicious clampdown has estranged millions of Iranians from the regime, creating a situation not unlike Poland’s in the 1980s. This does not mean change is imminent. It does mean the theocracy faces a people who have seen through it. As the Iranian-Canadian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo of the University of Toronto told me, “Violence equals moral and political weakness.”
If restiveness spreads to the Labor movement, as in 1979, or the anger of the religious establishment in Qom escalates, all bets are off. Iran is far more volatile than a year ago. I doubt that it could manage a peaceful transition were Khamenei, 70, to die.
The West, with its historical debt to Iran, owes it to the Iranian people not to surrender to feel-good punitive impulses that will only undermine a centennial struggle for some form of representative government.
A post-zealous Iran that has no illusion about Islamism — been there, done that — is one of the most hopeful societies in the Middle East precisely because the struggle between God’s authority and the people’s is being played out daily. Most Iranians want normal relations with the world, above all....
Iran is the original Heartbreak Hotel. It crushes people with its tragedy. Since at least the 1930s it has veered between forced westernization (“westoxification” to its critics) and theocratic imposition, banning the hijab and then making it compulsory, reaching for pluralism and then crushing it, opening its society and then slamming it shut.
Now, in 2010, a reformist movement, often led by brave women, trying to chart a middle course — true to Iran’s Shiite faith but also to its republican instincts — has been bloodied before our eyes. Classical Shiism envisages secular governance on earth not the now bankrupted rule of a purported representative of the Prophet.
It is time. It is time for Iran to find the balance between faith and pluralism that has eluded it for a century. It is time for the United States to help Iran’s emergence from isolation — not with Palin’s jingoism, nor empty punishments, nor bombs — but through firmness allied to creative diplomacy and sustained involvement.
Read entire article at NYT
A year has passed since President Obama’s groundbreaking Nowruz offer to Iran of engagement based on mutual respect. Iran is now a different country, its divided regime weaker and confronted by the Green movement, the strongest expression of people power in the Middle East and a beacon for the region.
Obama’s outreach has achieved this: the unsettling of Iran’s revolutionary power structure. That alone was worth the gambit. But the 31-year gridlock in Iranian-American relations endures. Sarah Palin, no less, is now urging Obama to “declare war on Iran” to save his presidency. She’s not alone. Daniel Pipes, the conservative commentator, called a recent National Review column: “How to save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran.”...
But the war option remains unthinkable, a potential disaster for the United States and Israel. It’s therefore worth outlining, before the drumbeat intensifies in the run-up to the mid-term U.S. elections, [some] truths about Iran....
Attacking Iran has known consequences. Saddam Hussein did so in 1980 — and thereby cemented Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic revolution by uniting diverse factions (socialist, liberal and others) in national defense.
Because the United States and Europe armed Iraq in that war, and Saddam then gassed the Iranians, resentment runs deep: I’ve often been shown war wounds in Tehran on arms and legs as a single word is uttered, “America.” The generation of young officers in that war, like Ahmadinejad, now runs Iran and constitutes the New Right. (Blowback is not limited to Afghanistan.) But most Iranians are under 35 and drawn to the United States.
The one sure way to defeat the Green movement, frustrate Iranian youth, unite Iranians in patriotic defiance, reinforce the New Right, put Iran on a crash course to a bomb, and buttress the regime — as in 1980 — is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. As Gates has said, “There is no military option that does anything more than buy time” — and not much, at that....
The shifts since the June 12 elections are seismic. A vicious clampdown has estranged millions of Iranians from the regime, creating a situation not unlike Poland’s in the 1980s. This does not mean change is imminent. It does mean the theocracy faces a people who have seen through it. As the Iranian-Canadian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo of the University of Toronto told me, “Violence equals moral and political weakness.”
If restiveness spreads to the Labor movement, as in 1979, or the anger of the religious establishment in Qom escalates, all bets are off. Iran is far more volatile than a year ago. I doubt that it could manage a peaceful transition were Khamenei, 70, to die.
The West, with its historical debt to Iran, owes it to the Iranian people not to surrender to feel-good punitive impulses that will only undermine a centennial struggle for some form of representative government.
A post-zealous Iran that has no illusion about Islamism — been there, done that — is one of the most hopeful societies in the Middle East precisely because the struggle between God’s authority and the people’s is being played out daily. Most Iranians want normal relations with the world, above all....
Iran is the original Heartbreak Hotel. It crushes people with its tragedy. Since at least the 1930s it has veered between forced westernization (“westoxification” to its critics) and theocratic imposition, banning the hijab and then making it compulsory, reaching for pluralism and then crushing it, opening its society and then slamming it shut.
Now, in 2010, a reformist movement, often led by brave women, trying to chart a middle course — true to Iran’s Shiite faith but also to its republican instincts — has been bloodied before our eyes. Classical Shiism envisages secular governance on earth not the now bankrupted rule of a purported representative of the Prophet.
It is time. It is time for Iran to find the balance between faith and pluralism that has eluded it for a century. It is time for the United States to help Iran’s emergence from isolation — not with Palin’s jingoism, nor empty punishments, nor bombs — but through firmness allied to creative diplomacy and sustained involvement.