Protests in Iran

I am not an expert on Iran, so have refrained from commenting on the ongoing political crisis in the country. I decided to comment on yesterday’s protests because the message of the protestors was that President Obama either stands with the pro-democracy protestors or with the autocratic and increasingly repressive regime.  The Christian Science Monitor’s editorial board nicely frames Obama’s dilemma:

Antigovernment protests erupted again in Iran on Wednesday. Unlike previous marches against the rigged June 12 elections, this one was focused as much on President Obama as it was on the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei…

Mr. Obama has been cautious about openly siding with the pro-democracy forces, even to the point of defunding many US groups that defend human rights in Iran. For him to boldly champion the reformers might make it easier for the iron-fisted Islamic Republic to accuse them of being American agents.

But that stance is getting harder to defend as Obama falters in his strategy to engage Iran on its nuclear program…

Even if a deal is reached, the regime’s past secrecy and tendency to flip-flop does not bode well that it will keep it.

What’s more, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose legitimacy is much in doubt after the flawed election, may be simply playing for time and using the talks with the West to gain an upper hand in Iran’s political power struggles.

He can always crack down hard on protests and then give an incentive to the West not to complain about it by appearing to cooperate – for a while – on the nuclear talks. This dynamic could go on for a long, long time unless Obama decides to make human rights and democracy more important to the American strategy toward Iran.

I agree whole-heartedly with their conclusion.  It was easy to avoid supporting the pro-democracy forces when the administration could make the plausible (if self-serving) claim that aiding the protestors would open them to charges of being US agents.  Now that they are openly calling for US support, the Obama administration possibly faces the scenario of failing to assist pro-democracy forces who want our help because it would complicate negotiations with a ruthless, duplicitous, and increasingly weak dictatorship.  It’s time to come to the of aid pro-democracy forces in Iran.

Michael Allen at Democracy Digest has more, and Nazenin Ansari and Jonathan Paris have an op-ed in the New York Times.

Tom Friedman parrots Jack Santucci

Jack Santucci, October 16, 2009

Thomas Friedman, October 24, 2009

Tom swims in Jack's wake

Tom’s just restating Jack’s thoughts, but Tom gives Jack no credit.  Where’s the love, Tom?  Where’s the love?

Jack accepts it like a gentleman.

Smears of a clown

Joel Rubin at Democracy Arsenal makes a good point about Ahmadinejad’s persistent holocaust denials:

Ahmadinejad is a master of distraction…Ahmadinejad is attempting to change the conversation about what’s going wrong inside of Iran by using the Holocaust as bait.  He doesn’t want to be questioned about his government’s behavior surrounding the June 12th elections, or about the show trials of political opponents underway in Tehran.  And he certainly doesn’t want to answer the hard questions being posed by the international community about his country’s nuclear intentions.

Poking his finger in the eyes of Israel and the West is also a cheap way for him to look good for the home audience.

Favorable democracy trends in the Middle East?

F. Gregory Gause, a professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont, has written a devastating critique that democratizing trends are favorable in the Middle East, as Thomas Friedman, David Ignatius, and James Traub, among others have argued.  Gause asserts that supporters of this argument make one of three claims: Islamic parties are losing ground, radical Islam is losing popularity, and an Obama effect.  According to Gause, the first and third ones are wrong, and the second is irrelevant.

First, Gause claims that Islamic parties are not losing ground.  In particular, viewing Lebanon’s and Iran’s elections as supporting this trend is misleading:

Contrary to the punditocracy’s analysis, the June 2009 Lebanese parliamentary election was far from an anti-Islamist referendum…the key swing voters were Christians. As Lebanon is the only Middle Eastern country with an electorally significant Christian community, it can hardly be a bellwether for trends elsewhere in the Middle East…Moreover, as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was quick to point out, his coalition actually received over one hundred thousand more votes total than his March 14 rivals. The Christian communities are overrepresented in Lebanon’s parliament and the Shia drastically underrepresented. March 14’s comfortable parliamentary majority in fact was drawn from fewer than 50 percent of the votes cast in the election…All told, hailing the Lebanese vote as a blow to Islamist political fortunes more generally is a profound misreading of events.

…

And heralding Iran as data point number two on the Middle East–secularism trend graphs only shows the pundits’ multilevel misunderstanding of the politics and dynamics at play in the Middle East…In Iran, this electoral phenomenon is a reflection of disillusionment with the powers that be, who happen to be Islamists a “throw the bums out” mentality that is a standard trope of politics everywhere…The problem with seeing Iran as a model for the Arab world is that, for the most part, the “bums” who would be thrown out of power in real democratic elections in the Middle East are our allies, the leaders who cooperate with the United States, host our military bases and maintain peace treaties with Israel. Since throughout the Arab world the most important and organized political-opposition forces are Islamist, a “throw the bums out” sentiment would lead to more Islamist governments, not fewer.

…

The supposed regional trend against Islamist groups of which the Iranian and Lebanese elections are purported to be a part is highly suspect. If we take 2005 as a starting date, indeed not so very long ago, we see victories by Islamist parties and coalitions in national parliamentary elections throughout the region. This was the case in Iraq, Palestine and Turkey. In Egypt, despite increasingly blatant government intervention against them, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 percent of the seats in the 2005 Egyptian parliamentary election. More importantly, they won nearly 60 percent of the seats they contested.

Second, Guase argues that waning popularity for radical Islam is irrelevant for democracy:

Armed extremists play into politics through bullets, not ballots. Their fortunes tell us little about electoral tendencies. It is incorrect to conflate the very positive trends regarding the decline of al-Qaeda and its ilk in Muslim public opinion and politics with the fortunes of mainstream Islamist political parties.

Third, Gause contends that there is no Obama effect:

Finally it is a mistake to attribute recent events in the region to an “Obama effect” of rising pro-American sentiment…It was Christian voters who determined the Lebanese outcome, and Obama’s outreach has been to Muslims. Far from encouraging opposition to the Iranian regime, the Obama administration has made its willingness to engage Tehran’s rulers a centerpiece of its new Middle East policy.

Gause suggests that three principals should democracy assistance programs in the Middle East:

1. Do no harm to core US interests, such as Arab-Israeli peace, stability in the Persian Gulf, and nuclear non-proliferation.
2. No hypocrisy: don’t talk about democracy where we don’t want it, such as in Egypt and Jordan.  The US is much better off by being honest than pushing for elections, but not accepting the results, as occurred with Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian elections.
3. Help consolidate democracy where it exists, specifically Iraq, Kuwait, and Turkey.

I am not a Middle East expert, so I will refrain from analyzing the paper.  It seems convincing to me, however.  Michael Allen has more.