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Commentary
by U.S. Alliance for Democratic Iran
No
Breaks for Democratic Change Movement in Iran
It has become a national pastime for Iranians to
ridicule the outlandish, often bombastic, policy
slogans by the ruling establishment. Recently,
the modified versions of state slogans such as
“Nuclear power is our inalienable right” are
making rounds in the series of anti-government
demonstrations by women, students, laborers and
teachers. The writing on many of the placards in
these protests said: “Freedom is our inalienable
rights,” or “job security is our inalienable
right,” and “health insurance and equal pay is
our inalienable right.”
The most telling re-invention of another state
policy happened in a recent anti-regime rally by
students in the Polytechnic University in
Tehran, the bedrock of pro-democracy student
movements in the past several decades.
Last February, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Supreme
Leader Khamenei’s hand-picked president, during
another bellicose speech said that Iran’s
nuclear program was like a train “without brakes
and a rear gear.” Polytechnic students responded
in kind in the last month demonstrations,
holding signs which said: “Iran’s student
movement is without brakes.”
While for the ruling mullahs the “nuclear train
and the “Iraq project” remain the pillars of
their strategy to prolong the theocratic regime's
lease on life for another decade or so, it is
the “train for democratic change” which is their
Achilles’ heel.
Indeed this is the train western governments
should empower in order to have any realistic
chance of derailing Iran’s “nuclear train”,
while working to slow it down by pursuing a
robust multi-faceted diplomacy and sanctions
regime.
Amazingly, the “train for democratic change” has
fallen off every one’s map in Washington and
long gone are even the occasional verbal praise
for Iran’s democracy movement as it continues,
despite immeasurable cost, to “stand for
liberty.” One can hardly notice even a mere
lip-service in support of the recent
anti-government demonstrations in any of the
public statements by the Administration and the
rest of the western capitals for that matter,
It is a sorry scene that as many Iran "experts"
keep falling off the over-crowded
let’s-appease-the-mullahs band wagon in
Washington, some others are making “the case for
bombing Iran.”
With such genius
policy formulas, why should anyone blame
Khamenei and his protégé Ahmadinejad for the
current policy paralysis?
In the meantime,
the debate about either policy options has been
feeding Tehran’s ploy to depict itself as an
ascending regional superpower which must be
“negotiated with” otherwise it become a victim
of the “Great Satan’s warmongering.”
As mullahs are skillfully exploiting this
paralysis, a close look at Iran’s internal
dynamics, on full display in a series of
anti-government demonstrations since April,
provides all the tell-tell signs of a tyranny in
the existential fear of its own people and their
“train for democratic change with no breaks or
reverse gear.”
Reflecting the tyrant mullahs’ fear of the enemy
within, Newsweek reported last month that “In
the name of national security and what they call
‘public order,’ Iran's hard-liners are
frantically lashing out at anyone they imagine
might somehow pose a challenge to their
increasingly unpopular rule.” It added that the
mullahs are “especially fearful of feminists,
trade unionists and the like... The big fear is
a repetition of the people-power uprisings that
toppled antidemocratic regimes a few years ago
in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and
Ukraine...” (USADI)
USADI
Commentary reflects the viewpoints of the US Alliance
for Democratic Iran in respect to issues and events
which directly or indirectly impact the US policy toward
Iran |