Is Iran’s Green Revolution The New Sino-Soviet Split?

July 1, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under International Affairs, Iran, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon 

Foreign Policy’s Laura Rozen has some insight on the Obama administration’s musings over which course to take with Iran:

The chessboard is moving demonstrably in the U.S. direction.” That is the takeaway, said Congressional Research Service Middle East analyst Kenneth Katzman , from recent assessments by administration officials. “What I heard them saying is, ‘Let’s take advantage of that now, while we have the chessboard, and try to get a nuclear deal and get that resolved, rather than the whole ball of wax.’”

Added Katzman, of the perceived trend: “The strategic picture in the Middle East has moved to the U.S. advantage. The Lebanon elections, reengagement with Syria, stability in Iraq, have added up to a shifting chessboard against Iran.”

In Henry Kissinger’s book Diplomacy, he introduces President Nixon’s triangular diplomacy as a break from the emotive and overly confrontational “theologians” and the “psychiatric school” who believed Soviet tension was based on their collective insecurity of American aggression and the perception of their adversary’s expansive options. Such all or nothing approaches, Dr. Kissinger believes, limits the statesman’s number of squares on the chess board. “Blinded by ideological preconceptions” most policy makers completely overlooked geopolitics and the “strategic opportunity” introduced by the ongoing Sino-Soviet split and the 1968 deployment of Soviet troops to the Chinese border. Not Nixon, he saw leverage as key to moderating, finding common ground and establishing détente with the Soviet leadership.

I would be hard pressed to re-produce an analogous scenario in establishing leverage in talks with the very hostile, revolutionary, theocratic (and frequently apocalyptic) Iranian regime that said yesterday that they want to “break the monopoly of global powers,”  but the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens (who is by no means a foreign policy realist or an advocate for talks with Iran) comes awfully close when he says the regime’s Achilles heel is not its isolation or its vulnerability to a gasoline embargo:

Third is that the Achilles Heel of the Iranian regime isn’t its “isolation.” (What kind of isolation is it when Ahmadinejad’s “election” was instantly ratified by Russian President Dimitry Medvedev?) Nor is it its vulnerability to a gasoline embargo, vulnerable though it is. Its real weakness is its own domestic unpopularity, which has at last found expression in a massive opposition movement.

Bingo! The regime’s weakness is its domestic unpopularity. Because of the protests of millions on the streets of Tehran over the past 3 weeks, Iran’s leadership has been splintered exposing rifts between hardliners and reformists who before have functioned very quietly and comfortably within the opaque veneer of the vast clerical, political and military apparatus.

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, once the presumed successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, condemned the violence against the protesters and decried the legitimacy of the elections as ” no one in their right mind can believe.” The Speaker of the Majlis (Iran’s parliament), Ali Larijani argues that the people no longer trust the country’s legal system expressing his desire that certain members of the Guardian Council “would not side with a certain presidential candidate.” And Ali Akbar Hashemi Rasfanjani, the once  reformist president, and now the richest man in Iran and a very powerful cleric with weight on the Expediency Council and Assembly of Experts is an avowed supporter of Mir Hossein Mousavi and is reported to be scheming for the ouster of the Supreme Leader.

The Supreme Leader’s response to the public protests have been decidedly brutal but not untactful or irrational. As Charles Krauthammer noted in last week’s column for the Washington Post:

Their brutality has been deployed intelligently. The key is to atomize the opposition. Start with the most sophisticated methods to block Internet and cell phone traffic, thanks to technology provided by Nokia Siemens Networks. Allow the more massive demonstrations to largely come and go — avoiding Tiananmen-style wholesale bloodshed — but disrupt the smaller ones with street-side violence and rooftop snipers, the perfect instrument of terror. Death instant and unseen, the kind that only the most reckless and courageous will brave.

Terror visited by invisible men. From rooftops by day. And by night, swift and sudden raids that pull students out of dormitories, the wounded out of hospitals, for beatings and disappearances.

For all our sentimental belief in the ultimate triumph of those on the “right side of history,” nothing is inevitable. This second Iranian revolution is on the defensive, even in retreat. To recover, it needs mass, because every dictatorship fears the moment when it gives the order to the gunmen to shoot at the crowd. If they do (Tiananmen), the regime survives; if they don’t (Romania’s Ceausescu), the dictators die like dogs.

The regime’s methods of limiting public displays by the jamming of communication flows, a sophisticated strategy of crowd control and the selective use of lethal force indicate that at the very least they are concerned about international perception and self-preservation (Khamenei’s recent speech at Tehran University also suggests that he is unable to alienate Rasfanjani and other key opposition).

Here is where President Obama’s support would have been key — and still could be — to unveiling and sustaining the momentum behind the critical mass of opposition forces:

The conventional  — and now unpopular in Washington — association of this position are those of “neocon” Weekly Standard and PNAC (Project for the New American Century) fame.  However, this position isn’t limited to regime change. Nor is it a position that would have conflicted with the Nixonian worldview. For one Nixon, as Dr. Kissinger noted, wasn’t in favor of limiting his options. Secondly, he would have delicately seized the opportunity of applying leverage of an embattled regime against its own existence, thus prompting the incentive to denuclearize.

The regime also has an Arab problem, as Laura Rozen notes Hezbollah’s recent loss to a Western backed coalition led by Saad Hariri and the stability in Iraq has moved the chessboard back in the United States’ direction (though Rozen is naive to believe that any of these developments were caused by President Obama’s inauguration. Lebanon has been at least 4 years in the making, and Iraq is a product of “the surge” 2 years ago). These developments can thus be seen as significant reductions in Iran’s ability to export revolution and gain concessions out of its adversaries.

As Mark Bowden wrote in his book Guests of The Ayatollah: The First Battle In America’s War With Radical Islam, starting under then President Rasfanjani and later President Mohammad Khatami it appeared until Khamenei and the mullahs subdued the reform movement, that democracy was evolving and free speech and debate started to blossom. With their hopes dashed, many Iranians stayed away from the polls in 2005, giving now President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a victory in run-off elections.

Now with a cheated and angry people determined for regime change the only option for Khamenei — other than the use of force — is reform. President Obama would be well suited to leverage this new dynamic to induce the regime to abandon its nuclear program, terror funding and — in the long term — press it to negotiate its way out of existence. 

Comments