A few days ago, I linked to a somewhat pessimistic overview of the first anniversary of the popular uprising against the stolen election in Iran. Here is a more balanced look at the story from someone whose deep knowledge of Iran I trust: Reuel Marc Gerecht, who used to serve as a CIA officer in Tehran. He points out how Iran has opened up a fissure within Islam and radicalized a previous little-heard-from liberal and secular opposition to Islamism.
But there is one point on which every observer agrees: that the Obama administration has utterly failed to do anything to help this opposition.
As Gerecht observes, the most effective form of aid would be to provide satellite Internet access that would be impossible for the regime to block and very difficult for it to monitor, allowing the Iranian dissidents unfettered communication, both with each other and with the outside world. And "The Green Movement's technology experts have done back-of-the-envelope calculations: just $50 million per year could open the entire country to the Internet." But while Obama extorts tens of billions from oil producers, he can't be bothered with such a relatively tiny expenditure.
"Iran's Revolution: Year 2," Reuel Marc Gerecht, New York Times, June 14
In the 1980s, when Iran's youth were enthralled by the charismatic Khomeini, it would have been difficult to imagine that in two decades the same Muslim society would engage in the most damning critique of dictatorship ever seen in the Middle East….
The Green Movement, which is an upwelling of Iran's enormous cultural and political transformation, is what America has long wanted to see in the Middle East, especially after 9/11: a more-or-less liberal democratic movement, increasingly secular in philosophy and political objectives, rooted in Iran's large middle class and even larger pool of college-educated youth (a college education in Iran, where the revolution zealously opened universities to the poor, doesn't connote any social status).
The movement is similar in its aspirations and methods to what transpired behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. It aims to incorporate the spiritually dispossessed, the free thinkers, the poorly paid, the young (more than 60 percent of Iran's population is now under 30), the dissident clergy and, perhaps most important, the first-generation revolutionaries of the 1970s who have been purged by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini's charisma-free, paranoid successor as supreme leader. The movement is also the most recent manifestation (the first being Mr. Khatami's presidential victory in 1997) of widespread anger by women over their second-class citizenship in the Islamic Republic.
The movement is unique in Islamic history: an intellectual revolution that aims to solve peacefully and democratically the great Muslim torment over religious authenticity and cultural collaboration. How does a proud people adopt the best (and the worst) from the West and remain true to its much-loved historical identity?
The millions who voted in 1997 and 2001 for Mr. Khatami, a clerical apostle of cultural integration, were telling us that for them, this is really no longer a big problem. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled from 1941 until the revolution, failed in his dream of turning Iranians into Germans. Yet 30 years of theocracy have done an astonishing job of Westernizing Iran's culture and political preferences.
While the riots of last June did not topple the mullahs, the Islamic Republic is now permanently unstable. Every national holiday has the potential of turning into a day of protest, and the regime must send out hundreds of thousands of security forces, as it did in the days leading up to the anniversary on Saturday….
While many in the West casually dismiss the movement because it's been unable to maintain huge street demonstrations, Ayatollah Khamenei has an acute grasp of how numerous his enemies are and how volatile the country remains.
