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Should We Support or Oppose Iran's June Revolution

Posted: 22 Jun 2009 07:53 PM PDT

Various anti-Jihad bloggers and columnists are going head to
head on the issue. As some have pointed out, the leading Iranian
opposition figures such as Rafsanjani and Mousavi are not significantly
better than Ahmadinejad himself, being involved in terrorism abroad and
the development of nuclear technology.

Those are all valid arguments, but there is another argument.
Before taking power, Khrushchev was a butcher and a mass murderer. He was
a loyal Stalinist and even once he seized power as Premier, he engaged in
a belligerent war of words, as well as a proxy war with the United States
and Europe. He hammered his shoe on the podium and declared, "We Will Bury
You." He continued Stalin's murder of Jews and conducted a new campaign
against Christianity in the USSR.

Nevertheless despite all that,
Khrushchev denounced Stalin and the worst atrocities of Communism, in
doing so created a division that broke the mold of the infallible and
all-powerful Soviet leader, and the USSR itself. This helped lead to
Khrushchev's own removal from power, followed by a series of increasingly
weaker leaders culminating in Gorbachev and the collapse of the
USSR.

Thus it would have been entirely correct in the 1950's to
point out that Khrushchev was a monster and a dedicated Communist who
sought the destruction of the West and the perpetuation of totalitarian
rule at home-- he was also a key element in the reform and eventual
collapse of the USSR.

It would have also been fairly accurate to
pass a similar judgment on Gorbachev toward the end of the 20th century.
Despite his best efforts to present a positive reformer's face to the
West, Gorbachev was a dedicated Communist and a totalitarian leader, the
protege of a key Stalin ally who hoped to gather in all of Western Europe
into an EU style arrangement under Russian leadership.

In turn
Russia's August Revolution could have easily been dismissed as crowds of
Russians who were seeking not the fall of the USSR, but the restoration to
power of a Communist dictator. Except that what they actually achieved was
the fall of the USSR at the hands of a man who himself had made a career
as a high ranking Communist official.

While Iran is not the Soviet
Union, and the June Revolt is not the August Revolution, there are some
valid parallels.

In the wake of Ayatollah Khomeini's death, the
Islamic Republic lost its own version of Stalin and Lenin rolled into one.
The death of their chief ideologue exposed rifts and conflicts within the
power structure of his disciples and associates, none of whom could
replace him. Much as the aftermath of Stalin's death created a shaky power
structure with the likes of Khrushchev, Beria, Molotov and Bulganin
scrambling for power. Like the Russian people who felt that those who came
after Stalin were small corrupt men who betrayed the legacy of the
Communist revolution, a similar sentiment exists among Iranians who view
Khomeini's Islamic revolution as a flawless standard which Iran's current
rulers have betrayed with their corruption and vested interests.

Within this structure the Revolutionary Guard holds the role of
the NKVD, a power pseudo-military organization with its own structure and
loyalties. The clergy play the role of the Communist party, containing
both progressive and reactionary elements. Like the NKVD, the
Revolutionary Guard has successfully sowed terror abroad in the name of
its ideology. Its growing power in the face of domestic instability may
lead it to either take power, or as in the USSR in the aftermath of
Beria's downfall, be dismantled into a safer more controllable creature of
the state.

What all this means for us is that the June Revolution
is a symptom of Iran's instability, the Iranian public's loss of faith in
the authorities, and the regime's increasingly corrupt and weakened
nature. While Mousavi may be no matter than Ahmadinejad from our
perspective in the short term, in the long term, either his ascension or
suppression is likely to lead Iran away from Islamic totalitarianism.

Reform has been in the wind in Iran for some time now. Most
ordinary Iranians may not be ready to jettison the whole Islamic Republic,
but large numbers of the young generation want a great deal more social
and political freedoms, as well as an end to the corruption of the
inheritors of the Islamic Revolution. That desire for change is genuine,
and it is likely to ultimately lead to the same place that it did in the
Soviet Union.

For those outside Iran, domestic instability is
likely to reduce the regime's ability to sow mischief abroad. If the
Revolutionary Guard and its associated regional Shiite militias, not to
mention Sunni fellow travelers such as Hamas, have to be hard at work in
Tehran, they will be less capable of planting IED's in Iraq, shelling
Ashkelon or shipping new rockets to the Taliban.

And taking on an
oppressive domestic role will lessen their long term organizational base
of support and survival at home, once the reformers do take power.

Whether Ahmadinejad remains in power, or Mousavi replaces him, no
matter what domestic changes happen with the Supreme Council, whoever
comes out on top will have to appease the people by redirecting portions
of the military budget to civilian in a tough economy, swapping out guns
for butter, which will again reduce the amount of harm Iran is able to
wreak abroad.

Finally the protests themselves and their suppression
demonstrate to the world the reality of what an Islamic regime looks like.
The protesters may be chanting Allahu Akbar, but the regime they are
fighting is one that came to power and holds power through treating
Islamic as a means of political supremacy. Those European and American
Muslims who hanker for Sharia and Islamic states might well consider the
reality before their eyes.

Whether or not we are seeing Iran's Berlin Wall or only its
Tienanmen Square, the Iranian regime will never be the same as it was. The
resulting changes will almost certainly weaken the regime, if not entirely
bring it down. Which is why it is entirely sensible to support Iran's June
Revolution, though without forgetting that Mousavi is no saint and that
Iran's reformers, like Khrushchev and Gorbachev, are not entirely
distinguishable from its monsters.

While it might be easy to write
off the protests and the protesters because of that, this would be
shortsighted. The protesters are genuinely idealistic and they are
fighting against an actual injustice and an unjust system. The aftermath
of their protests may leave us with no better a situation than Russia
after the fall of the Soviet Union, or China after Tienanmen Square, but
nevertheless both present day Russia and the People's Republic of China
are vastly preferable to what came before.

We personally cannot
change what is going on in Iran now, but we can bear witness and speak
out, for nothing to emboldens a tormentor as the silence of those watching
his crimes.