READING THE TEA LEAVES ON IRAN. Via Joe Klein, Azar Nafisi (whom I had the pleasure of finally meeting last week after Danny Postel‘s reading from his new book, Reading _Legitimation Crisis_ in Tehran) also makes the case that a military strike on Iran would be a disaster for Iranian dissenters. From her piece yesterday in The Los Angeles Times:
who would benefit from a military attack on Iran? Not the workers, students, minorities, women or the dissenters who have been trying to find nonviolent and democratic ways of resisting and changing the present system.
Such an attack would provide an excuse for the most reactionary and violent elements within the ruling elite to stifle any voice of dissent not just from within the civil society, but from the divided and factional ruling elite. It would help rally factions within that elite behind Ahmadinejad, and it would provide Iran a good excuse to attempt to further isolate the United States within the international community.
In other words, the main beneficiary of an attack on Iran would be the most militaristic and reactionary elements in the Iranian ruling hierarchy….
The most effective war against the tyrants in Iran is through giving voice to the workers asking for their rights, to women fighting for equality and to students, journalists, writers and intellectuals fighting for freedom of expression.
To miss this opportunity not only would be disastrous for the Iranian people, it would have dire consequences for the United States and the world.
Since Matt Y. brought it up, I should note that my item making the same point yesterday was less a counterweight to Danny’s argument than one inspired by his exhortation, and by a conversation with Roya Boroumand of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran. The question of the relationship of the American left and especially its new progressive institutions to Arab and Persian dissidents and liberals is something I’ve been thinking about since I met with a member of Kifayah (Enough), the tiny but mediagenic Egyptian pro-democracy group, when I visited Cairo last April, and also had the opportunity to meet Nawaal El Sadaawi, Egypt’s most famous feminist writer and long-time advocate for political and social reform.
One of the things that became clear to me as I rode around Cairo in a Lada that looked as though it had first spent a year under water in an Eastern European lake (before being hauled out, stripped for parts, and only then sent to Egypt to become a taxi), was that what Egypt needed just as urgently as democratic reform was progressive regulatory reform. The air in Cairo is some of the worst in the world, almost painful to breathe, the controversy du jour was about Europeans dumping toxic chemicals and low-quality foodstuffs into the Egyptian market, and the tales violence against women I heard (all intra-family, since there is little street crime) would chill your blood. Those are the kinds of problems that can only be dealt with through regulation and legal reform. It usually requires pressure groups to get such rules in place in any government, though, and in a society where even the mosques are regulated by the state, there was not enough freedom of association to make anything happen. The liberals, feminists, and political reformers were constantly being picked off, caught between the repression of an authoritarian government, on the one hand and the edicts of Muslim fundamentalists, on the other. They had a tiny little sliver of social space on which to try to build the kind of civil society needed to, perhaps, one day push for a real democracy and progressive social, legal, and environmental reform. And they were completely outgunned.
It was pretty clear that there was a need for a kind of George Soros for the Arab and Muslim world — someone who could help build up the space between the poles of authoritarian government and the religious reaction against it. Without the existance of this robust civil society and strong non-religious parties, democratization would, it seemed pretty clear, continue to lead to the empowerment of religious parties — as it already had in Algeria, the Palestinian Authority territories, and Egypt. This is not comment on anything essential to the Arab or Muslim world, but a direct consequence of the dynamics of democracy, which always empowers best those who are most easily organized. If mosques are the only extra-governmental social institutions that have (or are allowed to have) any power, then a movement toward true democracy will undermine liberalism and empower theocracy. (I mean, even in America — one of the freest, most stable democracies in the world — the great debate over the past four years on the left has been about how to create progressive insitutions (i.e. civil society institutions) strong enough to get candidates elected and an agenda passed. And why does the left want these institutions? In part to beat back the power of Christian right, with its built-in organizational advantages.)
Who could do it? Soros was obviously not the right candidate, because he is Jewish. Congress has funds for democracy promotion, but such monies are so frequently refused by real reformers that they only succeed in building up a thick layer of shysters, which cannot do any political system any real good. The CIA also has its own programs, about which I know much less. One obvious alternative approach would be private sector to private sector contacts between like-minded peoples, and in this regard, it really has for too long been the case that Arab and Persian liberals have been more welcomed by conservative groups than liberal ones, at least in Washington (the academy is a whole different issue). Part of that is that liberals are not gung-ho regime changers, and part of it is the typical incompetence of the left, which can scarcely manage to put its own views forward, let alone support any one else’s.
Still, I see small signs that this is starting to change. Danny’s book is one. Another was this recent piece on Egyptian bloggers in The Nation. And I think the New America Foundation-National Iranian American Council Conference is yet another.
–Garance Franke-Ruta