Far from quickening regime change, U.S. military action would rally Iranians around their present leaders, and lead to even stronger crackdowns on dissent. "We need to be able to give the democrats room and space to be able to maneuver," National Iranian American Council president Trita Parsi said yesterday. "Nothing has hurt the pro-democracy movement more" than the present stand-off. "The more the rhetoric is ratcheted up, the more Ahmadinejad is given a life vest," added New America Foundation Middle East Initiative Director Daniel Levy. The Bush's administration's pro-democracy agenda in Iran is failing. There was $75 million appropriated by Congress to support democratic regime change in Iran. But, noted Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies professor (and reformed neocon) Francis Fukuyama, "you cannot get a taker" inside Iran for the money. Iranian dissidents want nothing to do with U.S. dollars, which are seen as tainted and which could render them instantly discredited on the domestic Iranian scene, by opening them to charges of being American agents. Such individuals also steered clear of the administration and neoconservatives during a visit to the U.S. last summer. Akbar Ganji, perhaps the leading Iranian dissident, refused to meet with White House officials last July, as Laura Rozen reported on this site:
Leading Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji is sitting on something many people would only dream of: a personal invitation to the White House today to meet with top U.S. officials overseeing the United States policy toward Iran, including the National Security Council�s Elliot Abrams and State Department�s Iran nuclear negotiator Nicholas Burns. It's even been dangled before him that President Bush may drop by the afternoon meeting of Iranian opposition activists. But Iran's most famous former political prisoner, who arrived in Washington earlier this week for a month long U.S. tour after six years in Iranian prison says, while tempted, he's not going to accept the invitation. And he�s not the only Iranian pro-democracy activist choosing not to go: among the others are former Iranian Revolutionary Guard founder-turned-dissident Mohsen Sazegara; student leaders Akbar Atri and Ali Afshary; Iranian American human rights activist Ramin Ahmadi; and Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah. Their demurrals hint at the complexity of the relationship between those Iranians seeking democracy and regime change and the American administration that says it has the same goals there.Instead, Ganji met with Noam Chomsky and wrote this in The Washington Post after his trip:�Democracy is not machinery that can be exported,� Ganji told me, through a translator, at a ceremony Monday night where he was the recipient of a press freedom award.
We want the world to know that our rulers do not represent the Iranian people and that their religion is not the religion of the entire nation. We ask that in shaping its policies toward the Iranian regime, the United States not overlook the interests of Iranian civil society. In particular, we hope that America listens to those in Iran who fear that policies intended to contain the current crisis might in fact lead to a greater crisis, and to war.The president has made democracy promotion in the Middle East an essential part of his post-hoc justification for the war in Iraq. Over the past year, his democracy-promotion agenda has been sidelined. An attack on Iran would be proof that it is dead and buried.We are convinced that the outbreak of a new war in the Middle East, particularly against a large and populous country such as Iran, would destabilize the region and the world. And it would deprive us of the chance to found a peaceful and democratic political order.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
