[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The Great

[stefania]

The Revolution Next Time

October 11, 2004
The Bolston Globe
Laura Rozen
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/10/10/the_revolution_next_time



As Iran moves to the front burner, some in Washington are arguing that with a little help exiles and dissidents can topple the mullahs and establish a pro-Western democracy. Sound familiar?

As international concern mounts about Iran's nuclear aspirations, a fractious debate is emerging in Washington over what to do if multilateral diplomacy fails to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear program.

Some basic facts are agreed upon: that Iran's nuclear program has become broadly popular in that country and has given further political strength and cohesion to a clerical regime that has also been under growing internal pressure from its population to reform. But here consensus ends.

To some American observers, these facts imply that the United States should grit its teeth and deal directly with a regime that calls America the Great Satan, perhaps even offering to lift US sanctions in exchange for Tehran abandoning its nuclear program. Another faction believes the United States should pursue the Bush administration's current course of multilateral diplomacy to its logical conclusion: Encourage the International Atomic Energy Agency to report Iran in noncompliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the UN Security Council, thus triggering discussion of a host of various punitive measures, from travel bans and an oil embargo to possible enforced disarmament.

To another group, however, the current facts argue for an entirely different solution: Change the Iranian regime, their thinking goes, and the nuclear issue will take care of itself.

Leading the charge in favor of this idea is neoconservative writer and political operative Michael Ledeen. For years, Ledeen -- currently the Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and acontributing editor at National Review -- has argued that the chief source of international terrorism in the world is Tehran. In numerous articles and his most recent book, "The War Against the Terror Masters" (2002), Ledeen has insisted not only that overthrowing the regime in Tehran should have come before military intervention in Iraq (though he continues to strongly support that operation), but that it would be relatively easy. "You don't have to fire a shot," he told The New York Sun in November 2002. "The Iranians are dying to bring down the government themselves."

While Ledeen's argument did not prevail then, it is gaining attention now, in particular as European-led diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to curtail its nuclear program have faltered in recent months. Earlier this year, the White House considered a secret policy directive that included a proposal to destabilize the government in Tehran. Preoccupied with the insurgency in post-war Iraq, and facing opposition from the State Department, the Bush administration put further consideration of the plan on hold. But there are signs that it is returning to the fore. In July, Senators Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced the Iran Freedom and Support Act of 2004, which declared that "it should be the policy of the United States to support regime change for the Islamic Republic of Iran and to promote the transition to a democratic government to replace that regime" and would authorize the president to "provide assistance to foreign and domestic pro-democracy groups opposed to the non-democratic Government of Iran." (The bill has been referred to the Foreign Relations Committee for further consideration.)

The regime change idea is generating controversy both inside and outside the Bush administration, not least because it is Ledeen himself who is most vigorously championing it. For inseparable from Ledeen's decades-long fascination with Iran and fervent belief that it is on the verge of democratic revolution is Ledeen's own controversial history with America's Iran policy, his zeal for the covert, and his disdain for sanctioned bureaucratic channels for US foreign policy making.

It was Ledeen who, as a consultant to Alexander Haig, President Reagan's secretary of state, helped broker the initial secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran in 1985 that became part of the Iran-Contra scandal. More recently, he introduced his partner in that deal, Parisian-based Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, to two Farsi-speaking Pentagon officials, Lawrence A. Franklin and Harold Rhode, interested in discussing the regime change idea. In late August, the meetings drew new attention after it was reported that the FBI was investigating whether Franklin had passed the classified draft national security directive on Iran to officials with the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC. In addition to Ghorbanifar (who is alleged to have long ties to both the Iranian and the Israeli governments), the meeting also included a former senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who reportedly had intelligence on dissident ranks within the Iranian security services.

The regime-change idea is greeted with skepticism by many Iran experts. A high-profile task force at the Council on Foreign Relations, headed by former Carter national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA director Robert Gates, published a report this summer casting doubt on the prospects for a democratic revolution in Iran any time soon, and recommending that Washington therefore pursue a focused dialogue with Tehran on its nuclear program and other regional security issues."

Despite considerable political flux and popular dissatisfaction, Iran is not on the verge of another revolution," the CFR report said. "Direct US efforts to overthrow the Iranian regime are therefore not likely to succeed. The ferment of recent years demonstrates that the Iranian people will eventually change the nature of their government for the better."

But eventually isn't soon enough for Ledeen, who concludes most every article on the issue by imploring "faster, please." Ledeen believes that with a little push, the United States could help revolutionary efforts among Iranian exiles and dissidents along. This won't require military action, he insists, just "money, communications gear and good counsel."

While prospects for success -- at least in the short term -- of any US effort to back regime change in Iran are not widely considered high, some foreign-policy hands concede that it may be worth a try, given the even less attractive (and equally unpredictable) alternatives. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a Farsi-speaking former CIA officer now at the American Enterprise Institute, described them bluntly in a recent interview: "Punt, or strike" -- either let Iran go nuclear (as early as 2006), or strike their nuclear facilities.

Given the grim alternatives, Gerecht says, "I see no reason . . . why the US government cannot develop clandestine techniques for aiding certain Iranian factions. But you cannot do these things quickly. I think the Bush administration is deeply divided on this issue."

But even some who are sympathetic to the idea of nonviolent regime change in Tehran question whether Ledeen and other supporters of the idea really grasp the "nonviolent" part of the idea -- or the tangled political realities of Iran. If the Unites States starts down this road, will it end up with a bloodless revolution like the one that brought down Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 -- or a mess that looks more like Iraq?

Today, support for regime change in Iran doesn't come only from neoconservatives who believe, like Ledeen and Gerecht, that long-term US security depends on spreading democratic revolution in the Middle East. Current circumstances have produced an interesting convergence of regime-change agendas by groups with widely differing goals, intellectual inspirations, and visions for what a future government of Iran should look like -- not to mention what role the United States should play in any transformation. They also include Iranian exile and opposition groups hostile to the Tehran regime (and often, each other), pro-Israel activists concerned about what a nuclear Iran would mean for Israel, and activists and academics associated with the nonviolent resistance movement credited with helping empower the Serbian opposition to peacefully overthrow the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000.

The convergence is highly imperfect. Mistrust between different factions runs high, including among the various Iranian groups. They range from the monarchists surrounding Reza Pahlavi, son of the former shah, who is now based in Potomac, Md.; Western-educated writers and intellectuals such as Johns Hopkins's Azar Nafisi, author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran"; and the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an umbrella group that maintains an office in Washington. (While the NCRI enjoys the support of some influential Middle East experts, it was placed on the State Department's list of designated terrorist organizations in August 2003 because of its connection to the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK), or People's Mujaheddin, a highly controversial group that was sponsored for decades by Saddam Hussein and currently has 3,000 members under US guard at Camp Ashraf in Iraq.)

How neoconservative regime-change advocates like Ledeen fit in the mix is partly a story of overlapping agendas, partly a papering over of vast differences -- differences intensified by wariness over the neoconservatives' role in championing the US invasion of Iraq.

Case in point: A potential ally in the struggle for regime change in Iran is the loose network of NGOs, academic experts, and practitioners known variously as the nonviolent resistance network, or the strategic nonviolence movement. Based on the writings of Harvard political scientist Gene Sharp, the movement was instrumental in helping train the Serbian student group Otpor (Resistance) in techniques that enabled them to peacefully overthrow Milosevic. That struggle won the backing of the Clinton administration, and has been cited approvingly by Ledeen and other neoconservatives (despite their usual disdain for all things Clinton). More recently, nonviolent resistance experts have been involved in training democratic opposition groups from Burma to Georgia to Zimbabwe in their techniques.

At the heart of the strategy is the concept that through a sustained series of nonviolent resistance actions, a country's population can persuade the agents of a dictator's repression -- usually the police or army -- that the people have withdrawn their support for the regime. In so doing, the theory goes, they can get the security services to switch sides.

Some in the movement see potential for such a transformation in Iran. "There is plenty of political space in Iran for people to use now," says Jack DuVall, president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, a Washington-based organization that provides educational materials and training on nonviolent resistance strategies and techniques. "For the last few years, there have been multiple reports of dissatisfaction with the regime even within the Revolutionary Guards. There have even been clerics, ayatollahs, who have strongly criticized the regime. This is not a society in lockstep with the ruling group."

Others question whether the involvement of forces from outside the country would help or hinder the process. "I think if people are looking for any more from the outside, from the Iranian exiles, it's dead on arrival," says an Iranian-American activist recently back from Iran, who asked that his name not be used in order to protect his Iranian contacts. "It's a nonstarter. Because there's no opposition figure who's managed to convince both the Iranian community in the United States, or the people in Iran, that they have the ability to kick out the regime and that they are democrats."

This contrasts sharply with the vision that Ledeen sketches in his frequent writings on the subject, which emphasize an indispensable and central role for the US government. In a recent e-mail interview, Ledeen suggested that whether the push comes from inside or outside Iran is just a small detail that distracts from the larger goal."

Most successful revolutions have had external support," Ledeen wrote. "That includes the American, French, and Russian revolutions." Besides, he asserts, "Most Iranians believe that American support is crucial for the spread of freedom, and that unless there is American support, efforts to topple the regime are doomed."

Some Iranian opposition activists agree that the United States signaling to Iran in a decisive way that it wants regime change may embolden the internal opposition, as Reagan's labelling the Soviet Union "the Evil Empire" and calling on Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall may have emboldened dissidents to step up resistance to Soviet totalitarianism."

So our Natan Sharansky sitting in Iranian jail has to feel that something serious has changed in US policy," says Shary Ahy, a Virginia-based Iranian-American political scientist who is involved in a new effort to build a coalition of Iranian democratic opposition groups inside and outside the country. "Instead, they've been hearing a lot of double-talk from the US."

While Ahy wants the United States to commit itself to democratic regime change in Iran, he says it is crucial that it clearly state that this does not include any military action. "No one in the Iranian opposition I have talked to wants military action," he says.

This perhaps goes to the heart of the debate over American support for nonviolent regime change -- the fear that it won't really be nonviolent, and that it may in fact open the way for military intervention, either by Iranian opposition groups covertly armed by the United States or its proxies, or the direct involvement of American troops.

After all, several years ago, when the regime-change movement that became the Iraq war was gaining ground, some prominent neoconservatives, including former CIA director James Woolsey (who served as Ledeen's attorney during the Iran-Contra investigations) and Paul Wolfowitz (now deputy defense secretary), insisted that Saddam Hussein could be toppled with just US airpower and Special Forces, with indigenous Iraqi opposition groups, such as Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and the Kurdish peshmerga, serving as the bulk of the ground troops. If the Bush administration pursues nonviolent regime change, will Iran end up looking more like Serbia or like Iraq -- with nukes?

We are unlikely to find out anytime soon. With Iran's recent defiant statements about its right to pursue a nuclear program, and US and Israeli intelligence projecting that Iran could have nuclear weapons sometime in the next two years, advocates of a military strike against Iran's nuclear sites are likely to gain the upper hand. Even so, the fate of democracy in Iran will hardly be determined solely in Washington. A year after NATO bombed Serbia to halt Milosevic's brutal crackdown against the Kosovo Albanians, Serbian students led a peaceful struggle to overthrow Milosevic. The forces that lead to regime change are often unpredictable -- and not easily suppressed.

Laura Rozen, a writer based in Washington, D.C., reports on national security and foreign policy for The American Prospect and The Washington Monthly.
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Referendum AFTER Regime Change

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