Opinion: The fissures of Tehran

Turkey-based Iranian residents, who are supporters of Iranian opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi, hold pictures of a woman identified by protesters as Neda Agha-Soltan during a protest in Ankara June 27, 2009. Agha-Soltan, the young woman shown on camera-phone footage falling, apparently shot, on the edges of a protest n Iran, has drawn a passionate response worldwide. (Reuters)

BOSTON — Are the June days of Iranian protest destined to end with a whimper, not with a bang? The most serious crisis to Iran’s religious authorities since they took power in 1979 is being boxed in and contained. There has been no second revolution, and no Tiananmen either. The coercion of state power has prevailed — so far.

It won’t be the same as before, however. There is now a question of legitimacy that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will have to live with. No one believes the elections were fair, although none can be sure that Ahmadinejad would have lost had they been square. Iran may be what Winston Churchill called the Soviet Union 60 years ago, “ a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” but the flawed election exposed a fissure within the leadership for all to see. It will be very much open to question now whether the ayatollahs can rule Iran with the consent of the governed after what has transpired.

Unhappily, President Barack Obama’s sunshine policy towards Iran is now in shambles. The president is right to keep the door open for future negotiations, but for the short run at least this has been setback.

Conservatives in this country believe that Obama should come out firmly for the demonstrators and against the regime. Some conservatives have compared his reaction to Ronald Reagan’s original reluctance to abandon support for Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, or to Reagan’s original slowness to embrace Lech Walesa in Poland. If Reagan could see the light in time to make a difference so now should Obama, they argue.

Wiser heads know that Obama might make a great, barn-burning speech, but after feeling good for 24 hours this country still needs to deal with Iran. “Either way,” Obama said, “we are going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons.”

Fouad Ajami, writing in the Wall Street Journal, regretted Obama’s naivete to think he could “talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessors had drawn lines in the sand. (Obama) would look past them,” according to Ajami.

“The theocracy was said to be waiting on an American opening, and this new president would put an end to three decades of estrangement between the United States and Iran. But in truth,” Ajami writes, “Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted — just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime, but not enough to be a threat to their power … ” It was always a “ false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world.”

Ajami, a noted scholar, believes that Obama’s opening to the Muslim world in general, and to Iran in particular, was misplaced and ineffectual. “The earth did not move” after Obama’s Cairo speech. “Life went on as before. Iran’s ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency, ” Ajami noted. “President Obama’s Persian tutorial has just began.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/090629/iran-fissures