Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan
As tens of thousands marched in the streets of Tehran on Wednesday in support of the regime, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps assured Iranians the “sedition” had been defeated.
Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari is whistling past the graveyard.
The protests that broke out a week ago and spread and became riots are a fire bell in the night for the Islamic Republic.
The protesters denounced President Hassan Rouhani, re-elected last year with 57 percent of the vote, for failing to curb inflation or deliver the benefits he promised when Iran signed the nuclear deal.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, commander in chief and head of state, in power three decades, was also denounced, as were Iran’s interventions in wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen.
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In 2009, the uprising of millions in Tehran was driven by middle-class rage over an election stolen by the populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This past week’s protests began in the working class, in what might be called Iran’s “fly-over country.”
The protesters were Red State and Tea Party types, demanding their own version of “Come Home, Iran” and “Iran First!”
The charge against Rouhani is that he has failed to deliver the good times promised. Against the ayatollah and the mullahs, the charge is that what they have delivered — power and wealth to the clerics, social repression, foreign wars — are not what the Iranian people want.
The greater long-term threat of the protests is to the Islamic regime.
For if the protests are about people being denied the freedom and material goods the young enjoy in the West, the protesters are demanding what theocracies do not deliver. How could the ayatollah and the mullahs, who restrict freedom by divine law, accept democratic freedoms without imperiling their own theological dictatorship?
How could the Republican Guard surrender its slice of the Iranian economy and end its foreign interventions without imperiling its reason for being — to protect and promote the Iranian Islamic revolution?
Half of Iran’s population is 31 or younger. This new generation was not even born until a decade after the Revolution that overthrew the Shah.
How does a clerical regime speak to a people, 40 million of whom have smartphones connecting them to an outside world where they can see the freedom and prosperity they seek, but their government cannot or will not deliver?
The protesters are also telling Rouhani’s “reformers,” in power now for five years, that they, too, have failed.
Rouhani’s dilemma? To grow Iran’s economy and improve the quality of life, he needs more foreign investment and more consumer goods. Yet any surge in material prosperity Rouhani delivers is certain to undermine the religious faith undergirding the theocratic regime.
And as any transfer of power to the elected regime has to come at the expense of the clerics and the Guard, Rouhani is not likely to get that power.
Thus, he and his government are likely to continue to fail.
Bottom line: The Islamic Republic of Iran was not established to create a materially prosperous and socially free society, because, in the ayatollah’s theology, such societies, like the USA, are of the devil and corruptive of the people.
Social freedom is irreconcilable with Iranian theocracy.
And Iranian hard-liners, clerical and military, are not going to permit protests demanding Western freedom and material goods, to cause them to commit what they believe would be ideological suicide.
Yet the U.S. and President Trump also face a dilemma.
If as Trump says, we wish the Iranian people well, how do we justify scraping the nuclear deal in which Iranians have placed so much hope, and reimposing the sanctions that will restore the hardships of yesterday?
How does America proclaim herself a friend of the Iranian people, if we are trying to persuade Europeans to abrogate the nuclear accord and reimpose the sanctions that impoverish the Iranian people?
Will we urge the Iranians to rise up and overthrow their regime, as we did the Hungarians in 1956, which resulted in their massacre by Soviet tanks sent into Budapest? Ike’s response: He sent Vice President Nixon to greet the surviving Hungarian patriots fleeing across the Andau Bridge into Austria.
After Desert Storm in 1991, George H.W. Bush urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. When the Shiites did rise up, they, too, were massacred, as our Army from Desert Storm stood by in Kuwait.
If there is an Iranian uprising and it results in a Tiananmen Square slaughter in Tehran, do we really want the U.S., which would not likely intervene to save the patriots, held morally accountable?
The Iranian protests suggest that the Islamic Revolution, after 40 years, is failing the rising generation. It is hard to see how this is not ominous news for the Iranian regime.
As it was not on the side of the Soviets, time is not on the side of the ayatollahs either.
We need not go to war with them. Time will take care of them, too.
For those too young to remember, to illustrate the horror of this Islamic regime, during the 1980’s war with Iraq, Iran used their young men as human mine detectors. They sent them into the disputed no man’s land to clear the mine fields by stepping on the mines. Hundreds of thousands of young Iranian men and boys died.
For those that don’t remember, the last “color revolution” attempt in Iran was in 2009.
When it failed to gain traction, Michael Jackson died and took over the news cycle.
U.S. Gov’t = Look, there’s a squirrel
The main problem for Rouhani is that western banks have been unwilling to finance ventures in Iran because of uncertainty created by the US over whether the nuclear deal with be retained. Rouhani created expectations of economic growth that have proven unattainable because the US has fucked it up.
But the US has no influence in Iran.
Stagnant wages , increasing poverty and unemployment,parts of the country turning more into third world status,breakdown of trust with the ruling elite, no not Iran but the US .Why is the US obsessed with Iran ,is it because they need to loot its natural resources to finance its ponzi scheme economy. The Islamic republic will collapse but by then so will have the US.For both its a race against time ,who will fall first .American firsters and neocons desperately hope against hope the small disturbings in Iran are the beginning of the end of the mullahs but it’s just wishful thinking. The US has less than 15 years,it needs war .The Iranians have survived 40 years of sanctions,what’s another 15. Very soon with the petro yuan ,just have to hold out a tiny bit longer.
Would that Mr B were president! But that couldn’t nor could ever be the case, because those who rule from behind the curtain simply wouldn’t permit it. Note to USA citizens and residents of that nation: you’re royally fugged! Get used to it or do something about it.
So Buchanan is an Alt-Lite neo-Neocon, now? Huh.
Is anyone so utterly clueless that they can’t recognize Israeli intelligence puppet theater when they see it? On every channel? With the exact same sound bites? With the exact same “analysis” and “conclusions?”
Anybody selling this bullshit is a Deep State shill, or a complete moron. Maybe both.
If these people are indeed freedom loving democrats, they would do well to remember how the USA supported the Hungarians in 1956,the SouthVietnamese and the Salvadorans in the 1980’s.