U.S. Foreign Policy and the Future of Democracy in Iran
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Abbas Milani U.S. Foreign Policy and the Future of Democracy in Iran U.S. policy toward Iran has reached a crucial crossroads. Since the early 1970s, Washington has developed policies that lasted only until the next crisis, forcing the United States into a reactive mode, at the mercy of events and their subsequent tactical responses. A series of harried reac- tions, however, do not add up to an effective strategy toward this crucial country in a region of incomparable geostrategic significance. Harvesting the promise of a new Iran policy and avoiding its perils require a diplomacy wise in its historic insights, patient and prudent about its goals, honest and clear about its true foes and friends, and credibly resolute in its use of the requisite tools to bring about the desired ends. Today, many suggest that ensuring that the Islamic Republic does not ac- quire a nuclear weapon should be the centerpiece of U.S. policy toward Iran. A failure in this effort, they warn, will not only alter the balance of forces in the region, but more ominously still, it will sound the death knell of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Yet, real as these dangers are, the failures of the European Union and the United States to develop a coherent policy on the nuclear issue; the failure of the Iranian opposition to engage the regime seriously about the safety as well as the real strategic and eco- nomic costs and benefits of the nuclear program; and, finally, the adventurism of China, Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan have resulted in an Islamic Re- public which today finds itself in a win-win-win situation on the nuclear question. None of the three current policies on the table—going along with the EU’s proposed negotiated agreement, a surgical strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, or a “grand bargain” between the United States and Iran—will bring about an end to the regime’s nuclear adventurism. Abbas Milani is director of Iranian studies at Stanford University and codirector of the Hoover Institution’s Iran Democracy Project. © 2005 by The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Washington Quarterly • 28:3 pp. 41–56. THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY ■ SUMMER 2005 41 l Abbas Milani Ironically, although democracy has always been the Islamic Republic’s Achilles’ heel, these enumerated failures have turned the nuclear question into the clerics’ Herculean club. It has been the only issue in the last 15 years around which the regime has been able to garner public support. To solve Iran’s nuclear problem, the West has to stop playing to the regime’s strength and instead concentrate on its weakness. In other words, in spite of the many dire and serious warnings about the nuclear threat, the key to solving Iran’s nuclear problem is the fate of the country’s democratic movement. Democracy is in Iran has a viable, fact the focal point where Iranians’ interests con- indigenous verge with those of the United States. If the past is any indication, democracies are far more likely democratic than dictatorships to engage in a serious and hon- movement. est “roll back” of their nuclear programs. Further- more, only in a democracy can there be a serious national dialogue about the real costs and benefits of “going nuclear.”1 Finally, democracies are far less likely to allow terrorists access to their arsenals. Fortunately, in contrast to most Muslim countries in the Middle East, Iran has a viable, indigenous democratic movement. Also setting it apart, the United States is, for the most part, admired politically and culturally by many elements of Iran’s democratic movement and by the Iranian popula- tion in general. The movement sees the United States as its potential ally, but it is also wary of being used, in appearance or in reality, as a bargaining chip in a realpolitik between Tehran and Washington. The United States must treat Iran’s democracy movement as an independent ally, not a ward. It must respect its autonomy and its political exigencies at home, and most importantly, it must not interfere in the movement by anointing any person, group, or faction. Patronizing the democratic movement by throwing money at it will only serve to strengthen the regime’s claims that democrats in Iran are tools of the United States. Some in Tehran and Washington today, for a variety of often self-serving purposes, offer facile solutions to the complex problem of U.S.-Iranian rela- tions. On one hand, pessimists have already declared the democratic move- ment in Iran not just dead but deracinated. The regime, they say, is here to stay. It has weathered its crisis and is well ensconced; the opposition is scat- tered, and the populace is depoliticized; and the once active and vibrant youth are either fighting the demon of drug addiction or have morphed into what Francis Fukuyama calls the “Last Man,”2 an amorphous mass of lonely and atomized individuals bereft of ideals and goals, obsessed with frivolous consumerism or a destructive nihilism that values and hopes for nothing. 42 THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY ■ SUMMER 2005 U.S. Foreign Policy and the Future of Democracy in Iran l On the other hand, optimists see an utterly isolated, incompetent regime on the verge of immediate collapse. They have pinned their hopes on false messiahs popping up at a rapidly rising rate in the plethora of Iranian diaspora media outlets. A simple flick of a finger by the United States; a few million dollars thrown at the diaspora media or disbursed among those who claim to wear the mantle of the democratic movement in Iran; or if money fails, a surgical strike on Iran’s suspected nuclear sites is allegedly all that is needed to topple the renegade rogue regime. No sooner had whispers of U.S. dollars hit the rumor mills than a sudden surge of newly minted “democratic activists” and media personalities emerged, short on bona fide experience in fighting for democracy but gargantuan in their appetite for financial assis- tance. Neither the quixotic optimism of the second group nor the incorri- gible nihilism of the first, however, can help navigate the way to a real solution of the Iran problem. Avoiding these two extreme positions is not enough to develop a success- ful strategy toward Iran. Success will require a genuine understanding of the enemy’s weaknesses and strengths as well as a sober assessment of one’s own powers and limitations. Ultimately, an effective strategy must free itself both of the ideologues who sees the world as their ideology dictates and of the speculative scholar who offers endless complexities, paradoxes, and relativisms but seems to abjure action. The situation in Iran is complex enough to re- quire the resolution and decisiveness of the military commander, the pa- tience and prudence of the diplomat, and finally the appreciation of the scholar for the intricacies and paradoxes that define Iran as a nation. This combination, although daunting, is surely not impossible for the United States, as well as the Iranian opposition, to achieve. Democracy’s Indigenous Roots Iran’s democratic movement is seemingly dormant, but it has endured for a century. Contrary to the claims of foes of modernity in Iran, particularly among the clerics who suggest that democracy is by nature Western in origin and foreign to Iran’s Islamic cultural climes, Iran has a long history of think- ing independently about some of democracy’s seminal ideas.3 Over the last century, the threads of this movement were woven into the very fabric of Iranian society; the failure of President Muhammad Khatami or any other leader to deliver on reform promises indicates only tactical defeat and not the movement’s end. During its origins from 1905 to 1907, a strange, cognitively and historically discordant coalition of forces composed of cler- ics—some modernist and others uncompromisingly traditionalist—merchants of the bazaar, intellectuals, and segments of the urban poor and middle THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY ■ SUMMER 2005 43 l Abbas Milani classes launched the Constitutional Revolution in hopes of creating a secular democratic polity. By 1979, that same coalition came together to overthrow the shah. In 1905, secular intellectuals had outmaneuvered the clerics. The 1905 democratic victory was quickly followed by the realization that simply depos- ing a despot does not beget democracy. Successful democracy requires a soci- ety with a complicated web of institutions, social habits of tolerance, and civic responsibility. More than anything else, democracy requires a civil society and a middle class prudent in politics, free from the leveling tendencies of the poor or the oligarchic proclivities of the rich. Although the desire for democ- racy in Iran was present at the beginning of the twentieth century, the requi- site social institutions and habits were sadly wanting. The Pahlavi era, beginning with Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925, heralded an age that saw rapid es- tablishment of the social institutions and forces necessary for democracy. Unfortunately, this development occurred under deeply undemocratic circumstances. The new Iranian constitution of 1905 was adapted—indeed translated with some modification—from Belgium, where the king reigns but does not rule. The constitution stipulated an independent bicameral parliament, an independent judiciary, free elections, and freedom of thought and assembly. With the exception of a few limitations placed on women and non-Muslims, both written into law as a concession to Shiite clerics, the laws were democratic. In reality, however, both Reza Shah and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah, ruled with an iron fist. For nearly the duration of the Pahlavi era, the parliament was simply a dour, drab debating society merely rubber-stamping all royal commands.