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2 How to get real regime change in
Iran By Stephen Zunes
Though the administration of US President
George W Bush has repeatedly emphasized its desire
for democratization and regime change in Iran,
there are serious questions regarding how it might
try to bring this about. There is, however, little
question about the goal of toppling the Islamist
government, with the Bush administration
threatening war, arming ethnic minorities, and
funding opposition groups.
These efforts
come in spite of the 1981 Algiers Accords, which
led
to the release of American hostages seized from
the US Embassy in Tehran, in which the United
States pledged never again to attempt to overthrow
the Iranian government. The failure of the US to
honor this signed bilateral agreement has
contributed to the Iranians' lack of trust in the
US government and overall anti-American sentiment
in that country.
Despite claims by the
Bush administration that the US has always
supported "liberty" and "democracy" in Iran, the
history of US-Iranian relations during both
Republican and Democratic administrations has
demonstrated very little support for a democratic
Iran. In the early 1950s, the last time Iran had a
democratic constitutional government, the US
joined Britain and other countries in imposing
economic sanctions against Iran in response to the
nationalization of the country's oil resources,
which until then had been under foreign control.
Taking advantage of the economic collapse and
political turmoil that followed, the US Central
Intelligence Agency helped engineer a coup against
prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and returned
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from exile to rule with
an iron fist.
Over the next 25 years, the
US armed and trained the shah's dreaded SAVAK
(Organization for National Security and
Intelligence) secret police, which emerged as one
of the most repressive internal-security
organizations of the era. Despite claims to the
contrary by right-wing critics of the Jimmy Carter
administration, the US strongly supported the shah
until his final days in power, providing valuable
assistance to the regime even as it was massacring
protesters in the streets. It comes as no
surprise, in light of this, that the revolution
that finally ousted the monarchy in February 1979
was stridently anti-American.
Furthermore,
since the shah's repressive apparatus had largely
succeeded in wiping out the democratic and secular
opposition to the regime, it was religious
opponents - who survived as a result of the
greater cohesion made possible through the mosques
- who spearheaded the revolutionary movement. Thus
the radical Islamic orientation of the revolution
was greatly influenced by the shah's US-backed
efforts to maintain control through repression.
As a result of this history, most members
of the democratic opposition in Iran do not take
very seriously Washington's claims that it
supports freedom for the Iranian people.
The possibility of US-sponsored regime
change in Iran through invasion and occupation, as
took place in Iraq in 2003, is not even being
considered anymore in Washington. The US Armed
Forces are already too stretched for another major
land war. There is no feasible way for US forces
to invade and occupy a country that is more than
three times as large in both size and population
than Iraq and with a far more mountainous terrain.
In addition, unlike the Iraqi armed
forces, which were crippled by more than a dozen
years of strict military sanctions, the Iranian
armed forces have been able to modernize and
upgrade continually. In addition, the Iraqi
experience has largely discredited the already
dubious notion among some Washington policymakers
that a Western power can bring a stable democracy
to a Middle Eastern country through sanctions,
warfare, invasion and occupation.
Some
American neo-conservative leaders argue that
sustained air and missile strikes against Iranian
government, nuclear and military facilities - a
far more realistic scenario for a US war against
Iran - would cripple the regime to a point that it
would empower opponents to rise up against the
government. In reality, Iranian opposition leaders
emphasize that war and threat of war would
certainly unify the population around the regime
and would be used to justify further repression.
The widely reported clandestine US support
for Kurdish, Baloch and other Iranian national
minorities runs the risk of igniting violent
ethnic conflict and increased political repression
in parts of the country, but these efforts are not
likely to pose much of a threat to the survival of
the regime.
In addition, the United States
cannot realistically hope for a coup, given that
pro-US elements in the Iranian military were
thoroughly purged soon after the revolution. The
leadership of Iran's military and security forces,
while not necessarily unified in support of the
more hardline elements in government, cannot be
realistically expected to collaborate with any US
efforts for regime change in their oil-rich
country.
What recent history has
repeatedly shown is that the most effective means
for democratic change come from broadly based
non-violent movements, such as those that have
toppled dictatorships in such diverse countries as
the Philippines, Bolivia, Madagascar,
Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Serbia, Mali and
elsewhere.
Even the relatively
conservative Washington-based Freedom House has
produced a study that, after examining the 67
transitions from authoritarian regimes to varying
degrees of
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