Before We Get Excited About Iran

I’m far from an expert on Iran but I have to ask a question that I think may have been overlooked in the frenzy of election fallout. What is the end game here?

On another level I’m asking what do Mousavi and his supporters want because that it likely the key to how this will play itself out. And finally, on its most basic level, the question is: will Mousavi press his demands even if it places him in direct conflict with the Ayatollah?

Inspirational as they are there is a contrary logic to the protests — they demand new elections from the same government they believe stole the previous one. And if the Iranian government wants to be smart about stifling democracy they’ll hold new elections immediately. Despite the anger and the amazing displays of rebellion (for instance the hackers who responded to the shut down of twitter and facebook by crashing the government’s websites and the Tehran University faculty who resigned en masse) their demands are fairly conservative. This may not be a fatal flaw (the American Revolution began with demands for fairly simple reforms, as did the Cuban Revolution; the Montgomery Improvement Association initially fought for a more humane form of segregation, not its complete eradication.) But that said, the Iranian protests might not ever take such a radical turn.

The Obama administration has probably considered all this which probably explains the tepid tone of their criticism. The prevailing logic is that when the dust settles we will still be dealing with Iran’s ruling theocracy and the president of their choosing.

Even if the Iranian protestors  succeed in their demands and even if Mousavi were to win a new election, the end result would likely be the reinforcement, not the weakening of the theocrats. Flexibility, or even the appearance of flexibility, benefits even the most repressive regimes.

On some level it would be in the regime’s interests to have Mousavi, who is — whether justly or not — quickly becoming a Guevara figure in the West, succeed Ahmadinejad as President. Mousavi favors women’s rights, two weeks ago President Obama singled out women’s rights as a key concern in the Islamic world. You can imagine some future edict bolstering the status of women in Iranian society and a flurry of cable news commentary about whether this constitutes a diplomatic overture or not.

But since the real power rests in the hands of the governing clerics, Mousavi could just as well make for nice reformist window dressing — a situation that would make it that much harder to pressure Iran on nuclear weapons. Certainly it would complicate the PR angle of any Israeli attack on their nuclear sites.

Despite the reports of casualties from the protests and the threat of police using live rounds the regime has yet to go Tiannemen on the protesters. The arrival of tanks and a brutal crackdown would certainly be a bad sign. But the arrival of ballot boxes and new campaign posters might be even worse.