America Is Outlasting the Ayatollahs
The Obama policy
of extending an open hand to Iran is working and ought
not to be abandoned because of the grim events in
Tehran.
For the Iranian
theocracy has just administered a body blow to its
legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people and the
world.
Before Saturday,
the regime could credibly posture as defender of the
nation, defiant in the face of the threats from Israel,
faithful to the cause of the Palestinians, standing firm
for Iran`s right to enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear
power.
Today, the
regime, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, is under a cloud of suspicion that they are
but another gang of corrupt politicians who brazenly
stole a presidential election to keep themselves and
their clerical cronies in power.
What should we
do now?
Wait for the
dust to settle.
No U.S.
denunciation of what took place in Iran is as credible
as the reports and pictures coming out of Iran. Those
reports, those pictures are stripping the mullahs of the
only asset they seemed to possess—that, even if
fanatics, they were principled, honest men.
Like Hamas, it
was said of them that at least they were not corrupt,
that at least they did not cheat the people.
No more. Today,
in the streets of Tehran and other cities, they call to
mind
"Comrade Bob"
Mugabe in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad will never recapture that revolutionary
purity he once seemed to possess as the man of the
people who was elected president in the upset of 2005.
Today, he appears, as
The
New York Times
puts it, "as
the shrewd and ruthless front man for a clerical
military and political elite that is more unified and
emboldened than at any time since the 1979 revolution."
There are other
reasons Obama should not heed the war hawks howling for
confrontation now.
When your
adversary is making a fool of himself, get out of the
way. That is a rule of politics Lyndon Johnson once put
into the most pungent of terms. U.S. fulminations will
change nothing in Tehran. But they would enable the
regime to divert attention to U.S. meddling in Iran`s
affairs and portray the candidate robbed in this
election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, as a poodle of the
Americans.
When Nikita
Khrushchev bathed the
Hungarian revolution in blood, Ike
did
not break relations. Khrushchev was
at Camp David three years later. When Deng Xiaoping
and Co. ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square, George
Bush I did not break relations. When Moscow ordered
Warsaw to crush Solidarity, Ronald Reagan did not let
that act of repression deter him from seeking direct
talks to reduce nuclear weapons.
Again, let us
wait for the dust to settle.
By now, even
Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei must recognize that the
Iranian revolution is losing the Iranian people. This is
the third of four straight presidential elections where
the turnout has been huge and the candidate who promised
reconciliation with the West and an easing of social
strictures won a landslide among the student young.
Those are the future leaders of Iran.
Which way the
regime will now go is difficult to predict.
After Tienanmen
Square, the Chinese rulers who ordered in the tanks
sought to reconnect with the disillusioned young by
opening up to the West and building a neo-capitalist
economy.
Iran, in
economic straits with U.S. sanctions biting, its oil and
gas reserves dwindling, could try the same route. Seize
the opposition`s best issues by seeking accommodation
with America.
More likely, the
regime, backed by the hard-line military, will try to
reconnect with the masses and regain its reputation as
defender of Islam and the nation, by defying the
Americans, denouncing Israel and pressing forward with
Iran`s nuclear program.
The dilemma for
America is that the theocracy defines itself and grounds
its claim to leadership through its unyielding
resistance to the Great Satan—the United States—and to
Israel.
Nevertheless,
Obama, with his outstretched hand, his message to Iran
on its national day, his admission that the United
States had a hand in the 1953 coup in Tehran, his
assurances that we recognize Iran`s right to nuclear
power, succeeded. He stripped the Ayatollah and
Ahmadinejad of their clinching argument—that America is
out to destroy Iran and they are indispensable to Iran`s
defense.
With the mask of
patriotism and the legacy of true revolution lost
through this election fraud, Iran`s regime stands
exposed as just another dictatorship covering up a
refusal to yield power and privilege with a pack of lies
about protecting the nation.
Saturday`s
election not only revealed the character of the Iranian
regime. It also revealed that time is on our side. If
the people of Iran can defy this regime, it is no threat
to us.
As with the
other revolutionary and totalitarian regimes, from the
Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, to the People`s
Republic of Mao, to the revolutionary Cuba of Fidel,
America outlasts them all.
And the
ayatollahs, too.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Patrick J. Buchanan
needs
no introduction to VDARE.COM readers;
his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America
is Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its
Empire and the West Lost the World,
reviewed
here by
Paul Craig Roberts.
