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11/21/2003 Archived Entry: "Nothing to lose but their chains"

I'M NOT SURE HE'S RIGHT: Michael Ledeen argues in the Spectator that the West's most potent weapon isn't military firepower but democracy.

If the mullahs were brought down, they would certainly be replaced by a democratic government that separated mosque and state and gave the Iranian people a major voice in the country’s policies. There are very few knowledgeable people who doubt this, and this has been a major theme of the Dubya Doctrine all along. But to our shame the words have not been accompanied by action, either in Washington or London or any other Western capital, even though all are agreed that Iran is the leading terror master, that many of our troubles in Iraq are the result of Iranian actions or the actions of Iranian proxies, and that the Iranian people are ready to take to the streets against the mullahcracy in the same way the Serbs organised to bring down Milosevic.

Iran is ready for democratic revolution, and it is the key to the terror network. Ergo we should be supporting democratic revolution in Iran, and we should get on with it quickly before they show us that they have finally built an atomic bomb. It is hard to argue that Iran is somehow incapable of democracy, or that the mullahcracy should be tolerated any longer, let alone supported. Yet European and UN ‘diplomatic missions’ regularly show up in Tehran, occasionally mutter a few critical remarks about human rights violations or suspicious uranium samples, and then go away. I think we would do a lot better to recite the known facts about Iran every day, and give the Iranian people the support they deserve: round-the-clock broadcasting to encourage them to be brave, money to support potential strikes in the country’s crucial oil and gas and textile industries, communications toys like satellite phones so that they can communicate with one another when the regime shuts down the cells, as was done last summer on the eve of an announced national strike. Instead, we have remained aloof and even made highly misleading remarks (take the deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who proclaimed Iran ‘a democracy’; and the secretary of state Colin Powell, who, on the verge of the planned uprising last summer, said the United States really didn’t want to get involved in the Iranians’ ‘family squabble’.) Many Iranians felt betrayed, since they had earlier heard the President’s numerous statements about the need to spread freedom in their region.

That's all well and good but I've never thought that democracy was the be all and end all of reform when it comes to governments like Iran. Democracy, as Fareed Zakaria argued in his book The Future of Freedom, is a process not an end result. What countries like Iran need before they can enjoy democracy are the necessary institutions. Without them, Iran will turn into the Weimer Republic circa November 1933...except that instead of a new Adolph Hitler we'll see a freely elected extremist mullah who takes power by exacerbating social, religious and ethnic divisions. Don't believe me? Ever heard of Yugoslavia? It's a lot easier to divide than it is to build and a liberal democrat in a country like Iran wouldn't last long in an election.

That said, I do agree that recent U.S. mealy-mouthing about the nascent democracy movement in Iran is horrific...just as the Bush administration seemed to stop making the same bloody mistakes that other administrations have, along come people like Powell and Armitage to once again show that when it comes time to stand on the right side, the U.S. State Department falls into its old ways and screws everything up.

At any rate, I was just about to start writing an essay about this very subject when I came across Ledeen's essay...perhaps you'll see it on Monday.

Read Ledeen here.