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A week after the start of massive street theater, the type not seen in Teheran since the revolution of 1979, things are becoming deathly quiet in Iran. Sparked by what was popularly believed to be a rigged electoral process that returned Achmedinejad to the presidency, the streets of the Iranian capital first filled with hundreds of thousands or irate citizens who claimed that the election had been rigged in favor of Achmedinejad.
After the Revolutionary Guards and their basij henchmen killed and wounded scores of protesters, the numbers of Iranians taking their chances in the streets---those who felt strongly enough about the issue to complain about it publicly and risk a fractured skull or worse---dropped dramatically. When I was on the air last Saturday morning, the only verifiable number of protesters was 3,000. By the next day, no observers on the ground would venture a number, and most agreed that there were only isolated pockets of protestors.
The widely broadcast death of one of the protestors, Neda Agha Soltan, added a pretty face to the ugly brutality of the regime's response, but that has merely increased American sympathy and done nothing else. In sympathetic and elegant oratory, President Obama decried the civil rights abuses in Iran, but revulsion is---and will be---the extent of the American response.
As the events fade from the scene, even temporarily, it is worth putting the whose episode into some perspective.
First, although protests inside Iran will continue from time to time and may even flare again in large numbers, the Iranian electorate's first experience with free speech and street politics is over. It taught the axiomatic lesson that Iran isn't the United States, where similar events would have had wide-ranging and long-term results. Indeed, we've already moved on, covering health care reform (important but not interesting) and the adolescent behavior of Governor Mark Sanford (interesting but not important).
Second, although the manufactured election result that gave 62% of the vote to Achmedinejad was nonsense, there is a sizeable minority---maybe as much as half---that supports Achmedinejad, and the street protests surely did not represent the benighted citizens who actually believe that the conservatives are good for Iran.
Third, the view in the West is that Mousavi is a benign figure, but that is only in a relative sense. His views are only slightly less inimical to other nations' interests, and he is just as committed to supporting terrorism and the development of nuclear weapons as the rest of the Iranian leadership. Only those whose unbridled idealism is unalloyed with reality would expect a Mousavi victory to be followed by rapprochement with the United States and the opening of McDonald's shops in Teheran.
If the United States wants to have a positive effect on Iran, grousing about that government's treatment of its citizens will generate only the brief surge of endorphins that accompany the fleeting feeling that we are doing what we can, no matter how ineffectual it is. But at least one line of promising inquiry needs to be followed: quiet and private discussions with the other major powers---particularly Russia---to work in concert to eliminate the danger that Iran represents. Everything else is just empty grandstanding.
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Thanks. As much as an extremist as I am---and as we all tend to be on some subjects, especially as we get older---I find it useful to cut to basics, something we all learned as brand new soldiers.
