US sanctions on Iran have created widespread hardship and unrest. This, in turn, has led to massive protests and violence unseen since the Revolution of 1978. Presumably, the plan behind harsh sanctions is to overthrow the religious regime in Tehran, so the violence would obviously please anti-Iranian hardliners in the West.
The problem is that authoritarian regimes have access to levels of violence that democratic regimes do not. Sanctions are intended to create mass unrest that spills over into protests that ultimately leads to regime change, but the essential problem is that it requires a regime that at least nods towards democratic accountability. Sanctions and protests work against democracies. Indian independence was at least in part won by the British working class tiring of the moral burden of repressing Indian independence. Jim Crow collapsed when the rest of the nation was forced to confront it via televised reports from Birmingham and the Edmund Pettis bridge. Even apartheid collapsed under the strain of international approbation.
Authoritarian regimes that collapse under protest, usually do so because they have some connection to the democratic West. Mexico needed US support after the peso collapsed, and so they embraced electoral reform. Iran under the Shah was restrained by the Carter Administration. Gorbachev elected not to send the tanks into Eastern Europe in 1989.
But Deng Xiaoping DID send the tanks to Tiananmen in 1989. And it "worked." Gorbachev is a hero, but Deng won the argument about the use of force.
The Iranian regime will use the force necessary to retain power. Even if they lose the support of the Iranian military, they will still have the more powerful Revolutionary Guard to maintain their grip on power. The only way this ends in true regime change is if there is either a full blown civil war or perhaps Khamenei is assassinated. Either way, things in Iran are likely to become more brutal rather than less. And sadly, it might not amount to anything positive.
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