Iranian People Not In Pre-Revolutionary Frame Of Mind
parapundit.com
Writing for the New York Times Magazine Elizabeth Rubin has written an excellent essay on the democratic opposition to the unelected clerics who rule Iran. She confirms what I've read from other sources: the Iranian populace are not eager to launch a revolution to unseat the Mullahs from power.
As radical and impatient for democracy as the students are, however, most of them do not want to lead Iran into another bloody revolution. I asked Mehdi Aminzadeh, a 25-year-old student leader studying civil engineering, if there was anything brewing in Iran equivalent to Yugoslavia's Otpor, or ''resistance'' -- a grass-roots movement spread by Serbian youth that defeated the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic. (One of the opposition satellite television channels that are beamed into Iran by the Iranian diaspora in California constantly replays the chronicles of Milosevic's destruction of Yugoslavia and Otpor's destruction of Milosevic, as if trying to suggest a script for the students to follow.) No, he said. For now there is no social movement or political party tough enough and well financed enough to organize such mass demonstrations.
They had a revolution. It turned out disastrously. They are not eager to have another one. They want gradual change. All of this is understandable.
The United States can not count on an internal revolution to overthrow the Mullahs. The people of Iran are just not up for having a revolution. This is a problem for the United States because the Mullahs are well along in their development of their nuclear weapons program. The development of a democracy by either revolution or internal reform most likely will not happen before Iran becomes a nuclear power. The United States can not afford to wait long enough for the democratic forces to some day get into control of Iran and eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons program (if an elected government in Iran would even decide to do so). International Atomic Energy Agency director ElBaradei has recently toured Iranian nuclear facilities and found the Iranians close to launching the operation of a uranium enrichment facility.
Dr ElBaradei became the first international official to be shown the Natanz site just under a month ago. He reported yesterday that a pilot uranium enrichment plant at Natanz "is nearly ready for operation, and a much larger enrichment facility [is] still under construction at the same site".
In a Natanz Iran facility 160 uranium enrichment centrifuges are tested and ready for operation while more uranium enrichment centrifigures are being assembled.
In a nearby building, workers are assembling parts for 1,000 more centrifuges, part of a constellation of 5,000 machines that will be linked together in a vast uranium enrichment plant now under construction. When the project is completed in 2005, Iran will be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for several nuclear bombs each year.
Some members of the Bush Administration see Iran's nuclear program as something that needs to be dealt with fairly promptly.
John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, joined national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in warning that the White House sees nuclear-weapons programs in Iran and North Korea as imminent threats.
``The estimate we have of how close the Iranians are to production of nuclear weapons grows closer each day,'' said Bolton, a leading hawk within the administration.
Iran, like North Korea, will not have its regime overthrown by internal revolt. If the United States wants to end the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons development programs it must either launch preemptive strikes against their nuclear facilities or it must use military force to overthrow the Iranian and North Korean regimes itself. |
