Iranians Feistier Than Iraqis
April 24, 2003
USA Today
Jesse Walker
As Washington hawks threaten Syria, unveil road maps for a new Middle East and consider democratizing the region with bombs, Americans should keep two events in mind. One, of course, is the fall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq, represented by the image of a small crowd toppling his statue with the much-needed assistance of a U.S. tank.
The second, oddly enough, is neighboring Iran's victory over Australia in a 1997 soccer match. "When the final goal was scored on Saturday," The Christian Science Monitor reported afterward, "thundering cheers swept across every city and village in Iran. ... The soccer jubilation brought a brief but unstoppable disregard of tough Islamic restrictions on public behavior — restrictions that are often flouted in private. Men and women openly danced in the streets, and some women removed their mandatory head scarves and let their hair down."
These events provide insight into which of the two countries, Iran or Iraq, may actually establish a lasting democracy. In Iraq, Saddam was toppled without a popular rebellion. In Iran, there are signs that, with time, the people may bring down the dictatorship. In 2000, Iranian voters swept in a nominally reformist government. Last year, huge demonstrations shook Isfahan, Tabriz and Tehran. Iran may well be more likely than Iraq to create and sustain a democratic government.
Iran is not being shaken by native politicians or meddling Americans, but by a grassroots revolt of the kind that ousted Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Haitian strongman Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, a host of communist regimes in 1989 and Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian autocracy in 2000.
"Even totalitarian systems have weaknesses," explains Gene Sharp, a senior scholar at the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston. He has spent decades investigating how citizens successfully overthrow dictatorships and repel invasions through organized refusals to cooperate with their oppressors.
The power of mockery
In Serbia, for instance, university students in 1998 created a non-violent resistance movement, Otpor ("resistance" in Serbian). Its central mission was to peacefully undercut Milosevic. Sometimes this just meant mocking him — the group's "He's Finished" stickers popped up everywhere. Members spray-painted their symbol, a clenched fist, or "Otpor" on walls and distributed thousands of copies of Sharp's strategies for non-violent opposition. As the movement grew, Milosevic's government became less sure that its soldiers and police would obey if ordered to crack down on the rebels.
Clearly, no such popular movement existed in Saddam's Iraq, even though Iraqis had plenty of good reasons to hate their government. It's not because Saddam was especially more oppressive than Iran's rulers: When democratic ferment began in Iran, it faced one of the world's most repressive regimes. And it's certainly not because ordinary Iraqis are incapable of asserting themselves.
Sanctions create dependence
One major difference between Iran and Iraq: U.S. sanctions against Iran are much less severe than the ones against Iraq. Except in the Kurds' northern zone, the sanctions rendered Iraq's citizens more dependent on Saddam's government, and thus — perversely — helped crush the independent institutions needed for a real revolution. The end result was symbolized when Saddam's statue came down. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, jubilant crowds tore down the hated dictatorships' statues themselves. In Iraq, a much smaller crowd needed Uncle Sam's tanks.
Iraqi civil society is weak; even a completely well-intentioned occupation government will have a hard time transferring power to it. In Iran, however, the population should be able to throw off its oppressors and govern itself when the tipping point comes.
That's worth remembering as Americans mull Iraq's lessons and eye the region's other dictatorships.
Jesse Walker is associate editor of Reason magazine. |
