Iran: Careful What You Wish For

Posted by Tim McGirk Friday, June 26, 2009 at 5:05 am

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A few readers raised the very reasonable complaint that none of us has blogged about the events in Iran. You're right. A few feeble excuses: Andrew was in Saudi, Scott back in the U.S. and I was traveling through Lebanon and Syria. This may come as something of a shock to a few of the commentators, who actually think that I just rip stories out of the Israeli newspapers and re-cycle them as my own, but I actually find it hard, not to mention pointless, to write about things and places of which I have no immediate, first-hand knowledge. Iran is one of them. The last time I was there was in 2005, when I hiked up to the castle of the Assassins on a windy crag outside Teheran.

So I don't want to add to the hysterical and often wildly inaccurate punditry about Iran. It was infuriating watching how CNN flailed to stretch a meaningless scrap of Youtube video of a street demo into something portentious.

What I can tell you about, though, is how it all went down in Syria, a close ally of the ayatollahs. If you were following the local TV and newspapers in Syria, you'd think there was no uprising in Iran and that Ahmedinejad was more popular in Iran than Elvis in Memphis, with perhaps a slightly less flamboyant taste in windbreakers.

That's no surprise, really. In the Middle East, there are a few, more than a few, autocrats who must be alarmed about the groundswell of reform surging through Iran. These leaders sitting on their ornate but uncomfortable thrones must be wondering what's going on beyond their palace walls, in the bazaars and in the universities inside their own little kingdoms and republics. I'm sure the secret police reassure them that they are much loved by their subjects, and then, as proof, they run out and erect even more giant portraits or statues of their heroic leader. But if these despots have any sense at all, they have to be worried about the reformist movement in Iran. The difference is, in these other Middle Eastern countries, any democratic change would probably bring in the Islamists, as happened in the Palestinian territories.

Going back to when I was in Teheran… It was after witnessing some annoying piece of behavior by an Iranian Pasdaran –-scolding a schoolgirl for letting a lock of her hair slip from her hijab-- that I turned to my Iranian friend. “Could there ever be another uprising here?” My friend had left Britain at 16 to return to Iran after the fall of the Shah. Those were euphoric, revolutionary days. But they didn't last long. The revolution turned on itself, as they often do, and my friend found himself in prison. When the Iran-Iraq war broke out, the ayatollahs emptied the prisons and sent the undesirables to the front-line as cannon fodder. By luck, my friend survived, but it gave him a lasting wariness towards violent regime change. Any Iranian who survived those tormented times must be aware of the consequences: uprisings and popular movements have a nasty habit of spinning out of control and are inevitably hijacked by extremists. Be careful what you wish for in Iran.

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem