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Month after month, the Islamic Republic of Iran gets closer and closer to securing nuclear weapons, while the West appears more and more impotent. Tragically, but predictably, in the polarized red-blue era of President George W. Bush, the Iran issue risks becoming another liberal vs. conservative flashpoint.
We cannot afford another round of caricatured political cockfighting between seemingly trigger-happy Republicans and head-in-the-sand Democrats over whether to “nuke” Iran before it can do the same to us and our allies.
The Iraq imbroglio has made the military option far-fetched. Liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats must unite in derailing Tehran’s race toward nuclear power by fighting intolerance among the mullahs. It is in everyone’s best interest to develop a strategy that can pressure Iran politically, morally and diplomatically, rendering the debate about a military attack moot.
The West needs a massive political mobilization against the Iranian government and its representatives, combined with a warm outreach to the Iranian people. The model should be the various American protest movements opposing the Soviet Union that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. In February, the former Soviet prisoner of conscience Natan Sharansky called for such a movement based on the successful drive to free Soviet Jewry. That movement worked because it overlapped with a broader push to protect all Soviet dissidents – the outspoken Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov became famous along with Sharansky, who endured persecution as a Jew and a democratic activist.
Today, as with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, the Western public and media perpetuate the bigotry of low expectations regarding Iran and other Islamic autocracies. Few people seem surprised or upset when Iran jails women or labor unionists or professors, just as few once bothered noting Soviet oppression. The movements four decades ago spotlighted the state’s crimes and reignited outrage; it is now time to get angry and activist about the Islamic Republic of Iran’s human rights abuses.
In the last month alone, various branches of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran have convicted Nusheen Ahmadi Khorasani, Shahla Entesari, Parvin Ardalan, Fariba Davoodi Mohajer, Sussan Tahmassebi and Azadeh Forghani. Their “crime”? Agitating for equality for Iranian women.
In April, Human Rights Watch reports, 30 members of the Hamedan Teachers Association were imprisoned for exercising their rights to free assembly; as many as nine may still be detained. Just days ago, word leaked out that Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian scholar at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center, is now imprisoned in Iran. She entered the country to visit her 93-year-old mother.
All this nastiness occurs against the backdrop of Iran’s significant progress in enriching uranium, the recent Holocaust denial conference and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated threats against the United States as well as Israel. Where is the outrage against all this viciousness? Where are liberals in this fight against religious fundamentalism and oppression? What are conservatives doing to ensure that the Iranian nuclear threat is effectively contained?
The Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri has cleverly proposed that all Iranian diplomats, cultural attaches and economic officials get the same treatment Soviet diplomats received in the 1970s – constant jeering, repeated protests, multiple vigils – until the regime frees its political prisoners, tolerates dissidents, ends its nuclear arms program and stops being so bellicose. Aggressive dollar diplomacy should reinforce this legal street theater. While seeking to end the West’s oil addiction, corporations should boycott Iran, divesting from stock holdings, refusing to transact business and trying to cripple the oil economy that funds Iran’s infrastructure of oppression.
Some indicators, beyond the Soviet Jewry success, suggest such a broad-based grass-roots movement might succeed. Many Iranians have long resisted the mullah’s heavy hand, subtly but courageously. Frustration appears to be growing with the economic impact that the backlash against Ahmadinejad’s ravings has already caused. Iranians have a long history of an enlightened commitment to freedom. The thought of their country topping an international rogues’ list – and being the object of a moral campaign of indignation – would wound national pride. The million or so Iranians living in the United States can provide important leadership here, offering sage counsel regarding tactics, as well as informal intelligence charting the progress.
The women who were convicted for seeking female equality should become household names until all are released. These names are no more incomprehensible to most Americans than the names Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn once seemed. At the time, people scoffed at the idea of taking on the Soviet Union or trying to free the Soviet Jews. Today, the Soviet Union no longer exists and nearly a million formerly oppressed Jews live freely in Israel.
Iran must be stopped; it can be stopped peacefully. On this issue liberals can prove their foreign policy grit, while conservatives can demonstrate their diplomatic discipline. We must unite for the sake of world peace, and for the sake of the Iranian people.
Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of “Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.”
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