Is This Really Iran’s “Arab Spring”?
I remember the precise moment in February 2011 when I decided to go to Tahrir. I had been in Egypt on vacation that winter, as I often am, when the revolt against the thirty-year dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak erupted on January 25th. My initial caution was shared by many: dread of chaos and pessimism about a democratic outcome. The tipping point for me came when Mubarak’s police forces started shooting at peaceful civilian demonstrators. For the first time, I joined the throngs finding their way to Tahirir in support of the young protesters camping there.
I wonder, now, how Iranians are feeling. Is the tipping point for many of them the massacre of student protesters in January? By all reports the majority of the population is young, well-educated, and chafing under a cruelly repressive regime. Are they now welcoming the chance to topple the regime, even at the cost of foreign intervention? For others, is the bombing of their cities and collateral deaths of their fellow Iranians at the hands of Israeli and American forces too high a price? Do they look at Iraq after the American invasion of 2003 and want none of it?
In Egypt in January 2011, there was no bombing by foreign forces. There may have been covert intervention, as some have claimed, but whatever the case, the young idealists in Tahrir acted in good faith. If there had been an aerial attack by Israel in support of toppling Mubarak, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have spelled the end of any support for a revolutionary movement. Case in point: when Egypt was attacked in 1956, and again in 1967, even those who hated Nasser, those he persecuted most, like my father’s family, did not hesitate for a moment as to where their loyalties lay.
Liberal-minded Iranians today are in a hard place, whether they were hoping for foreign intervention to free them from the yoke of draconian mullah rule, or distrusting it. The odds of a democratic outcome are problematic, to say the least, and the lessons of the Arab Spring are cautionary in this respect. Egypt today, after months of turmoil and a brief, unserious flirtation with an Islamist party, has defaulted back to military dictatorship.
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