Fareed Zakaria (whose Future of Freedom is a must read) has this to say about the possibility of revolution in Iran:
It’s possible but unlikely. While the regime’s legitimacy has cracked — a fatal wound in the long run — for now it will probably be able to use its guns and money to consolidate power.
I don’t know why anyone thinks they need money. Regimes from Cuba to Burma to Cambodia to North Korea stay comfortably esconced with only the power that flows from the cracked barrel of a rusty gun, proving again what can be observed since the dawn of human history: leaders need neither legitimacy nor coin to quell internal uprisings, they need only force of arms and the will to use them.
Soon after the revolution, Iraq attacked Iran, and the mullahs again wrapped themselves in the flag. The United States supported Iraq in that war, ignoring Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iranians — something Iranians have never forgotten.
You know what’s odd? Every time I hear this assertion, propagated by the mullah tyrants and treated as gospel by American leftists, that Iranians are holding a grudge over American “support” for the Hussein regime during the Iran-Iraq war — which support amounted to a handshake and a smile, during a period when Iraq was the world’s largest importer of arms — I never hear any mention of the possibility they might be grateful we spent much more time and effort containing and ultimately removing Saddam. Shouldn’t this net out to a giant positive in their attitude toward the U.S.?
And wouldn’t it make more sense for them to resent the French, Germans, and Russians who were arming Iraq (at considerable profit) and who opposed Saddam’s removal?
The situation under Saddam is a bigger deal than many people realize. For decades, Iranians were cut off from Najaf. Since Saddam’s fall, millions of them visit Iraq on holy pilgrimage every year — where they now see real democracy, which is probably a large part of why they’re now taking to the streets and demanding their own.
But while we’d all like to see the mullahs overthrown and a liberal democracy in Persia, the truth is there’s very little chance of that happening as long as the regime believes it has the moral right to brutally suppress dissent — and with the current U.S. administration’s avowed strategy of enabling and apologizing, there’s little chance of that changing.
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A minor quibble: We did give Saddam a little money, in the form of loan guarantees if I recall right. It wasn’t much. I share your frustration: The French, Germans, and Russians gave him way, way, WAY WAY WAY more, and were the ones who armed Saddam. It’s an amazing bit of anti-American propaganda to say that we “armed Saddam Hussein” that gets repeated no matter how many times or how thoroughly it’s debunked.
I might also quibble and say that we don’t really see “real democracy” in Iraq yet. We’ve seen legitimate free and fair elections, and a nation still walking on wet wobbly legs toward real democracy, but it isn’t there yet by the most rigorous standards; elections are still marred by problems of violence and fear of getting killed if you run for office is still very real in many parts of the country. The Freedom House report for 2008 (issued in early 2009) is fairly dispositive. No question it’s a massive improvement, but the country’s still got a long way to go before voting and running for office aren’t acts of bravery. (In much of the country; in other parts it’s as peaceful and stable as you could wish.)
And by the way, let me echo you:
I’m constantly amazed that anyone thinks that money, or lack thereof, is generally the biggest challenge for despots. It’s not. Many if not of the world’s most oppressive nations run with a staggering level of poverty, and harming an oppressed nation’s economy often backfires and merely strengthens the iron grip of those running it.
Sure, let’s see if we can’t cripple Iran’s economy; that will just make the despots take more from the people and oppress them harder. It’s what they did in Cuba, it’s what Saddam & his cronies did, it’s what Kim did, and it’s what we can fully expect most tyrants to do. All while blaming external forces for oppressing them economically, whether that’s real (in cases like Saddam) or imagined (in cases like Kim).
Dave & Dean,
It’s an interesting point you raise regarding money and tyrants. Wealthy tyrannies, though they’re fewer and far between, seem to be forced to liberalize (China, Chile, Spain) when a bust follows a period of growth. While poor tyrannies tend to hold an iron grip on power despite unfavorable economic traditions. Others I think have hypothesized on the chicken and egg problem of which came first, the wealth or the liberalization, but there’s definitely something there.
China and Chile both experienced economic growth because relatively enlightened leadership liberalized their economies. In Chile’s case, the government ultimately capitulated on moral grounds, while China’s leaders seem content to crush dissent quietly.
It’s really nothing more than having the will, or not having it.
Dean,
The loans to Saddam in the 1980s were largely for agricultural development and oil development. In any case, they were immaterial next to the gigantic loan guarantees from Saudi Arabia.
We’ve seen legitimate free and fair elections, and a nation still walking on wet wobbly legs toward real democracy, but it isn’t there yet by the most rigorous standards; elections are still marred by problems of violence and fear of getting killed if you run for office is still very real in many parts of the country.
True, but this is a problem in many if not most poor democacies (at one point half of Colombia’s Supreme Court and a sizable fraction of their legislature were victims of violence). Democracy is orthogonal to violence in general. Iraq is violent, but a legitimate democracy.
I usually go by the measurements used by the political scientists who are in the business of making those measurements. Otherwise, you get nothing but pointless debates over what is or isn’t a democracy, and what democracy means, and it’s all purely a matter of opinion.
In most schools of political science, there are mainly two toolsets for analyzing a country on basic political science measurements; one is the Polity database, and the other is the Freedom House database. The Polity database is massively more granular and is virtually useless for determining a strict standard for what is or isn’t a democracy; it essentially treats the question as almost superfluous or simply unanswerable except as a matter of opinion. Freedom House’s data set has always striven to answer bigger, far less granular questions such as whether or not your nation’s rated a democracy. They’ve been using the same basic methodologies for over half a century, and the exact same methodologies since 1973, so if you want something in terms of reproducible and empirical data, you have to go to them on this question–and so far they still say “no” on Iraq, because running for office is still too dangerous and freedom of speech and press are granted by law but the law is hard to enforce and saying the wrong things in the political arena can still too easily get you or your family crippled or killed.
I have no doubt that they’ll probably get there, especially now that it’s clear that President Obama is committed to that goal and is basically doing nothing, in the big scheme of things, any much different than his predecessor. Which I utterly applaud him for, as tempted as I am to be snotty about it.
Zach: Yeah, I’m with you there. It appears to me, in looking at the history of attempts to strongarm tyrannical governments with economic coercion, that poor economies really don’t weaken dictators who are clever and ruthless enough, and attempts to weaken their economies often only strengthens their hands.
This isn’t always true, occasionally economic sanctions and such appear to have a positive effect. The best example I can think of is Apartheid-era South Africa, where economic sanctions and near-universal global condemnation seem to have made a big difference. Of course, South Africa is an ironic example, because, at least for the whites at the time, it WAS a democratic nation; if you were white, you could vote, if you were white, you had basic freedoms that we take for granted. It seems possible to have strongarmed and shamed them into doing the right thing; I’m pretty sure that if South Africa had been a dictatorship ruled by someone like Robert Mugabe (or a white equivalent), all that global condemnation and economic face-slapping would have had little effect.
With tyrants, economically harming their nations seems to me to usually just cause this reaction: “Hmm, my nation has less money now? OK, I’ll just take a bigger chunk of what’s left so I can maintain my own cushy lifestyle without a problem, and then I’ll blame everything on outsiders and crush anyone in my own country even faster if they argue about it.”
Economic ruin doesn’t seem to have done a damned thing to weaken Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il, and I suspect that’s the main reason why.
Dave,
With China the boom/bust I am talking about is what happened directly after the revolution and leading to the cultural revolution. The Chinese economy was quite strong in the years immediately following the revolution – standards of living skyrocketed before the policies of the great leap forward and ensuing maoist policies led to the famine and economic destruction preceeding the 1976 era of reforms.
I’m pretty much winging it here, but it seems to me that without the preceding boom, where people realized that the country was capable of moving on an upward trajectory, the ridiculousness of mao’s later policies wouldn’t have left the populace at large, let alone other members of the party establishment, anxious for change.
similarly for chile, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but for what it’s worth there was a severe economic downturn in ’82 that roughly corresponds to pinochet’s beginning of liberalization.
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