THE DEBT TO THE PEACOCK THRONE:

Turning the Arab street to Main St. (Steven Martinovich, October 9, 2002, Washington Times)

A news story broke recently that received scant attention from the West's major newspapers. The story dealt with the release of a poll of 1,500 Iranians which revealed numbers that proved to be the political and cultural equivalent of the major seismic events that often rock Iran. It was a poll which prompted that country's conservative judiciary to take two men to court for "publishing lies to excite public opinion," ignoring that the poll was in fact the public's opinion.

On Sept. 22, the news agency Irna published a poll conducted by Iran's National Institute for Research Studies and Opinion Polls (NIRSOP) that found that 74 percent of respondents supported dialogue with the United States. Even more frightening to the Islamic fundamentalists who rule Iran, 45.8 percent believed America's policy on Iran is "to some extent correct." It seems that authoritarian regimes are always the last to know that they are unpopular with the people they rule.

Though many in the West may not be aware of it, Iran is currently tearing itself apart over the issue of its future.

Brother Martinovich weighs in with a nicely turned column about the coming collapse of Islamic extremism, which looks to be well underway in Iran (and in Palestine). The one thing we'd caution is that a successful Iranian transformation to a more secular nation might not necessarily be a leading indicator of the possibility of such change in other states for one counterintuitive reason: The Shah. We tend to think of the Shah as a retrograde figure, a totalitarian who stifled the aspirations of his people, but he may more appropriately be viewed as a modernizing and Westernizing figure, almost in the mold of Ataturk, though without the same strong grip on the affection of his people. As the great Jeane Kirkpatrick was scorned for pointing out twenty years ago, right-wing autocrats, however much they offend our delicate sensibilities have the great advantage that they espouse democratic virtues, even if they don't strictly observe them. Moreover, as conservatives, they tend to foster existing institutions, rather than try to reinvent society from the ground up. In these senses they very much sow, or tend, the seeds of their own eventual destruction. Sooner or later they end up being held accountable to their own ideals and, because the underlying society is still relatively healthy, there exists a structure ready to replace them.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 9, 2002 10:43 AM