MOVE THE MILLIMETERS YOURSELVES OR BE SHOVED KILOMETERS:

The Millimeter Revolution: Iran may be next in line, but Iranian reformerslike Emadeddin Baghi would rather take a go-slow approach to democracy. They remember the last regime change. (Elizabeth Rubin, April 6, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

A contemporary historian and author of 19 books (6 of which have been banned), [Emadeddin Baghi] knows that history moves slowly -- and that the path to freedom sometimes takes detours, even detours behind bars. ''We went to prison, the newspapers were all closed down -- some might judge everything we're doing a failure,'' he said. ''But from the beginning, I assumed the democratic procedure has to progress millimeter by millimeter. Those who are tired and disappointed, they expected kilometers.''

Kilometer democratization is attainable in one of two ways -- through revolution or through invasion, like the one now under way in Iraq. Some in the Bush administration have suggested that Iraq is just the first of any number of Middle Eastern countries that might soon experience ''regime change'' one way or another. Policy makers have billed the war in Iraq as a grand opportunity not only to topple a murderous dictatorship and eradicate weapons of mass destruction but also to create a ''free Baghdad that becomes a magnet for Arab democrats everywhere,'' in the words of one former consultant to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The administration has come around not only to nation-building, it would seem, but also to region-building. Iranians, who are not Arabs but are one of the region's biggest powers, know where they fit on the Bush axis of good and evil, and they are anxiously wondering whether they are the next target.

There are plenty of university students across Iran who will say in whispers that they hope Iran is next on America's democratization hit list. But delve a little deeper, and they'll admit it's a pipe dream -- that no matter how much Iranians may hate the regime oppressing them, if they saw American soldiers advancing across the Iranian border, they would take up arms to defend their soil and their history.

Iranians judge American intentions today through the lens of history, and thus with deep suspicion. Those who lived through the war with Iraq in the 1980's and watched Saddam's chemical weapons incinerating and suffocating their families remember well that it was America and the West that supplied those chemicals. Older Iranians remember how America plotted what amounted to a coup in 1953 against their most progressive political leader, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, and eventually installed the shah. [...]

To many, Khatami is Iran's Mikhail Gorbachev, a transitional figure on the way to the real future. Just as Gorbachev could not dismantle the institutions of Communism, Khatami, they say, is not the man who can unlock the chains of enforced religion imprisoning the country.

The students may wave banners and rally to the defense of older, more cautious reformers like Baghi, Ganji and Aghajari, the makers of the revolution whom some students now refer to as ''our reformed sinners.'' But the students themselves have no psychological block against stating the obvious -- that religion must be removed from government, that you can't have half a democracy. While Baghi concedes that ''there should be a separation between religion and the state,'' his statement comes with a big but: ''But in Iran, religion is part of people's way of thinking. Sometimes it occurs to me there's an inborn pattern in people's minds which is mainly formed by religious concepts.''

Baghi's millimeter evolution comes down to the will of the people. ''If the majority of people are Muslim -- and if and only if they want an Islamic state -- the president of the country should be a person who knows about Islamic codes,'' he said. ''This person could then be the president and supreme leader at the same time. But he should be elected every four years by the direct vote.'' The students know, however, that under the present conditions, the hard-liners would never allow such a vote to take place. And that's where the unfettered students may decide to pick up the mantle of change.

Taxi drivers, shopkeepers, students and professors are all quick to tell a visitor that Iran is not like the rest of the Middle East. In Arab countries, the governments are allies of the United States, and the people are anti-American. But in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the government may be anti-American, but the people have a thing for America. And it drives the hard-liners mad. In November, Abbas Abdi, famous for helping to lead the charge of radical students who scaled the American Embassy walls and so begin the 444-day hostage crisis, was arrested. The charges? Spying for foreigners. He had helped to conduct a Gallup poll commissioned by a parliamentary committee, and the ruling clerics didn't like the results. Nearly 75 percent of those polled favored dialogue with the United States, and 46 percent said they felt that American policy toward Iran was ''to some extent correct.''

As radical and impatient for democracy as the students are, however, most of them do not want to lead Iran into another bloody revolution. I asked Mehdi Aminzadeh, a 25-year-old student leader studying civil engineering, if there was anything brewing in Iran equivalent to Yugoslavia's Otpor, or ''resistance'' -- a grass-roots movement spread by Serbian youth that defeated the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic. (One of the opposition satellite television channels that are beamed into Iran by the Iranian diaspora in California constantly replays the chronicles of Milosevic's destruction of Yugoslavia and Otpor's destruction of Milosevic, as if trying to suggest a script for the students to follow.) No, he said. For now there is no social movement or political party tough enough and well financed enough to organize such mass demonstrations.

As for American designs to democratize the Middle East, the students are intrigued but wary. They are puzzled by Bush's religious and ideological rhetoric. ''We're trying to move from ideology to modernity, and Bush is moving from modernity to ideology,'' one student leader told me. The Bush administration's Middle East adventure, they say, is for Israel's benefit, and for the economic and oil interests of the United States. Bush's speeches about defending human rights and promoting democracy around the world resound in their ears like superpower hypocrisy.

So long as Iran can be restrained from going ahead with a nuclear program that seems increasingly intended to yield weapons, we should mainly use pressure to get it to liberalize. But what the students fail to recognize is that Americanism is not "modern" but religious and ideological. It is not ideology itself that is the problem, but that they've adopted the wrong one. No democracy in the Arab world will long endure unless the people retain the moral teachings of Islam--most especially an understanding that certain core human rights are secured by Allah's creation of Man--but, at the same time, they have to renounce its totalitarian aspects, the doctrine that requires governance and economics to be part and parcel of religion. It would be a tragedy if nations like Iran went straight from Islamic theocracy to the European secular model, which in failing to ground rights in anything other
than the State has thereby surrendered those rights to the State. If Islam can learn from the mistakes of modernity--with its elevation of the individual and destruction of all intervening institutions between the individual and the State--it may end up creating a healthier and more enduring form of democracy than that extant in the West. The millimetric revolution is the right way to go, if they can keep pushing it forward, but we have to harbor significant doubts that they can, particularly because the Muslim world seems to so spectacularly misapprehend America. We hope, but doubt. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 6, 2003 12:07 PM