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Iran could yet be a model for the Mideast (Cameron Kamran, June 19 2003, Financial Times)

[H]ow do we harness Iran for positive change in the region? The US administration has recently resorted to tough talk to dissuade Iran from supporting terrorism, developing nuclear weapons and meddling in Iraq. But threats alone will probably backfire, forcing moderates to close ranks with hardliners - as happened after President George W. Bush included Iran in his infamous "axis of evil" last year - or giving the mullahs the excuse to crush an emerging civil society.

A more sophisticated strategy of subtle but continued pressure on the Islamic regime, combined with a vociferous effort to encourage the
overwhelming opposition to clerical rule, could work. Indeed, the Bush administration has openly applauded the recent wave of student-led protests across Iran. Some maintain that such a strategy will endanger Iranian moderates by associating them with the US, a nation Iranians have mistrusted ever since the coup in 1953, directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, that removed an elected government. But Iranian moderates have been in danger for some time as the ruling clerics have perfected the art of branding proponents of freedom as foreign stooges and rounding them up. The time to fear guilt by association has passed and the US will lose little by increasing its support for Iranian civil society as a whole. But it should do so openly, for the world to see.

If the US believes its troops fought for any worthwhile ideals in Iraq, it should pursue those ideals in Iran, albeit by peaceful means. After all, the country is poised for radical change. Seventy per cent of Iranians are under 30; they have more in common with the MTV generation than with their clerical rulers. They are among the more pro-American populations in the Muslim world and the US needs them if it is to rehabilitate its image in the region. For the sake of their future - and the emergence of pluralist civil societies in the Middle East - the US must act now.

People outside of tryannies often counsel that we should tone down our rhetoric because it aids the oppressors and unifies the regime. But then the tyranny falls and this is what we realize, Ronald Reagan (TIME 100):

As President, he kept pressure on the Soviets at a time when they were beginning to fail internally. He pushed for SDI, the strategic defense missile system that was rightly understood by the Soviets as both a financial challenge and an intimidating expression of the power of U.S. scientific innovation.

There are those who say it was all a bluff, that such a system could never have been and will never be successfully developed. Put that aside for a moment, and consider a more relevant fact: If it was a bluff, the Soviets didn't know it. And more to the point, Reagan as President had the credibility with the Soviets to make a serious threat. (And a particularly Reaganesque threat it was: he said not only would we build sdi, but we would also share it with them.) Reagan's actions toward the Soviets were matched by his constant rhetorical pounding of communism. He kept it up, for eight years, from "the evil empire" to "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," a constant attempt to use words to educate and inspire.

Margaret Thatcher said it best: he took words and sent them out to fight for us. He never stopped trying to persuade, to win the world over, to help it think about the nature of democracy and the nature of communism, and to consider which system it was that threatened the world's peace.

In doing all this--in insisting that, as the sign he kept on his desk in the Oval Office said, it can be done--he kept up the morale of the anticommunist West. And not only Americans. When Natan Sharansky was freed after nine years in the gulag, he went to the White House and asked Reagan never to stop his hard-line speeches. Sharansky said news of those speeches was passed from prisoner to prisoner in the forced-labor camps.

After eight years of Reagan and his constant efforts, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Until Iran is free, the President should end every speech with a simple phrase: The mullahcracy must be destroyed. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 20, 2003 1:54 PM