JASON SIBERT

As of the writing of this story, the administration of President Donald Trump is working out a ceasefire with Israel and Iran.

While the ceasefire is good news, the narrative that surrounds Israel, the United States and Iran has not ended. Let’s hope it ends in a happy way. The US and Israel both have authoritarian governments, and Iran has been a bad player in the Middle East for decades. Writers Eric Edelman, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Ray Takeyh provide a path forward in their story, “The Right Path to Regime Change in Iran: How America and Israel Can Create the Conditions for the Toppling of the Islamic Republic,” at  June 20.

In their analysis, the three writers hit on a key idea —the people of Iran should become stronger while the government becomes weaker, even though they had problems with the violence being used. They wrote: “Israel will have to do a lot more to shatter the coercive powers of theocracy’s police state—and do so without military actions that kill large numbers of civilians, especially women and children.”

In more than four decades in power, the Islamic Republic has faced more than one popular insurrection. Every decade, another social class defected from the revolutionary coalition. Students and liberals were the first to go shortly after the revolution in 1979. This was followed by elements of the middle class during the Green Movement of 2009, and finally, in the late 2010s, the working poor, in whose name the movement was waged. The regime beat back these uprisings.

These movements, pro-Western in nature, never gained critical mass, most likely because the Iranian people feared the nature of the Iranian state. The Israeli bombings have rocked the civilian population of Iran. Edelman, Gerecht and Takeyh said: “All the pathologies of the Islamic Republic are still intact. It remains a theocracy drowning in corruption. Core institutions, such as government ministries, are in an advanced state of decay, and social inequality, especially in the wake of soaring inflation, has deepened. Some observers imagine that Israel’s attack will stimulate a nationalist fervor that would help insulate the regime. But the bonds between state and society are too severed for such an outcome. In past demonstrations, the Iranian people have blamed their regime and not outsiders for their predicament. Another major protest movement is likely to arise. The question is what Israel and the United States will do to tilt the scales in the movement’s favor.”

Foreign policy realists, whether on the left or right, typically oppose using human rights and democracy as tools of power projection, and many Americans and Israelis are not interested in supporting human rights for Muslims. But the Israelis now appear far more attuned to how this advocacy, even if applied only to Iranians, reinforces the chances that the Islamic Republic might crack. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an authoritarian, urged Iranians to rise against their government, and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, both appear willing to think more seriously about supporting Iranians from the ground up. Edelman, Gerecht and Takeyh ended their story with a good point: “Iran belongs to the Iranians.”

Hopefully, the Iranian people will overthrow their authoritarian government and build a state that’s interested in conforming to Western norms or at least has no interest in projecting violence beyond its borders. Such a state could be key in a cooperative international order that emerges after the defeat of authoritarianism. A new Iran is due. Then let’s hope the people of Israel and the US overthrow authoritarianism through democratic means! 

Jason Sibert of St. Louis, Mo., is the Lead Writer of the Peace Economy Project.

Email jasonsibert@hotmail.com.