| Submit your comments on this article |
| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Iran Revolution's End Will Be Heard Around World |
| 2010-02-12 |
| Anti-government demonstrators showed up as scheduled on Iran's streets Thursday, commemorating in their own defiant way the 31st anniversary of the country's Islamic revolution. Government forces, meanwhile, worked overtime, and apparently with some success, to clamp down on the protesters. Important as the day's efforts by the dissidents may be, though, their significance transcends one day, or one anniversary. It is simply this: The Iranian revolution in 1979 was the biggest event of the last generation in the Middle East, spawning wars and radicalization that have reshaped the region and, to some extent, the world. If we're now watching the slow unwinding of that revolution, the consequences will be equally momentous. To be sure, this is a long-term question, not a short-term one. Iran's Islamic government in its current form is well-entrenched, and the Revolutionary Guards that sustain it are by far the country's most powerful force. The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shown that it possesses the most important attribute of any imperiled regime, which is the willingness to use brute force to quell rebellion. So it may take years rather than months to know the end result of today's grass-roots opposition to the Ahmadinejad government, and there is a distinct limit to what the U.S., or any outside force, can do to affect the course of opposition within Iran. Yet slowly, things appear to be changing. For one thing, the world increasingly views Iran's mistreatment of its own dissidents as a problem on a par with its nuclear program. One small sign of this came Thursday in the U.S. Senate, where a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a bill that would compel the Obama administration to target economic sanctions on Iran at officials who abuse their citizens' human rights, not just at those involved in the country's nuclear program. "The scheme of the bill is straightforward: targeted sanctions against human-rights abusers in Iran," said one Senate aide involved in drafting the legislation. |
| Posted by:Fred |