A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Has Iraqi Freedom Stirred Iranian Dissent?

Writing for Slate.com, Christopher Hitchens (best known for his outspoken atheism) makes the case that perhaps what has been accomplished in Iraq is rousing Iranian dissidents to action. Hitchens, a liberal, has had the intellectual honesty to consistently report the "good" that has come out of Iraq the past 3 years.

An excerpt:

Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about "the liberation of Iraq," he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran's regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media.

Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a "let's pretend" election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.

There are, no doubt, other determining factors as well. Contrary to the simplistic distinction between the "liberal urban" and the "conservative rural" that is made by so many glib commentators, Iran is a country where very rapid urbanization of a formerly rural population is being undergone, and all good Marxists ought to know that historically this has always been a moment pregnant with revolutionary discontent. In Saddam's Iraq, the possession of a satellite dish was punishable by death; everybody knows that the mullahs in Iran cannot enforce their own ban on informal media and unofficial transmission. And yet, precisely because they are so dense and so fanatical, they doom themselves to keep on trying. Every Iranian I know is now convinced that if this is not the end for the Khamenei system, it is at least the harbinger of the beginning of the end.