It began on July 8th, 1999 with a peaceful demonstration in Tehran, Iran. But by the end of the week, the Islamic Republic was responsible for the killing of several students, the disappearance of dozens of others, and thousands of arrests. There was mass rioting in the streets and Iran was thought to be on the brink of some kind of new student revolution.
But alas, the government was not going to have it. Indeed, it was a government born out of a revolution itself only twenty years before. They now had the guns, they now had the jails, and they now had the money. That's all it usually takes to control an uprising of an unarmed people with no organized resistance. It was only ten years before that the world witnessed the Chinese put down of protestors in a much more disturbing way at Tiananmen Square, where they mercilessly slaughtered thousands of people.
Today's story in Iran is really a story of what might have been. What if the American government had allowed or even encouraged Iranian American citizens to support an armed resistance for democracy in Iran? What if the U.S. government had learned and actually reacted to that mini revolution in 1999 to support a regime change movement?
But they didn't. The Clinton years, whose foreign policy consisted mainly of hands-off bombing campaigns, were winding down without apparent interest in revisiting policy on Iran. A few years earlier, in April 1995, President Bill Clinton had issued a complete embargo on all dealings with Iran, prohibiting any commercial and financial transactions with Iran. These blanket restrictions along with further sanctions against countries dealing with Iran proved to be as far as the U.S. government was willing to go with Iran policy. Creative foreign intervention had become a thing of the past for the United States, at least when it came to Iran, and civilians in Tehran were left to be forever on their own.
The neo conservative faction in America likely had some kind of different idea. Perhaps they imagined supporting armed resistance on both sides of Iran’s borders in now U.S. occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, that was to be stifled by a multi-year military entanglement in both countries.
And that’s where we are today. It is an Iranian nation with no alternative government solution with its people fighting for a so-called democracy within a ruling theocracy; fighting for at best a rollback from a radical powerless religious president to a moderate powerless religious president – a similar government to what they had for eight years under Mohammad Khatami.
It is an epic failure of American foreign policy intervention. There has been, in fact, no intervention at all. It is not only a tragedy for the Iranian youth full of hope yearning for a 21st century government, but a policy mistake that has led to a continuation of this extremist regime in Iran. Now would have been the time for armed resistance in Iran to chase out the Mullahs. Instead, the American government is left powerless amid sporadic nationalist protests and Islamic chants. An Iranian government overthrow and a secular democracy is still a long way away without an organized fully funded democratic opposition group. Only now can we hope that this time, American foreign policy on Iran will begin to anticipate the opportunity for democratic intervention. American values are the right values, especially when a people are loudly demonstrating their preference for those values in the face of arrests, torture and death.
