A Revolution Still
A trial of Iranian Jews shows moderates haven't prevailed
The truth of Iran's political life is straightforward: President Khatami reigns but does not rule. This trial is but one way of placing him on the defensive. It provides the theocrats what the late Ayatollah Khomeini gained with his fatwa death sentence, issued against the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie--a way of keeping the revolution vigilant, of tripping up those within the Iranian political class (Khatami and his supporters today) who are eager to temper the revolution's sound and fury. What stands in Iran today is a deadly impasse: On one side are Khatami and the vast parliamentary majority he carried in elections; on the other side is the supreme religious leader Ali Khamenei, as well as the vast clerical apparatus that controls the official media, the judiciary, the wealthy bonyads (the foundations that account for something like 20 percent of the country's economy), and the vigilante squads eager to uphold the reign of virtue and terror.
A society never yields its truth to outsiders easily. U.S. officials may express some remorse for the overthrow of Mossadegh nearly five decades ago as contrition for the past and a gift to Iran's moderates. But the political cartography of Iran is vastly complicated. A hero to the modernists in that country, Mossadegh is at best an ambivalent figure to the theocrats. He was a man of secular nationalism, educated in the West. For many of the hard-liners, Mossadegh is more of an anathema than the shah. The great tribune of the Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, was disdainful of Mossadegh. These are Persian rules, not ours. If moderation is to hold, if the men and women who shouted themselves hoarse against the Great Satan (America) and the Little Satan (Israel) wake up to the poverty of their country and wish for themselves a better world, they will make it with their own hands. There comes a time when a people tire of blood--and of revolutionary virtue and terror. For Iran, the matter, for now, lies in the balance.
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