GLOBE EDITORIAL
Arising in Iran
1/17/2004
IT IS BECOMING harder than ever to ignore the contradictions at the core of Iran's Islamic Republic. The sham quality of the system's democratic facade was on display Wednesday when Iran's unelected supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told the 12 clerics he had appointed to a watchdog committee they should reconsider their disqualification of 3,600 reform candidates for Parliament. Khamenei's action in response to reformist protests might appear more democratic, but it leaves intact the Guardian Council's power to ban candidates.
The primary lesson Bush administration policy makers should draw from Iran's political crisis is to be patient. The spectacle of Iran's hard-liners thrashing about to beat back all challenges to their power while timid reformists are losing the support of a youthful population should bring home to President Bush and his advisers the value of that virtue.
The theocratic rule of the mullahs in Iran is doomed. Two-thirds of Iran's population today is under 30 years old. By overwhelming majorities they have now voted several times for regime change. They want a truly free press, freedom of speech and association, women's rights, and jobs for a rapidly expanding work force -- jobs that will come only in an economy that has been liberated from the mobster-like hold of corrupt clerics running unregulated conglomerates called religious foundations.
Since the clerics' vessel is sinking of its own accord, Bush should avoid any interventionist measures that the hard-liners might be able to use to legitimate their rule, rallying Iranians to them under the banner of nationalism. The longer the misrule of the mullahs goes on, the more Iran's youth are alienated from both the hard-line clerics and those figures such as the ineffectual President Mohammad Khatami who want to preserve the current system by making it only marginally less repressive.
Young Iranians are being inoculated against the lures of autocracy and extremism. The lesson has been painful, but they are learning to demand true democratic self-government. They have become partisans of civil and human rights and of Iran's opening up to a diverse world.
The clerical hard-liners on the Guardian Council revealed their fear not only of reformists but also of the popular will when they disqualified about half of the 8,200 candidates in the parliamentary election scheduled for Feb. 20. More than 80 of the 3,000 reformist candidates purged from the ballot are current members of Parliament, and many of them have been conducting a sit-in to protest the hard-liners' contempt for basic democratic fairness.
This is a drama about the decomposition of the system built by Khomeini. It should not be interrupted by outsiders.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
