Like most Americans, I am watching events unfold in Iran with a mixture of hope and a sense that the inevitable crackdown will be ugly. It certainly doesn't help matters that there are confusing reports on the legitimacy of the election, on the way Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khameini is handling it, and the obvious question of which way the military and Revolutionary Guards will turn once a final decision is made.
Twenty years ago we had the weird and wonderful spectacle of the snowballing revolutions in Central and Southern Europe even as China landed with both tank-covered feet on pro-democracy rallies in and around the capital city. It was easy enough both to cheer and mourn the events of that fateful year - from the erection of the statue of liberty in Tianenmen Square to the people tearing down the Berlin Wall to the snow-covered corpses of the Ceaucescu's on Christmas Day - because everyone knew the horrible nature of the regimes involved, and celebrated the possibilities presented by the utter collapse of totalitarianism, as well as mourned the death of any possibility for change in China.
Now, however, the situation is different. First of all, far too many in influential circles in the United States government hold a thirty-year grudge for the storming of the US embassy and subsequent hostage-taking following the Islamic revolution in Iran. Most of our policy toward Iran in the intervening decades has been premised upon payback, pure and simple.
Because of the myopia brought on by a natural desire to punish a country that managed to humiliate the United States and bring down a President, it is often difficult to decipher the reality in Iran from our own wishes. It is true the final legal authority in Iran is the Supreme Council, a group of religious leaders devoted to a particular interpretation of Islamic law. This, however, doesn't make it much different from Saudi Arabia. Unlike the Saudi kingdom, however, within the parameters of theocratic absolutism - the supreme law of the land exists under the umbrella of Islamic law - Iran has had a lively, even vigorous democratic history in the thirty years since the revolution. Its parliament is multi-religious. Women have been a vital part of Iranian politics and civil life (one could hardly say the same for Saudi Arabia). While the first decade to decade and a half of its life were caught up in the twin predicaments of vilifying the United States and conducting a very long war of attrition with Iraq, national leadership has swung back and forth between various adherents to principles of the original revolution and those who wished to see the national constitutional framework of Iran - an Islamic nation - as contiguous with modern, western ideas of the Open Society. While not holding the reins of power, such a view is still powerful enough to make for lively debate within Iran, and drove much of the (foreign) news coverage of the recent elections there.
I will not pretend I do not wish to see Iran emerge from its current crisis as a secular state (one of the perils of being an American is seeing the advantage of dismantling any relationship between the state and religious practice). I will not pretend I do not desire sitting Pres. Ahmedinejad (sp?) to step aside. My hope is that the military and security apparatus will stand to one side and allow the legal system to disentangle the mess Iran currently has.
I fear, however, this will not be the case. Blood has already been spilled. The government is cracking down on foreign journalists reporting events. It has blocked various internet applications that would provide information to the outside world - a vital necessity.
So I watch and wait. I hope, but I also fear.
