Iran's dispirited opposition

Iran’s pro-democracy opposition was delivered a chilling setback last week when a ruthless government crackdown on dissent squelched planned rallies to mark the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. The regime arrested hundreds of people in the days leading up to the anniversary, and troops cut off streets around Tehran, preventing dissidents from gathering, other than in small groups. “We were defeated,” said one protester.

At a massive pro-regime rally, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasted that Iran has the capacity to make weapons-grade nuclear fuel. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during a Middle East trip, said Iran was becoming a “military dictatorship,” and she called for tougher sanctions to isolate the mullahs.

Iran’s pro-democracy movement needs the U.S. more than ever, said Reuel Marc Gerecht in The Weekly Standard. Despite recent setbacks, it continues to wage “the most momentous struggle for the Muslim heart and soul in the Middle East.” Yet by focusing U.S. policy on Iran’s nuclear posture, President Obama “gives the distinct impression that he’d rather have a nuclear deal” than a democratic Iran.

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It’s not either/or, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Obama can use sanctions to try to make a deal on the nuclear issue while still “betting on Iranian democracy in the long run.” Iran already has “serious economic problems,” said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Additional sanctions will “remind Iranians of the government’s failure to provide social and economic justice, and of Iran’s isolation.”

The short-term prospects for the opposition seem bleak, said Gerald Seib in The Wall Street Journal, but their movement—and its demands for democracy and liberalization—won’t go away. And if Iran’s Islamic regime does eventually collapse, the repercussions would be immense. The 1979 revolution inspired “Islamic fundamentalist sentiment” across the Muslim world, helping to spawn al Qaida. “Imagine a world in which an unwinding of Iran’s regime produced an unwinding of all those ripple effects.”