The Next Iran

The fact that Iran could "promote" its own democracy should be enough of a refutation in and of itself to the neoconservative agenda. -- LOG

true indeed, even if the Green Revolution falters. In the end, the seeds of the regimes destruction are being sown. The best they can do is put it off for a while. The question is, what will replace it? I suspect that the neoconservatives - who both rushed to assert that Ahmadinejad's victory was preferable even as they now fault Obama for not interfering - will find much fault with Iran v3.0, regardless of the outcome. They will surely find occasion to sing "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb bomb Iran" again the moment it becomes clear that the "new" Iran is no less patriotic or nationalistic thanthe "old" Iran, that it still takes its religion of Islam seriously, still sees nuclear capability as an essential element for its own national security, and still actively promotes its own regional hegemony in its backyard, a backyard that has at least one aggressive (and nuclear-armed) antagonist prone to extreme hostile rhetoric.

I hope the Iranian nation awakens from the nightmare that the theocracy has imposed upon it in the name of Islam. But the outcome of the election, or the Green Revolution, is largely irrelevant to the question of how our civilization should engage theirs in the future - recognition of mutual interest, or implacable hostility.

The simple truth is that the neoconservative agenda fundamentally has a single note - armed intervention for regime change. The consequences of such an agenda in Iran would have been equally likely to result in Neda's death.