Opinion: US should respond carefully to Iran crisis

BOSTON — After years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli invective, and Israel’s threats to bomb Iran, it seems almost impossible that 30 years ago I was able to fly non-stop from Tel Aviv to Tehran on Israel’s national airline, El Al.

Israel didn’t have an actual embassy in Tehran, but it had a trade mission that operated as an embassy, and there was a close alliance between Israel and the Shah of Iran. The reason: both were suspicious of the Arab world in between.

It has always been Israeli policy to try to reach out to a non-Arab state on the far side of the Arab world — Turkey serves that function today — much the way France reached out to Russia in the early years of the last century because they both had Germany to worry about. But those were in the days of the Shah and the Czar respectively, and revolutions ended both alliances.

We tend not to remember now, given 30 years of hostility, but President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger tried to build Iran up into what they hoped would be their surrogate policeman in the Persian Gulf, giving Iran advanced weapons as a bulwark against Soviet Russia. Presidents Ford and Carter continued the policy.

When former CIA director Richard Helms was our ambassador to Iran he told me the Russian ambassador had made a fuss to the Shah, asking how he could possibly accept a spy as America’s ambassador? The Shah answered: “At least I know the Americans have sent me their top spy.”

Today, Israel flirts with the idea of an anti-Iranian coalition with Arab states. And the United States today seeks Russian help in building sanctions against Iran. It is also largely forgotten that the Shah toyed with the idea of having a nuclear weapon.

Such are the vicissitudes of alliances and nations, but some things do not change. Iran is heir to an ancient Persian culture and the majority of its people may be deeply religious Muslims, but they are not Arabs. Iranians are a proud people with a profound sense of their own history.

Iran follows the Shiite branch of Islam, while the vast majority of Arabs are Sunni. The suspicion and hostility between these two branches of Islam continues. Although most Arabs may not have been unhappy to see Saddam Hussein go, they were horrified to see Shiites empowered in Iraq, which had always been run by Sunnis.

Our great ally in the region, King Abdullah II of Jordan, warned of a Shiite crescent stretching from Iran across Iraq to link up with the Shiite majority in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia worries because its own Shiite minority happens to inhabit the eastern regions of the kingdom where the oil is.

 The anti-Iranian rhetoric of today holds that Iran is nothing more than a theocratic and corrupt dictatorship. It is true that 30 years after the Islamic revolution, many Iranians, especially the urban and educated young, are longing for reforms and changes in their society. But it would be a mistake to think that the ayatollahs don’t depend on the will of the people. The consent of the government is important to them for their legitimacy. So is their rough form of democracy.

Their elections are not exactly like American or European elections. The non-elected ayatollahs decide who can run for office, but then, as an Iranian said to me, “did not your unelected supreme council, your supreme court, decide who was to be your president in 2000?”

The point is that the ayatollahs always said that there was no need for Iranians to take to the streets as in the Shah’s time because dissent could be played out in the political arena. Elections may have been set within certain parameters, but they were hard fought and usually fair. But should the safety valve of elections be shut down, should descent no longer be able to find a release through elections, such as they are, then people take to the streets. And this is what is happening now.

It has happened before, and in the past the ayatollahs have been adept at shutting down reform. But this is the greatest crisis Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has faced up until now, because it is a threat to his legitimacy. The mass of Iranians may not object to having a supreme leader, but, as it was in the Shah’s time, they want some flexibility and political say within the system.

The irony is that the Shah pushed reforms too fast. His secularizing “white revolution” was too high handed and radical for a deeply conservative people. Today, the ayatollahs are holding out against reform too hard and too long.

We don’t know how this drama on the streets of Tehran will play out. Tipping points are usually unpredictable. No one was more surprised at the timing of the revolution against the Shah than the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Paris, who scrambled to get on a plane to return to Tehran and take advantage of the shift.

It would be a mistake, however, for President Barack Obama to think of the events in Iran today as simply another example of “people power,” as demonstrated in the Philippines against Ferdinand Marcos during President Ronald Reagan’s administration. Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, recently wrote that he had helped persuade Reagan to withdraw support from Marcos at a critical time, and that Obama should be ready to speak out more in favor of the demonstrators in Tehran.

But there is nobody on the Iranian political scene that can be considered “our man,” as was Marcos, and the history between the U.S. and Iran is more freighted with grievances and misunderstandings than it ever was between the U.S. and the Philippines.

Overt American support at this delicate moment would be highly dangerous given the complicated history and passions of the region.

Editor’s note: President Obama made a carefully worded statement on Iran on Saturday.

Read more about Iran’s election and its aftermatch:

Iranian rockers find their voice

‘Don’t the Basij have parents?’

Protester vs. protester in Iran

Iran: Revolution, Tiananmen, or something else?

Iran election: Obama’s dilemma