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Notes -
Fiery but mostly peaceful protests in Iran.
I don't quite want to take the position that the current unrest in Iran is bad, but I do want to consider it. There is a lot of discussion downthread about the insidious effects of pervasive and assertive civil disobedience on the legitimate exersize of state power, and I wonder why that same logic doesn't apply here. It's common in the American conciousness to assume that Iran = bad, but I get the impression that a lot of Iran's badness is exaggerated by Western media. Is the current government of Iran illegitimate? If so, why? Is it because Iran isn't a full democracy? The United States props up lots of countries that are less democratic than Iran. Is democracy in Middle Eastern countries even desirable? It doesn't quite feel right to categorically rule-out theocracy as a legitimate form of governance, even if most of us would find living under one alienating.
The elephant in the room is geopolitics. Iran is aligned with Russia and opposed to many US allies. It would be good for US geopolitical intrests for the current regime to fall. Does this somehow make angry mobs torching government buildings okay, another form of spooky moral action at a distance?
I am not an expert on Iran, so feel free to tell me if the Khamenei Regime is actually the second coming of the Khmer Rouge or Third Reich.
From what I understand, Iran has democracy, and has in fact had a very long-running democracy, it's just that it has a theocracy stapled on top of it – sort of like how the Constitution restrains US democracy, the Ayatollahs restrain Iranian democracy.
In my mind, this makes me more optimistic about regime change if it is genuinely a popular uprising, simply because (at least in theory) Iran would not need to reinvent the wheel from the ground up. They could (in theory, as I understand it) simply remove the Ayatollah and theocratic laws and keep the regular government in place. But real life is often messier than in theory.
I think this is correct, although I would suggest the tightness of their relationship is sometimes overblown. People sometimes suggest that Russia and Iran are joined at the hip, but Russia actually has pretty good relations with Israel and (from what I understand) has refrained from top-end weapons deliveries to Iran out of deference to Israel, and worked to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. (At this rate the Iranians are never going to be able to replace their F-14s...)
However, Russia and Iran definitely share an interest in containing US power. It's going to be tremendously interesting if Iran and Venezuela both switch to US-friendly or at least US-neutral within a month of each other. It is tempting to say that neutralizing Iran as a foe would wrap up US concerns in the Middle East, particularly if a lack of Iranian support crippled the Houthis. I think that's likely an overstatement, but if Iran and Yemen went down that would basically be the end of Middle Eastern governments that were really hostile to the United States.
That is a bit of a vacuous definition of democracy. It is alike to asking a prisoner to pick between the noose and the firing squad, then reporting that the government granted his request to get hanged, as if it was MAID instead of an execution. A lot of countries are democratic on paper and have elections, but are effectively dictatorships. Take the former German Democratic (!) Republic (!), for example. Sure, they had elections. Perhaps sometimes the vote even decided which SED candidate would get elected. But without broad freedoms of speech and the freedom of running for office, their system was very far away from what anyone would consider a functioning liberal democracy.
I also disagree with you on basing an Iranian democracy on a continuation of the institutions of the Ayatollah regime. There is always the danger of backsliding. The theocrats had 45 years to entrench themselves. If you simply remove the Ayatollah from their parliament, it seems likely that during the next depression, people will vote for the fundamentalists and they will install him again.
To me one of the immediate risks of having a government overthrown is a lack of continuity of government. Most democracies are insufficiently respectful of human rights to my mind. The reason that Iran's democratic government seems like a positive to me in this specific circumstance is because there might be a system of government that could survive the fall of the Ayatollah and provide basic order and, ideally, legitimacy, not necessarily because they would be a liberal democracy. In other words, ideally there is a known factor, not an unknown power vacuum, if the current system of government is overthrown.
I doubt the ayatollahs are actually this popular in Iran, but I could be wrong!
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