February 11 has come and gone. The 31st anniversary of Iran's Islamic Revolution did not witness a historic confrontation between a human rights movement struggling to be heard and a regime that used every trick in the book to mobilize its supporters. Bussed in and bought off, driven by their own volition or by a massive case of collective false consciousness, the regime's supporters came a million strong, to proclaim, repeat or dutifully mimic their love for the Revolution, for Imam Khomeini, and for his heir, Supreme Leader Khamanei.
Having failed to mobilize their supporters en masse, Green Movement leaders are tearing their hair out trying to divine what went wrong. They should not be too hard on themselves. Every social movement experiences peaks, valleys and the occasional rut. Self-criticism is thus both good and necessary; but too much of it only plays into the hands of the regime.
Watching these events from afar, our own Iran experts and pundits are now arguing over the meaning of February 11 for U.S policy. Unfolding in an over-populated blogosphere that gives pride of place to the shrillest voice, this debate has often fallen into its own rut of analytical polarization. We need to climb out of this hole and meet on the common ground of empirical political reality and sober analysis.
For starters, consider the two groups battling it out in the blogosphere.
The No Appeasement Group (NAG) accuses the Obama administration of a failure of nerve and vision. Some of its prominent voices, such as Joshua Muravchik, Robert Kagan and Richard Haass, argue that the administration is so eager to get a deal on enrichment, and so fearful of giving Tehran a good thrashing, that it has abandoned a clear and present opportunity to bring down a regime—one which the NAGers insist has lost all legitimacy. For this group, February 11 provided the "Tear Down This Wall" moment, one that the administration supposedly missed.
By contrast, the Talk Already Group (TAG), led by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, not only denies that Iran's ruling regime is washed up, but also claims that Ahmadinejad won a clear majority during the June 12, 2009 presidential elections. In any event, this camp argues that regime legitimacy should have little or no bearing on the question of engaging Tehran. For the TAGers, Washington should either get serious about negotiating and/or prepare for a policy of containment and deterrence.
It is hardly surprising that the NAGers have quite a few vocal adherents and many quiet sympathizers. After all, they argue on behalf of a human rights movement of middle class (and in many cases, highly Westernized) Iranians who rightly believe that their votes were distorted, ignored, or simply not counted during the June 12 poll. When these men and women took to the streets, their massive, peaceful protests were captured globally on the Internet. Who could blame some Western observers for concluding that the streets of Tehran were much like the streets of Prague on the eve of Czechoslovakia's 1989 "Velvet Revolution?"
By contrast, the TAGers' assertion that the regime retains a strong base of popular support was bound to attract only a few lonely adherents—at least in public. Some analysts, as well as many activists, fear that highlighting the regime's strengths, or even more so, the opposition's weaknesses, might seem like a defense of the regime or a discouraging swipe at opposition. Thus many analysts—including not a few who are wary of the neo-conservative intellectuals who form the core of the NAGers—have shied away from any assessment that highlights the regime's capacity for self-preservation.
I have resisted the simplicities of both camps. Thus I have warned against the allures of wishful thinking that some supporters of the opposition have displayed. This is not because I do not sympathize with Iran's human rights movement (far from it!), or because I have any warm feelings for the regime.
Still, I do believe that the building blocs for a sustainable political opening in Iran are yet to emerge: the regime still retains a large measure of unity, it commands critical bases of organized support in the country-side and in lower-middle class urban areas, and as the failure to mobilize en masse on February 11 suggests, the Green Movement faces the up-hill battle of unifying its ranks and forging a realistic strategy for organizing wider numbers behind a politically feasible set of goals.
That said, I do not subscribe to key elements of the NAGer thesis. Indeed, it is simply wrong to argue, as the Leveretts do, that the opposition's uphill battle cannot be partly (or even mostly) attributed to regime repression. Absent the massive and well-organized effort of the security apparatus to muzzle the opposition, hundreds of thousands of Iranians would probably have taken to the streets on February 11.
Moreover, it is deeply misguided to imply—as the Leveretts surely do—that the opposition lacks political legitimacy or relevance merely because it constitutes a "minority." Even if the Green Movement represents only 30% (or even 20%) of the entire populace, this movement does speak for a strategically crucial urban middle class—a huge political plurality that has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade.
Many in this politically vital sector still believe in some version of an Islamic Republic. But their struggle to defend a pluralistic vision of that republic against the efforts of Iran's leaders to impose a populist dictatorship will continue to rattle the overall coherence and legitimacy of the regime. In today's Iran, as in the Iran of 1978/79, Tehran remains the politically crucial geographic arena for mobilizing for and against the regime.
For this reason, any analysis that reduces Iran's politics to "majority versus minority" entirely misses the essential point: Iran is a deeply divided society that pits elites against elites, and popular constituencies against popular constituencies. The confrontations that erupted over the summer of 2009 only widened the country's existential ideological, social and political gaps. If today the regime retains the upper hand, this is because it continues to deliver patronage to its rural and urban constituencies, because it uses force in ways that do not lead to mass public killing, and because its True Believers—first and foremost Supreme Leader Khamanei—have exploited the country's ideological and social divides by convincing their followers that any compromise with the opposition is political, social (and ideological) suicide.
A strategy of state-controlled mobilization and fear mongering might sustain the regime for some years. But escalating economic woes that cut across class and geographic lines, combined with periodic challenges from the urban middle classes, could eventually create significant fissures in the regime itself.
At that crucial juncture two critical questions will emerge: First, do Iran's rulers have the guts and common sense required for forging a compromise that averts further civil strife or, worse yet, civil war? (Their current Leader certainly doesn't!). Second, does the opposition have a coherent and unified strategy for exploiting these fissures to push for a reopening of the political field?
It is ultimately up to Iranians to answer these questions. As for those of us in the West who hope for a more democratic or pluralistic Iran, we must recognize that there is no magic formula that will remedy Iran's internal crisis or resolve our geo-strategic conflict with the Islamic Republic.
Daniel Brumberg is an associate professor of government and director of democracy and governance studies at Georgetown University. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy. His work focuses on political, social and economic change in the Middle East and wider Muslim World.
