The Iranian Uprising is Home Grown, and Must Stay That Way

The growing nonviolent insurrection in Iran against the efforts by the ruling clerics to return the ultra-conservative and increasingly autocratic incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinjead to power is growing. Whatever the outcome, it represents an exciting and massive outpouring of Iranian civil society for a more open and pluralistic society.

Even putting aside the bizarre spectacle of self-proclaimed "leftists" coming to the defense of a right-wing fundamentalist autocratic like Ahmadinejad, this claim ignores several key factors:

1) Neo-conservatives and other American hawks were hoping for a victory by the hard-line incumbent to justify their opposition to President Barack Obama's tentative steps at rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.

2) Opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and the vast majority of his supporters are strongly nationalist, anti-American, anti-imperialist, and would neither desire nor accept U.S. support.

3) There has been a longstanding Iranian tradition of such largely nonviolent civil insurrections against imperialist powers and autocratic rulers and no outside power is needed to convince the Iranian people to rebel.

Since he was elected president in 2005, Ahmadinejad has filled a certain niche in the American psyche formerly filled by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi as the Middle Eastern leader we most love to hate. It gives us a sense of righteous superiority to compare ourselves favorably to these seemingly irrational and fanatical foreign despots.

Better yet, if these despots can be inflated into far greater threats than they actually are, these supposed threats can be used to justify the enormous financial and human costs of maintaining American armed forces in that volatile region to protect ourselves and our allies, and even to make war against far-off nations in "self-defense."

It is interesting how some of the very foreign policy hawks who just last week were dismissing Mir Hossein Mousavi's expected victory as irrelevant since, in their view, there was essentially no meaningful difference between him and Ahmadinejad, are now among the most self-righteous in denouncing the apparent fraud and the most outspoken in their pseudo-outrage at the results.

Their worst-case scenario for these American hawks would be a nonviolent insurrection that would topple Ahmadinejad and allied hard-line clerics and the development of a more pluralistic and representative Islamic Republic in Iran. . Neither the neocons nor Iran's reactionary leadership want to see that oil-rich regional power under a popular and legitimate government. Indeed, the neocons and Iranian hard-liners need each other.

Yet, Mousavi attracted a large and enthusiastic during the course of the campaign which may have led the ruling clerics to fear that the momentum of his incipient victory could result not just in limited reforms, like those attempted under former president Mohammed Khatami, but revolutionary change. The size and intensity of Mousavi's final campaign rally, in which he referred to Ahmadinejad as a "dictator" -- which, by extension, implied an indictment of the system as a whole -- may have tilted the clerics into believing they could not take the risk of allowing the anticipated results to be verified. Despite his candidacy displaying a personality and style closer to Michael Dukakis than Barack Obama, Mousavi came to represent the change so many Iranians, especially young people, desperately desired and appeared determined to make happen.