George Bush Was Right

A few commentators have claimed that the uprising in Iran is an example of the "Obama effect"—a supposed result of his appeasing "outreach" to the Islamic world in his Cairo speech. This has been offered without any evidence to support it, and it has been thoroughly debunked by Caroline Glick.

There is an Obama effect at work in precipitating the crisis in Iran—but it has worked in the opposite direction. Obama's attempt to reverse America's foreign policy did not embolden the Iranian people to protest against a rigged election. It emboldened the regime to rig that election in the first place.

The Washington Times reports that in early May the Obama administration sent a letter to Iran's head dictator, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, making a groveling plea for "cooperation in regional and bilateral relations." The Iranians got the message: that the US was no longer likely to take any action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. So Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that the nuclear issue was "closed forever"—and the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei faction was encouraged to believe they could get away with rigging the presidential election.

Note that they didn't just rig the election to ensure Ahmadinejad would win; they rigged it to give him a landslide. The apparent intent was not just to keep Ahmadinejad in office but to provide an excuse to push aside moderates and political opponents within the regime. It is reasonable to assume that this was meant to clear the way for a final push toward a nuclear bomb—and to prepare for greater Iranian aggression once they could claim to be a nuclear power.

In short, the real "Obama effect" is that the Iranian regime sensed American weakness and was winding up to deliver a punch against the West. But they didn't count on one thing. They didn't realize that they were much, much weaker than us. And there is growing evidence that the Iranian theocracy was weakened because of a blow America had already delivered against Iran—a blow much more potent than anyone realized.

The nature of the Iranian regime's weakness is obvious: it has lost moral legitimacy in the eyes of the people it rules over. Specifically, as Fareed Zakaria argues, the election protests represent a widespread rejection of the central ideological doctrine of the regime: the divine and unquestionable authority of the supreme religious leader. When Ali Khamenei proclaims that Ahmadinejad's supposed election victory was divinely ordained, and everyone still rejects it, that means he is no longer accepted as a moral or religious authority.

What is less obvious is that this loss of legitimacy was already an established fact before the election. The surge of support behind the candidacy of Mir Hossein Mousavi when he became the stealth candidate of the liberals and reformers, as well as the immediacy with which protests broke out after the government announcement that Mousavi had supposedly lost—all of this indicates the rigged vote did not cause the loss of the regime's moral authority; it merely brought it out into the open, causing Iranians to realize exactly how many of them shared a contempt for their leaders.

As for the earlier and underlying cause of the rejection of the Iranian regime, here there is big news. Multiple sources have been reporting about behind-the-scenes machinations among the clerics who elect the Supreme Leader—and who are now considering replacing Khamenei, possibly with a diluted collective leadership. The AP covers this story, and so does the Washington Post's David Ignatius, while apparently Al-Arabiya is saying that Ayatollah Rafsanjani has already lined up enough votes to replace Khamenei.

But what really caught my attention was the news, via ThreatWatch's Steve Schippert, that these meetings have included "a representative of Iraq's Ayatollah Ali Sistani." Why is this important? Sistani, like the dissident Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, is of the old Shiite "quietist" school which believes religious leaders should not directly involve themselves in politics. Sistani rejects the Khomeinist doctrine of rule by a supreme religious authority, and therefore he has played a crucial role as an advocate for free elections in Iraq and against sectarian violence. You may recall that he played a particularly crucial role in giving religious sanction to the Iraqi government's dismantling of the Mahdi Army, the leading force attempting to impose an Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq.

Schippert also recalls to our attention a story I linked to back in 2007 about how Sistani was gaining a growing following in Iran. It's well worth following the link to read the whole report, but the most important passage is this one:

In Tehran's storied central bazaar, an increasing number of merchants are sending their religious donations, a 20 percent tithe expected from all who can spare it, to Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric—rather than to clerics closer to Iran's state power structure, said Jawad al-Ghaie, 48, a wholesaler of false eyelashes and nail extensions and a respected lay donor.

Speaking carefully to avoid directly challenging the Iranian government, he and several fellow merchants suggested that Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani holds more spiritual sway because of his lifelong commitment to quietism. That is the school of thought that says Shiite leaders should stay out of government….

"Any time religion is imposed by the gove

rnment," Ghaie added, "there is a bad reaction."…

The report concludes:

The war in Iraq has failed to produce the democracy domino effect that its US advocates contended would crack open calcified regimes across the Middle East…. But ever since US-sponsored elections brought the Shiite majority to power, Iraq's imperfect liberation has quietly influenced the debate among religious Shiites about the role of religion in government.

For five years, from 2003 through 2008, Iran tried to conquer Iraq for its political system, using Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia to push for an Iranian-style theocracy. Now Iraq is returning the favor by invading Iran with the example of its political system of representative government and political freedom. Sistani's involvement in the internal debate within the Iranian establishment provides direct evidence of this influence.

In short, it is starting to look like the "democracy domino effect" is finally working. Or to put it in more controversial and surprising terms: George Bush was right.

No one is saying it yet, but the unrest in Iran is providing evidence that vindicates the case for the Iraq war and the Forward Strategy of Freedom. Helping to create a relatively free society in Iraq did help to inspire a push for regime change from within in Iran. By contrast, if we had abandoned Iraq to al-Qaeda and the Mahdi Army in 2006, as our domestic defeatists demanded, we would have vindicated and empowered Iran's theocracy.

No, I do not think that the success of the new Iranian revolution is assured—the latest news indicates a more severe crackdown by the regime, but also new support for the uprising from Iran's labor unions and from the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri. But the mere fact that this uprising has occurred provides evidence that the Forward Strategy of Freedom does work, that defending and promoting freedom overseas promotes America's interests.

And if the courageous Iranian protesters succeed in toppling the regime, imagine the further "domino effect" that could follow. Iran's terrorist allies in Syria and Lebanon are already getting nervous, and authoritarian Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are looking on the Iranian revolution with mixed feelings: they would welcome a weakening of the Shiite threat from Persia, but they also fear the example of a popular uprising against an oppressive government. And the government of China is fervently hoping that the Iranian revolution would just go away.

While I backed the basic idea behind the Forward Strategy of Freedom, I was very critical of its implementation, which I thought was too slow and hesitant, too influenced by a woozy, subjectivist concept of "democracy" (which led to disasters like the Hamas election victory in 2006), and too slow to work in time to prevent threats such as an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Yet it is beginning to look like we will get very lucky. President Bush may have done just enough to precipitate a really significant, central victory in the war, even despite his successor's collapse into appeasement.

And so, just as the Iranian revolution was preparing to strike a new blow against the West, it may fall to the blow America dealt to tyranny by fighting and winning the war in Iraq.