Is there a new revolution under way in Iran?

The American people got a good glimpse of the chaos in Iran in 1979 when Americans were held hostage for more than a terrible year -- but perhaps you really had to be in the Middle East to see and feel what a profound effect the “Islamic Revolution” had in that era on the entire region.

From Egypt and the Persian Gulf to Indonesia in the Pacific, there was a sense that the world was shaking and might not right itself for many moons. In other Muslim countries, the predominant feeling and fear was that the radical Persian Shiite faith would move step-by-step to take over one country after the other.

In December 1978, I had sat interviewing “the revolution’s” sacred leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in a small village just outside of Paris, and the unsmiling old man’s unforgivingly penetrating black eyes remain in my mind’s eye to this day. Once Khomeini had taken over in the winter of ‘79 from the Shah of Iran, I talked with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut, and he was breathless with excitement after reviewing the revolution’s troops with Khomeini in Tehran: “And I sat up there, and all these thousands of men marched by us, and I was with him,” he kept repeating.

By the 1980s, this devouring melodrama had moved to another status. Iran and Iraq had attacked each other, and a horrendous nine-year war ensued in which more than a million people died mostly agonizing deaths.

At one point, in 1984, I was one of a small group of foreign journalists taken by the Iraqis in a singular visit to the front lines east of Basra in southern Iraq. The enormous and unforgiving desert of that part of the world --- it looked more like cement than sand.

Once that war ended inconclusively in 1989, very slowly the whole idea of a Persian Islamic revolution transmogrified into the multitudinous international Islamic movements, most definitely including the terrorist ones of al-Qaida and the Taliban, which threaten the United States and the West today.

Few people guessed, with the fall of the Western-supported Shah, the reach that Khomeini’s movement would come to have. Suddenly there was 9/11 in New York, there were multiple attacks on embassies in East Africa, and the earth was shaken by the bombings of tourist sites from Bali to the Valley of the Kings. How could it possibly all end?

Well, without many people realizing it, the end to the generations of Islamic radicalism and terror -- perhaps the real end to that Islamic Revolution started by Khomeini in 1979 -- may now be even well under way in the same place where it started. In Iran. In 2009.

What even the most voracious reader of foreign news will be reading about Iran these days is the problem of her nuclear pretensions and ambitions. Certainly most readers know by now that Khomeini’s descendants in Islamic power, led by the country’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are driving the West mad with their ever-increasing nuclear power, aimed surely at possessing a bomb that could be aimed at Israel and others. And that is all quite bedevilingly real.

But what has become even more abundantly clear since the much-contested elections of last June 12 is the fact that Iran is now in the full midst of a new, liberal anti-radical revolution. It has now been six months since the violent demonstrations of that period -- and, even this week, the streets of Tehran are again filled with violent anti-government protests, the government becomes more repressive than ever, and the generational chasms grow more uncrossable.

Is it really too far to reach to ask whether a “new revolution” has not already begun in Iran? And whether, just as the first one spread to the entire region and became “the” movement of retrogressive change, that this one could become the region’s example of liberal change?

It may at first seem highly unlikely, to put it mildly. For even since the dark events of last June, the men of the Old Order have moved on the surface to consolidate power more fully. The Revolutionary Guards, founded in 1979 as Khomeini’s elite Persian SS corps, has used this period to sideline the regular intelligence agencies; the guards have taken over the media and big businesses, as well as funding and training paramilitary groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon; the government has announced the building of 10 more nuclear enrichment plants.

Yet as so often is the case in historic Persia, with its passion for intrigue and indirection, all is not as it appears.

As Barbara Slavin, one of the world’s best analysts on Iran, wrote recently in The Washington Times, “the embattled regime fears showing weakness in the face of persistent domestic political opposition and rising foreign pressure. Some even question whether supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ... is still in charge.” He may instead now be “subordinate to the Revolutionary Guards and other paramilitary forces that keep his government afloat.”

If this is true, and all indications are that it is, then American and Western policy must be very careful. First, not to turn this new, essentially student and youth revolt against the establishment to the establishment’s benefit. An attack on the nuclear plants, for instance, could accomplish this. Second, essentially to stand back and to allow Persian events to unweave their Persian selves in an always anything-but-clear Persian manner.

This is not a simple moment, and it would be a terrible tragedy not to grasp it with intelligence and nuance. For this could mean the beginnings of a real turnaround in the entire Middle East. This could signal the rise of the modernized Turkeys and the beginnings of the ends to the revolutionary “Islamic republics” and to Islamic terrorism.

 
* Georgie Anne Geyer has delivered distinctive foreign commentary from a variety of foreign fronts for more than 30 years.

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