Iran Is Not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya

Read the full article in The American Spectator

When a government feels the need to repeatedly shut off the internet to silence its own people, it exposes its most crippling insecurity: citizens who can freely speak to one another and the global community. That, more than drone strikes or foreign armies, terrifies the clerical state in Iran. The United States, therefore, does not need soldiers on Iranian soil to influence Iran’s future. It needs an unflinching policy of supporting the Iranian people, keeping the lines of communication open, and amplifying Iranian voices that are already demanding change. Recent American memory is crowded with debacles in Baghdad, Kabul, and Benghazi, and that catalogue of failure understandably feeds public skepticism about any talk of regime change. Iran, however, is not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya. The country has a century‑long history of constitutionalism, a sophisticated bureaucracy, and a shared national identity that long predate the Islamic Republic. Those dormant institutions and that cohesive civic culture are the foundation on which a post‑theocratic Iran could stand. The question is whether Washington will treat Iran’s inevitable uprising as the next chapter in Middle Eastern chaos or as the 21st‑century analogue to the revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe during...

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