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| It is too early to tell what the outcome of Iran's deadly protests will be [AFP] |
Anyone who has lived during the past half century has watched many popular uprisings against governments.
Some, like the nearly miraculous collapse of East Germany and other Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe in 1989, were successful and relatively peaceful, as were the more recent "colour revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine.
Others, like the "Prague Spring" of 1968, the Tiananmen Square events in Beijing in 1989, or the Shia uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, were blood-soaked failures.
Whether a popular movement succeeds in a peaceful transfer of power, or is brutally repressed, depends entirely on the nerve of the ruling powers' leadership and the loyalty of its enforcers, the security forces or army.
In 1989, East German police and border guards stood aside and allowed jubilant crowds to rip down the hated symbol of their repression, the Berlin Wall.
In 1979, the ailing Iranian Shah lost his nerve and fled the country amid street protests and clashes.
But in 1956 the Central Committee of the Soviet Union did not hesitate to send tanks and troops to annihilate the poorly armed Hungarian revolutionaries and elderly communist rulers in Beijing did not flinch at sending troops from the provinces to mow down Chinese youths in Tiananmen Square.
Planting the seeds
It is too early yet to know what the outcome of the remarkable and dramatic events in Iran over the past week and a half will be.
The demonstrators, who have been largely forced off the streets with beatings, arrests and tear gas as of this writing, say the election victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, is a fraud.
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| Obama has said the US will not become a "foil" for Iran to blame for the protests [Reuters] |
The Iranian government and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic republic's supreme leader, however, say the election was proper and that no recount or revote will be allowed.
Much has been made of the role the digital revolution has played in the Iranian upheaval.
But even in much earlier instances of popular resistance to government authority, it has proved impossible for rulers to completely control images and information.
Something always gets out; even if the uprisings fail, such images often plant the seed of future unrest.
Back in 1989, when I spent some time in Beijing following the Tiananmen Square massacre, there were no mobile phone cameras, Bluetooth connections, or constant "Twittering".
But the indelible image of a lone Chinese man confronting a tank with nothing more than his thin body and indomitable will came out and inspired millions of people around the world.
In Romania in 1989, it was the televised picture of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's bewildered expression as jeers and whistles rang out from a crowd listening to his speech that triggered an all-out revolt.
US strategy
The people in Iran have much greater access to information flowing in and out of the country than did the Hungarians in 1956 or the Kurds in 1991.
The mobile phone video images of Neda Agha-Soltan's death will remain as vivid 10 years from now.
And the impulse among many politicians here in Washington is for the US to get more deeply involved, somehow, on the side of the Iranian protesters.
Barack Obama, the US president, thinks that would be a mistake.
"The United States is not going to be a foil for the Iranian government to try to blame what's happening on the streets of Tehran on the CIA or on the White House," he said in his press conference on Tuesday.
Stephen Walt, the distinguished professor of international relations at Harvard, makes a succinct argument in his Foreign Policy magazine blog that the US does know precisely how to deal with such a situation in Iran.
"As we learned during the Cold War, the proper response to thuggish authoritarian regimes is containment via deterrence, combined with hardnosed diplomacy on specific security issues and a sustained effort to win over their societies by showing them that we know how to produce a better way of life," he writes.
"That strategy won the Cold War without the manifold dangers of preventive war, and probably saved millions of lives in the process.
"The clerics and their front man may hang on for now, and they might even get a few [unusable] nuclear weapons one day.
"But time is on our side, and we can afford to be patient."
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