by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
My earliest political memory was the American hostage crisis in Iran during the late 1970s. That was the first political event that my little, growing mind could comprehend. Flash forward a few decades and I’m old and jaded and the prospect of autocracy in my own fucking country looms large in my mind.
And, yet, whatever is currently going on in Iran seems different enough to give someone as cynical as me a glimmer of…hope? It definitely SEEMS like we’re in pre-revolutionary Iran, that there might be a sudden shift and Iran will thrown off the yoke of the mullahs and rejoin the modern world.
But — and this is a huge but — it could go either way. It could be that there’s not a revolution, but a civil war. Or just a severe crackdown that leaves thousands dead. It’s very unusual for history to go in a straight line when there is a crisis like what’s going on in Iran at the moment.
So, I dunno. It’s very frustrating because there’s not really anything the United States can do to help the situation. In fact, if we do anything, we’re likely to make matters worse for the Iranians who want to breathe the fresh air of liberty, freedom and democracy.
I will note that if there was a successful democratic revolution in Iran, that would throw the status quo of the Middle East into a wood chipper. Suddenly, it might be possible for Iran and Israel to not be at each other’s throats anymore. While it definitely wouldn’t mean Middle East peace, it would definitely change things — the conventional wisdom of nearly 50 years of Middle East geopolitics would be thrown up in the air.
But I’m not prepared to have too much hope about a successful revolution in Iran. My thoughts are with the young women at the forefront of this nascent revolutionary movement, however. Those girls have guts.
