Time to Stand With Iran's People

Protests in Iran continue on Tuesday as millions of ordinary Iranian men and woman stand up to a regime that is feared, hated and distrusted by the population. The spark for the latest nationwide protests was economic, but it ignited a combustible grievance that has been steadily building since at least the late 1990s — in truth since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The vast majority of Iran’s 80 million people have no memory of the Revolution, and see only a brutal regime that enforces a medieval Islamic code of social mores while enriching itself and squandering the revenue provided by the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves. Highly educated and technically literate, young Iranians admire and, to the extent feasible, adopt many of the West’s cultural practices in music, television, dress and treatment of women. Yet they see their young Western counterparts enjoying higher employment numbers and freedom of expression, while young Iranians suffer a 40% unemployment rate and state-controlled speech. Very much like Soviet communism in the 1980s, the Islamic Revolution in Iran is old, tired and no longer able to inspire loyalty with its ideas, instead demanding loyalty with its guns.

The regime’s reaction to the latest protests has followed the usual playbook of denunciations by various officials, harsh crackdowns by the security forces, and of course blaming external forces for all of Iran’s problems. President Hassan Rouhani, who is widely blamed for the lack of any economic benefit for ordinary Iranians following the 2015 nuclear deal, stated Monday, “Our great nation has witnessed a number of similar incidents in the past and has comfortably dealt with them. This is nothing.”

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