Don't Oversimplify The Protests In Iran

[Draggingtree]

NPR

 Don't Oversimplify The Protests In Iran

January 3, 201812:02 PM ET

For years, Washington's thinking on Iran has fallen into two oversimplified opposing camps. Regime apologists insist the Islamic Republic is strategically invulnerable and the United States must not only accept, but appease, the status quo. On the other side are American jingoists who rightly point to the Iranian regime's egregious behavior — human rights abuses at home and proxy bating of the U.S. and its allies regionally — and then wrongly conclude that no negotiation with the regime is warranted and that the only prudent policy is regime change in Iran.

Both were wrong in the past, and are even more harmful now when the regime is in the throes of a serious test.

The regime is strategically weak because it faces daunting challenges — from oil price changes and water shortages to a disgruntled, Internet-savvy, youthful population, led by increasingly assertive women, hampered by chronic double-digit inflation and unemployment, and angered by corruption, cronyism and the squandering of massive sums in proxy wars, particularly in Syria

No less prudent, indeed exigent, is the recognition that the work of democracy for Iran is the responsibility of the Iranian people themselves.    

[Draggingtree]

Area 45: Iran on the Brink? with Abbas Milani

interview with Abbas Milani

via Area 45

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Eight years after Iran’s Green Movement and antigovernment protests, will the current unrest in the nation have no lasting impact or is it the beginning of the end for the repressive theocracy? Abbas Milani, a Hoover research fellow and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, explains the nature of the uprising, Tehran’s response, and the Trump administration’s options.  https://www.hoover.org/research/area-45-iran-brink-abbas-milani