Iran redux

The Iranian mass show trials which began Saturday suggest a floundering regime on the abyss without a clue about how to reawaken support among its shrinking base. Putting former ministers, high-ranking legislators and journalists on trial on the farcical charges of being agents of foreign powers is certain to backfire and leave the coup leaders like Khameini and Ahmadinejad in a cul-de-sac with few options.

I spent years living under a military dictatorship and find many of the accounts emerging from Iran entirely familiar, even predictable. The Iranian state appears to me to have about as much popular support as the collapsing Latin American dictatorships enjoyed in their waning years. Some lasted longer than others, but it was clear from the inside that their eventual disappearance was only a matter of time.

But these wounded beasts can do a lot of damage, and that is worrisome given the viciousness of the Iranian repressive apparatus to date. The Islamic revolution has a long tradition of torturing and disappearing its supposed enemies, so it’s not surprising to see the accused appear ashen-faced to recite the coached ‘confessions’ beaten out of them, which they will promptly disavow once out of the clutches of their thug jailers.

But it isn’t clear what the Ahmadinejad faction can do with the 100 defendants short of putting them all before firing squads. The more phony charges the leadership drums up, the more ridiculous it appears. The trials are made to order for the opposition, which now need do nothing but point out the glaring absurdity of the whole exercise. Day by day the ruling party loses credibility and authority.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the reports leaking out of Iran is the evident sympathy for the opposition among police and soldiers. Only the regime’s shock troops and Praetorian Guard, now turned into a huge corporate enterprise sucking dry the economy, can be counted upon to do the bosses’ bidding. This fact alone should shorten the regime’s survival by years.

When Ahmadinejad’s electoral coup first occurred, I wondered how long the momentum of his opponents would last. It was nice to think they would force the mullahs’ hand but more likely that the regime would crush the protests, and the whole cat-and-mouse game would continue indefinitely.

Now, I’m inclined to think that events may well accelerate toward a denouement much sooner.

When August Pinochet faced defeat in his 1988 plebiscite, he contemplated staging a coup similar to what occurred in Iran. He wanted to put out some fake results and intimidate the electoral officials. Instead, his military chiefs put a stop to his plan with the backing of the conservative parties because they decided that the 1981 constitution put in place by the military government was more important than the personal fate of its leading member.

So Pinochet was forced to accept that he had lost the vote. The result is that Chile’s democracy, run for nearly two decades by Pinochet’s sworn enemies, remains hamstrung by those structures.

In contrast, by jettisoning Iran’s electoral process and rigging the results, Ahmadinejad has undermined the political structures of 30 years’ standing and thereby raised the stakes by several orders of magnitude. Once he and his friends are finally ousted, there’s no telling what the country will do with its ‘Islamic republic’. The goofball religious fanatic may end up doing more to end the theocratic state than a whole generation of reformists.