Iran’s clerical tyrants are as different from Mark Twain as it’s possible to imagine. But since they toppled the shah in 1979, they might often have echoed him, saying, “reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.”
As Iranian popular protests multiply and grow into their third week, it is devoutly — if that’s the right word — to be wished that they will finally topple the revolting Islamist regime. For nearly half a century, it has sown violence and unrest across the Middle East, exported terrorism around the world, including to the United States, and murdered and suppressed its own people.
But happy predictions of its demise have always proved premature, as I know from personal experience. In the 1980s, I wrote a monograph on Iran, researching which was thrilling for an aspiring journalist in his 20s. It included a clandestine meeting with the shah’s last prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, at a safe house in the Paris suburbs, for which an escort was provided by blue-uniformed officers of a French paramilitary security unit.
It was a surreal occasion with a Le Carré atmosphere. The house, a nondescript stucco villa, was gutted except for a made-for-camera stage set that, viewed from the right angle, looked like a plush drawing room with white leather sofas, a low polished glass table on a deep carpet, a bowl of fresh fruit, and framed pictures on the only two walls not stripped down to lathe, plaster, and beams.
I was out of my depth and, perhaps fortunately, details of our discussion are hardly even a hazy memory. But I left optimistic that the hated ayatollahs might not last long. That was what I wrote. Yet Bakhtiar was assassinated a few years later by agents of the Islamic Republic, and here we are, deep into the next century, wondering yet again if the killers will be washed away on a wave of anger and a yearning for freedom among 90 million incarcerated Persians.
The ayatollahs have reportedly beefed up their repression forces with 850 terrorist mercenaries from their proxy Hezbollah, Iraqi militiamen, and members of the Quds Force. This suggests a coming crackdown that they had hesitated to attempt this time around.
They know the shah’s hesitancy was key to his downfall, and although their country is short of almost everything else, it has a plentiful supply of ruthlessness at the top.
Still, one must hope that brave Iranians marching in the streets, defiantly pulling off their headscarves, ripping down the Islamic Republic flag, and elevating their grievances about economic collapse and water shortages into a general revolt against their repressors, will at last rid them of the pious, hypocritical, cutthroats.
President Donald Trump has been willing to take decisive action against the dictatorship — his bombing of the Fordow nuclear facility was a triumph — and he should again act, not with military intervention but with aid to the protesters.
MAMDANI’S INCENDIARY SOCIALIST SPARKLER
This should include rhetorical support, a good supply of sophisticated technology to help protesters coordinate their revolt, sanctions against Iranian leaders and security personnel, plus CIA subversion.
Trump’s stunning operation to remove Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro lifted America’s global prestige from the nadir of former President Joe Biden’s humiliation in Afghanistan. Effective support for the pro-American mass of Iranians and helping them secure the freedom they crave would do the same.