Borzou Daragahi writes:

I and others have written Iranian protests lacking organization and leadership mostly fail to amount to significant political shifts. But Iran’s waves of street actions can nevertheless push change. The 2009 uprising likely convinced Khamenei to stop fiddling brazenly with election results. The “woman, life, freedom” marches ushered unmistakable cultural changes and the abandonment of the enforcement of dress codes on women.

But except for those in 2009, Iran’s protests have not offered any possible roadmap to substantive political change. Iranians seem to sense this, and the numbers of protesters in the big cities have thus far failed to match the crowds gathering in provincial towns, like Abdnanan in the largely Kurdish border region.

The truth is that protests in and of themselves are scary to the bulk of Iranians. They see people fighting in the streets. They hear foreign leaders abroad threaten their country just months after it was bombed. Like ordinary people they stay from crowds, denying protests the critical mass they need to be effective. They stay home because more than freedom, the bulk of Iranians cherish order, nazm, above all. Iranians realize that regime collapse or foreign intervention could worsen their economic plight and threaten their security.

I say this as someone who has lived among Iranians my whole life and in Tehran for years. I speak the language and have been in the middle of all sorts of protests in Iran as a journalist covering the country for decades. The Islamic Republic deserves to be swept into the dustbin of history. But the harsh reality is that there will be no soft transition away from it. Any regime change will likely be violent, prolonged, and destructive. [Continue reading…]

Lior Sternfeld writes:

Israel and the United States loom large in Iranian protesters’ calculations, though not in the ways many Western observers assume.

While Israeli officials have made little secret of their desire for regime change in Iran, and despite Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent bellicose statements, concrete evidence of an imminent military attack is limited. The 12-day war in June demonstrated Israel’s overwhelming military superiority, but counterintuitively, Netanyahu’s most critical achievement in that conflict may lie in the fact that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were not destroyed. The continued existence of a looming Iranian threat is key to the prime minister’s own political survival.

Meanwhile, in Washington, President Trump has publicly threatened intervention should Iranian security forces escalate repression and kill protesters. The administration’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife certainly lends credibility to Trump’s threats, but it has also activated deep-seated Iranian anxieties about foreign intervention.

Israeli or American military action while Iranians are taking to the streets would almost certainly benefit the regime by allowing it to frame domestic grievances as foreign-backed destabilization. Iranian political memory is long: The 1953 CIA-MI6 coup against Mosaddeq, which British and American officials justified as saving Iran from chaos, instead ushered in 25 years of dictatorship. The parallel with Trump’s open discussion of taking control of Venezuela’s oil resources is not lost on Iranians, who hear promises of “liberation” as cover for imperial domination. [Continue reading…]