The post-election crackdown in Iran is a frosty ending for what had been a genuinely exciting and optimistic spring in Middle Eastern politics.
Consider: in early June, Lebanon successfully held its second ever free democratic elections. More important than the fact that the ‘pro-western’ coalition won is the fact that Hezbollah accepted the result. A Middle Eastern government was democratically elected, without bloodshed.
This follows the provincial elections in Iraq in January, where millions of Iraqis risked their lives to assert the right to choose their government. Monthly civilian casualties in Iraq are now the lowest they have been since the start of the war.
In June, US president Barack Obama did wonders for US-Middle Eastern relations with his speech at Cairo Univerity, by being intelligent and non-patronising, by not dividing the world into simplistic Manichean divisions of Good and Evil and, in short, by not being George W. Bush.
Obama’s insistence on the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Palestinian territories, and on the creation of a viable state for Palestinians, seems to be bearing fruit. In mid-June, Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu publicly supported the creation of a Palestinian state, something he’d never done before.
In May, the UAE arrested a businessman for the torture of a former partner. What was unusual was that the businessman is a member of the UAE royal family, and it is the first time any royal has been arrested in the Gulf.
And a little further back, in February, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah appointed the country’s first ever female minister, as part of a broad government reshuffle that weakened ultra-conservatives and promoted several reformist-minded politicians.
These are all tiny, incremental steps. But still, they are in the right direction, towards the dream of a stable, prosperous, democratic Middle East.
And then the Iranian Revolutionary Guard weighs in with its batons, while the Ayatollah Khameni, Iran’s Supreme Leader, declares, with Maradona-esque insouciance: “There was truly a divine hand behind this election.”
The risk of that remark, and of the Ayatollah’s support for what appears to be a coup, is that it will drive a wedge between Iran’s youthful population and the Islamic Republic. When that Republic came to power, during the 1979 revolution, it had enormous domestic legitimacy because it appeared to introduce a more virtuous and Islamic democracy, after the despotic excesses of the Shah.
That successful alliance of democracy with Islamism sent shockwaves through the whole Middle East, providing a powerful role-model for other democratic, revolutionary, Islamist forces in Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere.
Now, as in Animal Farm, the new revolutionaries have turned out to be just as bad as the old despots. The divine hand of Iran’s theocracy has been caught in the ballot box, stuffing votes. This threatens not just the legitimacy of the Iranian government, but the legitimacy of the wider Islamist movement.
The Middle East’s ayatollahs, imams and mullahs have risen to political prominence, and in some cases power, because they provided an outlet for democratic yearnings denied by many of the region’s autocratic regimes. They risk losing their moral authority and influence if they are seen to stand in the way of people’s desire for a more legitimate and honest form of government.
