Policy Echo Chamber - Pakistan vs. Iran
In response to an editorial in the Washington Post today, I wrote a short piece further detailing the parallels between the political situations in Iran and Pakistan. I agree with the Post's editorial, but I think the similarity is so striking that it deserves a closer look:
Most Americans either do not know, or have chosen to forget, that the seeds of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution were sown by the CIA and Britain's MI6 in 1953 when they successfully arranged a coup d'etat which removed Iran's elected prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh was seen as a threat to British and American interests because he had passed a law nationalizing Iran's oil assets. When Mossadegh was removed from office, the Shah was free to exercise complete authoritarian control over Iran until he was overthrown in 1979. The U.S. and Britain realized that it would be much easier to influence Iranian policy through one man, the Shah, than proposing policies that would be mutually beneficial to Iran and western nations would have been.
Their miscalculation, of course, was an underestimation of Iranian dissatisfaction with their appointed dictator. The government of the Shah had been tempered by an elected representative government led by Dr. Mossadegh, and without these checks, the Shah was free to rule oppressively over an Iran that had tasted freer government. By 1979 many groups were vying for the overthrow of the Shahís government. Decades of tyranny had galvanized the people, and the more radical right-wing revolutionaries eventually gained the greatest prominence in the ensuing revolution. America and Britain, in 1979, were in the awkward position of having to reject a government based on the will of the Iranian people, a people driven to a radical government entirely due to British and American policies.
Today, both the American left and right completely ignore the devastating policies, of their own government, that led to the creation of the Islamic republic of Iran. Iranís government is demonized as anti-western, but historical context is conveniently omitted from the diatribes. Even worse, American politicians are making the same mistakes their predecessors made in the '50s. Just as America and Britain supported the Shahís authoritarian rule in the decades leading up to the Iranian revolution, they are now, under the guidance of President Bush, supporting Pakistanís despot General Pervez Musharraf. Like the Shah of Iran, General Musharraf gained complete authority over his state by a coup, which disenfranchised Pakistanís representative civilian government. He is widely reviled by Pakistanis and he is rightly seen as a tyrant whose power is guaranteed by American and British policies. Like Iran's radical clerics did in the '70s, radical Pakistani religious groups are gaining power, and a revolution like Iranís is entirely conceivable.
Musharraf has occasionally paid lip service to the idea of democratizing his nation. Most recently, he had promised to resign as the Pakistani Army Chief of Staff by today. He has reneged on this promise, and he still retains control of both the "civilian" government and the military of Pakistan. Like Iran, Pakistan has a history of representative civil governance, and like Iran before it, that tradition has been suppressed by western governments. If President Bush is sincere about his oft-stated desire to spread democracy in this region, then he would do well to learn the lessons of his predecessor and threaten to withdraw American support from General Musharraf if the Pakistani dictator does not make significant progress in his promise to re-democratize his increasingly radicalized nation.
