Like many many people across the free world I hoped that the recent uprisings in Iran would bring about the freedom of the Iranian people that has been denied to them since the Mullahs took over in 1979. I thought that this time the Iranian people had achieved a critical mass of protestors and had finally organised to do undo a truly brutal and dangerous regime in Tehran.
I was wrong. A whole lot of us were wrong. We misread what was happening and forgot that what the Tehran regime has got which any dissident or protest group within Iran has not and that is experience in suppressing, often brutally, any challenges to their rule. The regime has suppression and organisational tools that have been honed over many decades and that counts when the opposition is disjointed and might have a multiplicity of motivations for protest some of which might be more venal than virtuous.
I read this article linked below from Middle East Forum with sorrow and regret that so many of us misread the potential for the latest Iranian uprising. So many have messed up with regards to the uprising. As the Middle East Forum article points out, a whole generation in Iran has been destroyed because of their bravado in challenging the regime in Tehran but with no way really, short of timely intervention by the USA, a time which has now long past, of putting bones behind the bravado.
I found this part of the Middle East Forum article particularly moving and illustrative of the false beliefs that caused this latest uprising to fail:
"By the evening of January 9, the situation reached a critical juncture. Many Iran observers believe that protesters should have stayed home, preserving their numbers and denying the regime an opportunity for mass repression. Instead, exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi issued a call for demonstrators to gather at 8 p.m. and seize government buildings and police stations. He also called on all armed and security forces “who have joined the National Cooperation Platform: slow down and disrupt the machinery of repression even further, so that on the promised day you can bring it to a complete halt.” Many supporters believed this call was backed by assurances of foreign intervention and military defections.
In previous weeks, Pahlavi had claimed that up to 150,000 members of Iran’s armed forces had contacted him and pledged allegiance through a QR code he had advertised on the Saudi-funded Iran International satellite station. These statements created expectation that security forces might stand down or even defect."
Original source via the link below:
https://www.meforum.org/mef-observer/how-irans-latest-uprising-unfolded-and-why-it-ended-in-tragedy
As many will now know, there wasn’t the mass defections of security forces, enough stayed loyal to the regime either through ideological loyalty or through fear of consequences, to negate the street protests.
Thousands of people who put themselves out on the streets often for the good reason of wanting to live in a much less oppressive nation, are now dead because the exiled Shah and a whole host of others with interests in Iran and in among the Persian diaspora, believed in something, the defection of security forces, that did not and probably could have been predicted would not happen. Maybe the foreign policy experts in Washington DC and in Jerusalem understood what the Iranian protestors were up against and were doomed because the Tehran regime was better prepared, resourced and more united than their opponents? The understanding that this uprising was doomed and that military intervention at that point might kick off greater regional or global problems might have played a part in why the USA and Israel stayed their hands with regards to Iran when they did. This might certainly explain the cooling off of rhetoric by Western leaders as the Iranian uprising progressed. If Western leaders could see via their own intelligence sources that the uprising was going to eventually fail then it could have had significant influence on how many Western countries have acted during the uprising and especially towards its bloody and failed conclusion.
For various reasons the uprising in Iran has achieved almost nothing at all apart from a hill of slain. That mountain of the dead in Iran is now so high that it might be a long time before the Iranians try again at freeing themselves from the prison created for them by the Mullahs. We should mourn the innocent dead in Iran because a misplaced uprising that was based on little more than hope for a lot of people, has created a lot of dead Iranians.