Iran and the Crisis of Legitimacy

posted at 12:15 am on June 15, 2009 by Doctor Zero

The unrest in Iran, following a transparently rigged campaign to “re-elect” Mahmoud Amadinejad, is the latest example of a problem that continually plagues latter-day Western diplomacy. Who are the “legitimate” rulers of Iran?

It’s an article of faith among Western observers that all people of the world long for freedom. We occasionally find the behavior of a tyrant, such as Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, so horrible that we declare him to be an “illegitimate” leader, and encourage his overthrow, or engineer it ourselves. It’s interesting how much importance Western leaders assign to de-legitimizing a dictatorship before taking action against it. We place a great deal of faith in the authority our system of democratic elections confers on our leadership. The evolution of Western civilization suggests that no other method of forming a government is an acceptable substitute for democratic elections. We came to believe that a valid, respectable government is the expression of the collective will of its people. Americans are very uncomfortable with the notion of declaring war against the people of an enemy nation – we have recent historical memory of the awful carnage from the two World Wars, and a very high standard for the moral use of force as a result. We can commit to the use of force to remove a threatening regime, as we did in Iraq, but we go to great lengths to make it clear that we do not consider ourselves to be at war with the people who suffer under the rulership of that regime. In Iraq, we didn’t even consider ourselves to be at war with Saddam’s army… we allowed them to retire from the field with much of their equipment, rather than obliterating anyone who ignored our warnings and remained under arms after hostilities formally commenced. Of course, many of those retiring Iraqi soldiers went on to have busy second careers as terrorist insurgents.

In a similar vein, we have tried to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan as surgically as possible, having declared their regime illegitimate. Even the names of our military operations in the Middle East, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and “Operation Enduring Freedom,” make it clear that we see ourselves as liberating captive people from oppression. We went so far as to change the name of the operation in Afghanistan, originally entitled “Operation Infinite Justice,” out of respect for the religious sensitivities of the local (and regional) Muslim population, since they believe only Allah is entitled to dispense “infinite justice.”

Our insistence on targeting the leadership of enemy regimes is understandable – Saddam Hussein was indeed a brutal tyrant, and after much effort and sacrifice from American soldiers, democracy is taking firm root in Iraq. The Taliban needed killing, and its remnants should be hunted to extinction, for like the Nazis of World War II, they are an infection that must be completely burned out to be cured. We obviously did not want to exterminate the populations of Iraq or Afghanistan. The complications arise when we look at how many regimes around the world are every bit as illegitimate as Saddam or the Taliban were. The current Iranian theocracy came to power in a violent coup about thirty years ago. Cuba has been ruled by an equally undemocratic dictatorship for about twenty years longer than that. A quarter-century before Fidel Castro seized power, the United Kingdom created the modern state of Saudi Arabia, and installed a hereditary monarchy with absolute power. The psychotic dictatorship of North Korea came to power in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in World War II, because the northern half of the country was unlucky enough to be nursed back to “health” by the Soviet Union, becoming infected with the communist virus and refusing to participate in U.N.-supervised elections for the government of a unified post-war Korea.

We respond to all of these fundamentally illegitimate governments in different ways. We have an official policy of embargo against Cuba, but the American Left has been hopelessly in love with Fidel Castro since he took power – those Hollywood stars traipsing down for dinner and drinks in the Great Man’s palace obviously believe he’s the valid ruler of Cuba. Through the United Nations, we treat North Korea with a remarkable degree of politeness and restraint, generally addressing the lunatic dictator Kim Jong-Il as the legal ruler of his people. The United Nations is frequently unhappy with Kim’s antics and provocations, but they never quite get around to declaring him a global criminal whose emissaries are unwelcome in the parliament of mankind. On the other hand, the primitive monarchy of Saudia Arabia is regarded as the fully accredited government of its people, a point reinforced by Barack Obama’s recent, embarrassingly servile bow to the Saudi king. Of course, while Obama may have made a serious error of decorum and protocol, he is hardly the first American president to regard the Saudi monarch as an equally legitimate head of state.

There are many practical reasons for the complex hypocrisy of the West, with regard to governments that do not measure up to its own standards for securing moral authority. What is diplomacy, after all, but the eloquent expression of hypocrisy? There’s also the question of how institutionally uncomfortable we are with asserting the superiority of our system and its values – leading to absurd spectacles like Obama’s Cairo speech, in which he addressed a culture noted for its brutality and domination of women, and said his primary concern in the area of Muslim women’s rights was their right to wear their traditional, suffocating head coverings in Western nations.

We are, perhaps, also a little nervous about the mechanisms of our own system of government, which were rocked by a sizable chunk of the population refusing to accept the legitimacy of George Bush’s presidential victory in 2000… and now suffer from widespread voter fraud issues, which the current administration seems pointedly uninterested in addressing. As we recoil in horror from stories of Amadinejad’s goons beating his opponent’s supporters with clubs, we should remember that we had thugs with clubs in some of our polling places in 2008 – and instead of spending the rest of their lives in prison cells, they’re walking around free today, with all charges dismissed, despite their obvious guilt.

American presidents generally win election with around 50 to 55% of the popular vote, with a few 60% landslides now and then. A few percentage points stolen through fraudulent ballots and voter intimidation tactics, in closely-contested districts, could tip an election. This risk should be eliminated through vigorous prosecution of voter fraud, because our sense of confidence in our government – whose leadership about half of us, by definition, will disagree with – grows from our confidence that our elections are fair and legal. I believe we also damaged our sense of confidence in the validity of our government as we moved increasingly away from Constitutional principles, arriving at the current Administration, which seems to have honestly forgotten the document exists at all. Our government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, but also from the limits which are placed upon it. We don’t convene every four years to elect a new dictator. There were many prominent thinkers, in the early years of the twentieth century, who thought it would be most efficient to do exactly that… but their theories all ended in mass graves and burning cities.

Over the next few days, as the situation in Iran stabilizes, the American president and the United Nations will issue statements of grave concern… and then go back to dealing with Amadinejad, unless the people of Iran really do rise up and overthrow him. Recent history has taught us how unlikely that is, because the sad, terrible truth is that oppressing and tyrannizing a population is fairly easy to do. Most of the world lives under some form of domination, because freedom is agonizingly difficult to secure. The multiculturalist sensibilities of Western elites have blinded them to the uniqueness of the American achievement, winning its freedom through victory in a nearly impossible Revolutionary War, and then building a stable and prosperous democratic republic that has endured for centuries, through the fellowship of people from countless ethnic and religious backgrounds. Decades crawl past while we hold our breath and wait for the captive people of Cuba, North Korea, and other dictatorships to rise up and overthrow their oppressors… and when we do manage to liberate a nation like Iraq, we find the task of teaching people how to awaken from decades of brutality to be far more difficult than we imagined.

If the Iranians unrest somehow blossoms into a flame that burns away the mullahs and transforms that nation into a republic of free men and women, with the hands on the nuclear clock standing at one minute to midnight, it would be a dazzling achievement. Perhaps we could fan that flame by replacing the United Nations with an organization that has higher standards for membership – beginning with the absolute requirement that it will only entertain ambassadors from truly legitimate governments, elected through the will of their people, and restrained by constitutional laws they cannot ignore. We still wouldn’t achieve total harmony in such an august world body, but at least we’d all be speaking the same language… a language some people are trying to speak in Iran tonight, in the face of torture and death, when good people have the choice between expressing the language of democracy in a roar of defiance, or falling silent and letting their absolute rulers do the talking.

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