(Foreign Affairs) Sarah Morgan and Andrew Apostolou - Washington will only neutralize Iran by exploiting the regime's main vulnerability: its false claim to legitimacy. The ayatollahs' hold on power is inherently unstable because they have no popular mandate. Since staging a rigged election in 2009 to keep Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power, they have relied on repression and brutality to silence opposition, jailing journalists, torturing detainees, and executing critics (both real and imagined). By highlighting these crimes on the world stage and actively supporting Iran's dissidents, the United States can place a new, more effective kind of pressure on Tehran and support the movement for democratic change from within. Iran has the highest per-capita execution rate in the world. Official Iranian media and human rights groups report 450 executions this year, many conducted in secret. Sarah Morgan is Senior Program Associate and Andrew Apostolou is Director for Iran at Freedom House.
2011-11-09 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive