Daily Alert Archives

It Was a Mistake to Adopt a Low-Key Posture on Iran Demonstrations in 2009

(Foreign Policy) Dennis Ross - The image of Iran on the march is one the Islamic Republic has sought to market and exploit. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has spoken of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq as being part of Iran's forward defense. But there is a cost to Iranian expansionism, and we are now seeing it in demonstrations across Iran. Some demonstrators are even chanting for a referendum - an echo of the referendum that the new Islamic regime held two months after the 1979 revolution to provide itself legitimacy. In 2009, I was serving in the Obama administration as the secretary of state's special advisor on Iran and was part of the decision-making process. Because we feared lending credence to the regime's claim that the demonstrations in Iran at the time were being instigated from the outside, we adopted a low-key posture. In retrospect, that was a mistake. We should have shined a spotlight on what the regime was doing and mobilized our allies to do the same; we should have done our best to provide news from the outside and to facilitate communication on the inside. The writer, a former American envoy to the Middle East, is counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
2018-01-03 00:00:00
Full Article