Exploding the "Foundation Myth" of Iran's Islamist Regime

Spencer Ackerman reveals his shallow understanding of Iran, in "Moussavi’s Message of Reform." Stabbing at insight, Ackerman says of Moussavi:

Clearly we're in the realm of myth, and foundational myth at that. It matters very little what westerners think about Moussavi's description of Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution. By locating the opposition within the promises of the Revolution, Moussavi claims a clear source of legitimacy, the same that the regime claims, and seeks to denies that legitimacy to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.

Considering what the revolution of 1979 really represents, Ackerman needs to go back to school.

Contrast this "foundational myth" gobbledygook with Reuel Marc Gerecht, "The Koran and the Ballot Box":

WHATEVER happens in Iran in the aftermath of this month’s fraudulent elections, one thing is clear: we are witnessing not just a fascinating power struggle among men who’ve known each other intimately for 30 years, but the unraveling of the religious idea that has shaped the growth of modern Islamic fundamentalism since the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.

The Islamic revolution in Iran encompassed two incompatible ideas: that God’s law — as interpreted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — would rule, and that the people of Iran had the right to elect representatives who would advance and protect their interests. When Khomeini was alive and Iran was at war with Iraq, the tension between theocracy and democracy never became acute.

Upon his death in 1989, however, the revolution’s democratic promise started to gain ground. With the presidential campaign of Mohammad Khatami in 1997, it exploded and briefly paralyzed Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the theocratic elite. God’s will and the people’s wants were no longer compatible.

To the dismay of Ayatollah Khamenei, who remains supreme leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the candidate whom President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “defeated” in the rigged elections, has become the new Khatami — except he is far more powerful. While Mr. Moussavi lacks Mr. Khatami’s reformist credentials, he is a far steelier politician. And the frustrations of President Khatami’s failed tenure have grown exponentially among a new generation that is less respectful of mullahs and revolutionary ideology.

Yet in the current demonstrations we are witnessing not just the end of the first stage of the Iranian democratic experiment, but the collapse of the structural underpinnings of the entire Islamic approach to modern political self-rule. Islam’s categorical imperative for both traditional and fundamentalist Muslims —“commanding right and forbidding wrong” — is being transformed.

This imperative appears repeatedly in the Koran. Historically, it has been understood as a check on the corrupting, restive and libidinous side of the human soul. For modern Islamic militants, it is a war cry as well — a justification of the morals police in Saudi Arabia and Iran, of the young men who harass “improperly” attired Muslim women from Cairo to Copenhagen. It is the primary theological reason that Ayatollah Khamenei will try to stop a democratic triumph in his country, since real democracy would allow men, not God and his faithful guardians, the mullahs, to determine right and wrong.

Read the whole thing.

In contrast to Gerecht, Ackerman believes in the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution, BECAUSE IT OVERTURNED A U.S-BACKED REGIME.

But Ackerman, blinded by hatred, is wrong once again. As George Packer noted earlier, Ackerman is so intent on seeing the United States as the source of all evil in Iran, he can't see the bullets, truncheons, and rifle butts that are the real and immediate threats to the people on the streets. He suffers, frankly, from the same anti-Americanism and BDS that we've already seen in Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias - which is not surprising. Events in Iran have triggered some nasty partisan recriminations at home. And the debate is even more intense since it's likely we're looking at the Obama adminstration's first really substantive foreign policy failure.

If revolution fails now in Iran it won't because of events of long ago, from 1953. The realist "caution" of this administration will leave the president's hands soaked in the blood of this interrupted Green Revolution. Spencer Ackerman will be splattered along with him.