Wave of Iran Executions and the Slow Global Response

Wave of Iran Executions and the Slow Global Response

Independent Policy Digest -June 24th,2023

In view of all the changes that the world has witnessed over the past four decades, and the ups and downs that Americans themselves have experienced, one would expect to have seen major changes in certain areas of U.S. Policy.

Yet, somehow, in at least one area of foreign policy, stagnation has prevailed since the end of the 1970s, through seven presidential administrations, and countless other shakeups in Washington’s power structure. The 1979 revolution in Iran had a transformative effect on America’s understanding of Middle Eastern affairs. Yet the four decades of persecution and executions in Iran, including a recent wave of executions, have seemingly done little to change U.S. policy towards the ruling clerics that usurped power in 1979.

Such a dramatic transformation of Iran’s political identity and regional role should have led to a broad realization that anything is possible, and nothing is set in stone. But for some reason, leading policymakers in both Washington and Brussels seemed to retroactively identify the 1979 anti-monarchic revolution as something inevitable. Worse still, they quickly began to set policies in ways that prevail today and suggest that they also believed its effects were irreversible.

Of course, a certain set of those effects will prove to be permanent. As much as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran would like to convince the international community otherwise, there can be no return to the former monarchy in Iran. The Iranian people were remarkably unified in deposing that repressive and corrupt dictatorship, and the present-day population remains aware of how justified that change was, and how disastrous it would be for everyone if Iran tried to turn back the clock.

But one thing that Western policymakers seemingly fail to understand is that the populist demand for the Shah’s ouster did not equate to the approval of Ruhollah Khomeini, who installed himself as the supreme leader through deception and dictatorial tendencies. A regime was thus established that merely replaced a monarchical dictatorship with a religious one. As anyone who was in Iran at the time can attest, the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people shared a democratic vision for Iran’s future after the Pahlavi dictatorship ended. At the time, one of the great tragedies of world affairs was that the Iranian people were forcibly robbed of that vision. Were it not for Shah’s persecution of secular intellectuals, groups, and organizations, Khomeini and his gang of mullahs would have never succeeded.