Iran’s blame game

The question was not if but when the Iranian government would accuse the United States of fomenting mass street demonstrations over a tainted election, and the answer came on Wednesday when Tehran alleged that Washington was engaged in “intolerable” meddling. Rather than cast blame, the Islamic leadership should look in the mirror. The challenge to the Iranian government is homegrown and fueled by its own undemocratic actions.

This month, President Obama acknowledged that the U.S. had “played a role in the overthrow” of democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh during the Cold War, which ultimately backfired into sweeping anti-Americanism and the 1979 Islamic revolution. This week, Obama rightly responded with caution after the Iranian government announced that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won a suspicious 63% of the vote to 34% for reform candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and voters erupted in angry protest. Any perceived support for the Iranian opposition from Obama would only serve to undermine it and even put it in further danger. Indeed, allegations of U.S. intervention leave the opposition vulnerable to charges of treason.

While it’s true that the U.S. may have urged Twitter to keep its global network functioning, or opened its Voice of America site to video and messages from Iran, those were efforts at the margin. The real Iranian fight is internal. Until now, elections in Iran have given legitimacy to the religious government, but this time the vote is widely believed to have been stolen, and that has divided the country’s ruling elite along with its citizens. Today’s conflict is between factions in the religious elite. Mousavi, a former prime minister, is allied with reformists; Ahmadinejad was the candidate of conservatives, backed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Iranian government has acted appallingly, prohibiting foreign and domestic reporting on the ground, shutting down newspapers and cellphone and Internet services used by the opposition, raiding universities and arresting hundreds of reform political leaders and activists. Government thugs have beaten protesters, and official figures put the death toll at seven, although Iranian human rights monitors believe the number is higher. Khamenei rejected calls for a new election, offering only a limited vote recount, and he seems determined to quash the protest movement. The risk is that he will bring out the big guns and provoke a massacre, as the Chinese government did in Tiananmen Square in 1989. If he does, he’ll not only have blood on his hands, but his legitimacy and the government of Iran will be questioned for years to come.