NYT Opinion Piece on Iran’s Political Landscape (June 13, 2011)

20 Article 5. NYT Iran Without Nukes Roger Cohen June 13, 2011 — Remember Iran? I do. It’s been two years since the Iranian people rose up to protest a stolen election with a bravery that stirred the world and presented Americans with a truer image of a young and highly educated nation than the old specter of the bearded Islamic zealot. The Green Movement was suppressed through barbaric violence but its example helped kindle the Arab Spring. As Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University wrote in July, 2009: “Tehran, I believe, is ground zero of a civil rights movement that will leave no Muslim or Arab country, or even Israel, untouched.” He added, “The moving pictures of Iranians flooding colorfully into the streets have forever altered the visual vocabulary of the global perception of ‘the Middle East.”” Seldom were there more prescient words. They were quoted by Nader Hashemi of the University of Denver in a recent talk on Iran, in which he noted shared Iranian and Arab aims: “Democracy and dignity, the rule of law and respect for basic human rights, political transparency and an end to corruption.” That urge is still powerful in Iran beneath the opaque, directionless apparatus of the Islamic Republic. Iran is weak now, its ideology as tired as Osama Bin Laden’s, as marginal to peoples questing to reconcile their Muslim faith and modernity in new ways. I would probe this weakness through new approaches. But we are stuck still with the world’s most paranoid relationship: the American- Iranian relationship. That’s largely because there’s another way to remember Iran — as the Godot of nuclear threats, the country always HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031895