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The Perils of Funding Iranian Dissent

Negar Azimi has a highly discussed piece in the New York Times Magazine on the dangers of U.S. financial support for Iranian opposition groups. Azimi's thesis is more or less: "Please don't show us the money." Given the heightened paranoia … Read More

By / June 27, 2007

Negar Azimi has a highly discussed piece in the New York Times Magazine on the dangers of U.S. financial support for Iranian opposition groups. Azimi's thesis is more or less: "Please don't show us the money." Given the heightened paranoia of the Iranian regime about attempts to undermine it, pro-reform groups such as Voice of America and Radio Farda, which receive do their employees small favors by cashing checks from the U.S. State Department. Fair enough, but the alternative is what, exactly?

Letting these groups raise funds from domestic Iranian sources will hardly cause the regime to react in a more kittenish manner, especially as its latest crackdown on dissident elements is a sign of its insecurity and weakness — tied as much to economic woes as to political ones. The Great Satan is quite right to be shoveling dollars into Tehran, just as opposition groups are quite right to abjure any affiliation with their true bankroller. (If it was a matter of their not wanting the cash, they could simply refuse it.)

What seems especially silly in Azimi's implicit critique of what I'll call the Persian high wire transfer is that the Bush administration's supposed advocacy of regime change jeopardizes the situation any more than a modest advocacy of reform would do. How are the two mutually exclusive in a state lorded over by theocratic fanatics? Reform means undermining the regime; it means revolution, be it bloody or velvet.

Azimi writes: "The administration now finds itself in the curious situation of having its allies — potential and existing — feeling that they must publicly distance themselves from the White House, the State Department and America in general." The administration would find itself in that position, regardless of its democracy-or-bust foreign policy.

Or does anyone think that if the advice of the ever-fallible realist Lee Hamilton were followed, and we cozied up the mullahs on the shared objective of stabilizing Iraq, that we would be performing a service to the Iranian opposition? Their grievances would be the first brushed into the pragmatic dustbin.

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  • mmausner

    if any mediocre US company can figure out how to have shell corporations in the Cayman Islands, surely Western funders of Iranian dissent can figure out a few shady ways to slip some cash into the right hands… can't they just use some Iraq slush funds, like those off-the-books oil wells under the control of the american army? 

    iranian dissidents IMO are not so different from Soviet ones– highly educated, with a strong sense of history and of principles and of freedoms. 

  • Josh Strawn

    "The Great Satan is quite right to be shoveling dollars into Tehran, just as opposition groups are quite right to abjure any affiliation with their true bankroller." I think that says it all. Supporting these groups is, in principle, the right thing to do and one can applaud the administration for choosing this route as opposed to cozying up to the mullahs Lee Hamilton style. But if these offers alone will close the door on any incremental advances that can be made in what elbow room Iranian civil society has, I can sympathize with those who can't see the good in it.

    Chomsky warned the Iranian regime against holding Esfandiari because it would give the Bush administration ammunition in its supposed imperialist campaign to attack. I think the warning here is the same. American attitudes toward Iran don't hinge on Haleh any more than Iranian attitudes toward America or its domestic opponents hinge on American aid. It's the ease with which problematic or counterproductive tendencies are exacerbated by way of these issues.

    I think the Bush administration's strong advocacy of regime change serves as a totem–a bad omen both to the oppositon and to the regime. The U.S. is to Iran as Bush and Wolfowitz are to the Western left. Let Bush or Wolfowitz design a worldwide fight against dictatorship and watch the left run into the arms of theocratic reaction. Those guys are P.R. disasters for anti-fascism. To me it's like how folks like you and I have been deemed far-right reactionaries for signing to a document of simple leftist principle. The moment the Iranian dissent movement has a star or stripe anywhere near it, its fucked in every orifice, and I think they know it.

    Most groups are refusing the cash, but that hasn't mattered much in terms of the massive beatdown they're taking. When Ramin Jahanbegloo visited the U.S., he refused invitations to meet with Washington high-ups, even though those high-ups were to be commended for wanting to make alliances with a fellow like him. In contrast with the coup to oust Mossadeq, it's a huge move in the right direction. But the DIY ethic is integral to the engine of Iranian opposition and has only been reinforced by the failures of 1979. Suspicion of outsider interference goes back to the Arab/Islamic conquest and carries through to colonial tinkering, American intervention and now to clerical tyranny. It may be one of if not the most core aspects of identity and this is fight is, at least in part, a quest to open up the space for an authentic Iranian national identity, un-coerced and unabetted from outside. American aid would, as far as I can tell, undermine the resistance mostly by diluting its coherence of principle. It seems this principle is the primary weapon Iranian dissidents have had at their disposal–the thing that made them willing to face down the SAVAK and today the Hezbollahi.