American Progressives Must Support the Protests in Iran

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Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there are really remarkable protests taking place in Iran, and I think the first thing to say about them is that they deserve the support of progressives because progressives should care about human rights.

And there are pro-American regimes that can commit horrific violations of human rights, and there are anti-American regimes that can commit horrific violations of human rights. This is not a new story. You can go back to Joseph Stalin to realize that’s the case, and also to see that there have been times historically, where some progressives have forgotten that, and judged regimes less on the way they treat their people than how they treat the United States. And that seems to me, it’s as wrong to give countries a pass when they brutally violate human rights because they’re anti-American, as it is to give them a pass when they brutally violate human rights, because they’re pro-American, if you’re someone who cares and believes in the universality of human rights.

But saying that the Iranian protesters were protesting against this really, really autocratic and brutal regime deserve the support of progressives around the world—all people around the world—doesn’t answer the question of what the United States should do. It’s really important to remember that just because people hate their regime doesn’t mean they want a foreign country to attack their regime, let alone occupy their regime.

You know, many Iraqis—probably most Iraqis—loathed Saddam Hussein. It didn’t mean that they wanted the United States to occupy Iraq. And the United States learned the hard way—or those Americans who didn’t know beforehand learned the hard way—that Iraqis could both loathe Saddam Hussein and also loathe and fight against an American occupation.

And it’s also just important to remember that even if you could establish—and I don’t know how one could establish—the fact that Iranians might want some kind of American military intervention in their country, that there are questions of international law here that have global repercussions, right? Which is to say, even if you could establish that people in a certain country wanted, you know, wanted an attack by another country—and again, I don’t know how you would do that—one of the things we’ve clearly learned in the last 20-25 years is the way in which when one country, when the United States gives itself the right to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of another country, that emboldens other powers, you know, China and Russia in particular, to do exactly the same thing.

It’s different when you have the support of the United Nations, right, because support of the United Nations suggests that you have, essentially, some kind of consensus among many countries around the world. Then that is a check on the inclination of various powers—the U.S. in Iraq, or, you know, Russia in Georgia, Ukraine—to basically come up with some spurious claim to justify its imperial interests, right? So, it would be one thing if there was some kind of international UN support for some kind of intervention in Iraq. But I think that’s fundamentally different than the United States doing it on its own.

And the other thing I think is worth thinking about when we think about what we would want if we were Iranians, what kind of support we might want from countries around the world, is to imagine ourselves in their shoes. And I actually think that’s a little bit easier for many Americans than it was before Donald Trump. Now, obviously, the United States remains a much, much freer country than Iran does. But it doesn’t take that much imagination to imagine that if Donald Trump got his way, he could move the United States towards being the kind of really brutal dictatorship that Iran is today—a country that would literally not just kill the occasional person in ICE raids in Minneapolis, but actually might kill hundreds and hundreds of people on the streets. I think anyone who thinks Donald Trump is incapable of that is completely delusional, right?

So, I think one of the questions that Americans should ask ourselves is: were we in the desperate circumstances that people are in Iran in today, in open revolt on the streets against our government, what would we want other governments to do? How would we want them to respond? I suspect that most Americans would welcome statements of support, and might even welcome certain kinds of targeted sanctions, if they were aimed at the regime and not the population at large. But even in those extreme circumstances, Americans would be very, very reluctant. Even the Americans who hate Donald Trump the most would be very, very reluctant to support foreign military intervention in the United States.

And in a way, I think this thinking about this, thinking about Americans in the situation of Iranians, is a way of kind of countering some of the American exceptionalism that has done so much damage to American foreign policy in recent decades, and to American domestic policy: the thinking that Americans are somehow immune from what happens in other countries. And thinking about what we would want were we in the position of Iranians, I think can help us sort through this challenging question of how we emphatically endorse the cause that Iranians are fighting for, but also show wisdom and humility, and don’t succumb to lawlessness when we think about how the United States can support those efforts.

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