The release of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, from incarceration in Iran is an encouraging development. But the international community is still pondering what to do about Iran. Western leaders have not found a suitable means of responding to Iran’s nuclear program, support of insurgents in the Iraq war and Hezbollah in Lebanon. None of the alternatives now being publicly discussed seem promising. Either the West can use a military intervention to compel Iran to change its behavior or attempt to pressure Iran through diplomacy. But the West, and particularly the United States, appears to have little leverage with the current Iranian leadership—which has historically depended upon demonizing the West for legitimacy, while prohibiting internal dissent to guarantee stability. With the United States and NATO fully committed in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively, there is no military force capable of conquering and controlling Iran. Moreover, a military strike against Iran would prove that the hyperbolic rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was correct, and his many critics would likely rally around his leadership in order to protect their nation. It would be, in fact, the worst possible decision.
Perhaps there is a strategy that the West could pursue toward Iran, akin to one that worked well in undermining the totalitarian government of Czechoslovakia: the example of Charter 77. Charter 77 was a human rights group founded by a politically diverse group of Czech and Slovak dissidents who openly signed a petition insisting that the communist government live up to its own legal and international obligations to protect human rights. Charter members, such as Václav Havel—who later became president of the country—maintained that Charter 77 was not—at least not overtly—a political opposition that formally challenged communist one-party rule. Rather, the Chartists defined themselves as a human rights movement that by its very existence helped to create a parallel polis—and widen social space for authentic existence outside to and independent of the dictates of the state. Despite its apolitical principles, the government actively prosecuted Charter 77, some of whom were given long jail sentences. Yet Charter 77 persisted and never collapsed. In 1989, when fortuitous circumstances allowed communism to unravel in Czechoslovakia, Charter 77, reborn as Civic Forum, became the nexus of an opposition, and later formed the first non-communist government, committed to establishing democratic institutions—including the rule of law, an independent judiciary, private ownership, and free and independent media. Thus the “parallel polis” of the communist era was to serve as a model for a functioning civil society in a healthy and consolidated democracy.
Could such a model of supporting a human rights opposition work in Iran? To fully answer that question we must consider what happened in Iraq, where no legitimate opposition was capable of taking the reigns of government when Saddam Hussein was overthrown. Evidently, U.S. policy makers expected that the prospect of “free and fair” elections would produce legitimate and capable rulers. But thirty years of ruthless dictatorship and an American intervention strategy based on a misguided belief that average Iraqis would see occupiers as liberators, robbed Iraqis of a legitimate home-grown opposition movement or nascent civil society. Amidst the violence of insurgency and counter-insurgency, social trust defaulted to tribal identity or sect. Only in Kurdistan, where an opposition leadership was able to develop under the protection of a U.N. mandate and American airpower, have civil institutions been established.
