Power to the (Iranian) people
Rabbi Daniel M. Zucker, Chairman of Americans for Democracy in the Middle-East, responds to my column asking for solutions in solving the Iran crisis. He proposes a Third Option:
The Third Option is the empowerment of the Iranian people itself, aided by the Iranian people’s oldest, best organized, and most popular opposition groups-the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)-to rise up and change the regime. Iranians are fed up with the theocratic government of the fundamentalists and want to create a secular democracy. If free and fair elections were held in Iran today, some 90+% would vote to throw the clerics and their supporters out of office permanently. So why has this not happened yet?
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 
May 30th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
How does anyone know what percentage of people in a totalitarian state would vote for a change in government that would lead to democracy? Weren’t we told all sorts of wonderful things about the urban, secular, educated people in Iraq prior to the invasion in 2003? And once liberated from Saddam’s rule, they choose more Islam (which is decidedly anti-democratic) as well as tribal, religious and ethnic loyalty, often acted out in brutally violent fashion. When the Russian people had the yoke of communism lifted from around their necks, they quickly backed a former-KGB strongman who put a limit on their freedoms.
I wouldn’t doubt that the Iranian people are sick of the Mullahs running the country. Some certainly want to be free from the restrictions placed upon them by Islam. But I fear that once the Mullahs are gone, the masses will stick with what know, believe in and have been taught is the superior way: Islam. So regime change in Iran doesn’t necessarily make life more safe for infidels. Only a strong leader in the mold of Kemal Attaturk who is committed to suppressing the role of Islam, as was done in Turkey, has any chance of making a transition to democracy possible. And even in Turkey, without Attaturk’s ruthlessness and persistence keeping the public sphere secular, the country is heading in a direction that is bad for women, religious minorities and anyone committed to political and intellectual freedom. It is also bad for us infidels.