What Is Going to Happen In Iran?

Tom Friedman in Friday’s Washington Post says this about Iran:

"What's happening on the streets of Tehran is a lesson in what makes history: It isn't guns or secret police, in the end, but the willingness of hundreds of thousands of people to risk their lives to protest injustice. That is what overthrew the shah of Iran in 1979, and it is now shaking the mullahs.

This is politics in the raw -- unarmed people defying soldiers with guns -- and it is the stuff of which revolutions are made. Whether it will succeed in Iran is impossible to predict, but already this movement has put an overconfident regime on the ropes."

As Mr. Friedman says, nobody knows what is going to happen in Iran. I don’t. But I would like to make a comment on what has made a difference in some revolutions in the past.

Mr. Friedman talks about how the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979. Having visited Berlin last month, in this year of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, I think of the revolutions of 1989 that brought freedom to Poland and Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and others. In 1989 there were marches in those countries, like in Iran today. But there had been marches and protests in Eastern Europe before. East Germany in 1953. Hungary in 1956. Czechoslovakia in 1968. Poland in 1956, 1968, and 1980. And they had failed. What made the difference in 1989?

What seemed to make the difference was that the leadership had lost confidence in their system and in what they were doing. In earlier years, the leaders of these countries still believed in communism. They had fought for it; they were there when it started; they believed in it. And the leaders of the Soviet Union believed in it, too.

But by 1989 there was a generation shift. Most of the original leaders were gone, and those that were left were old. The ruling parties were no longer filled with true believers, but with people who belonged to get ahead. Even the leaders of the Soviet Union no longer believed as they had before. There was, in effect, a brittleness to the ruling parties. They were still in place, but there was nothing, or at least not enough, standing behind a façade that looked the same but wasn’t. And so when the people pushed, the leadership crumbled because there was no longer anything behind it; because it no longer believed in itself.

Obviously, that is not the only way or the only reason revolutions succeed. But it is one, and it provides one way to look at what is happening in Iran and to consider the chances that the protests in Iran will succeed.

Do the mullahs and the religious leadership in Iran still believe? Are they willing to fight; are they willing to push back? Or are they tired and old, without the courage of their convictions? Are their supporters believers or are they just trying to get ahead? I don’t know the answers to these questions any better than anybody else. It just seems like one way to look at what is happening.