Iranians don’t need Trump’s help to win their democracy |
In his memoir on the Khomeini revolution of 1979, British ambassador Anthony Parsons wrote that in Iran, “our failure was not so much one of information but one of imagination.” Perhaps we should not repeat the same mistake now that we are wondering what will happen and feeling powerless in the face of the massacres in Iranian cities.
The question is whether external intervention can help the opposition topple a regime that has been in power for over 45 years in a country of 90 million inhabitants, covering 1.6 million square kilometers, with the world’s fourth-largest reserves of oil and second-largest reserves of gas – which, if fully exploited, could supply the entire European Union. With just that short description, everything is clear: attacking Iran means attacking a power in the beating heart of the Middle East.
This is the only state in the region that has occupied more or less the same borders for 3,000 years under the name of Persia and has always been part of our Greco-Roman history books. This is something every Iranian, pro- or anti-regime, knows well: nationalism is the true glue of a country that has always viewed the Arab world and its neighbors as hostile.
External interventions over the last half-century-plus have had results both tragic and contrary to their goals. The U.K.-U.S. coup d’état in........