by Amir Taheri, GATESTONE • July 31, 2022
- There is no way that you or anyone else could help the Iranian people return to normalcy as long as the present regime is in place in Tehran. A people that finds itself in the hands of a brutal authoritarian regime that claims a divine mandate and is ready to do whatever it takes to remain in power, no holds barred, is beyond help by any outsider with the best of intentions.
- If you help the Islamic Republic improve its economy, the bulk of the proceeds will go to strengthening the apparatus of repression, with the people receiving mere crumbs to keep their mouths shut.
- If you make a deal with the supposedly “reasonable” faction within the regime, its rivals will do whatever they can to sabotage the deal. Haven’t you noticed that each time that the faction you consider as reasonable comes close to normalization, other factions start seizing hostages, putting bombs in your cities, or raiding your embassies to derail the process?
- President Barack Obama even smuggled $1.7 billion in cash to “help the Iranian people” but the money went to the regime’s repressive machine. Each time, however, that cursed “goodwill” led to the seizing of new hostages and a more virulent campaign of vilification against “the evil foreign powers.”
- Whatever helps this foreign power, with the best intentions one could offer, will go to the regime, not to the Iranian people.
- Remember how Prince Charles of Great Britain, Queen Rania of Jordan and US President George W Bush helped collect vast sums to help the earthquake-stricken people of Bam in southeast Iran? Well, not a single farthing reached those people while Khomeinist propaganda claimed that “the evil foreigner” was using humanitarian aid as a cover for espionage and the conversion of Iranians to “canceled (manuskh) religions such as Christianity.
- [T]he late Shinzo Abe went to Tehran to play peacemaker, he was insulted and told to return home empty-handed. It is interesting that President Joe Biden or whoever is his ventriloquist still thinks they can normalize the quintessentially abnormal.
Pictured: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, proclaims “Death to America” in a televised address. (Image source: MEMRI video screenshot)
There is no way that you or anyone else could help the Iranian people return to normalcy as long as the present regime is in place in Tehran. A people that finds itself in the hands of a brutal authoritarian regime that claims a divine mandate and is ready to do whatever it takes to remain in power, no holds barred, is beyond help by any outsider with the best of intentions.
“How can one help the Iranian people restore their normal life?”
This was the question that a Japanese friend put to me in 2019 in what at the time seemed to be a casual chat in a Persian restaurant in London. Three years later, I have just learned that the question had been something more than a dinner-table note to prolong the conversation. The friend in question had been sounding out a few people about the tactics that then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should pursue during a visit to Tehran to persuade the ruling mullahs to lead Iran back into “normal life.”
Following my old habit of writing down an account of such meetings for possible use in the future, I jotted down the main segments of my response the same evening.
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