Iran, “People Power,” and the Ghosts of 1989

A whole host of professions devoted to the memorialization of political movements — journalists, activists, historians hungry for op-ed opportunities –  anticipated 2009 if for nothing but the fact that it marked the twentieth anniversary of two of the most consequential events in recent world history: the fall of communism in Europe and, in China, the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

But this year has  marked far more — the culmination of a decade during which the shine came off the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama blandly labeled the post-communist period. First came the wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) often irresponsibly dressed up as civilizational struggles, then a collapse of faith in capitalism so stunning that, had it happened during the Cold War, might have sparked, if not a reverse 1989, a considerable propaganda coup for the Soviet bloc. Whereas one of the cataclysmic events of 1989 — the fall of the Berlin Wall — was more widely celebrated in the soaring boom of the late 90s, 2009 seems more ripe for an exploration of the ambiguous legacy of both the popular movements that swelled, on both sides of Eurasia, twenty years before.

Enter the Iranian election imbroglio, perfectly timed to capture a zeitgeist brimming with expectation of cultural chaos and refreshed by reminders of the popular demonstrations that erupted on the streets of Berlin and Beijing. Salient memories of the former make it unsurprising to watch media figures, cheerleading what they hope is yet another replay of 1989 Berlin, lump the demonstrations against the election result with other recent “Twitter Revolutions”. While Evgeny Morozov disputed social media’s usefulness for such movements in the March/April issue of BR, he is having slightly more trouble doing so in the context of Iran, where the government — let’s all stop inconsistently plastering every momentarily disfavored system with the epithet “regime” — is either much less sophisticated at harnessing the internet for propaganda purposes, or doesn’t need to.

After all, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad counts among his supporters significant numbers of the lower classes, and, though reported on with far less zeal by the BBC or (when it finally stuck its head out of the embarrassing gutter of celebrity gossip in which it’s been increasingly entrenched) CNN, many thousands of them also managed to mobilize in Iran’s capital without the aid of an expensive iPhone. Indeed, missing from the many discussions about the protests in Iran, from technology to the flared tempers on display in the streets, are they they, like many large street demonstrations over the past decade — and unlike the uprisings of 1989 — have been taking place in an atmosphere charged with class politics.

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Terror, Torture, the President, and the Past

Today, President Obama attempted a forceful reply to critics on both the left and the right for his policies on detention and torture. In a speech at the National Archives, in a room redolent with the iconography of liberty and rights, Obama attacked the Bush administration’s “ad hoc” legal approach to the detention and treatment of terrorism suspects. However redolent Obama’s speech was with the fragrance of American founding values, the president emphasized one overall – the consistency inherent in the idea of the “rule of law”.

In BR’s January/February issue, David Cole grappled with the same question – and reached a remarkably similar conclusion. Detention without trial, Cole argued, was not only legal, but necessary. Many detainees could not be brought to trial in the U.S. under international law. What they could be afforded, he claimed, was some modicum of due process – proceedings to clarify whether they had actually been members of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, for example. “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” moreover, would be firmly out of the question. Above all, Cole wrote, “Guantánamo is a black mark because of this resistance to law and refusal to recognize the basic human dignity of the detainees. If we are to fix the problem, we need not abandon military detention, but we must subject it to the rule of law.”

Still, Cole endorses a legally shaky principle of detention without trial as a “preventative” measure, meant to prevent strongly suspected terrorists from reengaging in violence. According to a recent New York Times article, one in seven former detainees returns to terrorism after release.

International humanitarian law affords Cole – and Obama – more flexibility with the Guantánamo detainees than they would have for domestic terror suspects. But human rights groups have been critical of ideas like these, which appear to represent an intermediary step between the “ad hoc” policies of the Bush years and a doctrinaire approach to detention that would essentially follow an established legal order — whether domestic or international. Leaks from a meeting between representatives from several leading human rights organizations and Obama indicate that they now see little difference between his policies and those of George W. Bush.

Lurking behind these debates are several definitional problems.

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