The Iranian theocracy’s downfall is a goal worth working toward

Fate is sometimes kind to America. Such merciful intervention happened last summer when Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, rejected the Biden administration’s effort to revive former President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal , the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It would have been a very bad look for the United States to be lifting sanctions and releasing billions of dollars to the clerical regime while it was killing, beating, and imprisoning young women and girls protesting for freedom.

It’s not crystal clear, however, that the White House and the State Department appreciate their good fortune. Comments by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Iran envoy, Rob Malley, suggest that President Joe Biden’s Iran team would still go to Vienna, ready to sign, if Khamenei would just say “yes.” Although the administration would surely be thrilled to see the theocracy fall, the White House view likely aligns with the Central Intelligence Agency’s assessment: the current Iranian rebellion isn’t regime-threatening.

Team Biden still wants to hope that the supreme leader will come to his senses — after the regime crushes its domestic enemies. If Khamenei won’t revive the deal, which loses most of its utility in 2025, perhaps he would still agree to something less. Even with the North Korean failure of “freeze-for-freeze” just behind us, it’s not inconceivable Biden could offer a Persian equivalent. The administration, and the Democratic Party as a whole, don’t yet seem able to let go of arms control as a prime directive.

They really should. They don’t have anything to lose. The president has never conveyed a serious intention to attack the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites, and the regime has methodically crossed red lines since an Iranian opposition group publicly revealed the nuclear weapons program in 2002. (The CIA, like Western European intelligence services and Mossad, knew the theocracy had a clandestine atomic program earlier; they just didn’t know how far Iran had come.) Why the Left even pretends that it could attack Iran as a last resort if diplomacy fails when it has exuberantly excoriated for years those who have suggested that military strikes are, or at least were, viable, reveals impressive disingenuousness if nothing else.

For 20 years, the pattern has remained: Tehran advances and we look the other way, defaulting to diplomacy, sanctions, or one but not the other to slow the speed and range of further progress. Occasionally, Washington threatens something more severe, always letting the clerical regime know that the military option is, like water in a mirage, just over the horizon.

The Iranian people have given us another chance to stop this insanity — that is, doing the same actions over and over again and expecting a better result. We ought to admit to ourselves, even if our elected leaders understandably decline to do so publicly, that there is only one way the Iranian nuke now gets aborted: regime change.

This has been a dirty phrase in Washington, on both the Left and Right, since the Second Iraq War went south. I and my frequent writing partner, Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations, have been regularly pilloried as “the regime-change boys” for simply pointing out what should have been obvious to anyone reading and listening to the Persian pouring out of Iran since the reform movement was crushed in 1999: an ever-growing majority of the Iranian people want to off the theocracy.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Washington needs to embrace some massive effort to topple the mollahs. Whatever the United States does to aid the Iranian people — if it can decide to do anything at all — needs to have bipartisan support, especially if any aspect of that aid is clandestinely delivered. The age of large-scale CIA covert-action programs is probably past. Bipartisan support on the critical committees in Congress is obligatory if any program of scale is to take off and last. Congressmen and their staff need to appreciate the common cause, vote on the money, and not leak.

And we ought to be able to come together on two fundamentals: The Iranian people — the Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Baluch, and Arabs, to name the big ethnicities — are trying to unite against their Islamist overlords. They are also trying to take another run at popular sovereignty. Iranians have been trying to put institutional, constitutional checks on arbitrary power for nearly 120 years. They have explicitly yearned for democracy since the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. That yearning was co-opted and betrayed by Iran’s theocrats; it remains a driving force behind the nationwide protests that started in September.

Iranians’ failure so far to establish representative government shouldn’t dishearten Westerners about the prospects for future success. European democracies repeatedly floundered before they finally got it right — for some, only after the Yanks intervened. Democracy-seeking Iranians have too often had to act against a dismissive, even resistant West, which could feel comfortable with monarchical despotism or accepting of an “authentic” religious dictatorship.

The second fundamental is this: an Iranian democracy would be a blessing for the Middle East. Its arrival could well produce a bigger shock wave than the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

If Democrats and Republicans can come together on that at least, and adjust their rhetoric to say unequivocally and loudly that the Iranian people have earned the right to elect leaders who reflect their mores, that would be a huge step forward for Washington and the Iranian people.

We can then fight among ourselves about whether aid to the rebellion might help, hurt, or be utterly irrelevant.