The uprising of the Iranian people

In the Federalist, Erielle Davidson informs us about the people's uprisings in Iran.

As the Iranian regime restores internet connectivity to vast swaths of the country following a government-imposed shutdown, new images are emerging from the week-long blackout that shed light on the severity of the tensions between the Iranian people and their repressive regime.

...“One year into the U.S. unilateral sanctions campaign against Iran – which have been more effective than the past decade of multilateral sanctions – Iranians are pouring out onto the streets and pointing a finger at their own leaders, not Washington, for their shortcomings,” asserts Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

...According to Amnesty International, at least 143 protesters have been killed in confrontations with the regime’s security forces, while reports from U.S.-based nonprofit Center for Human Rights in Iran allege that almost 3,000 others have been arrested. Due to the internet blackout intentionally orchestrated by the Iranian regime to isolate dissidents and prevent the spread of information about the protests, the violent nature of the clashes between protesters and regime security forces is only coming to light now.

As Amnesty reports, “Verified videos show security forces deliberately shooting unarmed protesters from a short distance. In some cases, protesters were shot while they were running away.” Other videos reveal images of security forces shooting at protesters from rooftops. Across the country, tens of gasoline pumps, police stations, and banks have been razed to the ground.

...As Hanin Ghaddar wrote in The Tower back in 2016, “From the very beginning, Iran’s goal has been the establishment of a Shi’ite Arab territory that physically links Iran to southern Lebanon via Iraq and Syria.” But fulfilling this behemoth mission has translated into the Iranian regime allocating funds to, among other things, the development of missile technologies and a burgeoning nuclear program, as well as resulted in the funneling of billions of dollars to various regimes (like Bashar al-Assad’s in Syria) and to terrorist proxies (such as Hezbollah and Hamas).

With Iran’s budget, transparency is a pipe dream, but some have attempted to crunch the numbers. It’s rumored that Assad received roughly $15 billion in aid from the Iranian regime in 2015. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, the terrorist group effectively seeking to run Lebanon, allegedly receives $700 million from Iranian coffers each year.

“Washington’s non-kinetic (peaceful) pressure policy is robbing the regime of revenues, forcing it to choose between ‘guns and butter.’” Taleblu evokes the classic economic model used to explain production choices in a given country when parsing down the regime’s economic preferences. “As [Iran] chooses guns, it risks increasing domestic ire from its own population for its choices.” Indeed, the protests represent the ultimate manifestation of that ire.

...In addition to an effective sanction campaign for identifying and shaming those who violate Iranian human rights, Taleblu also argues that the situation would benefit from the U.S. offering “rhetorical support, quickly and decisively, for when Iranians take to the streets to use every single crisis – social, political, economic – to express their dissatisfaction with the regime.”

Taleblu’s strategies represent a powerful means of supporting freedom-seeking people without immediately resorting to military tactics to do so. They also indicate that the Trump administration has the power to strike an effective deal with a group of individuals, even if informal in some capacities. Unlike the Obama administration, let’s hope it’s with the right ones.

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