Totalitarianism Isn't Reformable

The only viable policy on Iran is revolution, not reform.

June 8, 2018 Michael Ledeen

The secretary of state insists that the United States does not support regime change in Iran, but rather a change in the behavior of the Iranian regime. Speaking on Voice of America’s Radio Farda, our official Farsi-language channel to the Iranian people, Secretary Mike Pompeo said the United States supported Iranians, wherever they were, who were fighting for greater freedom, so long as they did not advocate an end to the Islamic regime itself.

Pompeo told (Radio Farda) that, while he supports many Iranian opposition groups in the United States and Europe, he does not back calls for regime change in Tehran.

"We don't want them advocating for regime change, either…We want them working on behalf of the Iranian people, ordinary Iranian citizens who want nothing more than to live their lives, to be able to take their hijab off, to be able to go to work and raise their families and worship in the way they want to worship."

The major problem with this policy is that totalitarian regimes, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, can’t be reformed. Remember “Communism with a human face”? We never saw it. Instead, we saw the Red Army crush Alexander Dubcek’s reformists in the streets of Czechoslovakia. Ditto for Mikhail Gorbachev, whose glasnost was widely believed to signal the transformation of Soviet Communism. It didn’t, and the Soviet system wasn’t transformed until Gorbachev was removed, and his successors abolished the Communist state. Italian fascism and German Nazism were both defeated on the battlefield, and abolished, not transformed......To Read More.....