Iranian democracy "within a decade"

To continue where I left off with Larry Diamond in my last post, I also chatted with him about Iran. Diamond is under no illusions about what the Iranian regime is up to, describing their current activities as an “obvious, frenetic pursuit of nuclear weapons.” But he is surprisingly optimistic about the prospects for reform in Iran; arguing that there’s a “good probability” that we might see a democratic Iran within the next ten years or so. 

He believes that if “if we bomb [reform is] dead for a decade.” But if we don’t, he sees real opportunities. He points out that, “Ahmadinejad is less effective and less politically potent internally than he may appear and the key to our strategy, in part, has to be to give him enough rope to hang himself.” He notes that Ahmadinejad has proven incredibly incompetent at governing and managing the economy, even managing to create a stock market crash while the oil prices rockets up. This leads him to conclude that “a sophisticated, patient, multi-dimensional, adroit, strategy of dealing with the regime in some ways, while stigmatizing it and fighting a war of ideas in other ways could yield democratic regime change within a decade.” 

The first step, to his mind, should be “direct, comprehensive negotiations with the Iranians in which everything is on the table.” He doesn’t think that the regime would bite but that this approach would “put the regime back up against the wall with its own people” in explaining why they were rejecting the opportunities that the lifting off economic sanctions and the like would bring.

But our track record on Iran, Diamond says, has been terribly weak. For the last 25 years, he observes, U.S. policy toward Iran has been characterized by a “shocking failure of imagination.”