Stiffing the Revolutionaries

So when I heard President Obama had decided to dismantle the Iran Democracy Fund, I, along with a great many Iranian-Americans working for change in Iran, thought, “Good riddance.”

In the press, Obama’s move to shutter the fund and cut off money for groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, whose founder boasts that it does what the CIA used to do covertly 25 years ago, has been characterized as abandoning Iran’s reformists and democracy activists. Former Senator Rick Santorum said Obama had “stiff[ed] Iran’s revolutionaries.” Senator Joe Lieberman called Obama’s actions “disturbing.” According to The Wall Street Journal, seven congressmen wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to express their concern with the administration’s decision.

Yet what few seemed to have noticed is that many of the people the Iran Democracy Fund was supposed to support—the human-rights activists and democracy promoters toiling inside Iran—wholeheartedly welcomed Obama’s decision. Indeed, a spokesman for Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi praised the move. “These U.S. funds are going to people who have very little to do with the real struggle for democracy in Iran and our civil society activists never received such funds,” the spokesman, Abdolfattah Soltani, told the BBC. “The end to this program will have no impact on our activities whatsoever.”

Akbar Ganji, Iran’s most famous political dissident, calls the Iran Democracy Fund “severely counterproductive,” noting that “none of the human-rights activists and members of the opposition in Iran had any interest in using such funds.” The problem, as Ganji sees it, is that even though Iran’s homegrown democracy activists refuse to go anywhere near the money—because the U.S. government will not release information about who actually receives the funds—the Iranian government simply assumes that any nongovernmental organization working for human rights in Iran must be in league with the U.S. government. This has greatly damaged the democracy movement in Iran, which, contrary to the beliefs of Zia Atabay and Rick Santorum, does not benefit one iota from their activities.

Admittedly, the Obama administration is still trying to figure out its Iran policy. Thus far, it has had some success in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, though much more needs to be done to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons capability. Yet despite the criticism Obama has received from his neoconservative critics for not reaching out more forcefully to Iran’s reformists (as though Bush’s silly platitudes about “standing with Iran’s reformers” achieved anything other than isolating and endangering those reformers), the fact remains that there is simply no way for the United States to promote democracy in Iran except through dialogue and diplomacy with its reviled regime—not through more meaningless and thus far totally ineffective sanctions, not through empty threats of military actions, and certainly not through sexy music videos.

It is quite simple, really. The only way to punish a country for its bad behavior is first to have some kind of relationship with it. That is precisely what Obama is trying to do. By working toward the normalization of relations between the U.S. and Iran, Obama is laying the groundwork for real, meaningful, and lasting reform in Iran.

So on behalf of most, not all, young Iranians struggling for change in Iran, I say, keep your measly $85 million, America (chump change as far as covert propaganda operations go). But by all means, keep the music videos coming.

Reza Aslan, a contributor to the Daily Beast, is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside and senior fellow at the Orfalea Center on Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of the bestseller No god but God and How to Win a Cosmic War.

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