The events in Iran are number one story in the United States; above health care, budget deficits, Arod, and even the Jonas Brothers. Many Americans from all political and social backgrounds are calling for something to be done to help the Iranian protestors, with many watching and critiquing President Obama’s statements and actions. Why? Don’t Americans have enough to worry about here at home with a struggling economy, major energy and health policies on the horizon, a North Korea talking about launching a missile toward Hawaii?

In this country it’s just assumed that we care about other people’s rights and freedoms, because, well, we generally do. I believe a portion of these kinds of sentiment come from the fact that many Americans have to time to spend on such faraway and seemingly distant problems and issues because our wealth affords them this. I loved to point out to my students that many other people would love to gather at conferences to discuss ways to solve the world’s problems (civil war, poverty, hunger), but they don’t have the time because their actually stuck dealing with them! But the abundance of media and civic attention spent so far on the Iranian protests show a nation more deeply involved in the plight of other humans fighting what most Americans consider universal rights. Wilsonian America is standing up and putting pressure on our politicians to support the spread of democracy and human rights and by Obama’s comments today and resolutions passed by Congress, the pols are listening.

Changing threads: Is Iran going to have a full fledged revolution with a regime change? This is obviously an important question and one that puts political scientists to the test. There are many theories by major scholars such as Stephen Walt, Fred Halliday, David Armstrong, and Theda Skocpol, that attempt to predict/explain revolutions in the international relations field, but I have yet to see a brave soul put a prediction regarding the current events happening in Iran. These theories stress such casual factors in revolutions as economic class, weakness or strength of institutions, international norms, civil society, army, individual actors, just to name a few.

I, myself, am not smart or arrogant enough to attempt to predict the fall or sustainability of the Islamic Republic, but I am definitely leaning one way and for a very good reason. The key questions I think one should ask to find out the answer to this question is…Who controls the army and does the army view the current government as legitimate? For it is true that part of the reason the Islamic Republic came to power in the first place is because the Shah lost his previously strong hold on the military. By the military’s willingness so far to attempt to contain/stop the protests and by reading these reports, I have to believe that the Islamic Republic still maintains this vital area of support and this I would predict likely keep them in power for at least a while longer. The Revolutionary Guards seem ready and willing to stop any attack on the regime and I’m not sure if the rising tide of civil society is strong enough to combat this force, history tells us it usually is not. In the next few days/weeks, I suggest paying special attention to actions of Iran’s military.

One last thought on the causes of a possible revolution and protests.  We have heard many reasons why thousands of Iranian citizens all of a sudden rose up against the Islamic Republic Regime, but one that I have not really heard much about is the fact that their neighbor Iraq had true democratic elections just a few months before Iran’s Presidential election.  Only this story in the Christian Science Monitor connects the two country’s elections, and it mainly does so by comparing their respective Ayatollah clerical system.  I don’t think the Iraqi elections had a major impact on the Iranian protests, but I think that to discount its possible effects would be mistaken.  How could it not have an impact?  A country, with which you share thousands of years of history, religion, and land, goes through a dramatic change, including in the political process, and it is impossible to ignore.  Iranians saw a lot of destruction and instability happening to their neighbor, but they also saw nearby people vote and elect fellow citizens to represent them.  That has to mean something.

Tags: American idealism, Iran, Iran Protest, Obama, revolutions, Wilsonian, Woodrow Wilson