Ahmad Sadri wrote a truly excellent article about the Iranian reform movement and Islamic fundamentalism. Sadri provides a panoramic overview of recent events as well as thoughtful analysis of the faults of President Khatami. Given those faults, the conclusions of the article are perhaps a bit too optimistic:

"The Iranian reform movement is about to molt out of the hardened, prudent and gradualist skin of the Khatami years. The discarded old casing already belongs to the historians. The young generations of Iranians are taking bets on the wing span and bright colors of the new, post-Khatami Reform. "

Middle East reformers should by now be used to failure. Every honest and hopeful attempt at reform has either failed or backfired on the people. Nasser's Pan-Arab movement promissed democracy and economic progress, and ended in the ruin of the 6-day war. Baathist Syria, Baathist Iraq, the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the regime of the Taliban all nightmares that resulted from implementation of dreams of reform in the real world of the Middle East. The pattern is familiar to us from the histories of every revolution gone bad: After the day of triumph, the earnest idealists find themselves in jail, and the new movement proceeds to impose a worse tyranny than the previous one.

Thus far, the conservative Mullah's have bested Khatami and the reformists in almost every encounter. But suppposing that a new day does dawn in Iran. Will it enact the dream of reform or the nightmate of yet another demogogic and repressive regime?

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by Moderator @ 09:15 PM CST [Link]