



Over the next 25 years, the United States armed and trained the Shah’s dreaded SAVAK (Organization for National Security and Intelligence) secret police, which emerged as one of the most repressive internal security organizations of the era. Despite claims to the contrary by right-wing critics of the Carter administration, the United States strongly supported the Shah until his final days in power, providing valuable assistance to the regime even as it was massacring protestors in the streets. It comes as no surprise, in light of this, that the revolution that finally ousted the monarchy in February 1979 was stridently anti-American. Furthermore, since the Shah’s repressive apparatus had largely succeeded in wiping out the democratic and secular opposition to the regime, it was religious opponents—who survived as a result of the greater cohesion made possible through the mosques—who spearheaded the revolutionary movement. Thus, the radical Islamic orientation of the revolution was greatly influenced by the Shah’s U.S.-backed efforts to maintain control through repression.

As a result of this history, most members of the democratic opposition in Iran do not take very seriously Washington’s claims that it supports freedom for the Iranian people.


Some American neoconservative leaders argue that sustained air and missile strikes against Iranian government, nuclear, and military facilities—a far more realistic scenario for a U.S. war against Iran—would cripple the regime to a point that it would empower opponents to rise up against the government. In reality, Iranian opposition leaders emphasize that war and threat of war by the U.S. government would certainly unify the population around the regime and would be used to justify further repression.


In addition, the United States cannot realistically hope for a coup, given that pro-U.S. elements in the military were thoroughly purged soon after the revolution. The leadership of Iran’s military and security forces, while not necessarily unified in support of the more hardline elements in government, cannot be realistically expected to collaborate with any U.S. efforts for regime change in their oil-rich country.



Despite the increased repression of recent years, Iran has witnessed a growing civil society movement and increasing calls for greater freedom. Indeed, those in the Iranian regime correctly recognize that the biggest threat to their grip on power comes not from the United States, but from their own people. Civilian-based insurrections have played a critical role over the past century in challenging Iranian rulers, such as during the Constitutional Revolution of 1907 and the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Iran’s clerical leaders, faced with growing dissent—particularly among youth, the middle class, and urban dwellers—realize that they may be next.


these allegations.

Some Western bloggers and other writers, understandably skeptical of U.S. intervention in oil-producing nations in the name of "democracy," have actually bought into these claims by Iran’s hardline clerics that prominent nonviolent activists from Europe and the United States—most of whom happen to be highly critical of U.S. policy toward Iran—are somehow working as agents of the Bush administration. These conspiracy theories have in turn been picked up by some progressive websites and periodicals, which repeat them as fact. The result has been to strengthen the hand of Iran’s repressive regime, weaken democratic forces in Iran, and strengthen the argument of U.S. neoconservatives that only military force from the outside—and not nonviolent struggle by the Iranian people themselves—is capable of freeing Iran from repressive clerical rule.



The U.S. government has historically promoted regime change through military invasions, coups d’etat and other kinds of violent seizures of power by an undemocratic minority. Nonviolent "people power" movements, by contrast, promote regime change through empowering pro-democratic majorities. Unlike fomenting a military coup or supporting a military occupation, which are based upon control over the population and repression of potential political opponents, nonviolent civil insurrections—as a result of being based upon a broad coalition of popular movements—are impossible for an outside power to control.


Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and is the Middle East editor and advisory board member of Foreign Policy In Focus. He is the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage, 2003) and the principal editor of Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective (Blackwell, 1999).