With the authorities cracking down, Iranians have demonstrated their democratic and civic impulses to the world.

TEHRAN


I have received a lot of mail since I arrived here a few days before Iran’s disputed June 12 election. The street party in progress then, a celebration of a vigorous and vibrant campaign, has since given way to a brutal clampdown by a regime intent on asserting that the vote was clean and that millions of enraged Iranian voters have no cause to believe they were defrauded. Never have I seen euphoria so transformed into anguish overnight.

That, I think, is what has moved people around the world so much: the sense of an Iranian people lured into hope and then bludgeoned into hell, resisting on the street with rocks and stones and all the outrage of their injured beings. Anyone who was here and witnessed this ballot-box putsch can have no doubt that this was what it was. You don’t celebrate a victory with two-thirds of the vote by beating women on the street and imprisoning all the leading aides to your opponent. Yet that is how President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chose to mark his re-election for four more years, and that has been the fate of any prominent adviser to Mir Hussein Moussavi, his adversary.

The mail has been of all kinds, but at its root it has been about a global solidarity of the human spirit. Just as the solitary man standing before the tank at Tiananmen Square two decades ago confronted steel with will alone, so the protesters in the streets of Tehran, and particularly Iran’s indomitable young women, have faced the full force of the regime armed only with their furious indignation. The downtown rally on the Monday after the vote, which drew about three million people, was of an intense dignity, one of the most moving events I have ever witnessed. The intermittent street fights since then have seen state-sanctioned thuggery confronting the outrage of broad sectors of society.

One Iranian-American wrote to me from the West Coast of the United States to thank me for the fact that, for the first time in decades, he is able to respond to questions about where he is from without preparing for a shadow to cross his interlocutor’s face. On the contrary, he commented, when he says “Iran” now, he is likely to get a smile, a hug or a nod of admiration. This transformation in American perceptions, of course, is the work of the brave people of Iran, to which I have merely tried to bear witness for as long as I could despite attempts to stop journalists from working and despite relentless attacks on “foreign media and agents.”

It is an important change. Countries can easily be turned into caricatures. Former President George W. Bush consigned Iran to “the axis of evil.” Evil images were about all we got from Iran: mad mullahs intent on securing an atomic bomb as fast as possible and then bringing nuclear Armageddon to Israel and the world. This presidential election was widely dismissed as the meaningless democratic fig leaf of a clerical dictatorship. When, on a visit earlier this year to Iran, I tried to paint a nuanced picture of an unfree society nonetheless offering margins of liberty and demonstrating great sophistication and vitality, critics rushed to attach the label “Iranian apologist” to my name. At the same time, countless Iranians in exile wrote to thank me for breaking through the facile stereotyping.

Iran has come into better focus now. The regime, three decades after the Revolution, has proved more brutal, more ruthless, than seemed possible back in January, or indeed during the heady evenings that immediately preceded the vote. At the same time, Iranian society has demonstrated to the world the strength of its civic and democratic impulses, and so given the lie to an image of uniform fanaticism. It has done so with a rare valor that nobody who has witnessed it will forget. Which of these forces - repressive reaction or the pluralistic urge - will prove stronger is hard to say. But I am certain that, unless it adapts, Iran’s revolutionary order will become so alienated from society as to be unsustainable. Millions have passed from reluctant acquiescence into outright antagonism to the regime over the past two weeks.

I think that, over the coming months, Iran may well try to use talks with the United States as a means to offset the rage at home. Iranians, in their great majority, are drawn to the United States. President Obama must tread carefully: a restoration of American-Iranian relations is in the world’s overwhelming interest, but it cannot come at the price of those whose blood is now on the streets of Tehran. The regime just raised the bar for normalization. It also lost a great opportunity to demonstrate that both words in its self-description - Is lamic Republic - mean something.