WarSclerotic

The heart rejoices at the sight of protests in the center of Tehran, smack dab in the middle of an indoor market. Finally, results. The heavy sanctions imposed by the enlightened world on the dark ayatollah regime are finally bearing fruit. The crowd was not chanting “death to America” or even “death to Israel” — they were chanting “death to Syria.”

Channel 2 commentator Dr. Arad Nir poured some cold water on all the excitement: the demonstrators didn’t make any mention of the country’s nuclear program — the cause of their dire economic situation and the Iranian currency’s recent free fall. Allow me to disagree: it would be counterproductive for them to protest against their country’s nuclear program. If they did, the ayatollahs would call them anti-patriotic and accuse them of undermining national security. Whether by instinct or by design they are avoiding this eventuality, and I hope they continue to do so.

The authorities’ response to the protests is interesting. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has censored television footage, both domestic and foreign. The blocked internet access around the country wasn’t an act of cyberwar initiated by another country — it was the Iranian government’s doing. This was the first demonstration, relatively small, a first spark if you will. But you can safely say that the ayatollahs are now afraid. Not of this protest, but of the ones that will surely follow.

But the ayatollah regime is not like Hosni Mubarak’s leadership in Egypt or Moammar Gadhafi’s in Libya. It isn’t even like Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria. Mubarak was a hollow leader, and apparently so was Gadhafi, and ever since the outbreak of the Syrian rebellion, Assad has represented a minority regime with strong ties to Sunni circles. That is not the case in Tehran. There, the ayatollahs are steadfast, and the regime has so far relied on the support of the majority of the Iranian people.

But the protest on Wednesday, and the ones that will follow, don’t yet pose any actual threat to the regime. The die is not yet cast, as Natan Alterman once wrote. Anyone looking on at the cruelty with which Assad, with the help of the Iranian regime, is butchering his people, must realize that they are capable of such cruelty not only on the streets of Damascus but also in the Tehran marketplace. There is no mercy, outward or inward.

The battle will be drawn out, and even if the ayatollahs are forced to withdraw their involvement from Syria, Lebanon and Gaza in order to focus their resources on their own economy, the megalomaniacal Iranian nuclear program will be the last budget cut to be made, and it will only be cut as a very last resort. On the contrary, Ahmadinejad and his cohorts will push the nuclear program onto the center of the country’s public agenda to rally the disgruntled masses around it before they ever decide to give it up, if they ever do. That is how a centralized, near-dictatorial regime carries out diplomacy and propaganda.

The obvious conclusion is twofold: The economic sanctions on Iran could be effective if toughened. At the current level they are an obstacle for the malicious Iranian regime, but they are not posing a threat to its continued reign. The vicious tiger is moderately wounded, but if it isn’t killed it could pose a bigger threat than it already is now. A job half done could, God forbid, prove to be even more dangerous than no action at all. The world’s democracies must finish it.