Mousavi and the South African Example

Democracy in America goes back to pre-election profiles of Mir Hossein Mousavi and finds a “cautious, pragmatic, vague and increasingly shrewd politician.” This seems a fair verdict and, as we know, Mousavi can hardly be the perfect poster-boy for liberals since, if he were, he wouldn’t have been permitted to stand in the first place. But that was then and this is now. The movement is bigger than Mousavi now and it’s hard to see how much of it he and his advisers really control anyway.

What can be said is that reform is a process, not an event. Furthermore, I would hazard that the regime faces a pretty bleak choice: manage change now or risk demands for reform in the future that you cannot manage, control or put out. That in turn would leave Iran’s rulers to make a choice between engagement or a kind of Burmese-style brutality that would also bring a Burmese-style isolation.