IRAN: Will protests spark regime change?

Men and women across Iran are risking their lives to protest the Islamic Republic’s theocracy. 38 years of Islamist terror and torture have produced a society that cannot even provide its people with enough food.

Under the Shah’s White Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, Iran became only the second Islamic society on Earth to modernize sufficiently to produce a middle class. Like Turkey before Erdogan, Iranians were shifting beyond Koranic medievalism into a successfully secularizing modernity.

Iranian Muslims embracing the modern world is what terrified the Mullahs the most. It produced a fundamentalist reaction that echoed from the Holy City of Qom to the Paris exile of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.  

President Jimmy Carter abandoned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, America’s closest Middle Eastern ally apart from Israel, because he was an imperfect authoritarian. The results were:

• The Shah’s overthrow, exile, and death in New York.  

• 444 days of America held hostage.  

• An Islamic Republic of Iran, which under Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei became the indispensable center of global Islamic terrorism.  

• The very Iran nuclear program that former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once claimed would purge Israel with God’s holy fire.

• A Millenarian regime eager to usher in the Islamic Day of Haq — Judgment Day.

Last year, President Trump freed us from that particular path to Armageddon. This year, hopefully he will help the Iranians slough off their evil regime and help bring a freed U.S. ally back from the dead.

RALPH K. GINORIO

Coeur d’Alene