It was the summer of the “Twitter Revolution,” it was 1979 redux, it was the beginning of the end of the 30-year Islamic regime in Iran. The year, we were assured, marked the demise of clerical reign; it was merely a matter of time before the Shia Humpty fell. Iran had a new face—youths who, armed with cell phones and Facebook accounts, were about to wipe the aged Islamic revolutionaries off the Persian map. And the world was momentarily bathed in their color, green—the color of candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s campaign to unseat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—in solidarity with the peaceful demonstrators who deplored their stolen election. There was no point engaging a regime that was on its way out, we were told, because the regime was fatally wounded not by Western sanctions or by a military strike, but by millions of its own citizens demanding to know, “Where is my vote?” It was June 2009, a year ago this week, and for several weeks, even months, those ideas seemed unassailable.

Obviously, they were wrong. ~Hooman Majd

Earlier this year, Majd wrote what was by most accounts the best analysis of the Green movement. He can probably be best described as a skeptical sympathizer: he wants Iranian opposition efforts to secure political reforms and civil rights to succeed, but he doesn’t harbor unrealistic ideas that the entire movement is some radical, anti-regime force that is poised to topple the government. The last six months since he wrote that analysis have vindicated his claims.

The follow-up column is also worth reading in its entirety, and I will come back to it, but I wanted to address Majd’s observation about the “unassailable” ideas he describes. He is absolutely right that these were the prevailing, overwhelmingly dominant ideas at the time, and to some extent they continue to be the default view of Western Green movement sympathizers. Iran hawks and other opponents of engagement with Iran took shelter behind these “unassailable” ideas in order to ridicule Obama for “weakness” and “appeasement” or to position themselves as idealistic friends of Iran’s democrats rather than the shabby, amoral, deal-making realists. To assail these ideas was to be considered a supporter of the Iranian regime, an apologist for Ahmadinejad, and all the rest of the insults opponents of the Iraq war had hurled at them seven and eight years ago. One of the reasons why I kept making counter-arguments against claims that the Green movement was going from strength to strength was that these arguments seemed to be built mostly on exaggeration and emotion, and there was never much evidence to persuade a skeptic that these arguments were correct. You were supposed to believe in the power of the Green movement because it felt like the right thing to believe, or else you were just a heartless villain rejoicing in the deaths of protestors. That was more or less the quality of the debate. Critical thinking and sober analysis didn’t matter a year ago, and they didn’t matter for much of the last year when it came to this subject. What mattered was demonstrating empty solidarity with a movement most Westerners misunderstood and one that many wanted to use for their own ends.

One of the reasons I spent as much time as I have over the last year attacking and questioning the claims of Green movement sympathizers here in the U.S., is that it was quite clear to me that isolating and vilifying Iran can only strengthen the hand of the Iranian government at home, split the opposition, and distract Iranians from domestic grievances by creating an external challenge to Iranian sovereignty and nationalism. Nonetheless, this approach of isolation and vilification was exactly what most Western sympathizers urged the administration to adopt. Because there was so much outrage at how the Iranian government had treated its dissidents, Green movement sympathizers wanted nothing to do with engagement any longer, and this ended up aligning them in the debate with Iran hawks who saw the Green movement as a useful short-cut to “solve” the problems they have with Iran. The goal of regime change was still there, but the heavy lifting was going to be assigned to the Iranian opposition.

One small problem with this was that this was not what the Iranian opposition wanted. As Majd explains, this is what Iranian exile groups and their Western supporters wanted the Iranian opposition to want, and it is what the exiles and Westerners claimed that they wanted. The exile groups were trying to turn what could have conceivably turned into a broader-based political protest movement into a politically non-viable anti-regime force. As Majd writes:

A raft of Iranian opposition groups and individuals, mostly abroad, have jumped aboard the Green train—in some cases even claiming the mantle of leadership—and their basic agenda (overthrow of the Islamic regime) invariably contradicts the Green Movement agenda (electoral transparency and civil rights). Statements of support from the much-despised Mujahedin-e Khalq, based in Paris, and the green wristband worn by the shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, were godsends to the government, which has from the start labeled the Green Movement a “velvet” or “color” revolution backed by foreigners. Green leaders have taken pains not to advocate the end of their government, since this is clearly the regime’s most potent charge against them. Though a few of their ranks may harbor seditious dreams, the movement writ large is about civil rights, not pro-Western revolution.

On the whole, Green movement sympathizers in the West provided endless ammunition to the Iranian government that wanted to weaken the opposition’s true claims that the opposition was an entirely Iranian phenomenon. Majd continues:

Commentators abroad who desperately wanted to help the Green Movement not only hindered but actively hurt it. To begin with, there was the sheer inanity of equating the Iranian opposition with revolution and a movement to overthrow the Islamic system [bold mine-DL] (not recognizing that even Ahmadinejad, and certainly Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, still enjoy a fair measure of support).

By celebrating them as radical revolutionaries and ignoring or downplaying the insider credentials of many of the movement’s figureheads, Western admirers imputed their own hopes to the movement and thereby did some significant political damage to the movement by portraying it as a subversive, anti-regime force. It would probably have been better to remain completely aloof and skeptical than offer this sort of harmful “support.” On the whole, the administration responded wisely for the first few months by saying as little as possible, but gradually came under pressure to pay more attention to the Green movement from the usual quarters that are always insisting that the U.S. “do something” about everything on the planet. Of course, this is a crucial part of the problem with much of the Western sympathy for the movement: unless it is an anti-regime force, it is of no use to the U.S. and the West, and it is therefore of little interest. As we have seen in recent years in their reactions to political changes in Turkey, Japan, Brazil and other countries throughout Latin America, many democratists quickly lose interest in democratization abroad when it threatens to complicate things for the U.S.

The Green movement has been struggling for Iranian rights and for the sake of their own country. Perhaps someday they or their successors will have some success, but whatever happens it has nothing to do with us. Unlike many of the “pro-Western” movements Washington has enthusiastically backed in the last ten years, the Green movement is not interested in dragging their countrymen against their will into a Western orbit in ways contrary to their national interests. What we cannot seem to abide here in the U.S. is the idea that there is a political reform movement in Iran that has emerged and developed pretty much entirely on its own, does not owe Washington anything for its existence, and does not particularly harbor “pro-Western” inclinations on contested issues. For a lot of its sympathizers, it has to be pursuing the same goals of regime change and compliance with Western demands, or it doesn’t really count. I agree with Majd that the assumption that the Green movement somehow needs U.S. support is insulting to Iranians, and more than that it reflects the fundamentally self-absorbed assumption of so many of our politicians and pundits that every great political change in the world can only be brought about through the exercise of American power and influence.