Mick Hartley

Abbas Milani lived through the 1979 Iranian revolution. Based at Stanford now, with a book on the Shah due out soon, he had some interesting observations which I quoted a couple of weeks back on Tunisia and Iran. That was before Egypt grabbed the headlines. Now here he is in the New Republic:

For Egyptians, the history of the Iranian Revolution should serve as a warning. In 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini hid his true intentions—namely the creation of a despotic rule of the clerics—behind the mantle of democracy. More than once he promised that not a single cleric would hold a position of power in the future government. But once in power, he created the current clerical despotism. And when, in June 2009, three million people took to the streets of Tehran to protest decades of oppression, they were brutally suppressed.

With this history in mind, Egyptian democrats must not be fooled by the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. If and when Mubarak falls, they simply cannot allow the most radical and brutal forces to win in the ensuing chaos. If these forces are allowed to claim power using the rhetoric of democracy, Egyptians will find themselves decades from now needing another uprising, which is precisely the current situation of the Iranian people.

The propaganda machine for the clerical regime in Tehran has been gloating about the similarities between the events of Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran and developments in Egypt now. It shamelessly claims that today’s uprising in Egypt is but an aftershock of the revolution in Iran. The Egyptian people must prove them wrong.

Michael J Totten interviews Milani here, allowing him to expand at more length on the similarities – and differences – between Iran in 1979 and Egypt now.  It's worth reading in full, but this caught my eye:

The Shah believed that if Khomeini went to Paris [from exile in Iraq] that people would see what this guy was really about and would be frightened. But the media never asked him any tough questions. They hadn’t read his books. And he completely hid his intentions.

And to lay blame where blame must laid, some Iranian intellectuals had begun to flirt with the clergy. They were propagating the idea that the clergy were on the forefront of the anti-colonial struggle. One of the most influential intellectuals of the 1960s, a man named Jalal Al-Ahmad, tried to rehabilitate the clergy and marched against the Enlightenment mentality. He was a secular leftist with social democratic leanings, but he wrote an embarrassingly shallow but very influential treatise called Westoxication. He lambasted the West and liberal democrats who supported Western democracy. And he said that we, the intellectuals he thought he represented, had been wrong by looking at the clergy as reactionaries. He said they were profoundly revolutionary and at the forefront of the struggle.

Not just Iranian intellectuals, of course. And not just then.