In Context: Prof. Jonathan Acuff on the Comparison of the War in Afghanistan with Vietnam

Many analysts have worried that Iraq would become a quagmire for the United States similar to the Vietnam War. Jonathan Acuff, assistant professor of politics, however, thinks Afghanistan, where the U.S. is committing more troops, is the better analogy with Vietnam. In this In Context interview, Professor Acuff explains why Afghan history, geography and population characteristics – as well as the troop strength of America and its allies – makes him think that way.

Prof. Acuff recently appeared on New Hampshire Public Radio's The Exchange, where he discussed the new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. To listen to the replay of this program, visit http://www.nhpr.org/node/26200.

Social Networking Media and the Revolution that Wasn’t

An Assessment of Popular Interpretations of the Iranian Election Protests

The theft of the Iranian presidential election by President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Khamenei and the demonstrations that followed captivated the world. Yet many U.S. media commentators and members of the think tank community fundamentally misinterpreted the events in the Islamic republic.

While the scale and duration of the protests came as a surprised to all, the willingness of some observers to throw caution to the wind and draw false parallels with seemingly similar events speaks to the lack of attention paid by the contemporary media to rigorous, academically acquired knowledge in favor of assumptions about the power of media-a particularly convenient position for the media itself-and inside-the-Beltway think tanks staffed largely by out of power political figures.

This tendency does not serve American interests well. Given the impending American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, our intensifying difficulties in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iran's nuclear program, and the regime's support for Hezbollah, we need a clear picture of Iran more than ever. Americans should resist the temptation to believe in what we want to be true about Iran and adopt a more pragmatic attitude.

Iran is probably not on the brink of revolution. We should thus prepare ourselves and our allies for the difficult task of interacting with the regime in Tehran, no matter its legitimacy.

During the remarkable recent events in Iran, many commentators in the U.S. media suggested that the massive street demonstrations were attributable to the new social networking media, particularly Twitter and Facebook. Such observers asserted that the ability of Twitter to distribute messages to every cell phone user who so chose to subscribe and the use of Facebook as a resource for posting video footage and photos of the protests produced a snowball effect. According to this logic, the initial largely spontaneous gatherings by supporters of the defeated presidential candidates Mousavi and Karroubi mushroomed with the broader reach of these media, putting tens of thousands of Iranians in the streets and, in the view of these commentators, placing the Iranian regime in jeopardy.

Yet this account demonstrates the striking amnesia of the U.S. press, particularly among the cable news providers who most commonly offered this interpretation. Almost exactly 20 years before, similar opinions were voiced during the seven-week occupation of Tiananmen Square by pro-democracy protesters. The Chinese students interacted with each other and the international media via fax machine, which caused many in the media to marvel at the seeming ability of the 24-hour news cycle paired with modern telecommunications to drive events. Yet fax machines proved no protection against the harsh crackdown by the People's Liberation Army that resulted in over 2,000 dead. In contrast, the successful, relatively bloodless revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 were in no small part influenced by the mass distribution of the writings of dissidents via photocopiers. The samizdat as they became known made the work of Vaclav Havel and others easily accessible, even when such subversive writings were officially proscribed.

While they certainly make social mobilization easier, fax machines, photocopies, Facebook, and Twitter do not make revolutions. "New media" were present at the birth of all three above instances of mobilization and yet the results were dramatically different in each case. Clearly, variation in the types of mass media cannot explain why some protests turn into revolutions and others do not. The ability to transmit information to the masses seems to be a necessary condition for revolutions-one is reminded of the pamphleteering of Thomas Paine in the American Revolution or even the cassette tapes of the Ayatollah Khomeini smuggled from Paris to Tehran in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. However, whether they are new or old, mass media are not in themselves sufficient to create revolutions.

Analysts from U.S. think tanks fared little better, particularly from institutions with an overtly conservative bent. The insurrection against the Iranian government's version of the election results does not necessarily represent deeper conditions of social unrest and discontent that would signal the onset of a revolution.

This assessment flies in the face of the claims of many self-anointed "experts" from such conservative strongholds as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hudson Institute. During the crisis several members of these think tanks sallied forth to the op-ed pages of major U.S. newspapers claiming with an abundance of confidence that this was, at long last, the revolt of the Iranian youth and urban middle class so often predicted over the past eight years by former Vice President Cheney and his disciples in the Pentagon. Other analysts of a similar bent suggested the election theft represented a "theo-fascist coup" against the ruling clerics and that, in keeping with the worldview of Mr. Cheney and others, the U.S. and its allies should thus assume a much more confrontational posture.

Yet a far more nuanced picture emerged among scholars who actually know something about Iran. No revolution was in the offing, nor would one be in the near to medium term. These scholars tend to stress not just the considerable scale of the opposition to the regime, but also the paradoxically weak position of opponents to the regime, particularly when compared with the scale and organization of the protests that precipitated the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Such realism about the prospects for fundamental political change suggests that, like it or not, the U.S. will have to do business with President Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader Khamenei.

One of the most prominent experts on Iran, University of South Florida professor Mohsen M. Milani, has argued that Iran's regime is far more rational than is often portrayed by both the U.S. news media and neoconservative analysts. The nuclear aspirations of the regime and its suppression of dissent are part of a larger strategy that they see in terms of a struggle for survival against the existential threat posed by the U.S. Thus the crackdown should be seen in the context of the view of many Iranians-and not just religious clerics-that the U.S. poses a fundamental threat to Iran.

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a professor of economics at Virginia Tech and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, even suggested that Ahmadinejad may have in fact won the popular election, although clearly not by the margin endorsed by the Guardian Council. This view was echoed in an op-ed in The Washington Post by Ken Ballen, President of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, and Patrick Dougherty, Deputy Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. However, Professor Mansoor Moaddel of the University of Michigan has persuasively argued that much of the poll data prior to the election was faulty and that Iran has been subject to rapid shifts in public opinion in the past, sharply reducing our confidence in the extant polls. Taken together, it is difficult to discern precisely where the Iranian public's preferences lie. Thus we should avoid overconfidence in inferring how the protests will affect Iran's future, particularly when such conclusions conform to our own preconceptions.

Of particular importance is the relatively low level of organization of the protests, as well as how the opposition will come to terms with the religious core to political legitimacy since 1979. Misagh Parsa, professor of sociology at Dartmouth College and an expert on revolutions has noted in the online journal Gozaar that the opposition "would require a strong, secure leadership that can break away from the existing system and present a democratic alternative acceptable to the majority of the protestors who are risking their lives. The leadership must forge a broad coalition of students, women, and the rest of the population to be able to challenge the regime. The coalition must include the major social classes and collectivities in order to disrupt social and economic structures." Such leadership has been hitherto lacking.

In contrast to view presented by commentators from conservative think tanks, there is no reason to simplistically read the events of June as validation of the neoconservative position that all people everywhere desire American style institutions. Neoconservatives have been quick to use the protests as validation for the "strategy" of airstrikes against Iran's nuclear program paired with increased public diplomacy, the view offered by former President Bush's Ambassador to the UN John Bolton in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. Most academics who study Iran argue that revolution is not necessarily around the corner and that airstrikes would hardly be interpreted by the mass of the Iranian people as a gesture encouraging them to resist Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. Far from it. Such a move would only feed right into the hands of the conservative clerics, who would remind the Iranian people of the U.S.' unprovoked shooting down of an Iranian airliner in the Gulf in 1988, which resulted in the deaths of 250 Iranian civilians, or the U.S.-led coup that overthrew democratically-elected Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 (Operation Ajax). Airstrikes and public diplomacy have not worked particularly well in the Middle East as a whole, and there is little reason to believe that most of the people in the streets of Iran were protesting because they were inspired in any way by our example. After the intelligence fiascos and mismanagement of the Iraq War, it is frankly amazing that major U.S. newspapers are even willing to publish such ill-conceived jingoism.

Although it is intrinsically appealing to believe that the U.S. is such a beacon of hope and democracy that we inspire freedom-loving people everywhere to throw off their chains, given the long term stability of dysfunctional regimes like North Korea, which many think tank analysts similarly claimed was ripe to fall in 1994, we should be more skeptical concerning the claims of those who interpret every mass protest as "freedom on the march" or that every country will experience a Velvet (Czechoslovakia) or Orange (Ukraine) Revolution.[1] Academics with a focus on Iran have been rather less swayed by either utopian or eschatological interpretations of the images emanating from the streets of Tehran, as hopeful and at times horrifying as those images have been. The tragic failure of the protests to stop the theft of the Iranian election, let alone spark a revolution, should remind us that wishful thinking and ideology are poor substitutes for learned, measured analysis in the formation of foreign policy. Using the criteria of existing theories of revolution, it is clear that Iran was-and remains-far from reaching the requisite threshold of a political or social revolution. It is not that such a revolution is impossible, far from it. Rather, there are specific political, economic, and social conditions that increase the probability of revolution. Contemporary Iran reflects, some, but far from most of these indicators. More on that next time.

Jonathan Acuff is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Saint Anselm College. He was previously a research analyst for the National Bureau of Asian Research and has served as an officer in the U.S. Army.

Flickr Photo credits: Cover Photo & Story Photo

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[1] Incidentally, the Orange Revolution has proven far from "revolutionary." Although it overrode the attempted theft of the 2004 presidential election led by Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine's politics since have become considerably more ambiguous, with the ostensibly liberal victors of this struggle proving far less amenable to democratic governance than initially appeared.

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