I was fortunate enough to participate in a conference call with Natan Sharansky hosted by the Heritage Foundation. As you all have probably guessed, I’m a big fan of his book, The Case For Democracy, so this presented a very unique chance to get a question in. I was joined by several heavyweight bloggers Regime Change Iran, Right Wing News, Red State, Power Line, Gateway Pundit, Hugh Hewitt, Atlas Shrugs, and Boker Tov, Boulder. Follow those links!

Unfortunately, there was an audio problem so no file or transcript will be available. Meaning I have to go by memory or notes. Both of which I have relatively none of. Luckily other bloggers are making sure that things go right, so visit Pamela’s post to download a wav audio file of the entire thing.

It’s really too bad that there is audio, because now I can’t paraphrase and make my question seem more eloquent than it actually was. In any case, Sharansky speaks for awhile, and then everything is opened up for questions and answers. The topic was mostly on U.S. policy toward Iran. I was lucky enough to get in the last question, so if you want to hear that, just fast forward. I think the whole thing was rather interesting.

Now, I’m a huge Sharansky fan. I admire his work as well as his life greatly, which is why I wish I could have the opportunity to do a more discussion-style interview with him. Q&A doesn’t capture enough detail and explore enough corners. But this will have to do for now. In case the audio file is too large, Hugh Hewitt posted a rough transcript of the questions and responses. Here is mine, followed by the response: “Iran seems like a very special case, different from the USSR, because it’s a regime that doesn’t care about the world and what it has to say about its actions. Who should we to support and how can we expect citizens to revolt before the time on the nuke clock is out?”

“To give them incentives is impossible because there are no incentives…They have a paradise next life, from that point, and if they make any concessions, they will lose it.”

“Iran is a unique example of a country where in one generation– overwhelming majority went from being true believers to an overwhelming majority being double-thinkers.”

“(In the USSR) majority of people were not accepting of this ideology, but they were afraid of the KGB.”

“How quickly does it happen depends on how strong they will feel the support of the West, how clear it is to them that the West is behind them.”

“They will find that they are surprisingly unafraid of the regime.”

A key part of my question that I probably didn’t emphasize enough was the difference regarding the Iranian regime and its connection to the outside world versus the case of the Soviet Union, and the ability of the Iranian people to overthrow that regime even if the security forces continue to stand against them. The answer was dissatisfying, if only because there was not enough time for a follow-up. So I will do that follow-up here, with my explanation, below.

The key difference between Iran and the Soviet Union is that the latter, following Stalin’s death, progressively became more and more pragmatic — and less ideological. It’s need to engage with the West to sustain itself in many ways, especially economically, allowed the United States to attach human rights strings to these things, which forced the Soviet Union in many ways to open up.

However, Iran’s leadership is still very much ideological and is trying to make good on its threat to destroy Western civilization. It also does not need to rely on the United States for any kind of economic aid for its survival. The mullahs have China and Russia, which have made it their primary goal to construct a multi-polar world, and so are using Iran as a hedge against the United States to achieve this end. Iran’s authoritarian regime is therefore reinforced on this level many times over, so it does not have to moderate its policies to satisfy the West as the Soviet Union had to do. This means that the United States cannot support dissidents the way it did previously, and even back then international influence played a secondary role to internal factors.

Sharansky puts a lot of faith in the desire of people to be free, stating that the toppling of the regime will depend upon the willpower of the Iranian people to overthrow their government. If the majority of doublethinkers — those who basically want to be free but also are afraid to oppose the government — decide to mobilize with the freethinkers against the regime, then it will simply vanish. This is certainly on the cutting edge of transition theory, as only recently has civil society been investigated and researched as a major cause of democratic revolution. The importance of mass mobilization is extremely important, as seen over the past few years with mass mobilization being a huge part of colored revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine; however, I think the role of the Iranian elite and the security services cannot be understated.

Transition research literature has indicated a couple of very important points: that most transitions from authoritarianism occur due to negotiation between opposition and incumbent elites (with the vast minority of them occurring due to mass mobilization), and mass mobilization replacement can only occur when the security forces step aside.

Looking at Iran, the only way that replacement through mass mobilization will ever occur is if the security forces, by and large, do not fire on and instead join their own people. Even if all of the doublethinkers rally against the regime, this is a necessity. Iran’s security forces are huge and could put down demonstrations of any size should they decide to. Therefore we have to put a lot of chance in the desire of the Iranian people to go against these forces, and even more in these forces to not kill them.

This is what happened in the recent colored revolutions, as well as in Russia itself. How could Yushchenko during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution have defied tens of thousands of riot police and the intelligence services had they not already changed sides? The dynamics are also different, as the leaders of these countries — even the Russia of the early 1990s — were pragmatic and their security services non-ideological, so they were not willing to fire on their own people. Iran’s leadership, on the other hand, is extremely ideological and has trained its security forces in kind, as they regularly torture and kill civilians publicly protesting against it’s policies.

Obviously the format and time limit did not allow for this kind of depth regarding the issue, but this is what I see as potentially challenging to how he believes that regime change will occur in Iran.

Again, thanks to the Heritage Foundation for an absolutely great experience. I enjoyed very much the chance to speak to Natan Sharansky and would do it again in a heartbeat.