And just suppose that a midnight telegraph immediately arrived from the prime minister and president of Iran to congratulate the Supreme Ideologue of Turkey's High Council for the Preservation of the Deep State for the sheer scale of this historic victory. I am sure that the people of Turkey would regard as offensive this foreign endorsement of a caste shamelessly prepared to disregard the democratic impulses of the nation at large. Other countries, too, would begin to take Tehran's claim to be a wise and impartial interlocutor in the politics of its region, an island of stability in a turbulent sea, with an outsize pinch of salt.Given the vast and bitter protests on the streets of Iranian cities which followed in the wake of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's unconvincing electoral triumph, Ankara must be wondering whether it was right for the Turkish president and prime minister to rush to the front of the queue to present their congratulations. The argument in favor of welcoming the result is that President Ahmadinejad has been sympathetic to Turkey's concerns to control the Kurdish militants that hug its eastern borders, whereas his rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, during his time as prime minister, was not. The other thought running through Ankara's head is that repression all too often works. There is no point needlessly offending the Iranian powers-that-be since the safest bet is that they will manage to nip the green revolution at its roots. At the same time, for the Turkish government to engage in such naked power politics is not a good investment for the future. As Ömer Taşpınar rightly described it his Monday column, what is happening in Iran is not just a more determined than usual display of political dissent or an unruly show of social anomie. It is a crack in state legitimation running through the very heart of the regime.
Ankara could quite well respond that its deep strategic thinking concludes that a wounded Iranian regime is more dangerous than one confident of its place in the world and that now, more than ever, is the time to avoid. As the poet Sa'di wrote in the 13th century, it is only when a pussy cat is cornered that it claws out the tiger's eyes, and “the viper stings the shepherd's foot because it fears he will strike his head with a stone.” In this case, the threatened beast is busy enriching plutonium.
And yet one cannot help but think that one reason why the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was determined to declare a winner in the presidential contest before the votes were counted was to avoid a second round of voting which might have put the nuclear program at risk. The race to become a nuclear power is part of Iran's determined efforts to establish itself as a regional power. Paradoxically, the race itself appears to be being subsidized by populist politics at home and an unchecked arrogance that has deeply divided Iran's elite. The search for status abroad has undermined legitimation at home.
Commentators point out that Mousavi began his campaign as a pillar of the Iranian regime, not its determined opponent. It is the very mildness of his opposition which has exposed the tyranny of the regime. “A tyrannic man cannot be a sultan as a wolf cannot be a shepherd. A padishah who establishes oppression destroys the basis of the wall of his own reign,” as the poet said.
Of course this will not stop Tehran from blaming the outside world for its own failings -- a phenomenon Turkey understands only too well. Washington has been caught in the act of requesting Twitter not to go offline for repairs when the Iranian demonstrators needed it most. Perhaps Turkish democrats can write a petition to the United States Embassy to urge it to try to restore YouTube to Turkish computer screens where it is still banned. Until then Ankara should remember that its own prestige depends on the respect it has for its own people's freedoms as well as the respect it has for those of its neighbors.
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