There will be strong temptations among Iran’s enemies as the regime steadily breaks down to intervene to hasten the end and to secure an outcome favourable to the West. They should be resisted at all costs. Nothing would shore up the tottering regime more effectively than credible allegations that the upheavals were being orchestrated by forces outside the country. Already there are claims by the government that the Mujahideen Khalq are involved and that members have been arrested, who will no doubt be accused of acting as proxies for foreign powers. Today spokesmen for the regime have taunted that Britain will be ‘hit across the mouth’ if it doesn’t cease its provocations. We should firmly repudiate all such bluster which will certainly intensify overthe coming weeks and months, but not engage in tit-for-tats that simply exacerbate the tension. In many Iranian eyes Britain is second only to the Great Satan after its substantial part in deposing the democratically elected Mossadeq in 1953, supporting the Shah as a Western puppet for two decades of increasingly repressive rule, and now leading the call for sanctions to stop the regime’s uranium enrichment programme. Nothing could be more counter-productive than for Britain to rise to the Iranian bait.

The other temptation as the revolution progresses is to try to influence the outcome to satisfy Western interests. That too would be a serious mistake. Certainly the stakes are high: the second largest oil and gas reserves in the world, nuclear ambiguities, Iranian-Israeli hostilities, and potentially regional power status in the combustible Middle East. But the truth is that whatever regime finally emerges from the current conflagration, there are several characteristics which can be predicted with very high likelihood. It will not abandon the nuclear programme which is seen throughout Iran as their right as a sovereign country, at least as long as Israel maintains its own nuclear stockpile. It will not become a secular democracy on the Western model since, even if the mullahdom is displaced, the commitment to Shiite Islam is almost universal and accepted as a central element of Iranian culture and society. It will not join any political bloc, but will seek out alliances on their own merits.
The mullah leadership could hardly be doing more to bring about their own destruction – quite apart from a rigged election, the mass arrest of political leaders, the killing of civilians on the streets on the holiest day in the Iranian calendar, the torturing and rapes of opponents in prison, the brutalities of the Basiji militia, the myriad of freedoms suppressed in everyday life particularly for the youth. Given all this, they need no help. The only force that can now deny this slowly burning fuse its prize – freedom – is foreign intervention.

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