Pushing democracy in Iran

From The Washington Post: "Prominent activists inside Iran say President Bush's plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote democracy here is the kind of help they don't need, warning that mere announcement of the U.S. program endangers human rights advocates by tainting them as American agents."

I'm not sure what to do about Iran. Who is? Given the recent collapse of Russia's uranium-enrichment proposal, the likelihood of eventual military action seems to have increased.

But beyond military action, beyond the emergence of a viable diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, it is certainly in our long-term interest for Iran to reform in the direction of liberal democracy. There is already a widespread reform movement within Iran, whatever the recent electoral success of President Ahmadinejad's illiberal populism, not to mention a youth culture that is unabashedly pro-American. But Iranians are also, by and large, fervently nationalist. Whatever their attraction to the West, they tend to resist excessive Western intervention. (As do most non-Westerners.) They may ultimately turn their country into a relatively progressive liberal democracy, but they surely want that accomplishment to be their own.

This is not to say that the U.S. shouldn't do what it can to promote democracy, liberal democracy, in Iran. It just needs to find a less direct and less obvious way to do it. Indeed, a less condescending way.

I'm confident, given what I know of the situation, that Iranians will listen to us and may even choose in important respects to be like us. But not if they're forced to.