Monday, May 19, 2025
No Result
View All Result
  • Media
Support Us
Macdonald-Laurier Institute
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy
      • Economic Policy
      • Justice
      • Rights and Freedoms
      • Assisted Suicide (MAID)
      • Health Care
      • COVID-19
      • Gender Identity
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • AI, Technology and Innovation
      • Media and Telecoms
      • Housing
      • Immigration
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Competition Policy
    • Energy Policy
      • Energy
      • Environment
    • Foreign Policy
      • Israel-Hamas War
      • Ukraine
      • Taiwan
      • China
      • Europe and Russia
      • Indo-Pacific
      • Middle East and North Africa
      • North America
      • Foreign Interference
      • National Defence
      • National Security
      • Foreign Affairs
    • Indigenous Affairs
  • Projects
    • CNAPS (Center for North American Prosperity and Security)
    • The Promised Land
    • Voices that Inspire: The Macdonald-Laurier Vancouver Speaker Series
    • Dragon at the Door
    • Canada on top of the world
    • Justice Report Card
    • The Great Energy Crisis
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • Double Trouble
    • Digital Policy & Connectivity
    • Managing Indigenous Prosperity
    • Defending The Marketplace of Ideas
    • Reforming the University
    • Past Projects
      • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
      • The Transatlantic Program
      • COVID Misery Index
        • Provincial COVID Misery Index
        • Beyond Lockdown
        • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
      • Speak for Ourselves
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
      • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
      • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
      • Straight Talk
      • Labour Market Report
      • Leading Economic Indicator
      • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
      • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
        • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Inside Policy
  • Libraries
    • Columns
    • Commentary
    • Papers
    • Books
    • Video
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy
      • Economic Policy
      • Justice
      • Rights and Freedoms
      • Assisted Suicide (MAID)
      • Health Care
      • COVID-19
      • Gender Identity
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • AI, Technology and Innovation
      • Media and Telecoms
      • Housing
      • Immigration
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Competition Policy
    • Energy Policy
      • Energy
      • Environment
    • Foreign Policy
      • Israel-Hamas War
      • Ukraine
      • Taiwan
      • China
      • Europe and Russia
      • Indo-Pacific
      • Middle East and North Africa
      • North America
      • Foreign Interference
      • National Defence
      • National Security
      • Foreign Affairs
    • Indigenous Affairs
  • Projects
    • CNAPS (Center for North American Prosperity and Security)
    • The Promised Land
    • Voices that Inspire: The Macdonald-Laurier Vancouver Speaker Series
    • Dragon at the Door
    • Canada on top of the world
    • Justice Report Card
    • The Great Energy Crisis
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • Double Trouble
    • Digital Policy & Connectivity
    • Managing Indigenous Prosperity
    • Defending The Marketplace of Ideas
    • Reforming the University
    • Past Projects
      • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
      • The Transatlantic Program
      • COVID Misery Index
        • Provincial COVID Misery Index
        • Beyond Lockdown
        • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
      • Speak for Ourselves
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
      • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
      • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
      • Straight Talk
      • Labour Market Report
      • Leading Economic Indicator
      • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
      • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
        • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Inside Policy
  • Libraries
    • Columns
    • Commentary
    • Papers
    • Books
    • Video
No Result
View All Result
Macdonald-Laurier Institute

People-led regime change is Iran’s only solution: Kaveh Shahrooz in the National Post

Showing solidarity with Iranians’ desire for regime change is a small price to pay for over 80 million people to have a better life and for fewer conflicts in the region

September 27, 2022
in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Latest News, Columns, In the Media, Kaveh Shahrooz
Reading Time: 3 mins read
A A
People-led regime change is Iran’s only solution: Kaveh Shahrooz in the National Post

Photo by Matt Hrkac, via Flickr.

This article originally appeared in the National Post.

By Kaveh Shahrooz, September 27, 2022

In recent months, the global war against dictatorship has been fought most fiercely in Ukraine, where the people have bravely resisted Russian occupation and liberated large swaths of their territory. In the past week, however, the beleaguered women of Iran opened a second front in this war. The only meaningful victory on this front will come with the toppling of the theocracy that has brutalized Iran for over four decades.

The spark that lit the recent Iranian protests — which increasingly displays all the hallmarks of a revolution — was the murder of a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s “morality police.” They had detained her because her hijab did not meet the Iranian regime’s strict standards.

The protests that have gripped the country after Amini’s death are the stuff of nightmares for the geriatric clerics and military thugs that have run Iran since 1979. Unlike in previous protests where the people chanted for economic relief or fair elections, the message from the streets has been clear: “Death to the dictator.”

In that slogan lies the essence of where things stand with Iran’s regime: it has proven itself both a cruel dictatorship, and one so rigid that nothing but complete eradication — a metaphorical death — can fix.

The cruelty of the regime is known to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the past 40 years of Iranian history. Ever since its founding, the Islamic Republic has jailed, tortured and executed wave after wave of political activists, ethnic minorities, artists, journalists and labour unionists.

It has, as the case of Amini so clearly demonstrates, established a gender apartheid state where women are afforded half the worth of men. It has severely discriminated against ethnic and religious minorities. It has taken hostages, shot civilian airliners and planted bombs abroad. That is to say nothing of the violent proxies it has funded and the nuclear weapons it has attempted to acquire at the cost of international isolation and economic ruin.

There is perhaps no better symbol of the system’s cruelty than its current president, Ebrahim Raisi, a man who by all accounts was directly involved in sending approximately 5,000 political prisoners to the gallows in a massacre in 1988.

In the late 1990s, there was a glimmer of hope that the Islamists might be willing to slowly reform their ways. Young Iranians used the system’s very limited and tightly controlled electoral mechanisms to place “reformists” in key positions. However, those men proved themselves to be both incompetent and fundamentally loyal to the theocratic system. Every demand for reform was either not pursued or stymied through threats, imprisonment or outright vote-rigging.

The brutality with which the “Iranian Green Movement” — a protest movement pushing for fair elections following the 2009 presidential election — was crushed and the ongoing detention of its leaders, men who had loyally served the upper echelons of the theocratic system for decades, put the final nail in the coffin of the reform experiment.

The idea of an evolution in the Islamic Republic no longer has any currency. All that remains now is the hope that either the current revolutionary protests, or a future one, overthrows the ruling clerical-military alliance and replaces it with something more democratic and humane.

To succeed, such a movement needs international support in the form of diplomatic pressure, technological assistance and sustained media attention. To facilitate those things, it needs a western consensus that the regime in Tehran is illegitimate in the eyes of its own population and must go. Alas, that consensus has so far been lacking.

For many western politicians and civil society leaders, the term “regime change” still brings back dark memories of America’s misadventure in Iraq, which is why they have been slow to accept that it is precisely what is needed in Iran.

But they are mistaken in applying the Iraq lens to Iran. Unlike when the United States toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, Iran’s regime change movement is entirely homegrown and is not seeking foreign military intervention. All it seeks is international attention and solidarity.

That solidarity with Iranians’ desire for regime change is a small price to pay for over 80 million people to have a better life and for fewer conflicts in the region.

It is a small price to pay to ensure that no woman is ever treated like Mahsa Amini again.

Kaveh Shahrooz is a lawyer and a Senior Fellow at Canada’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Source: National Post
Tags: protestsIran
Previous Post

A tale of two provinces: Assessing the opioid crises in BC and Alberta – Geoff Russ for Inside Policy

Next Post

Are we all liberals now? Shawn Whatley in the Hub

Related Posts

We should celebrate Victoria Day as a nation-building holiday: Geoff Russ for Inside Policy
Domestic Policy

We should celebrate Victoria Day as a nation-building holiday: Geoff Russ for Inside Policy

May 19, 2025
Welcome to the post-progressive political era: Eric Kaufmann in the Wall Street Journal
Social Issues

Welcome to the post-progressive political era: Eric Kaufmann in the Wall Street Journal

May 16, 2025
Spike in church arsons puts reconciliation at risk: Ken Coates and Edgardo Sepulveda for Inside Policy Talks
Domestic Policy

Spike in church arsons puts reconciliation at risk: Ken Coates and Edgardo Sepulveda for Inside Policy Talks

May 16, 2025
Next Post
Are we all liberals now? Shawn Whatley in the Hub

Are we all liberals now? Shawn Whatley in the Hub

Newsletter Signup

  Thank you for Signing Up
  Please correct the marked field(s) below.
Email Address  *
1,true,6,Contact Email,2
First Name *
1,true,1,First Name,2
Last Name *
1,true,1,Last Name,2
*
*Required Fields

Follow us on

Macdonald-Laurier Institute

323 Chapel Street, Suite #300
Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 7Z2 Canada

613.482.8327

info@macdonaldlaurier.ca
MLI directory

Support Us

Support the Macdonald-Laurier Institute to help ensure that Canada is one of the best governed countries in the world. Click below to learn more or become a sponsor.

Support Us

  • Inside Policy Magazine
  • Annual Reports
  • Jobs
  • Privacy Policy

© 2023 Macdonald-Laurier Institute. All Rights reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy
      • Economic Policy
      • Justice
      • Rights and Freedoms
      • Assisted Suicide (MAID)
      • Health Care
      • COVID-19
      • Gender Identity
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • AI, Technology and Innovation
      • Media and Telecoms
      • Housing
      • Immigration
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Competition Policy
    • Energy Policy
      • Energy
      • Environment
    • Foreign Policy
      • Israel-Hamas War
      • Ukraine
      • Taiwan
      • China
      • Europe and Russia
      • Indo-Pacific
      • Middle East and North Africa
      • North America
      • Foreign Interference
      • National Defence
      • National Security
      • Foreign Affairs
    • Indigenous Affairs
  • Projects
    • CNAPS (Center for North American Prosperity and Security)
    • The Promised Land
    • Voices that Inspire: The Macdonald-Laurier Vancouver Speaker Series
    • Dragon at the Door
    • Canada on top of the world
    • Justice Report Card
    • The Great Energy Crisis
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • Double Trouble
    • Digital Policy & Connectivity
    • Managing Indigenous Prosperity
    • Defending The Marketplace of Ideas
    • Reforming the University
    • Past Projects
      • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
      • The Transatlantic Program
      • COVID Misery Index
      • Speak for Ourselves
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
      • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
      • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
      • Straight Talk
      • Labour Market Report
      • Leading Economic Indicator
      • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
      • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Inside Policy
  • Libraries
    • Columns
    • Commentary
    • Papers
    • Books
    • Video

© 2023 Macdonald-Laurier Institute. All Rights reserved.

Lightbox image placeholder

Previous Slide

Next Slide

Share

Facebook ShareTwitter ShareLinkedin SharePinterest ShareEmail Share

TwitterTwitter
Hide Tweet (admin)

Add this ID to the plugin's Hide Specific Tweets setting: