Cakewalk In Iran

George Bush may have been intent upon invading Iraq long before 9/11 gave him the opportunity to do so, but the neoconservative ideologues who have been so influential in his administration always hoped that toppling Saddam would be merely the warm-up for regime change in Iran. Baghdad was attacked first because it was low-hanging fruit, but everyone knew that "Real men go to Tehran".

As time runs out on the Bush Presidency, the administration's rhetoric about why we must attack Iran is heating up. We seem to be witnessing a determined final push to squeeze in one more war before they leave.

Just as we were once told the Iraqis would greet foreign invaders as liberators, we are now told that Iranians can't wait to overthrow their government. A little Shock and Awe™ will supposedly be the catalyst that sets off a pro-U.S. revolution. In fact, our President and Vice-President think Iranians are so intent on having a government amenable to us, that they might just throw out their current leadership even without our bombs raining down on them.

Which is all well and good, until you actually factor in what Iranians themselves say about their current leadership.

This weekend I read (via Lenin's Tomb, via MR Webzine) the results of an opinion poll carried out in Iran in January / February this year by World Public Opinion, in conjunction with Search for Common Ground and Knowledge Networks. The full results have just been published in this report (PDF file): Public Opinion in Iran With Comparisons to American Public Opinion.

The poll asked Iranians for their opinions on a range of issues, including how they rate their own national leadership. Here (from Chapter 9 of the above report) is what Iranians - allegedly on the verge of revolution - think of their government:

Iranians largely express satisfaction with their government. Two out of three say that Iran is generally going in the right direction, though a plurality is dissatisfied with the Iranian economy. Half say they trust the government to do what is right most of the time, while another quarter say they trust it at least some of the time. Two-thirds express satisfaction with Iran's relations with the world as a whole. Large majorities approve of how President Ahmadinejad is handling his job at home and his dealings with other countries, though this support is considerably lower among more educated and higher-income Iranians.

About two thirds of Iranians make positive assessments of Iran's government and general direction. Asked, "Generally speaking, do you think things in Iran today are going in the right direction or... the wrong direction?" 65 percent say things are moving in the right direction, while 24 percent disagree...

Two thirds also approve of how President Ahmadinejad is handling his job at home and his dealings with other countries. Sixty-six percent approved "of the way President Ahmadinejad is handling his job as president," while 22 percent disapproved. To probe deeper into these sentiments of support, the study asked questions about "the way President Ahmadinejad has been traveling abroad and speaking about Iran's foreign policy." Sixty-three percent said the president's activities have made "the overall security of Iran" "mostly better"; only 14 percent said this has made Iran's security mostly worse. Similarly, 64 percent said Ahmadinejad's activities had made "other countries' views of Iran" mostly better; 16 percent said his work had made these countries' views worse.

Support for Ahmadinejad is stronger among those with low income and low education, and considerably weaker at the upper end of each scale. Among low-income respondents, 75 percent approved of Ahmadinejad's performance; among high-income respondents, it was 41 percent, with 38 percent disapproving. Among those with less than a high school education, 80 percent approved of Ahmadinejad; among those with some college or more, it was 49 percent, with 35 percent disapproving. These differences suggest that the remarks of many observers, to the effect that Ahmadinejad operates as the Iranian version of a "populist," are not far off the mark.

An opinion poll is just an opinion poll, but does that really sound to you like a country on the verge of a popular revolt? That sounds like an Iranian leadership that enjoys pretty good ratings from its electorate. And that's without us bombing them: an act that would surely spark the kind of nationalist camaraderie that only a blitzkrieg can bring, and which would surely send those ratings even higher.

By way of comparison, Americans have just this month been polled on the same issues the Iranian poll asked about. Remember how 65 percent of Iranians said that things in their country are moving in the right direction, and 24 percent disagree? Well, according to the NY Times/CBS "right track-wrong track" poll conducted in late March/early April 2008, this is how Americans feel about how things are moving in the U.S.:

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems. (NY Times)

And what do we think of our leadership? (Remember, 66 percent of Iranians approved "of the way President Ahmadinejad is handling his job as president," while 22 percent disapproved). According to a Gallup poll conducted at the beginning of this month:

President George W. Bush's job approval rating has dropped to 28%, the lowest of his administration. Bush's approval is lower than that of any president since World War II, with the exceptions of Jimmy Carter (who had a low point of 28% in 1979), and Richard Nixon and Harry Truman, who suffered ratings in the low- to mid-20% range in the last years of their administrations.

... Bush, the current president, has obtained a 28% job approval rating at a time when Americans are extraordinarily worried about the economy, when gas prices have risen to historical high points, in the middle of a war that the majority of Americans say was a mistake, and at a time when only 15% of Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are going in the United States.

By any criteria, those are spectacularly bad numbers for Bush. But no-one is suggesting the American people are on the verge of rising up and overthrowing their government. So how realistic is it that Iranians, who give their leadership much higher approval ratings, are just itching to do the same?

The people who insist that they are, are the same people who told us in 2003 that Iraqis were eagerly awaiting the opportunity to shower their American "liberators" with chocolates and rose petals. But chocolates and rose petals are not exactly what our troops in Iraq have been showered with for the last five years. From the look of those Iranian polling figures, I'll go out on a limb here and predict that despite the assurances of George Bush and Dick Cheney it's rather unlikely that the Iranian people are about to overthrow their government, and equally unlikely that they will shower us with anything more hospitable than what we have encountered in Iraq, should we decide to do the job ourselves.