Iranian Civil Society Warns Against Military Strike

According to a report published today by the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, "Influential and well-informed members of Iranian civil society believe that military action against Iran would lead to further political repression, deeper enmity between the Iranian people and the United States, and severe humanitarian problems":

The 38-page report, Raising Their Voices: Iranian Civil Society Reflections on the Military Option, presents the viewpoints of 35 prominent Iranians living inside the country on the domestic consequences of an attack by the United States or its allies. These Iranians include human rights defenders, activists, lawyers, journalists, writers, leading cultural figures, and members of the political opposition.

Those interviewed in the report are people outside the ruling establishment, many having faced censorship, harassment, and imprisonment for their opinions or activities.

“The potential of a pre-emptive military strike has gone up and down over the years, but seems to remain an option. The Iranian civil society voices in this report consider such a foreign military strike an utter disaster for the human rights situation in their country,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the Campaign’s spokesperson.

The Iranians featured in the report rejected justifications for military action against Iran based on human rights violations, saying a strike would not precipitate “regime change” and would even rally some reform-oriented citizens to the side of the government. One journalist who wished to remain anonymous said, “A foreign military attack would lead to many of the [Green] movement’s rank-and-file shifting their support to the same government they currently oppose.”

This is very much in keeping with past statements from Iranian democracy activists like Akbar Ganji and Shirin Ebadi, both of whom have warned that U.S. or Israeli strikes on Iran would be a death blow for their movement. In an interview last November, Ebadi told me that a U.S. attack “would give the government an excuse to kill all of its political opponents, as was done during the Iran-Iraq war.” For that reason, the Iranian government probably “wouldn’t mind the U.S. throwing a missile at them,” she said.

UPDATE: Ali Gharib has more.