By Setareh Danesh

Last week marked the first anniversary of the fraudulent Iranian elections on June 12, 2009, and the shaping of what has come to be known as the Green Movement. This time last year, the world was watching brave acts of nonviolent resistance, and suppression which no word is violent enough to describe.

On June 13, 2009, tens of thousands of protesters poured onto the streets asking “Where is my vote?” On June 14, plainclothes militia, the Basij, attacked the University of Tehran, Isfehan, and Shiraz dormitories, murdering at least five students. June 15 was a day of silent demonstration for three million people in Tehran, which ended with the Basij opening fire on protesters from the rooftop of a mosque.

On June 16, the staff of a nearby hospital protested against the number of deaths by bullet wounds and the fact that the injured and the bodies of the dead were being forcefully removed from the hospital. The demonstrations continued in the days following until the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, held Tehran’s Friday prayers on June 19, threatening people with further bloodshed. Sure enough, on June 20, we not only witnessed more protests, but the painful death of a 27-year-old student, Neda Agha-Soltan, as she stared at the cellphone camera recording her, dying with her eyes open.

Despite the vicious crackdown that followed after, the Green Movement has been standing strong for a year now. The 70 percent of the Iranian demographic which is under the age of 30 has a strange ability to survive the arrests, tortures, and rapes through the world of information and technology. And this alone has caused enough structural blows to the Islamic Republic that the nuclear issue, at least in the past year, has been the least of its concerns.

And as usual, western governments, and the G8 and the UN Security Council, are missing the point. The sanctions on Iraq and Libya never worked and only caused humanitarian crises, and of course the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still not working. However, it seems as if all political discussions on Iran are forever destined to be confined to the nuclear issue, leaving us with only two options: sanctions or war. Or, in other words, to kill civilian populations slowly through starvation, or promptly with bombs.

If there is one entity that can prevent the Iranian government from producing nuclear weapons, it is Iranian civil society. In a country where we are witnessing the region’s single most progressive student, worker, feminist, and environmentalist movements, now all active under the political umbrella of the Green Movement, the only object of fear for Khamenei and his puppet government is the Iranian people. And the best possible solution for them to steer out of their current crisis of legitimacy is for a military attack to be imposed on Iran, so that they can align the people against a foreign enemy, and silence all domestic dissidence under the label of treason.

After all, this is precisely what was done during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when western governments threatened by the Islamic revolution supported Iraq in the war and sanctioned Iran. This single-handedly intensified Ayatollah Khomeini’s domestic support as a result of wartime nationalism, which further allowed him to execute some 10,000 political dissidents, and guarantee the establishment’s power until at least another generation.

And today, we are the other generation. Last week, there were protests in over 90 cities around the world, including Vancouver and Victoria, in solidarity with the Iranian Green Movement. If western governments manage to not miss the point again, there are many opportunities for the world’s nations and states to support the Iranian people and allow the regime to deteriorate from within. But, if they do miss it, we shall soon be witness to a western-backed Israeli attack which will destroy Iranian civil society and crush all hopes for a democratic, non-nuclear Iran.

Setareh Danesh is a founding member of the Green Student Movement of Vancouver and the Students for Iranian Green Movement Association of Victoria. She is writing under a pseudonym to avoid being arrested while visiting Iran.