Important Statistics About Iranians
Iranians share U.S. interests.
It is a matter of pure coincidence that the survey conducted by the Center For the Promotion of Democracy and Human Rights (CFPD) on Iranian public opinion came out at almost exactly the same time as that of Terror Free Tomorrow’s (TFT) survey on the same subject.
According to TFT’s President, while the majority of Iranians are pro-Western, large majorities expressed their dissatisfaction with their own regime and its policies.61% said they opposed the current system of government,79% said they wanted a democratic system of government instead.
The CFPD survey went even further; Fully 72% of Iranians said given the chance to go back they will not support an ‘Islamic Revolution’.67% do not consider the Islamic Republic to be a political system that satisfies the needs of the Iranian People.61% opposed the government’s policy of support for Hizbollah,56% opposed its support of Hamas,70% said they did not believe that the State of Israel should be destroyed and 65% said they did not agree with Ahmadinejad’s claims casting doubt on the Holocaust. A whopping 92% of Iranians said they did not believe that their government’s regional role was a positive one.
Indeed in the CFPD poll 67% said they would support a ‘Velvet Revolution’ for the removal of the regime .
A couple of other findings in the CFPD poll would perhaps prove instructional for Western policymakers; While 54% approve of U.S. funding for the promotion of democracy in Iran, 52% do not believe that the West is keen on seeing democracy take shape in that country, implying that due to the conflicting messages they receive from the West, Iranians believe that Western countries are only interested in containing the present regime and are not overly concerned with the plight of the Iranian people. It is perhaps due to the same lack of confidence in Western support that despite their clear wishes to the contrary 54% of Iranians felt that under current circumstances a ‘Velvet Revolution’ will not be possible.
http://freethoughts.wordpress.com/2007/08/23/important-statistics-about-iranians/
