There isn't consensus on the empire's "democracy assistance" on the broadly defined Left (perhaps not even on the remaining Marxist Left), the lack of which in part made opposition to the multinational empire's doings in Yugoslavia scarce (the problem of left-liberal intellectuals in this instance will be revisited in a future issue of Monthly Review) and remains a major problem in the age of discourse of humanitarian imperialism.
Nor is there a great deal of information available about who gives what and who gets what, for obvious reasons of the national security state, except that, regarding Venezuela, Eva Golinger succeeded in obtaining some crucial documents by using FOIA: <http://www.venezuelafoia.info/english.html>. There's this online attempt to keep track of published information and opinions about "democracy assistance": <http://inthenameofdemocracy.org/>. The attempt seems fitful, and its archives of "democracy assistance" in the Middle East are thin, but more facts may be gathered to improve the understanding of the empire's "democracy assistance" apparatuses: what they are, to whom they are linked, and how they actually work.
As far as US activists and intellectuals are concerned, though, the main problem is not so much lack of knowledge as absence of the aforementioned consensus even on the Left. It's bad enough that the US ruling class buy political power here in the USA, and it's worse for them to try to buy political power overseas, and yet the latter as well as the former is taken for granted as their right.
> The one thing that I have to say on the question, is that while I
> feel that it is critical to give a nuanced and honest perspective of
> the country against the strange combination of Orientalist racism
> and warmed over anti-communism that characterizes the presentation
> of Iranian society, part of that is being critical of the regime
> when it warrants it. I think that puts the movement in a stronger
> position, rather than a weaker position. (To the extent that there
> is even a 'movement')
Surely, criticism is necessary, and I have never said otherwise and offered some myself, but there are two kinds of criticism, as Steve Ellner notes in his own criticism of Venezuela:
if Venezuela is to learn from the errors that are
being committed on this untrodden path, discussion
within the movement is essential. The private media
is alive and well and continues to criticize the
government, sometimes aggressively, notwithstanding
the non-renewal of the TV channel "Radio Caracas."
Opposition criticism is no substitute, however, for
constructive criticism from those who support the
"revolutionary" project. ("The Trial (And Errors) of
Hugo Chavez," 27 August 2007, <http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/print/3296/>)
Regarding Iran, what most leftists in the West do is what Ellner calls "opposition criticism." Opposition criticism from those who live in the country whose government is bent upon destruction of social gains in Iran through regime change or worse can't be very welcome in that country and is unlikely to get a wide hearing. Instead, the type of criticism that the Iranian people would benefit most from is _constructive criticism from religious and secular leftist intellectuals from the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia_ who encounter the same or similar problems in their own countries and are committed to building and developing friendly relations between their respective countries and Iran.
That is why I translated and published, for instance, the criticism of the Holocaust conference in Iran published in Le Monde by an ex-PFLP Palestinian activist: Mahmoud Al-Safadi, "Other Victims of Denial," <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/alsafadi141206.html>. That's an example, but you get the distinction. It's one thing to publish criticism basically as a weapon of propaganda against a country and its government targeted for regime change by the empire; it's quite another thing to publish criticism as a way of saying, "Look, what you are doing harms your country, and I'm saying this because I wish your country well in its resistance to the empire." What's needed is the latter, especially from the South.
Last but not the least, US activists and intellectuals, however clever, have NO experience of running a government in the Third World and facing the empire's regime change campaign, including its support for armed and unarmed oppositions. So, we in fact don't know how to deal with it at all. But people in Cuba and Venezuela, to take just two examples, have faced roughly the same problem as people in Iran. Advice from Cuba and Venezuela, two nations committed to friendship with Iran, would be undoubtedly more useful in Iran than advice from the USA. -- Yoshie