Roger Cohen of NY Times, then my two cents:
I said the Islamic Republic has been weakened. Why? I see five principal factors.
1) The first is that the supreme leader’s post — the apex of the structure conceived by the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — has been undermined. The keystone of the arch is now loose.
Khamenei, far from an arbiter with a Prophet-like authority, has looked more like a ruthless infighter. His word has been defied. At night, from rooftops, I’ve even heard people call for his death. The unthinkable has occurred.
2) The second is that the hypocritical but effective contract that bound society has been broken. The regime never had active support from more than 20 percent of the population. But acquiescence was secured by using only highly targeted repression (leaving the majority free to go about its business), and by giving people a vote for the president every four years.
That’s over. Repression will be broad and ferocious in the coming months. The acquiescent have already become the angry. You can’t turn Iran into Burma: The resistance of a society this varied and savvy will be fierce.
3) The third is that a faction loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, fiercely nationalistic and mystically religious, has made a power grab so bold that fissures in the establishment have become canyons.
Members of this faction include Hassan Taeb, the leader of the Basiji militia; Saeed Jalili, the head of the National Security Council and chief nuclear negotiator; and Mojtaba Khamenei, the reclusive but influential son of the supreme leader.
They have their way for now, but the cost to Iran has been immense, and the rearguard action led by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a father of the revolution, and Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, will be intense.
4) The fourth is that Iran’s international rhetoric, effective in Ahmadinejad’s first term, will be far less so now. Every time he talks of justice and ethics, his two favorite words, video will roll of Neda Agha Soltan’s murder and the regime’s truncheon-wielding goons at work. The president may prove too much of a liability to preserve.
5) The fifth is that, at the very peak of its post-revolution population boom, the regime has lost a whole new generation — and particularly the women of that generation — by failing to adapt.
Thirty years from the revolution, the core question of this election was: Must Iran stand apart from the forces of economic and political globalization in order to preserve its Islamic theocracy?
Or is it confident enough of its Islamic identity, and its now firmly established independence from America, to trash the nest-of-spies vitriol and an ultimately self-defeating isolation?
The answer has been devastating.
Read more. I think Cohen is being shy. I’ll add to his 5 reasons/signs:
1 - No Street Cred: Unlike Khomenei, Khamenei lacks real authority. The man who helped him become the Supreme Leader has turned against it, what does that say about all of the clerics who were never really all that “into him?” So to take Cohen’s argument one step further, it’s not so much that Khamenei has lost authority, I daresay he never had it.
2 - Regression to the Mean: the 1979 Revolution was a just movement to ridden Iran of the US’ puppet. But, the religious movement hijacked the Revolution due to a lack of options. This movement is all about evening that extreme movement.
3 - It’s the Demographics, Stupid: 70% of Iranians are below 30 years old, meaning they are connected via technology to the rest of the world. To them, the concept of not having democracy or freedom is absurd. This is a matter of when, not if.
4 - The Religious / Military Matrix: This was a coup d’etat not so much by the Religious Crazies, but by those who seek both a further Militarization and more Religion in society. That’s pushing it. It’s possible that Ahmedinejad would have won 50%+1, but the Regime got greedy by saying it won 60%+. In Iran, some might want religion, others might want a strong military, but few really want both.
5 - Bearded Men Make Way for Courageous Women: Cohen does hit the nail on that one, but he fails to recognize the true extent of Iran’s women who will seal the deal. The Revolution in 1979 was about bearded men who grew tired of the Shah’s subservience to the US and his corruption. The soon-to-be-dubbed Revolution of 2009 will be driven by women who will provide a shield and beacon for the rest of the nation to follow.
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WatchMojo NewsletterThe following doesn’t even need to be true to enrage Iranians; but if the Regime is importing Arabs to fight off protesters in Iran, then this will only ignite the movement further, from Independent.co.uk:
The Iranian opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi is under 24-hour guard by secret police and no longer able to speak freely to supporters, according to the film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Mr Makhmalbaf, 52, an informal spokesman abroad for the protest in Iran, said that Mr Mousavi was not under arrest but “he has security agents, secret police with him all the time. He has to be careful what he says.”
In a telephone interview, Mr Makhmalbaf, the director of the 2001 film Kandaha, denied suggestions that the protests against the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were losing steam.
“The regime, arguably, is losing ground, not the protests,” he said. “Ordinary Iranians are openly rejecting the legitimacy and power of Ayatollah Khamanei. That is entirely new, unheard of.”
Mr Makhmalbaf, a friend of Mr Mousavi for 20 years, said that there were reports from Iran that some of the militia deployed to suppress protest were “speaking Arabic”. “That is unconfirmed but it suggests that the regime is unable to trust its own security forces to repress the Iranian people,” he said. “It suggests that people are being used from abroad.”
Iranians have an affinity with Arabs because of their shared religion. But beneath that veneer, lies two major rifts with Arabs:
- even within the religious affinity, Iranians are (like Iraqis, who are Arab) largely Shiite,
- nationalistically speaking, Iranias are Persians, ie. non-Arabs, and many still resent how the Muslims came to their country and imposed Islam onto them.
Any suggestion that the Regime is bringing in Arabs to fight off the Iranians taking to the street will backfire.
None of this is PC per se, but it is real: while an Iranian and an Arab will exchange pleasantries, an uneasy tension will exist between them, as well.
If these images of Clerics joining the protesters are real, then the Regime is beyond doomed:
The more Republicans talk, the more the likelihood that Iranian protesters pack up and go home. John McCain et al. should really keep their opinions to themselves.
What are these tools doing flying a 30-year old flag, a flag which connotes American Imperialism to 99.9% of Iranians?
This was clearly an event set up by some kind of irrelevant US or Israeli-set up “pro Iranian democracy” group that only makes those on the ground protesting in Iran want to back the Regime.
People, stop being stupid, stop meddling.
Found via here, via What Really Happened.
The Republicans track record in Iraq is enough to convince everyone to outright ignore them on Iran, where we have even less information. So tell me why this specimen is even being given any ink?
“I understand the concern about meddling in a way that seems to label the opposition as American tools, but the opposition made it very clear they want support from the world,” said Wolfowitz, a staunch supporter of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
It would be nice for CNN to have added the word disastrous in the following sentence: “a staunch supporter of the U.S.-led war in Iraq”, but I digress.
Intelligent article on Obama’s handling of Iran thus far:
In contrast, not a lot is known about how Iran is actually governed. If, for instance, the White House asked the State Department to send over someone with on-the-ground experience in contemporary Iran, the car would arrive empty. The last American diplomats left Iran in 1979. The United States has to rely on foreign diplomats and journalists for its information.
But information is not experience. It cannot substitute for the feel of the country — a sense of what happens next. This sort of knowledge was precisely what the United States did not have about Iraq, and we have learned the hard way that satellites, intercepts and the like are no substitute for human intelligence. The Obama White House is showing commendable respect for what it does not know.
For instance, right now a crucial question is: What is the role of the former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani? As far as Washington is concerned, this powerful figure has dropped from sight. He presumably is in the opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, like other supposed reformers, had opposed the increasing power and influence of the military. But, as with many of the others, to call this deeply conservative and — at least in the past — virulently anti-American figure a “reformer” gives the word a whole new meaning.
Few of these nuances have made much of an impression on certain Republicans. As in the Cold War, they yearn for liberation rhetoric — strong statements with a Jeffersonian flourish. Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are two of the more notable proponents of this line of criticism, wondering why Obama did not initially condemn the crackdown in much more forceful terms, as did Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel of Germany. “The president of the United States is supposed to lead the free world, not follow it,” Graham said.
Good point, usually. But not this time. Neither Germany nor France has America’s history in Iran. It was America that staged the 1953 coup that ousted Mohammed Mossadegh and returned the shah to the Peacock Throne. Neither France nor Germany has been the object of Iranian vituperation since the 1979 revolution — all that Great Satan nonsense — and neither of these countries felt obliged to respond in kind: the axis of evil formulation of the Bush years. Pow! How brilliant.
Obama is on pace to become his generation’s Reagan, the way Reagan is credited for taking down the USSR.
It’s true, the regime does always seem to be bedevil the Brits. I don’t always agree with the man, but this part I do like:
The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured “experts.”
