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The Stories Behind the News

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Iran Takes a Step Forward, America Takes
a Step Back

Posted: 19 Jun 2009 03:48 PM PDT

The Iranian election dominated this week's news, with
large numbers of student and youth demonstrators refusing to accept the
rigged election results.

While the outcome of the current Iranian
crisis will have a limited impact outside Iran in the short term, it may
have a far larger one in the long run. While the protests began as
something more akin to the Venezuelan protests over Chavez's media
hijacking last year, they have already passed the point of Tienanmen
Square. And while we are not quite at the Tehran version of the Berlin
Wall, whether or not they get there will depend on the actions of the
Iranian regime.

The regime assumed that a quick and harsh initial
crackdown would silence the most vocal protesters and drive the rest
underground. It's a tactic that often works, unless enough pressure has
been building up so that it instead generates an explosion. That is what
happened in Iran, resulting in growing protests and much larger dissent at
the top.

Had the protests been mainly student riots and marches,
they could have been suppressed. However they reflected a split within the
oligarchy of the Iranian Islamic Republic itself over a boiling stew of
ethnic, political and economic issues.

Iran's regime today looks a
lot like what Nazi Germany might have looked like had it survived into the
1980's, with Hitler dead and his old cronies scrambling for power. Inside
and outside the corridors of power there are no shortage of old Khomeini
associates. Those outside the corridors of power want change. Those inside
the corridors want to maintain the status quo and line their own
pockets.

The death of Khomeini terminated the relative totalitarian
stability of the Iranian Islamic Republic, leaving power increasingly up
for grabs. A similar situation in the Post-Stalin USSR resulted in the
erosion of leadership and growing conflicts that eventually tore down the
party and the regime from the inside.

Ahmadinejad was thought to be
the regime's best bet for avoiding that kind of fate, offering a great
deal of hostility toward the west, combined with pop culture appeal at
home and some small liberalizations backed by a revolutionary guard
background and militia ties. But now the Ahmadinejad train has gone very
badly off the rails.

At some point during the election, the regime
made the decision to rig the results. Had they done so early enough, the
change would not have been so jarring. Instead it appears to have been a
panicked reaction in response to the realization that Ahmadinejad was
going to lose.

And whether that decision was made at the level of
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or not, the ball finally rolled back to
him.

The regime now has a limited number of choices to
make.

1. It can pursue a comprehensive crackdown on all protesters,
resulting in either the successful suppression of the protests, or leading
to the fall of the regime entirely. The old lessons of the Shah are not
entirely lost on the men who helped overthrow him.

A full scale
crackdown at this juncture, even if it temporarily succeeds, would likely
do so at a heavy death toll. The People's Republic of China survived a
similar crackdown by pushing enough economic and social liberalization so
that the next generation would up not caring. Iran does not quite have the
same option, particularly when it comes to social
liberalization.

2. Khamenei can conduct an investigation, bring
forward a few scapegoats and announce Mousavi as the true winner by a
small margin, or propose a compromise option of some sort along the
Zimbabwe model.

This of course would involve a serious personal
loss of prestige, as well as a clear demonstration of weakness by the
regime. It would avoid a short term explosion, but the long term
consequences would wind up demonstrating the power of the protesters to
compel the government to surrender to their will. And would in turn be
quite destructive as well.

3. Play a waiting game, allow the
protesters to discharge their energy, keep Ahmadinejad where he is, make
some daily life concessions that would make people's lives
easier.

Overall it would appear that the regime went with this
third option.

After the failure of the initial limited crackdown,
Khamenei chose to embrace a slightly more conciliatory tone. The violence
was toned down and a limited recount of some sort was promised.

The
problem with this approach is that it only emboldened the protesters who
have begun to learn their true power. The protests have only become more
comprehensive. Secret police have been outed on blogs. And more high
ranking regime critics have stepped forward.

In response Khamenei
is now threatening bloodshed if the protests don't stop. This strongly
suggests that despite being the inheritor of the revolution, he is
actually making the same exact mistakes as the Shah's government
did.

After using brute force, he showed weakness, only to now
threaten brute force again. The cycle is not unusual, but it does make a
failing system of authority that lacks confidence in exercising its
authority.

The reason for that is that Khamenei knows quite well
that the younger generation in Iran is deeply dissatisfied. The limited
reforms trotted out under Ahmadinejad, such as letting women attend soccer
games, have only whetted their appetite for more. Life in Iran is based
around a series of hypocrisies, in which homes have satellite dishes and
Western movies are downloaded through the internet, but outwardly Iran is
supposed to be a deeply religious republic.

The bottom line is that
the Iranian regime lacks confidence in its public support, and even in the
support of its military. The failure to deploy the military strongly
suggests that Khamenei suspects that the outcome of attempting to use
troops on the marchers might resemble the fall of the Soviet Union more
than Tienanmen Square. And that conclusion is only further backed by the
use of Hizbollah and Hamas Arab terrorists imported to attack the crowds.
Another sign of brutality and weakness that can only further destabilize
the situation.

As it stands now Khamenei and the regime's insiders
are not ready to retreat, but neither do they appear ready for a full
scale assault. Their waiting game has only made the situation worse. Now
they have to choose between options 1 and 2, a full scale assault or a
limited surrender.

Meanwhile in domestic Western political
coverage, many of the same leftists and liberals who chose to ignore or
justify Chavez's similar crackdown on Venezuelan students, have broken
with the regime and taken vehement stands, including Andrew Sullivan and
the Huffington Post.

Many sites do continue to underplay the
coverage, and the American news media appears to be providing much less
coverage of the situation, than their British counterparts, probably to
avoid embarrassing Obama over his weak response.

It is ironic that
Obama was elected as a major speaker and a supposed voice of conscience,
only to be unable to do more than mumble a few random words in Iran's
direction. The successfully unanimous congressional vote, opposed only by
perennial tyranny lover Ron Paul, criticizing Iran, was itself a rebuke to
Obama.

If Iran was the crisis that Biden warned us about, Obama has
already failed miserably. If the Iranian regime falls, Obama will be
remembered mainly for standing on the sidelines and doing nothing. The man
who traveled all across the world giving speeches, had nothing to say when
the people of Iran risked their lives fighting for
freedom.

Meanwhile in the roundup,

Israpundit's Jerry Gordon
takes Obama to task for
missing an opportunity on Iran and Bill Levinson covers
Ron Paul's failed vote.

Paul Williams at Canada Free Press looks at
Jimmy Carter, the real father of
the Islamic revolution

Carter’s real legacy remains in Iran with the Islamic
Revolution and the rise of the murderous mullahs.

Before Jimmy
entered the White House, America’s closest friend and ally in the Muslim
world was Iran’s Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ascended to the Peacock
Throne as shah (the Persian word for king) in 1941.

The shah
modernized Iran by launching the so-called “white revolution,” a massive
attempt to Westernize the Persian country through the construction of
roads, railways, airports, dams for power and irrigation, agribusiness,
pipelines for the oil companies, steel and petrochemical plants, heavy
metallurgy, and public health, education, and welfare programs. He
bolstered the expansion of U.S. business and industry throughout Iran;
shared he spoils of his country’s oil reserves with Britain and the
United States; endorsed (at the request of President Eisenhower) the
Baghdad Pact to ward off the spread of communism in the Middle East, and
never voted against America in the United Nations.

By the 1960s,
Iran’s back-alley bazaars became transformed into Fifth Avenue shops.
Rock ‘n roll blared from the radio stations. Movie theaters showed the
latest Hollywood flicks, and programs like Rawhide and I Love Lucy
played on Iranian television. Restaurants served beer and hotdogs.
Nightclubs and casinos catered to foreign tourists, foreign contractors,
and foreign military advisers.

And let’s remember that the shah,
unlike the fat Mid Eastern despots and dictators, never asked or
received a dime in U.S. foreign aid.

But not all Iranians were
pleased with the changes. The Shi’ite clerics viewed the democratic
changes as diabolic. The straw that broke the camel’s back came with the
shah’s democratic ruling that Iranian officials were free to take their
oath of office on whatever holy scripture they preferred - - including
the Christian Bible. The mullahs under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rose
to condemn the shah in mosques and seminaries and to demand his removal
from the throne.

Enter Jimmy Carter.

Instead of supporting
America’s ally, Jimmy, true to his form as a turncoat, supported the
Ayatollah as a “fellow man of religion.” Andrew Young, Carter’s
ambassador to the UN, went so far as to call Khomeini, who sanctioned
sex with cows and camels, a “misunderstood saint.”

When Khomeini
launched his evil revolution, Carter refused to provide the shah with
any kind of military assistance despite the pleading of the
shah.

Instead, Jimmy demanded that he release from prison all the
murderous mullahs and militant radicals who were bound and determined to
overthrow the government and to impose an intransigent interpretation of
shariah (Muslim law) on every Iranian.

The shah acquiesced to
this demand and the rest in history.

The Ayatollah - - Carter’s
misunderstood saint - - came to power and launched a bloodbath that
resulted in the deaths of twenty-thousand pro-Western Iranians. Churches
and synagogues were razed, cemeteries desecrated, and shrines vandalized
and demolished. The judicially murdered included the 102 year-old
Kurdish poet Allameh Vahidi and a 9 year-old girl convicted of
“attacking revolutionary guards.” Women were reduced to servitude. They
lost their rights to attend school, to initiate divorce, or to retain
custody of their children. When they appeared in public, women were
obliged to wear the hijab (the traditional Islamic head cover). All
American music was outlawed. The movie theaters were shut down; the
nightclubs closed. To top things off, the Muslim militants overran the
U.S. embassy in Teheran and seized sixty Americans as
hostages.

Good ole Jimmy responded by his infamous “malaise
speech” of July 15, 1979 in which the former peanut former expressed his
belief that America had lost its guts and remained in a state of near
senility.

Read it all

Maggie's Notebook meanwhile has a
look at the ACORN run around

Amendments presented by GOP included two blocking
A.C.O.R.N. - or any group - from getting Federal funds while under
Federal indictment. This was among those not allowed as was one related
to investigating Nancy Pelosi's claim that the CIA lied to Congress. If
there were any doubt of the un-Democratic party's heavy-handed tactics -
to rush through reckless spending at a breakneck unexamined pace - that
was eliminated today