Iran 7/7 - The Pot Simmers (Updated)

(A great music video from Cyrus Mafia on Iran's uprising, with some English subtitles / Hat Tip Michael Ledeen)

A summary of the current situation in and about Iran:

1. Mousavi called for a 3-day strike leading up to a major rally planned on Thursday, 9 July.

2. Khameini ordered another crackdown, with hundreds more arrests and orders to confiscate all satellite dishes. He also has ordered most businesses closed, apparently in an effort to prevent a wide scale general strike being portrayed as a show of support for Mousavi

3. Money is flooding out of Iran as Iran's rich read the writing on the wall

4. The Commander of the IRGC has publicly announced that they have taken over all internal security missions since the election

5. A major development two days ago was the decision of Iran's most influential clerical body to condemn the election and the repression of protesters. Christopher Hitchens speculates that the hands of Rafsanjani and Grand Ayatollah Sistani were behind the move. He further ponders whether the example of Iraqi democracy played a substantive role in the current Iranian discontent.

6. The utterly spineless and wrongheaded Obama regime has come out against any international sanctions against the bloody theocrats for their repression, reasoning that any sanctions "might backfire." Fortunately, Congress is acting independently of Obama.

7. Biden has greenlighted Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities and Saudi Arabia apparently will do its role to assist Israel. That said, this should not be Israel's burden to carry alone. Unfortunately, with Obama at the helm, it will be.

Update: 8. Amir Taheri writes on the likelihood that Khameini is likely to be far more brutal than the shah in attempting to put down the current unrest. He also writes on the fact that Ahmedinejad is now unwelcome in most parts of Iran.

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1. Mousavi, facing calls from supporters of Ahmedinejad for his arrest and punishment for treason, has called for a 3 day general strike leading up to a major planned protest on Thursday, "the 10th anniversary of a 1999 attack by pro-government militiamen on the dormitories of Tehran University that led to weeks of political unrest." Mousavi is not backing down. While some rumblings are being heard about arresting Mousavi, there can be little doubt that this ham-handed regime would already have done so if they were fully confident of their ability to weather the unrest.

2. According to Michael Ledeen, Khameini has ordered another round of arrests, as well as the confiscation of all satellite dishes:

The Iranian tyrant, Ali Khamenei, told his cluster of top advisers two days ago that it was time to totally shut down the protests, and he ordered that any and all demonstrators, regardless of their status, be arrested (although there is no longer room for new prisoners in Tehran’s jails; they are now using sports arenas as holding areas). He further ordered that all satellite dishes be taken down (good luck with that one; there are probably millions of them in Tehran alone). He ordered that the crackdown be done at night, to avoid all those annoying videos. By Sunday night, hundreds of new arrests had been made, including the regime’s favorite targets: students, intellectuals, and journalists.

His deadline: July 11th. He told his minions that if that were accomplished, the rest of the world would come crawling to him.

He may be right about most of the rest of the world, which has distinguished itself by its fecklessness, but he is certainly not right about his own people . . .

The regime was apparently so worried that the general strike would show massive support for Mousavi that they took the step of ordering the businesses and offices to close for three days. The Telegraph is reporting that most businesses in Tehran's Central Bazaar are closed, though there is no word coming out on the rest of the country.

3. File this one under "rats deserting a sinking ship." Underscoring the continuing seriousness of the unrest in Iran, the Telegraph is reporting on the mass movement of money out of the country:

Millions of pounds in private wealth has begun flooding out of Iran in the wake of mass demonstrations which have paralysed commercial life after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Fears of a new round of crippling sanctions are also thought to have fuelled the movement of money out of the country.

Western intelligence agencies have reported that prominent private businesses and wealthy families have moved tens of millions of dollars out of Iranian banks into overseas accounts. . . .

4. The IRGC is a corrupt organization whose leadership has a fully vested interest in seeing the theocracy propped up. The leadership of the IRGC is getting as rich from corruption, graft, and business interests as have many of the politicized members of Iran's clerical establishment. Thus it is no surprise to find that the IRGC is now running the internal security to brutally crush the protests. This from the LA Times:

The top leaders of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard publicly acknowledged they had taken over the nation's security during the post-election unrest and warned late Sunday, in a threat against a reformist wave led by Mir-Hossein Mousavi, that there was no middle ground in the ongoing dispute over the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the elite military branch, said the guard's takeover of the nation's security had led to "a revival of the revolution."

. . . "Today, no one is impartial," Gen. Yadollah Javani said at the Sunday news conference, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. "There are two currents -- those who defend and support the revolution and the establishment, and those who are trying to topple it."

The uniformed Revolutionary Guard leaders, joined by the turbaned cleric Ali Saedi, Khamenei's representative, said they would play a more active role in defending the Islamic Republic's core values . . .

It should be noted that the basij, Iran's version of the Nazi brown-shirts, who have played a central and bloody role in repressing the protests, are under the command of the IRGC.

5. I blogged here on the recent major development of Iran's most respected clerical organization, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, who issued a statement that condemned the regime for their repression of the protests, called the regime illegitimate, and challenged the Guardian Council for certifying the election. Related to this, Abbas Milani has written an exceptional article at TNR giving the history of the split among Iran's clerics over the theocracy itself that we now see spilling out into the open.

Christopher Hitchens, writing at Slate, makes the point that the impetus for the Association's statement - a group that normally stays out of politics - was likely prompted by Mousavi's backer, Rafsanjani, and the most popular cleric in Iran, Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Hitchens goes on to ask a salient question:

Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about "the liberation of Iraq," he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran's regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a "let's pretend" election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.

I will be amazed if, once all is said and done, we find out that Iraq's model did not play a significant role in promoting the discontent of Iran's rank and file. I have been saying for years that the greatest single threat to Iran was a border with Iraq's secular, Shia dominated democracy - and indeed, that the two could not possibly coexist. But don't expect Hitchen's question to get asked by our MSM. Instead, we have the MSM regurgitating the Obama administration's laughable claim of credit for being a cause of the uprising, pointing to the Cairo Speech. That would be the speech wherein Obama signalled a retreat from promoting democracy in the Middle East. And it would be the speech that was not broadcast in Iran. The theocracy actually jammed the signal to prevent people from picking it up on satellite dishes.

6. As I posted here, Obama has come out against any international sanctions against the theocrats for their bloody repression because of concern that any sanctions "might backfire." As Robert Averich cogently points out on his blog, such a move could not be more counterproductive, nor more useless.

Fortunately, Congress is acting independently of Obama. McCain and Lieberman announced two weeks ago that they were sponsoring a bill to require the U.S. to assist with the communications into and out of Iraq - perhaps the most critical area where we can assist the nascent revolution in Iran. Unfortunately, that also tells us that if we are having to legislate such actions, Obama must have our covert operators sitting on their thumbs, doing nothing to assist the protests. That, if true, is an atrocity. But it would comport with Obama's simply mystifying continued push to hold talks with this illegitimate and brutal theocracy. The Telegraph also reports on more legislation in the U.S. pipeline:

. . . Republican congressman Mark Kirk has claimed there is growing support for a bill he is sponsoring which would strip American support for foreign companies supplying refined petroleum to Iran.

Iran is a large oil producer but decades of financial isolation means it must import petrol and other end products from abroad.

Reliance, the Indian operator, provides one-third of Iran's daily needs while also enjoying a massive trade loan from the US.

Another bill that would exclude companies involved in the trade from doing business in the US was put on hold earlier this year as a gesture from President Barack Obama to improve relations.

Iran's economic problems are severe. Their per capita GDP is only slightly over $3,100, inflation is running almost 25%, and their unemployment rate is well into double digits. These are not transitory conditions that just came about as a result of the global economic meltdown, but are the result of years of misrule by clerics and now Ahmedinejad. Real sanctions, particularly ones that attack the theocracy's dependence on foreign refined fuel products, could prove very effective in furthering unrest in Iran. But with Obama seeking to derail international sanctions over Iran's brutal repression, it is unlikely he would ever sign such bills.

I recommend that you take a look at how Obama has long approached such issues to evaluate their effectiveness. We learned today that Obama was highly critical of Reagan in 1983 for going ahead with the deployment of new nuclear missiles in the face of Soviet opposition and opposition in Germany - the so-called nuclear freeze movement. Obama was very much on the wrong side of history there, and if his policies were then in place, we might still be facing the Soviet Union. Let us hope Obama does not manage to throw a lifeline to our own modern "evil empire," Iran's bloody theocracy.

7. VP Biden has greenlighted Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, stating that Israel is a "sovereign nation" entitled to make its own decisions on security without U.S. interference. Given the current state of Iran, Israel would be foolish to pull the trigger yet. If they strike Iran, they may put back Iran's nuclear weapons program by a few years but unite a country on the verge of toppling. Conversely, if Iran's theocracy falls, the threat to Israel would likely vanish overnight.

That said, it is also being reported that Saudi Arabia has agreed to allow Israel to overfly Saudi airspace to attack Iran. It is now being denied, but I do not doubt that this is true. For all of the vile hatred Wahhabists preach against Israel and the Jews, the bottom line is that Israel is no threat to the House of Saud. Iran, however, is not only a religious enemy of the Wahhabis because they practice Shia'ism, but Iran also poses a major threat to the Sauds. Iran has long been reaching out to all Shia in the Middle East in an effort to expand their influence. The House of Saud rules over a substantial and strategically placed Shia minority. Anything that the Sauds and most of the other Sunni countries could do informally and covertly to assist Israel against Iran has probably already been considered and discussed.

To go one further, Daled Amos, blogging at Soccer Dad, ponders the question of whether it is time for there to be a Sunni-Israel alliance directed against Iran and what it would take to achieve such an alliance. I doubt that a formal alliance would ever coalesce until the Sword of Damocles visibly appears over the Arab Sunni world. But it is a sign of the times that such an issue is even being discussed with seriousness.

Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon was one issue that President Bush clearly wanted to deal with on his watch. It was only vociferous intervention led by Obama, Reid and Pelosi against even the threat of force, coupled with the release of a highly politicized NIE, that tied Bush's hands. Now Obama owns the Iranian problem and is responsible for countering the mad theocracy's rush for a nuclear arsenal that will threaten the U.S. every bit as much as Israel.

During his campaign, Obama said he would consider using force to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. That was then, this is now. In light of totality of Obama's approach to Iran, it is fair to assume that Biden's statement was, if not a public punting of the ball to Israel, then at least an acknowledgement that Israel is on its own in this.

The Obama administration has given us many things things already - a record debt, rising unemployment, a failing dollar to name but a few. What they haven't given us or the world is anything remotely approaching leadership. Apparently, that is now Israel's job. At least the House of Saud seems to recognize it.

8. Iranian columnist Amir Taheri has several recent articles on Iran. In "For Mousavi: Three Roads Ahead," Taheri points out that Khameini is no longer even making a pretense that Iran has a "republican" system of government and that Khameini will not shirk from using all of the violence necessary to stay in power:

Thanks to Mousavi’s decision to fight back, the current crisis has already produced at least one positive result. It has clarified the situation by exposing the composite noun Islamic Republic as an oxymoron. The space allocated to the "republic" has shrunk to its smallest since the start of the Khomeinist regime.

On Tuesday, the official Islamic News Agency (IRNA) published the text of a long sermon by the "Supreme Guide" in the province of Kurdistan and for the staff of the elite 27th Division, spelling out the nature of the regime.

This is what Khamenei says: "Islamic society is the society of the imamate. This means that the imam is at the head of the system. {The Imam is} a man who exercises power because the people follow him as their leader from their heart and because they have full faith in him."

Khamenei makes no mention of the presidency or any other organ of state because the system he is defending has a single, all-embracing institution: the imamate.

With pretensions about democracy and popular will gone, the current system in Iran is closer to models such as the imamate in Yemen and the "Islamic emirate" in Afghanistan under the Taliban, than to a republic in which Mousavi, or anybody else, could claim a mandate based on victory in an election.

Khamenei's sermon also contains a clear warning that the regime is prepared to provoke a bloodbath to maintain its hold on power. Khamenei says that had the Shah killed half a million people he would not have been overthrown.

He criticizes the Algerian Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS) for not having called the masses onto the streets and provoked a bloodbath by confronting the army. "Had they brought the crowds onto the streets there would have been an Islamic government in Algeria today," he says. "But they were afraid and showed weakness."

With admiration, the "Supreme Guide" recalls the massacre of one million Communists in Indonesia under General Suharto that he claims saved the system in that country.

A reluctant hero, Mousavi has succeeded in drawing the true battle lines in Iran's politics. Whether he wishes to be present on those lines, for how long, and with how much determination remains to be seen.

This throws into stark relief the paucity and imprudence of the Obama administration's decision to minimize sanctions against the regime. Khamieini is set on his path and beliefs. Nothing Obama could possibly do will light a fire in the regime that was unlit before. To the contrary, the best hope of limiting the repression against those braving it in a fight for democracy would be to significantly increase the external pressure on the regime, making the regime's already noticable faultlines into crumbling chasms. As is becoming a regular pattern, Obama is doing the polar opposite.

Taheri also writes in a seperate article, A Suddenly Most Unwelcome Guest, that Ahmedinejad has been cancelling most of his travel plans inside Iran because of the likelihood of his presence leading to mass protests. Ahmedinejad is, writes Taheri, a very diminished figure whose "legitimacy is challenged at all levels of Iranian society, including every segment of the Khomeinist establishment." I don't see this ending well for Ahmedinejad.

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Obama On Iran: A Broken Moral Compass, A Distorted Perception of Reality,

Chatham House has done perhaps the definitive study on the vote in Iran's Presidential election, finding vote fraud pervasive. Obama continues to give the protesters in Iran short shrift while holding out hopes of still engaging what is now a wholly illegitimate theocracy in talks over its drive for nuclear weapons. And yesterday, as protesters took to the streets again, suffering beatings and murder at the blood stained hands of the butchers of Iran's theocracy, Obama chose that time to assure the theocracy that they were invited to attend 4th of July celebrations. That is not merely immoral, its obscene and so contrary to our interests as to be inexplicable.

The revolt against the regime continues with a general strike called for today. There are several possible ways that this may be resolved, two of which would involve the end of Iran's theocracy. That is the best case solution for both Iran and Western civilization, yet Obama seems utterly - and ominously - oblivious. Is he seriously considering throwing the theocracy a life line over the bodies of the dead protesters so that the regime acquiesces on paper to his major demands? Is he really that amoral, narcissistic and detached from reality?
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As a threshold matter, whether Iran's theocracy engaged in massive vote fraud should have been beyond question the moment the Supreme Guide announced final vote totals two hours after polls closed in an election done with tens of millions of paper ballots. Any lingering doubt should be answered by the analysis done of the election by Chatham House, a left wing British think tank. You can read the analysis here. They found overwhelming evidence of fraud based on publicized election results and prior voting patterns. One snippet of their conclusions:

In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.

Obama has yet to acknowledge that actual vote fraud took place, nor to make a statement that actually supports the protesters. While I supported Obama's initially restrained response because of the popular belief in Iran that the U.S. underminded the Iranian government in 1953 and has been behind plots since, that restraint should have ended as soon as it became clear that this was a grass roots protest and that there was blood in the streets.

Bill Kristol documents the time line of Obama's responses to the protests at the Weekly Standard. Instead of a robust response, we were at first treated to days of silence as riots swept Iran, then tepid statements that reached their nadir when Obama attempted to answer criticism by claiming that the two Iranian Presidential candidates, Ahemedinejad and Mousavi, were "two of a kind." I am still not sure if that was raw political cynicism at its worst or whether Obama was that clueless about what was occurring in Iran. One hopes the former, as the latter would mean that Obama is a naif who will cause tremendous damage to our country.

During the Presidential campaign, Mousavi, despite having revolutionary credentials exceeding those of Ahmedinejad, advocated real and fundamental reforms that utterly energized the Iranian populace. Iranian specialist Michael Ledeen took note, writing on July 10, two days before the election, that Mousavi had lit a firestorm in Iran by offering reforms, particularly in the area of women's rights, that threatened "the whole structure of the Khomeinist regime . . ."

So for our President not to grasp this and to try to sidestep criticism by claiming that Ahmedinejad and Mousavi were "two of a kind" was both a distortion of reality and, as the Mousavi camp noted in a letter to the President, highly destructive. As Mousavi's office put it, the President's "two of a kind comparison, was "a specially grave insult for those who are now fighting for democracy and freedom." Mousavi's office rightly assessed that Obama was being deliberately misleading as he held on to false hopes of a "dialogue with this regime."

The protests began almost as soon as Khameini announced the "divine assessment" of the electorate, supposedly voting for Aheminejad in a landslide. The repression followed almost immediately. Tens of thousands have been beaten, gassed, arrested and/or murdered, with the most barbaric symbol of the regime's brutality and illegitimacy being the murder of Neda, a woman peacefully standing in the street during a protest.

And yet Obama mutes his criticism because he does not want to be seen as "meddling" - a pretextual excuse at this point since the Iranian government is portraying this as an American directed plot regardless - and despite all of this, he continues his outreach to this illegitimate regime. According to WaPo, Obama is trying to "calibrate his comments to the mood of the hour" so as to "preserve the possibility of negotiating directly with the Iranian government over its nuclear program, links to terrorism, Afghanistan and other issues." Indeed, under this rubric, yesterday, while this bloody theocracy was involved in the beating and murder of its citizenry, Obama's State Dept. took the opportunity took the opportunity to assure the theocracy that they were still invited to attend 4th of July celebrations. That is not merely immoral, its obscene and so contrary to our interests as to be inexplicable.

And Obama is the person explaining to America that our moral compass is broken because the majority of us believe that its okay to waterboard a terrorist if it will save American lives? Obama's moral compass is the one broken. There could be no clearer demonstration that Obama sees the world through a reality distorting lens then his response to this protest and his continued reaching out to the butchers of Iran's theocracy.

The reasons to pressure the theocracy and support these protesters are crystal clear, both as a moral and a practical matter. Morally, who can possibly condone or do business with a regime that uses beatings, arrests, and indiscriminate murder to thwart the will of its people. As a practical matter, leading international pressure on Iran can only help the protesters. It matters not a wit to the theocracy, since they are claiming we are the cause of this uprising anyway . It is a transparent pretext that, with the facts established, can fool no one in or outside of Iran.

Further as to the practicalities, there was never any chance that talks with the theocracy would do anything to convince them to forgo their drive for a nuclear arsenal that existentially threatens the U.S., Europe and Israel. For one, what could Obama possibly offer this illegitimate regime moving ever closer to the edge of oblivion at the hands of its people? What could he offer that would make the regime give up a nuclear arsenal it had heretofore utterly refused even to discuss giving up?

The very fact of such talks would add legitimacy to this failed regime. But this gets far more insidious. Iran has rejected every carrot offered by the West, and every reasonable one has been tried multiple times - including the inane suggestions of Obama during the campaign. What could Obama possibly offer the theocracy in their final hours that would induce them to suddenly change their position (on paper at least, as to expect this regime to hold true to their written word is to ignore decades of history to the contrary). Literally the only things they could want that would be worth the price of agreement would be tools that would allow them to survive the challenge of their people. In other words, Obama would have to throw the protesters to the hyenas of tyranny to get any movement from the theocracy. That would be an abomination. Yet it is the only possible logical outcome of talks under the current circumstances.

The reality is that this revolt presents a golden opportunity to end the nuclear ambitions of the mad mullahs as much as it is an opportunity for the people of Iran to end their oppression. If this rebellion flowers into a successful revolution, it will change overnight the dynamic of the Middle East every bit as fundamentally as the founding of Israel changed the dynamic in 1948.

How to approach Iran in this instance has clear lessons from our recent history. The playbook on this was written in 1981. It does not involve playing nice, weinie roasts or conducting "business as usual." This from Sean Hannity via Gateway Pundit:



As I write this, Obama is holding a news conference. In his speech moments ago, he said this on Iran:

The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings, and imprisonments of the last few days. I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost.

. . . [T]he United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not at all interfering in Iran’s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and dignity of the Iranian people, and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.

. . . Some in the Iranian government are trying to avoid that debate by accusing the United States and others outside of Iran of instigating protests over the elections. These accusations are patently false and absurd. They are an obvious attempt to distract people from what is truly taking place within Iran’s borders. This tired strategy of using old tensions to scapegoat other countries won’t work anymore in Iran.

Good, but not yet a condemnation of blatant vote fraud, nor an endorsement of the goals of the protesters - human dignity and democracy. Further, in response to a question from Major Garret as to whether in fact Obama still was holding open the invitation to 4th of July celebrations to the theocracy, Obama hemmed and hawed, leaving the clear impression that the answer is yes. Just amazing.

It was relatively quiet in Iran yesterday. The government has achieved its immediate objective of largely clearing the streets and has further hardened its position. The Guardian Council announced today that they would not annul the election. The government is engaged in mass arrests, including today Mousavi's staff. That completes the arrest of essentially the "top two tiers" of leadership in Mousavi's organization. Additionally, the theocracy has "retired" the soccer players who wore green wrist bands in the match with South Korea. Yet all is not returning to normal. As I wrote here, major faultlines are becoming apparent in the regime.

Still Mousavi and another Presidential candidate, Kharoubi have called for a protest march tomorrow. The few protesters who have shown up on the streets yesterday and today are turning the tables and conducting hit and run attacks on the basij. Mousavi has called for a strike today, though it is not clear whether one has occurred and, if so, how widespread it is. This is a revolt still in its nascent stages. Coups can happen overnight, but grass roots revolutions do not. Indeed, the closest antecedent to what is happening in Iran today is the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah. It began in 1978 and played out over a year, going through periods of intense protests and violence followed by long lulls.

There is yet another way that this could end - a clerical coup that ends Khomeini's three decades old experiment in theocracy. It is not one that I imagined possible as there are too many clerics in the theocracy with vested interests, financial and otherwise, in the theocracy's survival. But it seems that is now under discussion in Qom at the highest levels of Iran's clerical establishment.

An article in the Saudi's Al Arabiya, "Iranian clerics seek supreme leader alternative," states that Rafanjani, president of the Guardian Council, is in Iran's home of Shia scholarship, Qom, holding "secret talks" with Iran's top Shia clerics about doing away with the position of Supreme Leader. Whether this would be a full scale retreat from theocracy or a partial one, going from a "Supreme Leader" to a "Supreme Council," is unclear.

As I have pointed out many times before, Khomeini's creation of the Iranian theocracy based on his personal theory of the veleyat-e-faqi (rule of the jurisprudent) is a complete reversal of over a millenia of Shia tradition holding that there should be separation between mosque and state. Khomeini's veleyat-e-faqi was not only a break from tradition, it was a radical and complete reversal.

When Khomeini established the theocracy thirty years ago, he split with many senior clerics in Qom who believed his experiment wrong-headed. And indeed, three decades later, Iran's theocracy is facing a popular revolt from a population many of whom have been secularized as a result of the misrule and massive corruption of the theocracy.

It is of important note that Rafsanjani's meetings have "included Jawad al-Shahristani, the supreme representative of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is the foremost Shiite leader in Iraq." Sistani is an ardent traditionalist who believes in separation of mosque and state. His last contact with the Iran's theocracy was to snub Ahmedinejad when Ahmedinejad visited Iraq. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is also the most popular clerical figure in Iran. His presence in the meetings suggests that the options under consideration are far reaching. And indeed:

An option being considered is the resignation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's president following condemnation by the United States and other European nations for violence and human rights violations against unarmed protesters.

This could itself work a sea change to Iran - and it might just work. It would end with the the corrupt theocracy fading into the woodwork, the evil doers with their scalps still attached to their skulls, but out of power. It would likely overcome the IRGC without firing a shot because they too rely on the authority of the ayatollahs as their raison d'etre. At worst, it might kick off an active civil war between IRGC elements in a naked power grab and the rest of Iran's military. Steve Schippert has more on this at Threats Watch.

This is something that we can only support indirectly, just like the protests, by keeping the pressure on Iran's theocracy to allow democracy, free speech and rights of free association. But so long as we have a President who is seeing the world through a reality distorting lens and navigating with a broken moral compass, that will not come from him.

Prior Posts:

21 June 2009: Faultlines Developing
21 June 2009: When The Regime Will Fall
20 June 2009: The Regime Turns On Its Own People (Updated)
20 June 2009: Life, Death & Terrorism On Iran's Streets - Neda
19 June 2009: Countdown To High Noon
19 June 2009: An Iranian Showdown Cometh - Liveblogging Khameini's Speech At Friday Prayers
18 June 2009: Iran Update
16 June 2009: Iran 6/16: The Fire Still Burning, An Incendiary Letter From Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, State Dept. Intercedes With Twitter & Obama Talks Softly
16 June 2009: Breaking News: Vote Recount In Iran, Too Little, Too Late
15 June 2009: Iran Buys Time, Obama Votes Present, Iraq's Status Is Recognized
15 June 2009: The Fog Of War - & Twitter
15 June 2009: Chants Of Death To Khameini
15 June 2009: Heating Up In Iran
14 June 2009: Heating Up In Iran
14 June 2009: Tehran Is Burning; What Will The Iranian Army Do? (Updated)
13 June 2009: The Mad Mullah's Man Wins Again - For Now
15 April 2008: The Next Moves In An Existential Chess Match (Background On Iran's Theocracy)

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Faultlines Developing

Violent protests in Iran are now entering into their ninth day. The mid-level cleric cum Supreme Guide Khameini's decisions to approve of - if not initiate - massive election fraud in support of Ahmedinejad and then bet the legitimacy of the theocracy on the election results is now causing or exacerbating multiple faultlines. Those faultlines are spinning out from the center like the strands of spider's web.

Khameini's decision has pitted the regime against the Iranian populace and has horrified those with a vested interest in seeing the theocracy survive. And indeed, as those that took part in the 1979 revolution surely realize, if the regime does not survive, there is a good chance they will not survive long afterwards.

There are numerous reports that Khameini's decision has split the IRGC and members of Iran's security apparatus. Yesterday, Michael Ledeen wrote about "cracks in the regime’s instruments of repression," noting reports that "many [IRGC] commanders" have refused to carry out orders. Further, he reprints an extraordinary appeal from several former IRGC soldiers who, on their farsi blog, accuse the regime and the IRGC of having become wholly corrupt and "calling on their brethren to defect, and join the revolution." This is perhaps the most critical of all the faultlines, for if the security apparatus fails, there can be no doubt that the theocracy will be swept away soon after.

CNN is reporting this morning that Ali Larinjani, the Speaker of Iran's Parliament, has taken the extraordinary step of publicly criticizing, on Iran's official news stations, "some members" of the Guardian Council for "sid[ing] with a certain presidential candidate." He thus implies that there was in fact fraud in the election and corruption at the highest levels of government. This is no doubt the tip of the iceberg amongst the many senior officials who are feeling the stress from the threat to the viability of the regime that Khameini has created. It is not clear, though, what if anything the senior officials could do to effect this situation short of a coup, replacing Khameini and the majority of the Guardian Council, then allowing for another election with the hopes that, one, the protests die out and two, the regime survives. All of those events seem to have next to no chance of coming to fruition, but they do indicate a very serious split in the apparatus of government itself.

Another fault line that has today opened up considerably is that between the Khameini-Ahmedinejad axis and the Mousavi-Rafsanjani axis. Rafsanjani is a deeply corrupt Ayatollah, a former President, a member of the Guardian Council, an enemy of Khameini and the wealthiest person in Iran. Ahmedinejad has made of Rafsanjani the public symbol of corruption that he promised to clean up. Rafsanjani has followers throughout Iran, and it was likely he that bankrolled Mousavi's run for the Presidency, if for no other reason than out of survival instinct. You can read a detailed explanation of the byzantine maneuvering of these two axises from Reul Marc Gerecht. Although this fault line long existed, the stakes were upped considerably during the campaign. But today the were upped to existential levels when Rafsanjani's daughter, his grand daughter and two other relatives were arrested by Iranian police, ostensibly for protesting the election. Clearly this is a thug like move to neuter Rafsanjani.

And yet another faultline appears to be among the Shia clerical class whose spiritual home is in Qom. (I mention that because you will often hear the leadership of Iran's clerical class identified in shorthand by reference to Qom.) The very existence of a theocracy in Iran has been opposed by many Shia clerics, most notably Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, because it violates the ancient Shia tradition of keeping politics seperate from religion. Beyond that, there is clearly discontent brewing at Qom over Khameini's handling of this situation. This from Ali M Ansari, Head of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews:

Indeed, five senior clerics have protested, with varying degrees of severity, at the manner in which the elections were conducted and the violence that followed. Ayatollah Montazeri, the former heir to Khomeini, who was pushed aside following political disputes, has been the most explicit in his condemnation of the elections. . . .

Neither Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor Ahmadinejad are popular in Qom. The latter's unorthodox millenarian views are regarded with contempt by most senior clergy, while Khamenei has never been accepted as a scholar of note. The clerics may bide their time, but their intervention, which may come sooner rather than later - especially if violence spreads - could be decisive.

Also see Henry Newman, writing at the Guardian, covers this faultline in detail.

What do all these faultlines mean? There is a famous poem by Yeats, The Second Coming, apropos to that question. As Yeats wrote:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned . . .

As we watch the faultlines in Iranian society become ever more pronounced, it is clear the center cannot hold. The only question is what will follow the anarchy. In 1979, Iranians revolted against the Shah, expecting freedom. What they got instead was a regime every bit as repressive and corrupt as the Shah's. Let us wish them better fortune this time, for everyone's sake.

Prior Posts:

21 June 2009: When The Regime Will Fall
20 June 2009: The Regime Turns On Its Own People (Updated)
20 June 2009: Life, Death & Terrorism On Iran's Streets - Neda
19 June 2009: Countdown To High Noon
19 June 2009: An Iranian Showdown Cometh - Liveblogging Khameini's Speech At Friday Prayers
18 June 2009: Iran Update
16 June 2009: Iran 6/16: The Fire Still Burning, An Incendiary Letter From Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, State Dept. Intercedes With Twitter & Obama Talks Softly
16 June 2009: Breaking News: Vote Recount In Iran, Too Little, Too Late
15 June 2009: Iran Buys Time, Obama Votes Present, Iraq's Status Is Recognized
15 June 2009: The Fog Of War - & Twitter
15 June 2009: Chants Of Death To Khameini
15 June 2009: Heating Up In Iran
14 June 2009: Heating Up In Iran
14 June 2009: Tehran Is Burning; What Will The Iranian Army Do? (Updated)
13 June 2009: The Mad Mullah's Man Wins Again - For Now
15 April 2008: The Next Moves In An Existential Chess Match (Background On Iran's Theocracy)

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