Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Iran: The Eleventh Day

KEEP. GOING. IRAN!!!
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As always, watch The Spirit of Man and Azarmehr blogs, Andrew Sullivan and Huffington Post, especially Nico Pitney, for updates. niacINsight is also invaluable.
I'm adding Gateway Pundit to
this list.

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Well hallelujah!! Harper finally makes a strong public statement regarding Iran!! Now, if we can just see the world's leaders take Winston's plea seriously:
"The criminal mullahs will turn Iran to a middle-eastern Burma or N. Korea like country, armed with nukes, awash in oil money ruling with iron fist over an isolated people held hostage at the point of a gun ONLY if the free world doesn't seize upon this moment to change the regime in Iran."
Here we have one of the biggest, most intense international crises of my lifetime unfolding in Iran and where are our leaders? Sarkozy, and yes, Merkel, have shown the biggest gonads of them all, but that doesn't say much. At least they were quick to condemn the regime for it's behavior, instead of waiting more than ten days. Britain has been reactionary rather than proactive, and Canada, while finally issuing a strong statement was very late out of the gate, and as far as I'm concerned, Obama is a complete write off. He has had to be dragged in front of the microphones and cameras, away form his golf game and ice cream with the kids, just to issue the most wimpy of statements, and it's clear he couldn't care less about what could well be the biggest test of his presidency.

After all, the last time Iran made such an international stir was 30 years ago and Bush, thank God, took care of one of the other most pernicious threats on the planet in the neighbouring country. Barrack Obama is a blight on not just the American people, but on the free world, at the moment. I gave him the benefit of the doubt for the first several months, but that's finished. He will now go down in my books as the worst American President in my lifetime, worse even that tricky Dickie, who for all his scandalous domestic failings, at least faced up to his responsibilities as a world leader during the tense days of the Cold War. He didn't pretend that he had no responsibilities in keeping West from annihilation. Here we have a situation, the outcome of which will either resolve several long-standing sources of international tension, or, conversely, make it very much worse. And what is he doing? He's pretending it's inconsequential.
In the course of human affairs, in the midst of a crisis, we often don't get the leaders we need. Let's hope the Brits can bring a new leader with a massive pair to the fore in their next election. Since taking office, The One's have only shriveled.
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Stage I of the Iranian revolution appears to be closing. Massive street protests have dwindled, as could be expected under the harsh crackdown by the regime. But as Winston said on his blog, the 1979 revolution took a full year from beginning to end and one of the commenters on his blog reminisced about the 1989 revolution in Romania and how it succeeded when the army turned against the
Ceausescu regime.

Images of eight days of massive street rallies sent round the world a report so loud that the Mullah's will never sleep comfortably in their beds again and signs of their panicked reaction are everywhere. In fact, reaction, rather than pro-action seems to be their principal modus operandi in the last few days. They have lost their iron grip and in response to the strikes and other forms of passive resistance that are promised over the next few days, we can expect even more harsh repression to follow, which, of course, will only succeed in fueling the next stages of the revolution. They have no idea how else to handle it.

Modern methods of communications facilitated by the Internet and cell phones will make this one different. As of yet, we don't know exactly how it will turn out. When a short two minute YouTube video of a strikingly beautiful young woman shot in the chest, dying a few minutes later, blood flowing up from her chest, out through her mouth and nose,
as if lava from a volcano, or any of a number of other videos shows, this new media is powerful and it only takes minutes for masses of people world wide to see what the Mullahs are doing to their people. The have been outted in the most public of ways and their silly rhetoric and backwardness serves only to further embarrass the regime and discredit and de-legitimise its structure. The clerical class itself is cracking with reformists breaking ranks with traditionalists.

This is a long way from over. Mark my words, or rather, mark saggezard's words, from Winston's blog:
saggezard said...

Mehran, It is extremely premature to decisively believe the revolt is over, it is true hat the media, especially the western news gathering, has been almost successfully been suffocated, but the media has never been capable to represented the truth inside Iran. Communication by phone and internet has been constrained to less than one tenth of normal levels for full surveillance. The fire is burning very hot, people's anger cannot be reversed anymore. The strikes are starting, foreign boycotts and sanctions can be a huge blow to the regime. LONG LIVE THE GREAT IRANIAN REVOLUTION

KEEP. GOING. IRAN!!!
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Iranian authorities scramble to negate Neda Soltan 'martyrdom'
"The Iranian authorities have ordered the family of a student shot dead in Tehran to take down mourning posters as they struggle to stop her becoming the rallying point for protests against the presidential election."
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"The authorities had already banned a public funeral or wake and have prevented gatherings in her name while the state-controlled media has not mentioned Miss Soltan's death.

Today it was reported that they had also told her family to take down the black mourning banners outside their home in the Tehran suburbs to prevent it becoming a place of pilgrimage. They were also told they could not hold a memorial service at a mosque.

Nevertheless posters of Miss Soltan's face have started to appear all over Tehran."
Hah!! They're afraid of posters!
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Timesonline has continuous coverage. Diplomatic fallout all over Europe, as Iranian diplomats are being called on the carpet. Meanwhile, Obama makes nicey-nice with regime representatives in Washington: US says hot dog diplomacy still on with Iran
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Aw.
All these meddlers. Why don't they just go away? Poor Mullahs.
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The Crisis in Iran is Just Beginning
"Don’t expect that this will be resolved cleanly with a win or loss in short period of time. The Iranian revolution, which is usually regarded as one of the most accelerated overthrows of a well-entrenched power structure in history, started in about January 1978, and the shah departed in January 1979. During that period, there were long pauses and periods of quiescence that could lead one to believe that the revolt had subsided. This is not a sprint; it is a marathon. endurance is at least as important as speed."
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Too good to be true??
"Steve (Schippert) starts with a report from al Arabiya that says senior ayatollahs have been meeting secretly in Qom to discuss significant changes in the structure of the Iranian state. In addition to the Iranian clerics, there was a foreigner: Jawad al-Shahristani, the supreme representative of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the foremost Shiite leader in Iraq.

If this is true, it is, as Steve says, huge. Because it means that senior religious leaders in Iran are talking to the representative of an Iraqi Imam who believes, as most Shiites did before Khomeini’s heresy, that the proper role of religious leaders is to guide their people from the mosque, not from the political capital. In other words, they are talking about the most serious form of regime change."

Stay tuned.

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Even the blind come out to protest!!

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