Iran: The Twelfth 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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The Day of Axes or preparing for the 4th of July.
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Violence flairs again in Tehran which suggests to me that the protests have not stopped even if journalists are not allowed to cover them.

"It was a far cry from the massive demonstrations of last week. Today, just a few hundred protesters converged on Baharestan Square, opposite the Iranian Parliament, and they were brutally repulsed.

It was an exercise in courageous futility, not a contest. Thousands of riot police and militiamen flooded the area. They used teargas, batons and overwhelming force. Helicopters hovered overhead. Nobody was allowed to stop or to gather, let alone exercise their constitutional right to protest."

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"All that can be said for certain is the regime has finally recaptured the streets through strength of numbers and the unrestrained use of violence. Thirty years after the Iranian revolution it no longer rules with consent, but with military might, and it is cracking down with all means at its disposal."

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"Saeed Mortazavi, an Iranian prosecutor notorious for his abuse of prisoners, has been put in charge of arresting and investigating dissidents.

Mr Mortazavi has a long record of involvement in cases of torture, illegal detention and extracting false confessions, Human Rights Watch said. “The leading role of Saeed Mortazavi in the cracksdown of Tehran should set off alarm bells,” it said."

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"All 25 employees of Mr Mousavi’s newspaper, Kalemeh Sabz, were arrested, with intelligence officers suggesting that it was plotting against national security.

Mr Mousavi’s freedom of manoeuvre appears to have been severely curtailed, with some reports suggesting that secret police and security agents are monitoring his every move. He was careful to distance himself from what he described as an “independent” demonstration yesterday, and some analysts believe that he will be arrested immediately if he calls for a strike."

and last but not least:

"In Washington the State Department confirmed, to nobody’s surprise, that not one Iranian diplomat, anywhere in the world, had accepted ground-breaking invitations from their American counterparts to share hotdogs at July 4 parties."

Hah! Like the IRI thugs were just waiting with baited breath for the invitation.
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A day late and a dollar short, Mr. President. Your reputation is already FUBAR. You are a certified dithering, clueless moonbat.

And now they've canceled the invitations to Iranian diplomats. Good thing, of course, but my God, this president is stark raving hopelessly naive. He knows diddly squat about history or global politics and he's being led around by the nose. I spit in his general direction.
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On June 21st Steve Schippert wrote a speculative piece about a meeting in Qom that could lead to an entire revamping of the political system in Iran, essentially the separation of mosque and state. Since his speculations, much has been said over the last two or three days about the meeting of clerics in Qom, where a representative of Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani allegedly has sent a representative, basically echoing Schippert's rather tenuous thesis. For example, read this, this, this and this. Frankly, I'm skeptical that such a sweeping change is what's coming out of that meeting. I think a lot of what has been written about it is simply wishful thinking and only in the fullness of time, if ever, will we see what transpires at that meeting and whether or not it means an major overhaul of the theocratic structure of the regime. I predict that a lot more people currently holding a piece of the power structure in their hands will have to switch sides before anything of that nature will happen and in the meantime only a continuous and well organized resistance will lead to an abandonment of the Mullahocracy by the ruling elites.
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Go read Anti-Mullah for some very detailed history of the current cast of characters on the Iranian stage. Videos of Reza Pahlavi's speech, too.