Pipeline Sabatoge and More in Iran

The Death Spiral of the Islamic Republic II

Some of this stuff I already read about a few days ago, but Michael Ledeen does a great job of parsing the meaning of this event and analyzing a whole lot more than most of us may not have even heard about. For example (emphasis mine):

"The explosion, which took place in pipes carrying Liquid Petroleum Gas (which is mostly propane), caused fires throughout the facility. It took at least three hours before the fires were brought under control. At least two persons died (fortunately, at that hour personnel was at a minimum) and at least 30% of the plant was completely destroyed"...."The incident was almost certainly an act of sabotage by the regime’s enemies, and the whole story has been spiked."

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"Due to the chronic shortage of gasoline, many of the city’s 3500 buses and thousands of taxis had been converted to run on LPG. They were grounded after the attack on Pars, amounting to almost all of the two thousand LPG-run buses and, at a minimum, hundreds of taxis. Some of them are now being switched back to gasoline, but, given the country’s notorious lack of efficiency, it is a slow process. All this not only increases the ongoing distress of Iranian commuters, but heightens the country’s vulnerability to a potential cutoff of foreign gasoline, which has been proposed by bills now on the Congressional agenda.".... "The regime’s internal enemies are getting stronger and more brazen, despite the bloody crackdown of recent months."

But that's not all:

"...the regime...faced with the problem of how to dispose of hundreds of bodies (many of which carried unmistakable marks of torture and sexual abuse), stashed them in meat lockers in and around Tehran. Testimony from cemetery workers tells of receiving frozen bodies in the middle of the night from security forces."

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"Worse yet, according to Afshin Ellian, the highly reliable law professor at the University of Leiden in Holland, Supreme Leader Khamenei has received secret messages from Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf, Iraq, criticizing the bloodthirsty behavior of Khamenei’s people. Sistani has apparently echoed the statement earlier this week from Grand Ayatollah Montazeri that the regime is neither “Islamic” nor “a Republic,” but a tyranny. Disrespect for the regime was also publicly displayed by the family of the founding father. In a break with protocol, Hassan Khomeini, the Ayatollah’s grandson, ostentatiously did not welcome Ahmadinejad and his administration when they visited the Imam Khomeini Shrine. Nor did he attend the swearing-in ceremony for the new government."

And more:

"Not to put too fine an edge on it, the supreme leader admitted guilt, and opened the door to the prosecution of his entire regime. He proclaimed the innocence of his enemies and called for the prosecution and punishment of his allies. But how can he hope to escape blame himself?"

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"In all the coverage of the ongoing Iranian crisis, most of the pundits have missed what seems to me the key point."...."Afshin Ellian has reported in the Dutch Press that the opposition leaders confronted Khamenei with the evidence of his own criminal activity. He was then given the choice between admitting guilt, or facing the release of the evidence. His opponents are not salon intellectuals, and they know that they are in a life or death confrontation. Contrary to those who have long said that a revolution in Iran is impossible because there is no effective leader, the events of the past two and a half months have demonstrated that Khamenei is facing very dangerous leaders who threaten the supreme leader both from the outside–with tens of millions of followers whose courage and resolve are growing with the passage of time–and from within, because of their intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Islamic Republic and their ability to convince and coerce key actors to help the Green Wave.

Khamenei knows all this. Pity nobody seems to have told the Western leaders. If Obama and his czars were as smart as they think they are, they’d be talking to the future leaders of Iran right now. If the regime’s enemies can take out the country’s biggest petrochemical plant, and compel the supreme leader to bend to their will, they can–and no doubt will–do more."

As Ledeen himself says, faster, please!!