[BRIEF NOTE] My take on Iran?

[rfmcdonald]

This post will be fairly superficial, informed by only three Asia Times articles, but what the hell? The only thing that I can say for certain is that the Islamic Republic is currently stifling the people of Iran and that a new regime woujld be wonderful, but how likely is that?

• Pepe Escobar ("Iran's streets are lost, but hopes remain") suggests that the opposition to Ahmadinejad and the religious oligarchy isn't a thing only of the young, but rather includes conservatives and business classes upset by recent economic mismanagement, potentially creating a broad coalition aimed against the Islamic Republic as currently constituted.


• Shahir Shahidsaless' "Miscalculations abound in Iran" also argues that the recent election helped created a broad coalition against the established order, but argues that even if the lowest possible number of Ahmadinejad voters that's still a huge number of people opposed to the anti-government coalition. Culture--and political--wars are ungoing.


• Kaveh L Afrasiabi's "Crunching the numbers" takes a critical look at the criticisms of the election as fraudulent, arguing that many of the claims made by the anti-Ahmadinejad coalition might be inaccurate, and that their nemesis might have won fairly.

So what will happen? If the military remains under the control of the established order, there won't be a revolution now or for some time to come. Maybe there will be a gradual softening; maybe there will be a sharp shock. Who knows? I'd just hope that it would come quickly, for everyone's sake. A stable, prosperous, and hopefully secularizing Iran would be a much better policeman of the Persian Gulf than Saudi Arabia, I'd like to believe.