This past week the news out of Iran has come via Twitter and Utube, that in our time is as significant as the telegraph was when it began to send instant reports singing along wires in dashes and dots, over one hundred and fifty years ago. At first, the MSM was out of the loop and spent the week catching up to what is becoming a replay of 1956, 68, and 89 when the population of a repressed society took a stand. Armed with green headbands and cell phones millions of Iranians took to the streets to send out 140 character bursts of information that in it's brevity resembled those early telegraph messages.
As the week progressed Congress responded with resolutions as the President held his bully pulpit in check amid some criticism that he needed to speak out more forcefully. The blogs have blazed hot with opinions and reports linking the Twitter reports as some began to write thoughtful pieces that tried to make some sense of what we as a people who value liberty as our bedrock creed should do or not do to help the Iranian people.
Thomas Barnett leads off today with this piece written for Esquire magazine.
Having followed the machinations of Iran closely for the last two decades (hell, I pretty much got a major player fired for following the place so closely), there's no doubt in my mind that Tehran's theocracy — sensing the looming furor we've seen from its contested outcome — fixed last week's Iranian presidential election. Not that former prime minister Mir Hussein Moussavi would have won the election outright, but it's entirely conceivable that, if the fix wasn't on, he could have forced a second-round fight with an uncertain outcome — or, worse, the sort of angry popular protests (and, worser still, angry mourning prayers) we're witnessing at this moment. Clearly the religious regime was having none of that (yes, it could have been worse and, yes, there could have been even more thousands of Tweets and riot officers). So the powerful mullahs, I'm pretty sure, chose to manipulate the vote count and portray President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's otherwise probable victory as an undisputable landslide.
Read more: Why Obama Should Let Iran's 'Red-State' Regime Die on Its Own
In a related post Barnett calls attention to this article written the day before the Iranian election.
"What If Israel Strikes Iran?" by John R. Bolton, Wall Street Journal, 11 June 2009.
Tom defines the article this way.
The gist appears in the call-out text: "The mullahs would retaliate. But things would be much worse if they had the bomb."
Iran won't close the Straits of Hormuz, nor cut its own exports to raise global prices, nor directly attacks U.S. forces in either Iraq or Afghanistan, nor launch missiles against Israel. It will unleash Hamas and Hezbollah and that's about it.
Then Bolton tries to sell with contrary logic: "This brief survey demonstrates why Israel's military option against Iran's nuclear program is so unattractive, but also why failing to act is even worse."
The deuce you say.
I have refrained from writing too much about this situation. My son's mother is from Iran and that side of the family has many members still living in Iran. They have my prayers and have asked me to not write too much as they believe that the time unfortunately is not ripe enough for a true regime change. The ruling elite and their Revolutionary Guard still hold all the cards as well as the arms to suppress any uprising. Gandhi like non-violent protests have no effect on a regime that from it's earliest beginning, sent children off to be martyred by the tens of thousands in the Iran/Iraq War and is willing to hang and stone women for social crimes.
1 comment:
Yes, the media reach from tweets coming out Iran is pretty massive. I conducted a study yesterday that found that most tweets coming from on-the-ground protesters in Iran received an average of 57 retweets.
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