Iran: Significance of the Protests

My eyes are getting tired from staring at this news for too long but wanted to post one more. There is quite an interesting debate going on about the nature of the Mousvi movement and the base of support for the current protests in Iran. Rob at Arabic Media Shack sums up a debate between Juan Cole on the “elections clearly rigged” side and Andrew Exum, among others on the “Western media are elitist and underestimate Iranians’ true arch-conservatism” side. Rob came down on the Exum side, asking if we were wildly misreading Iran through the lens of Western journalists. For me, watching the videos of the Mousavi protests that came out today left little doubt that there is a fairly broad based mass movement on the Mousavi side, not just some pajama wearing twitter jockeys (spoken with love from someone who has been glued to the twits all day and not left the house). So what’s going on and how do we know these are significant? A few points:

• Khamenei has already backed down and assented to an investigation into vote rigging. This is the day after he declared Ahmadinejad’s a “divine victory.” A huge climb down any way you look at it.
• The government all day on state media had been announcing that the protests were not legal or had been cancelled. The protests ended up being enormous, to the point where the government resorted to gunfire to break them up. (Last I heard they were decamping to a Tajrish protest led by Karroubi)
• The shots fired and casualties mean that there will be memorial services in 40 days for those killed tonight, thus lowering the chances that this will go away quietly
• Coverage is bad outside Tehran, but I am seeing some Twitter reports of violent protests in other cities. This is a place where projects like Swift and Meedan have a lot of potential – filtering out the “reTweets” and organizing the information in a more usable way
• We need to see how this plays out, but there is a major component of intra-elite competition and rivalry going on within the government. This is not just a mass movement of disaffected youth, but one that is tearing the Islamic Republic’s leaders apart. Witness the statements by Rafsanjani before the vote and after, the protests of several clerics, and also voting objections raised by former Revolutionary Guard commander and candidate Rezai — not exactly a narrow sliver of Iran’s political spectrum. The best roundup of these angles is in the Jim Muir’s snap analysis here. I agree with him and ISN’s Kamal Nazer Yasin that all eyes will now be on Qom for more clergy to announce where they stand.

This is a developing and explosive situation, and there is no telling how it will end up. At very least, it will mean a severe reshuffling of who the major Tehran power players are. I think, however, it goes far beyond the smaller bouts of unrest we have seen in the last ten years. The Obama Administration is doing well to express concern, but avoid getting to far into the fray.

Signing off for tonight but keep up to date with Cole, NIAC, CUMINet, Meedan, Sullivan, Uskowi, Ulrich.

-WW