Here’s something to spark discussion over the weekend. Is it time to say that the window of opportunity for an Iranian “colored” Revolution – e.g., a massive protest following electoral fraud that succeeds in overturning the results of that election and/or changing the leadership of the country as a result – is coming to a close? It now looks likely that these election results are going to hold – in part for some of the reasons I suggested in a “previous post”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/06/lessons_from_the_orange_revolu_1.html – and Ahmadinejad is going to get inaugurated for a second term later this summer. If this the case, then the potential for an Iranian colored revolution is over.
This is not, however, meant to sound the death knell for protest in Iran, or even for the possibility of some sort of regime change in Iran in the future because of these events. But I think now the model becomes the Iranian Revolution of 1979 itself. While I am far from an expert on these events, the “general story”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution is that protest built up gradually from late 1977 through 1978 and then culminated in regime change only in 1979. Given the memory of these events in the minds of many Iranians – and probably passed along to younger generations by parents and grandparents as well – it strikes me that we at least need to consider the possibility that this will become the new model for the many Iranians that the past weeks revealed are so clearly dissatisfied with the current regime. And to the extent that the events of the last two weeks may have revealed the Iranian regime to be more of your typical petro-dictatorship propped up by security forces (“here”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/24/opinion/main5109089.shtml and “here”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6544249.ece?openComment=true) than its citizens may have believed previously, then perhaps this sort of scenario is slightly more likely than it might have seemed in previous years.
Thoughts?