This is the lesson I’ve been reading into this, that ultimately the Supreme Council has lost it’s grip on Iran regardless of the outcome of this election.
I didn’t care about Iranian politics before the election.
I assumed that nothing they did was fair or for the good of the populace.
So why should I care now? They were an evil empire before and now we’re supposed to cry because they are a failed democracy? Let them look to their Islamic friends to bail them out.
I presume, then, that this will be your last interruption of this thread?
Why assume that? Even authoritarian and undemocratic governments prefer to be popular rather than unpopular.
They’re Shi’ites. They haven’t got a lot of Islamic friends. Most other Islamic states would tend to be inimical to them.
Without knowing, yet, who’s going to “win”, we can’t picture whose influence will shake out in exactly what way, and when. It’s quite possible that moderate reformers within the political and clerical classes will unite and cause some real change, thereby retaining a measure of power and/or creating a new political system entirely if the view of this version of ‘democracy’ is shattered by whatever events would have to cause the downfall of the current regime.
In any case, just to clarify, are you talking about the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council or the Guardian Council, or the group that Rafsanjani is a member of, the Assembly of Experts?
This is now about a government trying to crush its own people after screwing up, and it’s not about the crooked election anymore. So something has changed, probably permanently, in the relationship between Iran’s government and many Iranians. But it’s hard to tell who the exact loser is; one thing this crisis has exposed is how factionalized the Iranian religious government is. I’d heard this hinted at before but I didn’t know the extent. It’s hard to see anything positive happening here for Khamenei, but it could end up hurting his opponents too, for example. What happens if Ahmadinejad’s supporters buy into the propaganda he’s putting out and blame the protestors for these problems, for example?
Already done. Ahmed Khatami, (not to be confused with Mohammed Khatami), already made a speech last Friday in which, without naming Mousavi, he efectively called for Mousavi’s death.
I’m not surprised that a religious leader on the Council of Experts wants Mousavi done away with. I’m wondering what happens if the populace falls for this whole “it’s the foreign media” story or the “some spy agency shot that woman” story or blames the protestors, rather than the government, for the violence and disturbances.