So Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demands that protestors desist from
their demonstrations and give proper obedience to their
self-selected rulers.
Reports the New York Times:
Iran's
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
sternly cut off any compromise over the nation's disputed
elections on Friday. In a long and hard-line sermon, he declared the elections valid and
warned of violence if demonstrators continue, as they have
pledged, to flood the streets in defiance of the government.
Opposition leaders who failed to halt the protests, he said,
"would be responsible for bloodshed and chaos." The tough words
seemed to dash hopes for a peaceful solution to what defeated
candidates and protesters call a fraudulent election last week,
plunging Iran into its gravest crisis since the Islamic
Revolution in 1979.
"Flexing muscles on the streets after the election is not
right," he said, before tens of thousands of angry supporters
at Tehran University. "It means challenging the elections and
democracy. If they don't stop, the consequences of the chaos
would be their responsibility."
But opposition leaders, who stayed home Friday, called for yet
another huge rally on Saturday afternoon, setting the stage for
a possible showdown between protesters and security forces,
perhaps a violent one.
The sermon put Ayatollah Khamenei, who prefers to govern
quietly and from behind the scenes, at the forefront of a
confrontation not only among factions of the government but
among Iranians themselves.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's dictatorial pronouncements give
him the look of the Shah some three decades ago: an
elderly thug surrounded by a rapacious elite who'd grown
increasingly out of touch with the people he desired to
rule. Popular protests helped sweep away the Shah, his
pampered military brass, and Savak, his secret police.
Let's hope the same will happen to Khamenei, the
self-interested mullocracy which he represents, and its
jack-booted enforcers like the so-called Revolutionary
Guard.
The point is, the real issue is not the election, in which no one
really represented the Iranian people and their desire for
liberty, and subsequent back-mosque maneuvering
amongst the power brokers, such as the eminently
opportunistic Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. It is the
entire system, in which a repressive and unelected elite make the
most important political decisions and use force to crush any
opposition. The Iranians are entitled to create their
political system, whatever it looks like, rather than have one
imposed upon them, like the present one.
In this we should sympathize with the Iranian people and do what
we can to help them. But that mostly means us, not the U.S.
government. Twitter adjusting its maintenance schedule to
ensure maximum availability for Iranian protestors is one
example. Abundant and continuing press coverage is
another. Sharing methods of circumventing official
censorship from Chinese dissidents is yet another.
Presumably there are additional means of directly empowering
those opposing Iran's reigning autocracy.
Unfortunately, warn Iranian activists, the worst thing the Obama
administration could do is turn what is presently the
Iranian autocracy versus the Iranian people into a contest
between the U.S. and Iranian governments. No one really
doubts where Washington stands, and its previous record, a la the
Shah, brought to power in a U.S.-supported coup against a
democratically government, is not particularly helpful. It
is critical to keep the focus on the Iranian people.
Overthrowing the system will not be easy. But the Iranian
people succeeded against the Shah, and the end came
surprisingly quickly. Hopefully the current system is
equally brittle. There are some divisions within the
elite; perhaps unity will similarly break within the
security services. Hopefully the Iranian equivalent of the
Iron Curtain can finally be brought down.
