Meanwhile, Back in Iran

Laura Secor provides an update on Iran in The New Yorker.

The American attention span for foreign crises is notoriously short. In the two weeks since Iran’s disputed election and the ensuing protests and violence, Michael Jackson died, Sarah Palin resigned, and news from Iran slipped below the fold and into the inside pages of most daily newspapers. In this case, however, American editors and readers are not solely to blame. The Iranian authorities had an interest in making this story disappear, and they have done a very effective job...The less we hear from Iran, the easier it is to presume that the regime’s strong-arm tactics have succeeded in putting down the protest movement. But the silence we hear is only our own. The protest movement that exploded into Iran’s streets in June was not a momentary flash of anger.

Iran’s broad middle class has entered into open revolt against its government. The reformists, who once sought to triangulate between these forces and the theocracy, have by and large chosen the side of the protesters. This is a confrontation to be measured not in days but in months, or even years. Among analysts of Iran, debates rage over the relative demographic, political, and economic strength of the opposition coalition. We’ll know it by its failure or its success, and not in the immediate short term.

Secor goes on to point out that this situation has shown that the Iranian clerical establishment is less a reactionary bloc than the West may have thought. As reformist cleric Mohsen Kadivar has said, “we have many clergies."

--Ballard Burgher