it is ridiculous to allow this golden opportunity for permanent regime change in Iran to pass by , without arming as many opponents of the regime as possible at this time , to allow THEM to fight back against the Basij and RevGuards.
It will be a long time before this chance comes again ,and the result may be a mushroom cloud(s) rather than mere pointed street battles .
This is our shot . Take the shot
We have got to stop the massacre! They are crying for our help! They are asking for assistance! We can’t ignore them!
SHAME on our government for just talking about the crisis. SHAME on millions of Americans for their apathy!
Good news ping!
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Times of India reporting that Rafsanjani and family have been arrested, waiting for confirmation.
More on Understanding Iran: The Conflict is not Just Intra-Elite, but Inter-Institutional
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Monday, June 22, 2009
I have focused on the issue of intra-elite conflict in most of my commentary on Iran, noting that the drama of the street protests is not ultimately where the endgame will be located. A comment to one of my posts yesterday from Matthew Shugart amplified this point by noting that the intra-elite conflict (i.e., the fact that the major players here, i.e., Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, Mousavi and Rafsanjani, et al. are all major long-term elites, and none are outsiders assailing the status quo elites) is also playing out within the state with differing institutional forces in play.
To wit: Khamenei is the Supreme Leader, but Rafsanjani is head of the Assembly of Experts, which oversees the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council. Theoretically the Assembly of Experts (which consists of 86 clerics) can dismiss the Supreme Leader. As such, not only do we have a situation in which elites are at odds, but one in which key elites have independent power resources that they can attempt to deploy to their own political ends. This does not mean that either will be successful nor that the resources in question are of equal power. Indeed, we may find out exactly how supreme the Supreme Leader is before this is all said and done or we may discover that other Iranian institutions are more robust than we might have otherwise thought.
Back to the Assembly of Experts: Matthew wrote about the last election of the Assembly here back in 2006 and noted the following (the whole post, btw, is worth reading):
The one clear formal role of the Assembly of Experts is to select the Supreme Leader when that position becomes vacant. The Assembly also has the formal power to oversee and even dismiss the sitting Supreme Leader, but no one expects that the current occupant of that position, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is in any jeopardy of being removed or seriously restrained by the winners of today’s Experts elections. In the sense that this institution has formal powers of supervision that it is not known to exercise this is, of course, an indicator of less-than-full institutionalization. That is, the relative autonomy of the Supreme Leader from oversight and the apparent security of his (life) tenure suggests “top-down” authority is a good deal stronger than “bottom up,” where the “top” is the Supreme Leader himself. This is a rather unremarkable statement: Almost all popular commentary on Iran assumes that the Supreme Leader is, well, supreme.So is the Assembly of Experts therefore meaningless? Maybe, but I don’t think so. For one thing, one of the reasons its powers are limited is that the candidates for it–while popularly elected–are vigorously screened by a body known as the Guardian Council, which is a panel of twelve clerics, of whom six are appointed by the Supreme Leader and the other six by the elected parliament (Majles). It is easy to look at such top-down screening of candidates for a body like the Assembly of Experts and therefore conclude that the latter must be irrelevant. I would conclude the opposite.
Anti-freedom Obama