Middle East Politics

2cents said:
I doubt it but let's see. Iran tends to defy any kind of conventional analysis.
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I don't think its very difficult to analyze. Authoritarian system ? Check. Young, oppressed population ? Check. Poor governance ? Check. Rigged elections ? Check
 
Silva said:
I've watched a good 100 videos of the protests so far and none of them have more than a few hundred people at any given site. They'll need to get a lot bigger if it's going to be successful.
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Doesn't sound good, I just hope they don't get crushed. People already have died, and the repression system is relentless.
 
Synco said:
Doesn't sound good, I just hope they don't get crushed. People already have died, and the repression system is relentless.
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If there's a change in government you can bet it will be bloody and brutal as the regime won't give up power without a vicious fight.
 
Raoul said:
If there's a change in government you can bet it will be bloody and brutal as the regime won't give up power without a vicious fight.
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Absolutely. But the question is if this uprising has the potential to overthrow the regime in the first place.
 
Raoul said:
I'd say this is as serious as it was a few years ago during previous elections. A signiicant majority of the population are below 30 and want greater say in their governance. Its inevitable that Iran (and Russia) flip at some point in the very near future.
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Still waiting for the trump pivot?
 
The protests in Mashad and Qom are especially interesting given they're the religious heartland of the country. There also seems to have been initially at least some support for the protests from the clerical right.
 
The people whose tweets have been quoted here are heavily interventionist wrt Iran. I have a bad feeling about this(TM).

Sources, in case someone is insterested:
Sohrab calling for change in 2012: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/can-iran-be-saved/
Such a confrontation may take the form of an all-out land invasion or, more likely, a limited intervention aimed at delaying the mullahs’ nuclearization drive. Either scenario could spell the fall of the clerical regime under the weight of far superior Western militaries.
...
Regime collapse in Iran represents a historic chance for advancing democratic development there and, by extension, the wider Middle East and North Africa.
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Sohrab apologising for CIA's Ajax:
One attempted distortion appeared in a Wall Street Journal review by Sohrab Ahmari. In researching this piece, I found that Ahmari’s review is essentially a reprise of his February 2009 pseudonymous review of Gholam Reza Afkhami’s biography of the Shah. Behind the anonymity of a fictitious name, Ahmari presents much of the same, but does so with the brazen language of an ideologue that expects no accountability. While a visceral contempt for Mossadegh shines through his writings, Ahmari gushes over the Shah and a paradise that never was. “Javid Shah!” is Ahmari’s proclamation when his advocacy needn’t be disguised as analysis.

Profiled recently as “the neocons’ favorite Iranian,” Ahmari has been caught twisting statistics to suit his agenda in the past. The biography of the Shah that Ahmari to construct his case was in fact written by a former minister of the Shah and criticized for, among other things, relying too heavily on the Shah’s own autobiographies.
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from: http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/our-i...n-53-paved-the-way-for-political-islams-rise/



Alireza Nader is from the...RAND corporation*. Nice start.
Don't Be Fooled by Gains Like Nuclear Deal When It Comes To Iran
U.S.-Iranian relations have enjoyed positive breakthroughs recently, but real change in Iran remains to be seen.
By Alireza Nader

Though to be fair, he does say this too
The Islamic Republic is a revisionist state that seeks to undermine what it perceives to be the American-dominated order in the Middle East. However, it does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations.
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Then there is Ted Cruz, Trump, and that weird Iranian government-in-exile woman also tweeting with great enthusiasm.

It seems inevitable now. The tankies are correct, Kim and his father are correct, and the neocons are correct, and both will be correct as long the other is around. Stockpile nukes and build walls.



*If someone says this is an ad-hom, well, it is supposed to be.
 
Raoul said:
I don't think its very difficult to analyze. Authoritarian system ? Check. Young, oppressed population ? Check. Poor governance ? Check. Rigged elections ? Check
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No doubt that would explain much of the unrest. But there's sure to be other factors at play behind the scenes which observers outside the country will miss. The fact that some members of the clerical right have come out in support, along with the big protests in Qom and Mashhad, suggests there may be an element of elite divisions or rivalries at play. Also some of the bigger protests I've seen in the videos seem to have come from the Kurdish and Arab regions in the west and south-west which indicates there may be some sort of separatist sentiment at play. Like I said, it's very hard to get a proper feel for any of this just by scanning Twitter.
 
2cents said:
The protests in Mashad and Qom are especially interesting given they're the religious heartland of the country. There also seems to have been initially at least some support for the protests from the clerical right.
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People here have no clue and it's really funny to see how everybody is taking the pictures of the protests and put their own title on it.

The protests were actually started by the conservatives. It was against Rouhani's reformist policies. There was even an interesting decision two days ago about not a enforcing dress code in Tehran.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...aea358f9725_story.html?utm_term=.7f88ac96c270

However, with the use of social media (ala what the US did in Cuba) the protests were hijacked by different groups of people who actually have different goals, some protesting against economy, some against the conservatives themselves, and some even tried to take a sectarian and ethnic dimension.

The real problem for these protests right now is not only that they are small, it's that they have different goals.
 
So the power brokers in the west support Saudi Arabia and Israel in their enmity against Iran because of their support for terrorists. Is that right?
Nothing to say about Netanyahu being filmed at the bedside of an Al Nusra terrorist being treated at an Israeli hospital in the illegally occupied (Syrian) Golan Heights?
Nothing to say about Saudis support for ISIS?
fecking bullshit.
 
I think most saw another wave of mass protests going down in Iran, but I thought it'd be further down the line.
 
DenisIrwin said:
So the power brokers in the west support Saudi Arabia and Israel in their enmity against Iran
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Yes.

DenisIrwin said:
because of their support for terrorists. Is that right?
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No.

Team A: Iran + Syria (Assad) ---- Godfather: Russia
Team B: Israel + KSA + Daesh + AlQaeda + Islamic state ---- Godfather: USA (France being another slave of the US)

Team B employs more terrorists and Team A is strongly hated by Israel for obvious reasons.

Syria will be the next Iraq and team B also wants a regime change in Iran
 
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Ecstatic said:
Team A: Iran + Syria (Assad) ---- Godfather: Russia
Team B: Israel + KSA + Daesh + AlQaeda + Islamic state ---- Godfather: USA (France being another slave of the US)

Team B employs more terrorists and Team A is strongly hated by Israel for obvious reasons.
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How does this work?
 
Ecstatic said:
Yes.



No.

Team A: Iran + Syria (Assad) ---- Godfather: Russia
Team B: Israel + KSA + Daesh + AlQaeda + Islamic state ---- Godfather: USA (France being another slave of the US)

Team B employs more terrorists and Team A is strongly hated by Israel for obvious reasons.

Syria will be the next Iraq and team B also wants a regime change in Iran
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Yeah definitely.
 
Danny1982 said:
everybody is taking the pictures of the protests and put their own title on it.
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Yeah, same happened in 1979. You had Marxist journalists like Fred Halliday predicting a socialist Iran and publishing articles and books on the Revolution that made no mention of Khomeini. Then even when Khomeini emerged at the head of the protests, you still had people like Foucault either playing down his role, predicting his eventual demise, or casting him as a Gandhi-type figure.
 
Raoul said:
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I wonder why you left out the previous tweet, which proves that some of these groups have started to call its subscribers to initiate violence. :rolleyes:

I think by looking at the numbers it's very clear now that what we have here is not really popular protests (like in 2009, although there are many people still unhappy about the economy) but rather sleeper cells/limited groups instructed to incite violence and unrest at a tactical moment, and trying to seize and opportunity, hoping that it will lead to something bigger. Just like the US did with Cuba a few years ago:

US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government
In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government.

McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the US government.

McSpedon didn't work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the US Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in US humanitarian aid.

According to documents obtained by the Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones "Cuban Twitter," using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba's strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet.

Documents show the US government planned to build a subscriber base through "non-controversial content": news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize "smart mobs" — mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban spring, or, as one USAid document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society."

At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the US government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-zunzuneo-stir-unrest

I think social media is crucial for these activities, once it's blocked they will need to get creative to organize any meaningful event to report on.
 
US, Israel and Saudi Arabia trying to unsettle Iran from within, nothing new here. feck all to do with oppressive nature of the regime (which it is) and all to do with weakening your enemy that's gotten much stronger and more influential after recent wins in Syria.

Same shit, different country. Iraq, Libya, Syria, now it's Iran's turn.
 
antihenry said:
US, Israel and Saudi Arabia trying to unsettle Iran from within, nothing new here. feck all to do with oppressive nature of the regime (which it is) and all to do with weakening your enemy that's gotten much stronger and more influential after recent wins in Syria.

Same shit, different country. Iraq, Libya, Syria, now it's Iran's turn.
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I don't know if there's any reason to believe that the protests weren't spontaneous/internal.
The inevitable, cynical use of these protests by people who have been itching for this war for decades, that is the problem.
 
berbatrick said:
I don't know if there's any reason to believe that the protests weren't spontaneous/internal.
The inevitable, cynical use of these protests by people who have been itching for this war for decades, that is the problem.
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If the US were to try to foment unrest in Iran along the lines of what we're seeing, it's likely the MEK would be the top contenders among the channels they'd try to use - they've got a high profile presence and growing support in certain DC circles. With that in mind it is interesting that some of the first English-language Twitter accounts to start posting videos of the protests seem to be MEK-linked in some way. Searching "MEK Iran" on Twitter right now throws up dozens of videos explicitly attributed to MEK "activists".

On the other hand it seems a bit inconceivable that the MEK, who are generally despised by everyone in Iran for supporting Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war, could have the means to provoke any kinds of protests, never mind protests all the way from Mashad to Kermanshah.
 
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