Iran Analysis: The Regime's Pyrrhic Victory
Enduring America / Mr. Verde (pseudonym)
12-Feb-2010 (one comment)

The regime has demonstrated that, as with other occasions, it can bus in people, or entice them with free food or fear of their government jobs, for the setpiece event. It has also demonstrated that, again as with previous occasions, its security forces are very capable of beating peaceful protestors and dispersing them.

...this year’s events were less like celebrating a Revolution that freed the country from tyranny and dictatorship and more like a tyrannical dictatorship celebrating its continued survival...

The regime is fast losing any claim of being Islamic, popular, just, or merciful. And its showpiece events have become occasions on which its forces are mobilized to attack its own citizens, even as it pours resources into a show for TV cameras so that it — and some foreign media with superficial view of the events — can call it a “victory”.

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FG

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Other Interesting analyses come from readers responding to articles like that.  A few examples:

ANALYSIS: Applying the ‘hard power’ of authoritarian repression to maintain control may be sufficient to keep power in the short term, but without a convincing claim to legitimacy it will bring diminishing returns, we are seeing this already as protests continue. In the medium to long term the loss of legitimacy will increasingly erode the authority of the state as people become less willing to submit to coercion. Most important is the need for the rank and file of the security forces etc. themselves to perceive the regime as legitimate, and they are not isolated from the prevailing attitudes in the society around them, nor can they be completely oblivious to the increasing disconnection between ideology and reality."

ANALYSIS: One could liken it to a soccer game in which one side was allowed to field their team while the other was prohibited–no mystery who would win that one. Keep heart because the regime is on borrowed time. They are on borrowed time simply because they have to go to extrodinary lenghts to manufacutre the semblence of “succesful” rally. Just imagine how many of these pro regime supporters would actually rally if they were met with beatings, death, and the possibility of rape. None would show and any intelligent person can see that. I would even hedge a bet many of these “pro regime” supporters only came out because they were told to show up like they were at other rallies.

ANALYSIS: A totalitarian dictatorship put on their annual propaganda rally on the anniversary of their “revolution” and had to publicly beat their own nation’s clerics and political leaders, young people, women, etc… and the regime even had to silence the actual noise from their own rally to block out chants of “liar” and “death to the dictator”.

By what insane standard is that a victory? If that happened in North Korea we would be counting the days before Kim Jong Il’s hanging.

...victory for the Green movement is not going to come from unarmed protesters storming Khamenei’s palace, that’s not how dictatorships fall. But as the protests go on and the regime is constantly seen as staying in power exclusively through brutality, more and more cracks appear in the regime’s unity and gradually the political class, military, clergy, and business interests lose patience with the status quo...

ANALYSIS: "the regime has to win everytime, the greens have to win only once."


 



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