But wait . . . here’s maybe a better reason to talk about Iran: the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung is now reporting that that country has a design ready for atomic warheads. The newspaper hints heavily that this revelation is its exclusive scoop; according to information it has managed to obtain, the key to Iran’s efforts was a certain Russian nuclear expert, present in that country from the mid-nineties to the year 2000 (or maybe all the way to 2002), and whose work in developing a certain high-speed camera process was crucial to the Iranians being able to fashion a so-called two-point implosion system for setting off the nuclear explosion. Now the Iranians have the blueprints they need to develop bombs that in fact would be small enough to fit comfortably on the medium-range Shahab-3 missiles they possess. Supposedly, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency know about this new development and concede that the warhead design would certainly work. (It was in fact an IAEA document that was the source for the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s revelations.)

Alright. But we still have that Munich Conference; maybe the world leaders and experts there can take note of this dangerous new situation and start thinking about how to deal with it. Instead, the Conference seems to be the target of some sort of Iranian charm offensive, according to an account in the Financial Times Deutschland (Security conference: Iran causes turmoil in Munich). You see, we first had at the beginning of this week the surprise mention by Iranian President Ahmadi-nejad in an interview that it should be OK to actually take the West up on its standing offer to take Iranian uranium and process it on the Iranians’ behalf, but only to purity-levels consistent with power-generation and not weaponry, before returning it. Now the Munich Conference has received the pleasant surprise of an announced intention to attend it from Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. (Apparently it has been difficult for quite a while to get any Iranian foreign minister to show up, or in fact even to decline the invitation without adding some gratuitous comment casting doubt on the Holocaust.)

This is important. Mere declarations from Ahmadi-nejad in some interview have long since lost their ability to inspire confidence in other world capitals, but now the officials attending the Munich conference (including many foreign ministers and even some heads of state, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel) will have a chance to collar Mottaki (in a nice, diplomatic way, of course) to see whether Iran really means what its President just said. Mottaki has already declared that it does – sort of, in that he does intend to negotiate for higher levels of enrichment for that Iranian uranium than what was envisioned in the original Western offer. In any case, all this conveniently can occur just as the UN Security Council is preparing a new resolution imposing tougher economic sanctions on Iran, and also as public statements from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicate that Russia is even ready to change its previous position and support the resolution. (Lavrov made these en route to Munich; also attending will be Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, although there’s no indication from him or any other Chinese official that they are likewise willing to reverse their previous position and accept such sanctions, and that’s a problem.)

In the meantime, away from Munich, the US Department of State announced today a conference-call, initiated by Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns, the Department’s #3 official, between officials at analogous level to Secretary Burns at the other countries of the “Group of Six” presenting a common front against Iran (namely the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China). This is reported in France’s Nouvel Observateur (The Group of Six discussed a nuclear Iran). Naturally, this event was likely prompted, not by the Munich conference, but at least by the sanctions resolution coming near completion in the Security Council, and probably also by a combination of Ahmadi-nejad’s pronouncement and the far more ominous news, uncovered by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, of Iran’s nuclear weapons progress. Again, the key country to bring around is China, which could simply veto the Security Council resolution, and the Nouvel Observateur reports that, this time, the Chinese at least did make available for this conference-call the counterpart in their Foreign Ministry to Secretary Burns. The last time there was a “Group of Six” meeting – last month in New York – they had only a lower-ranking official attend. (Those readers really on-the-ball will recall that this “send a lower-ranking guy to show disrespect” tactic was also one they used at various occasions during the COP15 climate-change conference in Copenhagen in December.) Such is progress.

                          

It’s not quite like that, though, because even if we get “All Quiet on the Iranian Front,” that tranquillity could be shattered on any given morning as Europe and the US wake up to news of an Israeli airstrike against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities. Furthermore, the current heightening confrontation – in which the Iranian regime has recently announced that it has plans to build 10 more nuclear fuel-enrichment plants – was admittedly sparked by last Friday’s demand to Iran from the International Atomic Energy Agency that it freeze operations at its already-existing uranium enrichment plant at Qom. And this, as Atlantic journalist James Fallows would have it, was itself a result of successful behind-the-scenes diplomacy in Beijing during President Obama’s recent Asia trip.

Be that all as it may, this Iran-vs.-the-World stand-off is indeed getting steadily nastier, as is described in that previously-cited NYT article from today but also by another piece in the Dutch newspaper Trouw (“Iran weighs pulling out of nuclear treaty”). That “nuclear treaty” is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), originally from 1968, in which treaty-signatories who don’t have nuclear weapons pledge never to try to get them, in exchange for those that do have them working to (eventually) give them up. Iran is a signatory to the NNPT, which among other important things means it is obliged to allow period visits from IAEA inspectors, which it has done. (Although that enrichment plant in Qom was for some reason kept secret – ooops, sorry about that! – and that was the main point of the IAEA’s complaint of last Friday.) The Trouw article cites growing sentiment from among important Iranian parliamentarians that their country might as well just withdraw from the NNPT regime if it’s going to be treated that way. And while they are at it, they say, why not just explicitly bar entry to any more IAEA inspectors as well?

It must be borne in mind that, as the article also points out, such thoughts are for now being aired only within the Iranian parliament, not by government officials. Furthermore, the intent here may just be – for now – to bluff and remind Iran’s accusers at the IAEA of what further non-cooperation they could provoke if they go too far with their demands. But surely all of this also brings that much closer to us all that terrible morning when we wake up to news of the Israeli attack.

                          

Well yes, the word now is that that cargo did indeed include weapons, specifically Russian-made S-300 anti-aircraft missiles – reportedly a very sophisticated defense system against invading enemy airplanes and even ballistic missiles – which were to be delivered to Iran on behalf, not of the Russian state, but rather certain Russia-based mafia interests. I was first alerted to this revelation by an on-line article in the French newsmagazine Le Point (The Arctic Sea supposedly carried S-300 ground-to-air missiles for Iran), but that piece in turn based all its reporting on an account from the Austrian newspaper Salzburger Nachrichten (The rocket-smugglers on the “Arctic Sea”).

The Salzburger Nachrichten, of all papers! It does seem a bit strange to learn of the secret details behind contraband cargo on an ocean-going ship from a journal based somewhere that is, oh, about 250 km from the nearest open water, eh? (And that BTW is to the South: Salzburg is closest to the sea if you proceed through NE Italy to the Adriatic.) The key variable enabling the scoop, however, seems to have had nothing to do with closeness to water, but rather closeness to Israeli intelligence sources, as the piece itself carries the by-line “Gil Yaron Jerusalem” [sic].

So here’s what Gil Yaron writes:

• Iran approached certain rather dodgy rogue elements of the Russian military in Kaliningrad – that’s the Russian enclave on the Baltic, northwest of Poland – to arrange for the S-300 rockets to be loaded onto the Arctic Sea two months ago, when it conveniently was due to be there to undergo some repairs. These were hidden under the ship’s ostensible cargo of wood.
  
• A “Western intelligence service” – no further details – let Moscow know what was going on. The Russian authorities immediately recognized the potential great embarrassment this could cause them, for if anyone is going to deliver S-300 missiles to Iran, it naturally has to be the Russian authorities, according to proper signed contracts, and not something like this out of left field.
  
• As a result, those “hijackers” who boarded and took control of the ship shortly after it set sail and was in international waters were actually agents from the FSB – basically the successor to the KGB. And the reason they then kept sailing the ship all the way to a spot off the West African coast was to put it in as inaccessible a spot to any Western journalists as possible before letting their navy “recapture” it and bring the episode to a close.
  
• Oh, and naturally NATO and most of the world’s intelligence services were perfectly aware of where the ship was at all times as it made its way out into the Atlantic, but they were willing to let the Russians set up their little cover-story as long as they made sure that the S-300′s never got anywhere near Iran.

Chief among the intelligenge agencies monitoring the situation was of course the Mossad, Israel’s highly-regarded version – naturally, because any S-300′s deployed in Iran would immensely complicated Israel’s task should it decide it needed to strike with its air force to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. It wasn’t necessarily the Mossad which first discovered what was going on in Kaliningrad – or maybe it was; we don’t know – but Yaron does claim that the Israel authorities even canceled an arms deal they had arranged with Georgia as a further incentive to get Moscow to act to do something about the “Arctic Sea.” What’s more, Israeli president Shimon Peres paid an unscheduled visit to Moscow shortly after the Russian navy “recaptured” the ship. According to official word, while there he provided “concrete proof that Iran and Syria are providing weapons to Hamas and Hizbollah.”

By the way, to tie up some other loose ends here, the American government (as well as Israel, of course) has long urged Russia not to act on the contract it does have with Iran to deliver official S-300s. Assuring cooperation on this matter could very well be one of the main motivations for the apparent turn-around in the Obama administration’s decision to station an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, which I discussed here a few days ago.

                          

The Berlin newspaper Die Tageszeitung also released a Friday-preview piece yesterday (End-Time scenarios in Iran), which generally agrees with Klein’s evaluation, going on to provide additional supporting details. For one thing, Rafsanjani’s speech is to be televised on Iranian State Television; for another, both the main putative loser of that June 12 election, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, and another high-placed ayatollah who has been supportive of him (as well as formerly serving Iran’s president himself), Mohammad Khatami, will be sitting there in the first row, as we learn from Moussavi’s Facebook page.

Klein indulges in a bit of speculation about what Rafsanjani might say; the Tagesspiegel writer(s) (no by-line; we’ll just use “she”) rather speculates on how this rather astonishing occasion has come to be allowed in the first place. She offers two possibilities: Maybe it’s the result of a behind-the-scenes compromise whereby concessions have been made and assurances put forward so that Rafsanjani intends to make use of it, in effect, to back down and lower the heat now focused on the official government, to “save the Republic.” Or maybe, instead, Rafsanjani has used his still-considerable influence to power his way into the speaking engagement, which the reformers intend to use as an occasion to bring out into the open the very real rifts that have opened up within that official government.

Surrender or else going on the attack, then. Either way, tomorrow figures to be an important milestone of some kind. And the list of quotations which this article’s author goes on to use to round it out strongly imply that the evidence points to the latter, attacking interpretation. There are the recent comments of Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri, still influential but with no official position, who is quoted here at length, declaring among other things that “The Country belongs to the people, and not to anyone else” and comparing the behavior of the present regime to that of the Shah in 1979, earnestly hoping that they won’t imitate him in recognizing “the call to Revolution of the people” too late. Shirin Ebadi, the (female) lawyer and winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize is also quoted here, declaring that the present government has effectively lost its legitimacy through the unacceptable violence it used in suppressing the protests. Possibly most ominously, though, are the comments reproduced here from the website of one Mohsen Rezai, long-time Chief of the Revolutionary Guards, who warns that the whole System is on the brink of an “inner collapse” unless the government and opposition sides can get together to fashion some sort of compromise.

                          

Naturally, I leave it to you, dear reader, to examine Pfeifle’s article itself as you may wish. Intern.de, though, has some reservations about it, like Pfeifle’s assertion that Twitter was mainly responsible for the emergence of the story of the assassination of Neda (Neda Agha-Soltan), who basically became the lead-martyr for the Iranian opposition’s cause. I also rather believe that it was YouTube, if anything, that figured most largely in spreading the news and horror of her killing. Pfeifle also conveniently ignores the very substantial defects to Twitter that emerged during those days of Tehran street-demonstrations, such as the sheer volume of “tweets” to be digested (221,000 per hour at their height, it says here) and the related problem of a high “noise-to-signal ratio” (i.e. it was difficult to glean out useful information – much less anything that could be verified – from that flood), as the audience for the “#iranelection” hash-tag eventually was even treated to tweet-advertising piggybacking on that tag from a UK furniture company! The intern.de blogger also detects a high level of sheer PR content in Pfeifle’s piece, whether it’s trying to spin for Twitter or for Mark Pfeifle himself. I agree, but again, you can go off to the Christian Science Monitor site and judge for yourself.

                          

This has to be an important development, in the first place because of the vital importance these days of the IAEA, which is more-or-less the UN’s atomic power/atomic weapons supervisory agency. (It is formally an autonomous organization, but reports to both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.) Just think of all the countries where possession/non-possession of nuclear weapons is currently an issue: North Korea, Israel, Syria – and then, of course, Iran. It’s also important because of the very troublesome relationship the US has had in the recent past with the IAEA, particularly under the George W. Bush administration (e.g. over whether the 2003 invasion of Iraq was really necessary), which actively campaigned against the re-election to the post in 2005 of Dr. ElBaradei.

Again, these days the main atomic trouble-spot is Iran (if only because, in North Korea’s case, the cat is already long out of the bag). So what is Amano’s view on the alleged Iranian ambitions for nuclear weapons? “I see no sort of indication of that in official IAEA documents” – that is, put him on the skeptics’ side (when even Dr. ElBaradei, in a recent interview with the BBC that the Volkskrant article cites, maintains that his “intuition” tells him that that is what the Iranians ultimately are pursuing). Amano’s attitude here will certainly go down rather poorly among most ranges of American public opinion but, again, it is the official attitude of the IAEA itself, i.e. of the impartial experts who are supposed to know (and whose expertise was blatantly ignored in the Bush Administration’s rush to war in 2003). For what it’s worth, it is also the long-held view of leading Middle East expert Juan Cole, who has also covered past American attempts to fool the IAEA into detecting an Iranian weapons threat by supplying it with forged evidence.

                          

Could this be a sign that the authorities have succeeded in quieting down the opposition and convincing the country to forget about that election, accept Ahmadinejad, and just go back to work? Probably not; Rezaei is identified in that Standaard article as the “conservative presidential candidate,” i.e. the one closest anyway to the current government establishment. Juan Cole implies that, in the true tally of the 12 June votes, he probably came in dead-last.

                          

Andreas Relster, writer for the Danish opinion newspaper Information, certainly has no idea. Still, at least he has that forum in which to raise the subject, and can resort to a strategy of canvassing the opinions of every Iran-expert out there whom he can get to respond to his inquiries. This is essentially the method behind his current piece, Iranian mirage.

Along the way, he does manage to unearth some unconventional points-of-view. The most remarkable one comes from one Ali Alfoneh, a Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Political Science. You’d expect Alfoneh to be well-versed in political theory and history, and his take on the current troubles in Iran bear that out: he sees Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as aspiring to follow in the power-politics footsteps of Mao and Stalin, through engineering a crude electoral swindle that deliberately provokes his regimes opponents to come out onto the streets in protest – so that he can identify them all the more easily, brutally eliminate them under a state of martial law (this includes eventual show-trials and executions of all the opposing electoral candidates), and so consolidate his hold on state power for quite some time to come. In this perspective, the presidential election was for sure stolen, indeed obviously so, but the “obviousness” – and so the implicit “insult to the intelligence of the Iranian electorate” that so many other commentators have inferred from that – was entirely the point.

Alfoneh adds that all of this was something that Ahmadinejad was not in a position to pull off back in 2005, when he did manage to win the Iranian presidency for the first time in a run-off against Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. But in the interim, he claims, the president has managed to stock much of the government with his supporters: “half of the parliament consists of former Revolutionary Guards,” and the same is apparently true of the government itself. (Note that this is a base of power in the military, not in the Shiite mullah establishment.) So basically Ahmadijenad could be confident that he could approach the 2009 presidential election not really needing to worry about actually submitting his performance to a popular referendum – he could regain his office and keep his power in better, longer-lasting way.

Wait! They Really Do Love Ahmadinejad!

But then, in the middle of his article, Relster throws us a curve ball by bringing up the controversial opinion-piece in the Washington Post a week ago in which authors Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty claimed that their polling research showed that it was in fact quite plausible that the 62% election-result officially attributed to Ahmadinejad was true and fair. (This view has in the meantime been disproved by a number of analyses, the latest of which is a Chatham House study reported on in Juan Cole’s Informed Comment weblog, but maybe Relster hasn’t yet gotten this memo.) So what harm does this twist in the scenario do to Alfoneh’s argument? Actually, not much: while a really, truly valid 62% would not have been something Ahmadinejad planned to include for carrying out his purported conspiracy, in the end it didn’t matter anyway, because the opposition rose up in revolt nevertheless.

In any event, Andreas Relster is nothing if not an assiduous surveyor of Iran-experts; if you want another commentator willing to accept the Ballen/Doherty argument that that 62% level of support for the current president was real, you got it, in the form of one Abbas Barzegar, himself a Ph.D. student (but at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta, GA), who also is described as “the Guardian’s” man [i.e. the British newspaper the Guardian] in Iran,” who was visiting there the very week before the 12 June election. Barzegar pooh-poohs the very thought that the current regime in Tehran is in any trouble; “intellectuals, academics and other so-called experts” have been predicting its fall ever since the 1979 revolution, all in vain. But in fact, Iran is not just only Tehran, President Ahmadinejad still commands the support of a large majority of the population, and Mir Hussein Mousavi’s big protest movement is based upon nothing more than delusions.

In fact, take a good look at this Mousavi fellow, Barzegar urges us, and with good reason: he was Iranian prime minister after the Revolution, for most of the 1980s. So he was both very involved in that Revolution (including some of its after-events, like the American-hostage affair – so that, although Ahmadijenad himself is widely thought to have been a student at the time actively involved in storming the embassy and guarding the hostages, Mousavi was actually involved with a more responsible role) and very close afterwards to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Why, Mir Hussein Mousavi is much more representative of that original 1979 Islamic revolution – which made Iran into the country with the unique theological-political government that it is today – than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could ever be! The only reason the former has now metamorphosed into the people’s champion is that everyone conveniently forgotten that past political history – he took 20 years off starting in the late 1980s (when the post of prime minster was abolished) to lie low for awhile!

Andreas Relster has really come up with some live ones here, has he not? To be sure, he cites some other people in his article as well who express views which are a bit closer to the accepted narrative of the Iranian protestors coming out to risk life and limb in a quest for democracy, like Rasmus Christian Elling, an academic at the University of Copenhagen specializing in the Middle East and Central Asia. Elling, while not quite yet ready to characterize what is happening in Iran as a “revolution,” is clear in his mind that the actions the government took in the immediate wake of the election – shutting down the telephones and the Internet, sending security forces out into the streets, arresting opposition politicians and journalists – do constitute a political coup. Still, he also offers the following further caution: “It’s important to keep in mind that it is not only Ahmadinejad who is accused of trying a coup. Many Iranians regard the present demonstrations as the real attempt at a coup, with Rafsanjani the man behind it, holding the reins” – and so with Mousavi apparently as only Rafsanjani’s tool or even puppet.

But What If Democracy Wins?

Anyway, dear readers, there is your healthy serving of some quite alternative views of what is going on now in Iran, all thanks to Andreas Relster and Information – which is indeed known for both its high intellectual level and its defying of conventional wisdom (yes, usually from a leftist perspective). I hope it all wasn’t too disillusioning for the Iran-as-American-Revolution picture many of you might have had in your heads up to now. Especially if you have read this post down this far, you deserve a little intellectual relief, a little good news about what is happening there, so I’d like to discuss as well a remarkable commentary from the German newspaper Die Welt, What happens if Democracy wins in Iran?, by Hannes Stein (and I don’t know whether that’s a man or a woman’s name: maybe someone can enlighten me with an e-mail). Placed just above an inspiring photo of a banner bearing the hand-written words for Freedom in both Farsi and English, here is the piece’s lede:

Let’s imagine that the democratic revolution in Iran meets with success. What then? WELT ONLINE dares to undertake that thought-experiment: The entire MidEast could experience freedom and prosperity. Iranians and Israelis would love each other, and Iranian whiskey would be a sales-hit.

Sounds pretty wild, doesn’t it. But, like I wrote, that’s just the lede; here is how things would work out in a little more detail, according to the rest of Stein’s article, if (as s/he rather poetically puts it) things ultimately work out the way they did twenty years ago in Leipzig and Dresden and East Berlin:

• An Iran is born that actually reflects the educated and cultured Iranian people, where tolerance, art, and science can bloom. Tourists flock there; the leading national money-earner is no longer oil, but rather the industry and innovation of Iranians themselves, so that the world soon gets to choose among top-class mobile phones, laptops, and autos labeled “Made in Tehran.” (And, yes, there arises first-class Iranian whiskey, too.)
  
• More importantly, though, with the rise of a new Iran the Middle East now becomes a much more peaceable region since, as Stein maintains, it was never the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off but rather that between hard-line Shiite Iran and the region’s Sunni Arab regimes that was always the fundamental problem in the first place. Now “the Near East could awake out of its fevered fundamentalist dream”; radical groups like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah wither on the vine as their support was cut off, and Syria finds itself politically isolated.
  
• Meanwhile, Iran extends a friendly hand to Israel; mutual embassies open up on Teheran and Tel Aviv, while both El Al and the Iranian national airways begin flights the other way and citizens exchange vacation-visits in each other’s land. Further from Stein: “Young men from Isfahan and Golbahar will get to know the night-life on Shenkin Street [that's in Tel Aviv]. Young Israeli women will plunge into amorous adventures in Shiraz and Mashad.” The Iranian president – whoever he is – visits the Wailing Wall wearing a yarmulke – and, Stein again, “suddenly the union [?] of Israel with the Palestinians will no longer seem so utopian.”
  
• Of course, Stein saves the best for last: Iranian-American relations. S/he sees President Obama attending a fancy ceremony reopening the same American embassy that was subject to such fierce attack back in 1979, as the US of course resumes full diplomatic and commercial relations. And Iran’s nuclear ambitions? According to Stein’s scenario, in secret talks Obama lets Iranian leaders know that the US is prepared to accept an Iran with nuclear weapons, under the condition that such weapons can never be directed against allied states – most especially Iran’s shining new ally, Israel. Oh, and America’s dependence on Arab oil becomes a thing of the past – replaced by plentiful supplies coming from Iran.

Pretty fantastical, I must say. All that dismisses the intractable, sixty-year-old struggle between Israelis and Palestinians over the lands “of Judah and Samaria” a bit too easily, no? Note also that the new Iranian embassy is posited in this narrative to open in Tel Aviv; the Israelis would no doubt prefer to put it in Jerusalem, as yet another token of recognition of that city as Israel’s official capital, but even a new, enlightened Iranian state would likely have problems with that. And of course there is little evidence so far of anything similar happening – at the economic level, which is most relevant – in present-day Leipzig or Dresden or (East) Berlin.

It’s a nice daydream though, isn’t it – and to think that it was rather that other article, the Danish one in Information, whose title was “Iranian mirage”!

                          

Meanwhile, commentator Karl Grobe has some interesting points to make in the Frankfurter Rundschau (Culture war in Persian). One thing people tend to forget – which he reminds us of here – is that Musavi has quite a hard-line reputation himself, harking back to the years he served as prime minister back in the 1980s, under and with the the blessing of no less than Ayatollah Khomeini. (I also recall reading that he played a major and somewhat cold-blooded part in the 1979 revolution, but his Wikipedia page is not helping me out here; indeed, the entry is surprisingly short, and what there is features phrases like he “has a reputation for ‘being honest, humble and a supporter of the masses’” that remind me that the inner-Iranian political conflict can also spread to this particular precinct of cyber-space.) Back then, during the Iran-Iraq War, there was surely no scope for maverick “tribunes-of-the-people” to attain any positions of political power at all, much less that of the premiership, so you know that Musavi had to have been a radical-religious team-player. For that matter, the very fact of his being allowed to stand as a candidate for president this time also has to attest to the Iranian Establishment assuming that he is “safe.”

It doesn’t seem that way anymore; what happened? Either Musavi really put the wool over the eyes of that Establishment – or, as Grobe thinks is more likely, he remains fundamentally a “safe” candidate, in his heart-of-hearts, but one whose candidacy and political role has been expanded by circumstances far beyond the man himself and whatever personal political and religious views he may have. Similarly, much analysis of the current power-struggle in Iran posits Musavi as some sort of tool for former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to regain a leading position of power within the regime. Many reports describe Rafsanjani as a “reformer”; Grobe, however, characterizes him as “kleptokratic,” i.e. mainly interested in being government in order to gain power and riches for himself. (It is known that he is involved in many Iranian businesses, and, for what it’s worth, his own Wikipedia article does state that “[m]any believe Rafsanjani to be the richest man in Iran.”) But the larger point is that the analytical framework in play here to analyze the current political unrest is merely that of an internal power-struggle within the Iranian ruling elite, whereby those who were once “in” but are now “out” try again to get “in.”

But it’s doubtful that those masses of hundreds of thousands, of millions evening, demonstrating out there in Tehran’s streets (and other major Iranian cities as well) are much interested in that framework, either. What this means is that Iran is simply in uncharted territory when it comes to how its government will look like – if the demonstrators (the “Musavi” side, so to speak) prevail. We can only be sure of the following: according to Grobe, the new Opposition

. . . is mainly a Culture Revolution in the Western sense. It struggles for freedom for literature and songs, it desires freedom and equal rights for women, it also wants to have music, film, and TV in the capitalistic Western style; but it doesn’t want to become westernized like a clone. It is Islamic; [but] it rejects the dogmatic Islam of the powerful under the Ayatollahs, indeed it abhors that.

In Grobe’s view, though, the guns that the Government can wield – especially the notorious Basij forces, the lynchpin of President Ahmadi-nejad’s power – are just biding their time to intervene and make the desires and ideological make-up of the street-protestors again irrelevant. His point is that this is an all-or-nothing contest; victory by the “Musavi” forces is sure to bring unpredictable, massive changes to the Iranian government (which, indeed, may not ultimately even involve Mir Hussein Musavi), while defeat will restore a sullen status quo. Sooner or later we will all witness which outcome it is to be.

                          

As of this Sunday, the world’s burning news is of course the recent election in Iran, the apparent plot by the authorities in that country to steal it, and the people’s reaction thereto. Unfortunately, all of this is occurring so far over a weekend, which might be another dastardly trick by the current Tehran regime designed to limit take-up of the story by the regular European press, some parts of which do not work on Sunday at all (although there’s also word that the American MSM has been similarly slow off the starting-blocks).

Still, some European papers are reporting on the situation in Iran already, including Berlin’s Tageszeitung (or “taz”). Although its report – attributed to news agencies – is entitled Mass disturbances on Tehran’s streets, the text makes clear that that refers to Saturday and that, as of Sunday morning, things are calm again. Still, some of the results it reports include the detention of some 100 opposition figures, the beating of a TV cameraman from the Italian network RAI3 (and confiscation of his film; all by the security forces, of course), and a gruff statement on the situation from German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, which among other things terms the violence by the security forces against demonstrators as “unacceptable.” (But what struck me in particular about this report is how the “taz” reveals once again its extreme left-wing political coloration: in a discussion of presidential challenger Mir Hussein Moussavi, it brings up how he had proven himself a “good economist” in the past, when he was prime minister, by his imposition of food-rationing and price-controls!)

The French Libération, on the other hand, has somewhat of a different take on today’s (Sunday’s) situation, summarized in its article’s title: Iran: The riots have begun again this Sunday in Tehran. That newspaper’s reporters witnessed today a violent confrontation between the police and a group of about 200 protestors. But they also report that the Iranian mobile telephone network is functioning again. (My aside here: on the right-hand side of the Libération web-page you can see the newspaper’s cover-story last Friday: “Spring in Tehran.” Would that be anything like the Prague Spring?)

Elsewhere, Denmark’s Jyllandsposten is reporting that the Iranian authorities have instructed the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based Arab TV broadcaster Al Arabiya to cease their operations in the country immediately. As the company’s editor, Nabil al-Khateeb, told the French news agency AFP, “We have no permission to cover anything. We have not received any justification, and we were not warned beforehand.” And the Flemish paper Gazet van Antwerpen reports how this morning two Belgian journalists were arrested on Tehran’s streets and shut away, with a number of other detainees, in a cellar-dungeon at the Interior Ministry. But this story has a happy ending – they were set free a short time later, after confiscation of their notes – and even a nice bonus: one reporter worked for the Belgian-Flemish broadcast organization VRT and the other for the corresponding Belgian-Walloon broadcaster RTBF, and it seems they were detained together and stood up to the arresting officers with great solidarity – a heart-warming and much-needed tale for present-day Belgium!