Is the country on the verge, or already in, a civil war? Michael Totten is on the case. Hit his tip jar if you can.
[Update a couple hours later]
More over at Gateway Pundit.
[Late afternoon update]
More from Michael Totten: Insurrection, Day Two.
More news at PJM. This is interesting:
There are widespread reports of police and security forces, around Tehran and other big cities where there have been demonstrations, who are not Iranian and either speak Persian with a very pronounced Arab accent or speak no Persian at all.
From Iraq? Or elsewhere?
[Update early evening]
Iran doesn’t have elections — it has circuses:
Stalin would be proud. But even his Soviet Union eventually succumbed to the dissidents, and while the regime has most all of the guns, the chains, the clubs, the tear gas cannisters, and the torture chambers, there are tens of millions of Iranians who hate the regime. The question is whether they are prepared to face down the Basij, the police, and the Revolutionary Guards. It is usually a matter of numbers in these cases: if a million people gather in front of the Supreme Leader’s palace and demand freedom, while half that number make the same demand in front of the government buildings in Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz and Mashad, they might win.
Until quite recently, the Iranians did not believe they could do such a thing on their own. They believed they needed outside support, above all American support, in order to succeed. They thought that Bushitlercheney would provide that support, and they were bitterly disappointed. But nobody believes that Obama will help them, and they must know that they are on their own.
Any hope they might have had in the Obama White House was quickly dismissed in the administration’s two statements on the matter. The first came from the president himself, anticipating a Mousavi victory (it is too soon to speculate on the source of this happy thought), and of course, in his narcissistic way, taking personal credit for it:
“We are excited to see what appears to be a robust debate taking place in Iran and obviously, after the speech that I made in Cairo, we tried to send a clear message that we think there’s a possibility of change and, ultimately, the election is for the Iranians to decide but just as what has been true in Lebanon, what can be true in Iran as well, is that you’re seeing people looking at new possiblities, and whoever ends up winning the election in Iran, the fact that there’s been a robust debate hopefully will help advance our ability to engage them in new ways.”
I’ve reread the Cairo Sermon, and I can’t find a single word calling for freedom for the Iranian people. Au contraire, Obama’s words about Iran were penitent, apologizing for the American role, back in 1953, in removing what the president called an elected government (Mossadeq, that is. Except that he was appointed by the shah, not elected at all). But then, history is not his strong suit.
No, it never has been.
On the other hand, as Michael points out, the Bush administration never covered itself in glory with Iran policy, either. There was a potentially huge pro-American youth movement there that they never engaged. I though that one of the (many) purposes of removing Saddam Hussein was to intimidate the Iranian regime and encourage its opponents, but that was never obvious from administration policy post 2003. Colin Powell never really bought into that grand strategy, and perhaps Condi didn’t either. Seriously, this time, I say that I blame George Bush.