Iran

So much for the fiction that Iran is an Islamic Republic. Clearly it neither follows the precepts of the Qur’an nor the rules of a democracy. Whether or not the last election was rigged, the use of police and army units today in Tehran to suppress unarmed demonstrators, the wholesale arrest of opposition leaders, the suppression of web sites and phone communication, and the telephoned threats to people who might demonstrate on the streets mark this as nothing more than another authoritarian regime trying to stay in power by using their tame thugs to intimidate people. In that respect, Iran, for all its high-flown rhetoric and piously-clad mullahs, is politically no better than the Chinese at Tiananmen Square, the Soviets in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, or the current North Korean regime.

Clearly there is a power struggle going on in the highest levels of government, but just as clearly no one in the upper reaches of government is prepared to give any weight to the obvious discontent of large segments of the population, who are clearly tired of the repressive theocracy and the isolation from the world mainstream.

Well, these things have a way of sorting themselves out over time, usually to the eventual destruction of the ruling dictators. One can only hope that not too many people have to die before the regime loosens its grip.