Over here, all the televisions in the dining facilities have been tuned to the anti-government protests in Iran that were sparked when charges of election fraud were leveled against the current President Al...
It started as a peaceful, massive rally. No one really knew how the regime would react. We soon found out. Rhetoric about banning the protests led to police and the army being readied, to the on-air killing of a female student protester by a militiaman's bullet, to the latest -- violent confrontation by both sides.
I certainly think that if I were Iran I would have played this with a little more savvy. Allowing statements to go out like, "We will crush this protest" (from a leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard) don't really help legitimize your nation in the international arena. Many have clamored for more aggressive public support by the US government (mainly the Republicans), but I think that would play into Iran's hands. When your enemy is destroying himself, sometimes the best course of action is to stay out of his way.
This is definitely helping in the Iraq theater though, where anything that can distract the Iranians from their covert influence over Iraqi goings on -- whether anti-coalition force propaganda, economic influence (through cheap imports, for instance, which destabilize domestic Iraqi agriculture), and the smuggling of lethal aid to insurgencies, is welcome.
Yup, I agree let it run its own course. History shows dictators and tyrants don't last. Qin Shih Huang who built the Great Wall, who buried China's scholars and burned China's books lasted only 15 years. Communism didn't work for Germany, Rusia; it's not working for Cuba, N. Korea and I'd predict it won't in Vietnam and China. Politics in Chinese is not a dirty word; instead, it's made up of two radicals meaning to rule with reason and humanity as versus absolute power. Ah, when are we humans going to learn from history and the voice within?
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