Lago PARANOIA wrote:Why, oh why did the government of Iran shoot protesters on Ashura of all days and how long is it going to take for the government to get their just desserts?
- 1. To further erode the power of the Islamic Council.
2. It's not.
We like to think of the Islamic authorities and the authoritarian conservatives as being the same people - after all, they
say that they are the same people and they mostly have the same supporters amongst the men on the street. But Police State and Fundamentalism are genuinely two different methods of government (even if they aren't different
enough to justify taking up two out of three governmental systems in Alpha Centauri). But the fact is that breaking the religious institutions that dominate the country leaves a power vacuum that can be as easily exploited by
secular conservatives as by liberals. Here's a section from the news:
The Guardian wrote:By authorising the use of lethal force on one of Shia Islam's holiest days, the Islamic regime may have fatally undermined its claim to be the protector of Iran's religious traditions.
And yeah, that's totally true. Also here's a great quote to ruminate on:
The Guardian wrote:The shootings threaten to further undermine the standing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had already replaced President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the target of the opposition's wrath.
How sweet is that? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can give an order that erodes the power and prestige of Khamenei by shooting the lieutenants of Mir Hossein Mousavi in the face?
Awesome! Ahmadinejad would totally do that. He'd do it
nine times. Every time a mourning cycle comes up, Ahmadinejad can shoot at it and then Mousavi's people die (so he has to share power less) and Khamenei's prestige goes down (so he has to share power less.
As long as Ahmadinejad doesn't actually have the Ayatollah killed, he can turn the country into a military dictatorship. If he keeps this up, he can have line-item vetoes on parliamentary legislation moved to the Presidency from the Clerical Council in a few years. Maybe even a few months if things get bad enough.
For democracy to actually flourish, the Islamic Council has to be defeated and torn from the government root and branch. But the military junta represented by the Republican Guard has to
also be defeated and stripped of all political power. The current situation is weakening the Islamic Council, and that's good, but it's
not weakening the Republican Guard. And the fires aren't going to die down any time soon without outside intervention - and neither the US nor Britain nor France
can intervene without setting off every country from Chad to Indonesia. The only countries that
could intervene are Russia, China, and India. And there's no way in hell that India is going to put sanctions on Iran without an agreement by China and Russia - and Hu and Putin are both basically on record as
supporting crack downs on pro-democracy protesters, so that ain't going to happen.
Prediction: Ahmadinejad gathers more power as Khamenei loses power, and when he finally retires or dies he does so as a man with more strength than he had two years ago. Khamenei is relegated to a pathetic shell of a supreme leader by the time he dies in office, and the final acts he signs are given him by the Presidency and approved without comment. Khamenei's replacement is chosen by the President and never makes a policy decision in his entire term.
-Username17
