The meaning of the Tehran springPepe Escobar, Asia Times:
What Iranian presidential candidate Mousavi qualified as 'this dangerous charade' and Supreme Leader Khamenei 'the sweetness of the election,' or better yet, a 'divine assessment.' has all the non-divine markings of intervention by the Iranian Republican Guards (IRGC)... Scores of protesters equating Amadinejad with Augosto Pinochet in 1973's Chile might not be that far off the mark...
This is emerging as a no-holds-barred civil war at the very top of the Islamic Republic. The undisputed elite is now supposed to be embodied in the Ahmadinejad faction, the IRGC, the intelligence apparatus, the Ministry of the Interior, and Basji volunteer militias, and most of all the Supreme Leader himself.
The elite wants subdued, muzzled, if not destroyed, reformists of all strands: any relatively moderate cleric; the late 1970s clerical/technocratic Revolution Old Guard (which includes Ayatollah Rafsanjani, Khatami and Mousavi); 'globalized' students; urban, educated women; and the urban intelligentsia...
This has nothing to do with the US-supported color-coded revolutions in Eurasia. This is about Iran. An election was stolen in the United States in 2000 and Americans didn't do a thing about it. Iranians are willing to die to have their votes counted. There is now an opening for a true Iranian people-power movement not specifically to the benefit of Mousavi, but with Mousavi as the catalyst in a wider struggle for real democratic legitimacy. The die is cast; now it's people power against 'divine assessment.'
