Public Enemy In Iran

A crucial moment, a tipping point, a turning point, a Berlin Wall moment and many other adjectives and parallels are in place in international media trying to grasp the nature of events taking place in Iran.

Iran stands on the brink says Massoumeh Torfeh in a op-ed in the Guardian. The situation in Iran has reached the point of no return she concludes.

The leader is now surrounded by the hardline clergy, right of centre politicians, Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia, who are calling for direct confrontation. This can only lead to further bloodshed. The opposition is now calling for more strikes and attacks at important centres of power such as the state TV, where clashes took place yesterday. And February sees the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic. There is talk of a military coup by the Revolutionary Guards if the situation does not settle down.
Iran is facing a long period of political instability; and with increasing tensions in neighbouring Pakistan, plus the volatile situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, regional security appears more precarious than any time in the recent past.

Simon Tisdall wonders in the same paper if what's taking place in Iran is a second revolution.

What's changing, as the battle lines sharpen, is that fantasy politics and paranoid posturing can no longer conceal the widening fissures – economic, social and ethnic as well as political – that are splintering Iranian society.
Maybe the regime can still cling to power. But the legitimacy of Khomeini's republic is all but shot. The infallibility of the Vali al-Faqih is blown. The "month of blood" is upon them.

Ali Ansari pens a very thoughtful piece in the Independent in which he says that the government in Iran is way out of control.

This is in many ways a crucial moment. Many of those who have hedged their bets will now begin to reassess their loyalties. Can Islam really be identified with Khamanei? Is Ahmadinejad really the best the Islamic Republic can do? Where in the Holy Koran – as demonstrators chanted – does it say you can sexually assault prisoners?
It is the brutality of the government response to the initial protests that has profoundly shaken Iranians, who are now confronted with an attempt to reimpose an extreme version of Divine Right.
The Iranians have responded forcefully, and with considerable courage, to these demands. This is not a disorganised mob, but a well-marshalled and coordinated crowd. Preoccupied with the events of 1978, observers earnestly cast around for a "leader". But this battle between accountability and autocracy has much more in common with an earlier movement, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906.
There was no single leader then, but there was a powerful idea. And today the means of disseminating that idea is much more potent. With literacy over 90 per cent and more than 25 million registered internet users, and 50 million mobile phone accounts, the days of Divine Right monarchy are long past their sell-by date. Change is coming to Iran.

Ramin Ahmadi goes a bit further in his comments in the Forbes magazine online edition. Iran's regime is on the ropes he says.

The military regime in Tehran is in its final days. The signs of an imminent collapse, perfectly traceable on the Iranian streets.

Robin Wright considers the events in Iran as the country's Berlin Moment. He goes on to describe the green movement as the "the most vibrant and imaginative civil disobedience campaign in the world."

It is time to start wondering out loud whether Iran’s uprising could become one of those Berlin Wall moments.
… [t]he green movement is far more than simply sporadic eruptions. This is the most vibrant and imaginative civil disobedience campaign in the world.

So far the green movement has insisted on non-violence. Perhaps the ultimate irony in the Islamic Republic today is that a brutal revolutionary regime suspected of secretly working on a nuclear weapon faces its biggest challenge from peaceful civil disobedience. And even such a militarised regime has been unable to put it down.

It is not only the media that finally starts taking the events in Iran right. Consider this Washington Post editorial.

[m]ore than ever, the Obama administration and other Western governments must tailor their policies toward Iran to reflect the centrality of the Green Movement's fight for freedom. While diplomatic contact with the regime need not be broken off entirely, by now it should be obvious that it cannot produce significant results -- and might serve to shore up a tottering dictatorship.
President Obama shifted U.S. policy partway in the right direction when, during his Nobel Prize speech this month, he departed from his prepared text to say that "it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear that" the Iranian protesters "have us on their side." He went further Monday with an admirably strong statement that condemned "the violent and unjust suppression of innocent Iranian citizens" and called for "the immediate release of all who have been unjustly detained.