There they go Again

In The Weekly Standard (!) we have two pieces on the unrest in Iran and a breathless cover titled, 'The Crackup of the Theocracy in Iran.

Two think pieces lay within, The Princes and the Mullahs by Elliot Abrams (ho-boy, Elliot Abrams is till around and a write up pf the General  situation by Reuel arc Gerecht from the Foundations for Defense of Democracies! Oh my.

Gerecht tells us that urbanization and education has a lot to do with the protests in the streets:

The rest of Iran is becoming like Tehran. Large-scale urbanization, which started under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, has gained enormous speed under the mullahs. The big provincial cities have an added accelerant for discontent: They are not Tehran, with its capacity to take the largest share of the country’s wealth. Upper- and middle-class Tehranis may rarely travel to the provinces; provincials who have the means regularly go to the megalopolis. Rapidly improving handheld communications and better transportation have also cut down the size of the country. The great revolutionary foundations and owqaf trusts, charities historically built upon land bequests, have essentially become mafia networks, inevitably under the control of the politicized, corrupt ruling clergy, ultimately under the guidance of the supreme leader and those mullahs he trusts. In many parts of the country, they dominate economic life. In other words, the Islamic Republic’s tyranny has become as acute outside of Tehran as it is in the capital. For those cities where large, potentially troublesome minorities live—Kurds, Arabs, and even Azeri Turks—the police state has always been vigilant. The clerics have improved upon the Pahlavi shahs’ love of centralizing, surveilling authority.

Basically the hipsters are tired of all the Islam. Who isn't. Gerecht points out that there are millions of young men who would love to beat the crap out of the protesting hipsters. This is what happened to the Green Revolution of 2009. 

[-You spent a lot of time last spring fantasizing about taking on Antifa at the Battle of Berkeley. -Ed]


He concludes:

In the coming weeks, we should have a much better idea whether Trump will be towards Iran something more than a harshly tweeting version of Obama. Iranians, the good guys and the bad, will force his hand. Until then, it’s at least a pleasure to see a people daily engage in such exuberant, politically incorrect behavior. “Regime change” and “democracy” are much easier to say in Persian than in English.

Oh god, here we go again.

Regime change Iran.

It's not that we aren't sympathetic. But we've seen this movie before. 

The 2000's ringing a bell for anyone? 

Besides, we've been hearing about hip, young Iranians wanting to overthrow the mullahs since 1989. As late as 2001 we thought Bush including Iran in his Axis of Evil was a mistake. Yeah nailed that one, we did.

As far regime change  in Iran goes, we remain unpersuaded and much prefer a different slogan: 'Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran....'

We even wrote a book about it once.