Iran unrest shifts power dynamics

Reformists must rethink strategy

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31700644/ns/world_news-washington_post/

TEHRAN, July 1 -- Three opposition leaders, including a former president, openly defied Iran's top political and religious authorities Wednesday, vowing to resist a government they have deemed illegitimate after official certification of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection.

So it continues.....I salute them:

"......Their defiance in the face of harsh official denunciations and threats of arrest and prosecution appeared to dash the government's hopes of pressuring the opposition into accepting the disputed June 12 election.

"Rather than dropping his complaints of extensive vote-rigging, leading opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi took his fight to a new level Wednesday, risking arrest by urging followers to continue their protests. After formal certification of the election results Monday night by the Guardian Council, a top supervisory body of Shiite Muslim clerics and jurists, Iranian authorities warned that no further protests would be tolerated.

"Mousavi, 67, a former prime minister, was joined in his dismissal of the official results by two other opposition leaders: presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi, 71, a cleric and former speaker of parliament, and Mohammad Khatami, 65, a cleric who served as president for eight years before Ahmadinejad, now 52, was first elected in 2005. They also called for the annulment of the June 12 vote and the continuation of protests, although Khatami's remarks were not as tough as those of the two candidates...

...

"The opposition's persistence appeared to put the government in a bind. If Iran's top leaders order the arrest of Mousavi and the political and religious figures who support him, they risk further undermining the country's complex system of religious and democratic governance. But if they allow Mousavi to continue calling for protests and challenging the election results, they could jeopardize the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other key figures who have backed Ahmadinejad's reelection.

"Political factions and some grand ayatollahs, senior Shiite religious leaders with tens of thousands of followers, have voiced disapproval of the violent response to street protests and have called on authorities to heed demonstrators' complaints.

"There has been a velvet revolution against the people and against the republicanism of the system," Khatami said during a meeting with families of war casualties, according to a Web site associated with his faction. "A big segment of society has lost all trust in the system, and this is a disaster."

from today's Christian Science Monitor

.

"Elections were always marred in Iran . . . but they were never faked," said Ahmad Sadri, a columnist for the reformist newspaper Etemad-e-Melli and chairman of Islamic world studies at Lake Forest College near Chicago. Elections have always helped give the regime its legitimacy, he said. Now, amid widespread allegations of vote fraud, that has been lost, he said. "By faking the elections, the right wing has sort of killed the goose that laid the golden egg."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/01/AR200907...

Iran arrests 7 allegedly tied to exiles in France

Police say most of the 1,032 detained in protests have been freed

Right, probably in body bags

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31711133/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Or chipped for GPS.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/31715864#31715864

Video

Iranian cleric: British Embassy staff to be tried

Hard-liner tells worshippers that Iranian employees ‘made confessions’

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31722550/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Yeah, right.  More like 'forced to make confessions', I bet.

Iran leader’s aide: Mousavi is a U.S. agent

Top adviser also accuses opposition leader of 'murdering innocent people'

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31732559/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

I heard that Mousavi is responsible for the deaths of 7,000 people but I don't know the circumstances.  From what I heard, he has his own baggage and was only marginally better than Ahmadinejad, but more welcoming of the West and less likely to use nuclear weapons.