Iranian Madness

When you see police patrolling the alleys and destroying the vehicles that are parked there, it’s a clear sign that the regime has weakened big time.

Now that the street protests have largely been quieted the rough way, and anyway the foreign media cannot report them, a question looms: how will life go on in Iran?

The only answer I can see is that things will get worse. The regime, weakened by the protests and the challenges posed by their own establishment (let us not forget that people like Mousavi and Rafsanjani are a byproduct of the regime just like Khamanei and Ahmadinejad), will have to resort to repression in order to keep people quiet.

This may not be enough, though. While people are still scared, and resort to tricks such as changing their identity in Facebook in order to protect themselves from retaliation, the protests that are still going on these days are not anymore linked to Mousavi, or the Green movement. Rather, they are led by university students and middle-class youngsters, who took the pretext of the recent protests in order to demonstrate against the regime in general.

This is a risky gamble for the Islamic Republic. Let us not forget that the restrictions imposed by the regime(from the compulsory headscarf for women to the absence of any form of entertainment) are at least as important a factor as the economic mismanagement behind the discontent of the young, educated Iranians.

And when you lose your brains, you have lost your country.

Update (1 July): I have just found out that no less than Martin Fletcher from no less than The Times actually agrees with me!