If I had to put my money on a regime falling tomorrow, it would be Greece - not Iran.
From Tehran Bureau:
Everyone we have spoken to so far this morning has said about the same thing -- in a word or two: "A big anticlimax," "defeat," "An overwhelming presence from the other side. People were terrified."In fact, it appears that the regime was so confident, it did not feel the need to disrupt cellphone or messaging services, or even the internet for that matter.
One of the pitfalls in analyzing the ebb and flow of a reform movement by crowd size and exuberance is that you end up with rather bipolar measurements for success and failure. For instance, Greece is teetering on the brink of total economic meltdown, and nationwide strikes have shutdown large swaths of the public sector, yet no one is doing up-to-the-minute live blogging on that looming catastrophe. But if I had to put my money on a regime falling tomorrow, it would be Greece - not Iran.
And I understand why one is sexier than the other, but that's also why it becomes all the more imperative for knowledgeable people - academics, journalists, and policy wonks - to try their best to divorce emotions from the subject and relay what's going on with as much sobriety as possible.
Whatever happens today will not change the fact that Iran is changing. But how it's changing, and at what pace, is where people in-the-know must fill in the gaps.
[h/t Andrew Sullivan]
(AP Photo)
