Roger Cohen writes:
Two weeks after Iran’s ballot-box putsch, mysteries still envelop it. Why have a pre-electoral freedom-fest, bring hundreds of journalists to Tehran to witness it, then put on a horror show, throwing them into jail or out of the country? Everything I saw — the sheer brazen clumsiness of the vote theft and its hysterical, club-wielding aftermath — suggest a last-minute decision.
I think there were two determining factors — one internal and the other external — behind this violent gamble, this historic error.
Nobody predicted the Moussavi surge in the last two weeks of the campaign. Even in mid-May, he was dead in the water. Then his why-spurn-the-world message connected, delivering millions of young Iranians from apathy to activism, and sparking the green wave that had “Velvet Revolution” alarms flashing in every Ahmadinejad acolyte’s zealous little mind.
You can hear the militia and Revolutionary Guard commanders conspiring: “We let this Moussavi guy win, or we go to a run-off, and this thing could get away from us.” For “this thing” read, our revolution and our ideology and our piles of cash (not necessarily in that order.)
link: Op-Ed Columnist - Let the Usurpers Writhe - NYTimes.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment