As many have predicted, it now seems that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been dealt a significant reverse in elections to municipal councils across the country. The elections have no direct effect on Ahmadinejad’s hold on power. But they’re the first significant, electoral sign of public discontent with his policies which have been long on confrontations with the West (over nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, Israel, etc.) but short on bread and butter issues (like growing unemployment and a slumping real estate market).
Here’s my question, how long before this bit of data gets run up the flag pole as a sign that Iran really is ripe for ‘regime change’ after all? Just ripe for the plucking, in Cheney’s words, as we heard earlier in this decade. And why sit down and talk with these jokers about the situation in Iraq when there’s going to be a revolution there pretty soon anyway?
(ed.note: The Times article I linked above quotes extensively from Vali Nasr, author of âThe Shia Revivalâ and a professor Middle Eastern studies at the Naval Postgraduate School. Nasr has just joined the America Abroad blog at TPMCafe and here’s his first post “Should We Worry About the Saudi Threats?“)
