Andrew Sullivan and crew have been simply awesome at blogging news about the anti-government protests and the violent government pushback that occurred over the weekend. Just hop over there and keep reading for some of the amazing stories coming out.

I don’t have a lot to say about Iran, as I’m not an expert and I’m only now getting caught up on what’s going on. But here are a few notes of interest.

* Obama’s prudence in toning down anti-Iranian rhetoric appears to have paid off in one sense: the government propaganda has been notably not blaming the United States for the protests.

* It’s tough to watch what’s going on in Iran and not want to get involved, but Stephen Walt makes a convincing case that the United States should just sit back and let things unfold. On a related note, Spencer Ackerman points out that Iranian dissidents are very concerned that new sanctions from the United States could harm their movement.

* Let’s also not get our hopes up too much. As Juan Cole points out, no truly revolutionary movement has yet to arise.

But for the movement to go further and become truly revolutionary, it would have to have a leader who wanted to overthrow the old regime and who could attract the loyalty of both the people and elements of the armed forces. So far this key revolutionary element, of dual sovereignty, has been lacking, insofar as opposition leaders Mir Hosain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi have tried to stay inside the Khomeinist framework while arguing that it is Khamenei who violated it by making it too authoritarian. Saying you want slightly less autocracy within a clerical theocracy is not a recipe for revolution.

There is definitely some organization to the protests, but I think Cole is right about this.

The next few weeks in Iran should be fascinating and I’d urge you to keep an eye on what’s going on there.

Image credit: Tehranlive.org

Daniel Larison has an excellent post on the futility of American “condemnation” of Iranian bad acts.

The demand that Obama “speak out” is ultimately a selfish one made by people who want to feel as if they and their government have some control over a situation that is beyond our control. If Obama issued ringing denunciations of Iranian abuses, it would give Western audiences some comfort, and it would offer some false hope to Iranian dissidents who would expect to see Obama shape his policy decisions accordingly, but it would primarily be for our own consumption and it would be a very easy way for Obama to score cheap political points with a political and pundit class steeped in our modern moralistic foreign policy traditions.

Read the whole thing.

I wholeheartedly recommend this entire post of Steven Taylor’s regarding Iran. In particular, this bit about the insanity of military action against Iran.

This takes us to war, and that way is madness. Let us consider a few specific facts.

1) The US military is already rather heavily vested in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Where are the resources going to come from for a war against Iran? Are we going to reinstitute the draft to populate the military?

2) War in the Persian Gulf would create a dramatic increase in oil prices. The global economy is currently teetering between recovery and continued recession. A massive spike in oil prices might very well cause a global recession.

3) An invasion of Iran would, no doubt, spark a wave of terrorism from groups like Hezbollah.

Further, there are no guarantees that a) the invasion would be successful (Iran is not Iraq, either in terms of military capacity or geography), and b) that an occupation could be maintained. And then what happens once the occupation forces leave? How long before some post-invasion government decides that what it really needs to protect Iran from future invasions is a nuclear weapon?

Read the whole thing.

I feel like it’s worth noting that all throughout the 2008 campaign, the line that conservatives had against Obama is that he was just “pretty words.” A good speaker who can “inspire with words” (according to Sarah Palin) but can’t back them up with deeds or experience.

Now, during the Iranian protests, it appears that the most common complaint about Obama is that he hasn’t “spoken forcefully enough” to the point where many conservatives are echoing this claim of Melanie Phillips:

What a disgrace that this man is leader of the free world; and at such a point in history. If he had put America stoutly behind the protesters and championed them against the regime, by now they might have toppled it.

Yes, you’ve got that right. During the campaign, Obama’s rhetorical skills were meaningless and couldn’t accomplish anything. But when it comes to Iran, Obama is such a compelling speaker that if he just said the right things, the protesters would magically become bullet and club proof and topple Khameni once and for all!

BBC Farsi has some amazing footage of riot police vs. a crowd of protesters. Long story short: police attack. Protesters advance. Police attack. Protesters advance. Police attack. Protesters advance. Police run away.

Amazing.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Chris Dierkes has a fascinating post about the role of religion in the current Iranian revolt.

When the people shout God is Greater, they mean it. And they aim directly at those who claim (like Khamenei) in the place of God but who do not imparrt justice.

Read the whole thing.

I’d just like to join the growing chorus elsewhere in the blogosphere which notes that TV news coverage of the Iranian election, probably one of the biggest stories of the year, has gone virtually unnoticed by the cable news networks. One of the few things that I rely on the cable news networks for is for breaking, on the ground coverage of a current crisis.

They are spectacularly dropping the ball on this one.

As for Iranian election coverage, right now nobody is beating Andrew Sullivan. Just go to his blog and follow the links.

One consistent meme that has popped up during the War in Iraq is the idea that the government of Iran is actually arming Shi’ite militias so that they can fight American soliders. As it turns out, though, there’s not a lot of evidence for this proposition.

Last April, top George W. Bush administration officials, desperate to exploit any possible crack in the close relationship between the Nouri al-Maliki government and Iran, launched a new round of charges that Iran had stepped up covert arms assistance to Shi’a militias.

Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates suggested that there was “some sense of an increased level of [Iranian] supply of weapons and support to these groups.” And Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung was told by military officials that the “plentiful, high quality weaponry” the militia was then using in Basra was “recently manufactured in Iran”.

But a U.S. military task force had been passing on data to the Multi-National Force Iraq (MNFI) command that told a very different story. The data collected by the task force in the previous six weeks showed that relatively few of the weapons found in Shi’a militia caches were manufactured in Iran.

The most likely culprit for Iranian arms being found in Iraq, as it turns out, are arms dealers, not the Iranian government. The article is worth reading in full.

(link via Matthew Yglesias)

Daniel Larison points out quite ably that, as a consequence of the economics of oil, Iran, Venezuela and Russia aren’t nearly the threats that many make them out to be:

Venezuela and Iran were never great threats when oil was over $120 a barrel, and now that is close to half that they are even less threatening. Their growing internal economic woes, which are going to become even more acute as the global economy slows down, are going to expose their regimes to increasing pressure from their populations, who are going to be even less interested in any foreign adventurism and posturing of their leaders, which makes it much less likely that these regimes are going to “test” anyone.

Read the whole thing.