US President Barack Obama condemned Iran’s ‘iron fist’ this week after attacks on protestors left hundreds injured and at least 17 dead, including Neda Soltan, the young student hailed as a ‘martyr for freedom’. But he stopped short of criticising the ruling mullahs.
The relationship between Britain and Iran, meanwhile, suffered a “sharp deterioration” as Iran expelled two British diplomats. As the West “hardened its stance”, Tehran “tightened its grip on power”, says Philip Webster in The Times: the Guardian Council ruled out an election re-run, parliament set a date for the inauguration of President Ahmedinajed, and the regime arrested a close aide of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmedinajed’s rival.
Iran’s “unelected institutions of priestly rule have been fatally undermined”, says Edward Luttwak in Canada’s Globe and Mail.
Rivals of President Ahmadinejad are “flatly rejecting” the orders of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, to accept the re-election. With Khamenei in the “impossible position” of having to support a President whose authority is not accepted by much of the governing structure itself, the government is effectively “paralysed”.
Richard Dalton in The Sunday Telegraph disagrees. “Notwithstanding brave acts of individual protest, such as resignations, most appear to have calculated that Khamenei and the security apparatus will win.” A successful challenge to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad’s faction would need three things: “a coalition united behind the aim of adjusting Iran’s constitution or rewriting it; a countrywide leadership; and a broad strategy. Not enough people seem ready to act in this way.”
So where does this leave Iran’s relations with the West? asks Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. The resentments of Iran’s discontented citizens don’t seem likely to fade on their own, and if they are violently repressed, Obama’s strategy of engagement – on nuclear weapons, anti-Semitism, on terrorism – will not only be difficult but shameful, “like breaking out the champagne corks following Tiananmen”.
No it won’t, says Greg Sheridan in The Australian. The Iranian regime has shown the world its true colours: there is a popular desire for better relations with the West, and “if either the US or Israel now finds it necessary to carry out a limited military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities later this year or impose tough financial sanctions”, they’ll face a “much weakened” Iranian government. “In many ways, a savagely weakened Iranian regime is the best result Israel and the US could have hoped for.”