IRANIAN WAR OF ATTRITION CONTINUES?

The Guardian Council confirmed the validity of the June 12 presidential election on Monday evening.

Mousavi's status unclear. Arrested or not?

Now what? Now the mettle of the Iranian people in and out of the country is tested. The anger, certainly, remains

She is an Iranian girl growing up in NYC. She is visiting Iran. She reports on those not afraid to die Watch the video and see the reason they must be prepared to die:

People are coming out without fear. They are not afraid of even dying. . . .

The situation itself is strange for me . . . . There are military people and police on the streets. You really don’t know who they are. They are divided into four groups, with different clothes and ideas about how to behave with people. I really don’t know who are with the people and who are against.

. . . . Yesterday they were carrying around a half of one of the victims . . . . They start shooting people again. They don’t let families have funerals for their children and people who are dying, because they think they are calling people to come again in the streets. I’m afraid of walking in the street after 4 or 5 p.m.

Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy Theories in Iran's Unrest

. . . .Then, as the crackdown ensued, the authorities resorted to form and, starting with Ali Khamene'i's key speech on June 19, they began blaming perfidious foreigners, and especially the British government, for their problems. Khamene'i described Western countries as"hungry wolves ambushing us and removing the diplomatic cover from their faces. Do not neglect these people." He went on:

The outstanding diplomats of some western countries who have talked to us with diplomatic courtesy up to now, have, during the past few days, taken the masquerade away from their faces and are showing their true image. They are showing their true enmity towards the Iranian Islamic state and the most evil of them is the British government.

The crowd responded by chanting of"Death to Britain."

Comment: It is one thing for the mullahs to raise conspiracy theories and another for the population to believe in them. I don't live in Iran and cannot judge the situation at first hand, but I get a sense from news reports that Iranians no longer suffer under the sway of their historic conspiracist mindset. If so, this would be a huge advance for the country. (June 29, 2009)