Arab Spring Grows Teeth: Protesters In Iran And Syria Go On The Attack

Michael Ledeen writes that the weekend explosion outside Tehran indicates that the protests in Iran may be intensifying:

These attacks on the Guards — the symbol of the regime’s intensifying repression and slaughter of the Iranian people — are part of a pattern that includes explosions at refineries and pipelines. At the same time, strikes have been spreading (and no wonder; up to 30,000 retired teachers have been waiting for their pensions for many months). In short, people have lost patience, and the smaller of the two explosions at the RG base was aimed at Major General Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam, one of the most brutal of the country’s military leaders.

Contrary to the inevitable suspicions of the thumb-suckers (the Americans did it! no, the Israelis did it! no, it was an accident!), the operation was planned and carried out by Iranians from the opposition-that-does-not-exist.
They intended to demonstrate that no leader is safe from the people’s wrath (if that base can be penetrated, any place can, and if that man can be assassinated, anyone can), and that the opposition knows its gravediggers.[emphasis added]

The big question is whether the Obama administration is going to do anything about this opportunity to neutralize a major threat to Mideast stability.

Ledeen notes:

As I forecast some time ago, it was only a matter of time until the opposition abandoned its commitment to non-violence. We are now in a new phase. A French analyst, Jean-Jacques Guillet, understands the situation very well, and has called for a Western policy to intensify the pressure on the Iranian regime in order to bring it down. “If we press the regime strongly,” he said, “there could be an implosion. The real objective these days should be the regime’s implosion, not more talk.”

Instead, we have leaders who still believe in the talking cure, and who seem not even to know what the Iranian opposition wants, even when it’s delivered to them in black and white. As it was, at the height of the turmoil in 2009.

But at least the US is being consistent--after all, Defense Secretary Panetta has already made clear that the US has ruled out military force in Syia.

This at a time that Walter Russell Mead writes how the First Real Threats To Assad Strategy Emerge In Syria

News comes this morning that suggests the opposition is raising its game. The attack on an intelligence facility on the outskirts of Damascus suggests that an organized, armed internal opposition, possibly with links to allies abroad, is forming inside the country. That could be a game changer.

It’s not that the armed opposition of army defectors and others is strong enough to defeat loyalist forces in open, pitched battles. Rebel army tanks aren’t about to storm into Damascus. But the existence of a more organized and powerful internal opposition, along with a rising tide of sectarian chaos, could change the calculations both of outside actors and of significant regime allies inside Syria.

The difference between Mead on Syria and Ledeen on Iran is that Mead makes no mention of outside help--he is looking at how the pressure on the Syrian regime is growing internally and limited to parties in the Middle East.

But nothing will matter if the protests inside Syria and Iran do not gather steam--and in these cases, that means violence.

Technorati Tag: Arab Spring and Middle East and Iran and Syria.