Iran: Round up opposition leaders

After so obviously rigging the presidential election in June, Iran’s ruling clique apparently figures it can’t do any more damage to make their tyranny more obvious.  Iranian political leaders and the commanders of the Revolutionary Guard called for the arrest and detention of opposition figures, including Mirhossein Mousavi, after two months of turmoil following the botched fix on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election:

Revolutionary Guard generals, top politicians and senior clerics have called for the arrest and punishment of opposition leaders, including defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, Iranian state media reported Sunday, while the national police chief acknowledged that protesters had been mistreated while in custody.

The calls for arrests come as part of a crackdown against opposition activists who continue to dispute June’s presidential vote, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad officially won in a landslide but which Mousavi and his supporters say was stolen.

In recent weeks, the government has staged mass trials in which activists have given controversial confessions, admitting involvement in elaborate, internationally backed plots to bring what prosecutors call “a nonmilitary velvet revolution” to the Islamic republic. Opposition leaders have charged that the confessions are coerced and have vowed to continue the protests that have deeply unsettled Iran in recent weeks.

“In order to end this mayhem, they need to arrest, try and punish these political figures,” Gen. Yadollah Javani, head of the political office of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, advised the judicial system Sunday, according to state news agency IRNA. “These individuals should be prosecuted, punished and tried as traitors.” He singled out Mousavi, fellow defeated candidate Mehdi Karroubi and former president Mohammad Khatami. The Revolutionary Guard is a force that plays a highly influential role in politics.

Does this really represent a change?  Curiously, yes.  While the tyrants in the mullahcracy have a tight grip on power and use elections as nothing more than a venting process for the masses, they have managed to keep reformists within the club by co-opting them within the mullahcracy.  For the thirty years since the Islamic revolution, that balance has kept the hard-liners in charge while reducing the counter-revolutionary impulse from those within the Islamist community.

Ali Khamenei’s poor handling of this election has ended that balance.  If the mullahcracy arrests those who were within the ruling clique for their opposition, all pretense at democracy and republicanism will disappear, even to those in Iran.  Iran will cease being a theocracy with the veneer of self-determination to a military dictatorship with the veneer of theocracy.

In fact, that’s already happened, and the demand of the Revolutionary Guard is just the first instance where we see the fruit of Khamenei’s bumbling.  When he had to call in the IRGC to quell the street demonstrations, he effectively handed control of the country to the armed forces.  The IRGC now wants to demonstrate its control over Iran, and they’ll likely have their demands met, because Khamenei can’t afford to lose them now.

The Iranian mullahcracy is losing the last shreds of legitimacy with its people, and the IRGC has none as a ruling body except by the power of force.  Dark days lay ahead for Iran, but it’s really the beginning of the end of the Iranian tyranny, a terminal stage in which the brutality of the tyranny paves the road for a revolution to come.  Hopefully, that comes in peace and results in freedom.

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