Iran, One Year Later

I feel like I should mark the first anniversary of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election as President of Iran, but I don't have that much to say. On the one hand, last summer's events made it evident that power in Iran now rests with the principlist faction and its military and paramilitary supporters. They've maintained it over the past year by simply threatening to crush the opposition with brutal force, and conditions haven't been desperate enough that a critical mass of people have risked going out to protest anyway. All this leaves us in a situation where the regime is unpopular, but too powerful to safely oppose, the same situation one usually sees in the Arab world.