Momentum Lost? Chilled Spines in Tehran

The other opposition: They're not exactly hoisting the Statue of Liberty in Tehran. And those flag-burners are still in control. (Getty Images)

After 10 deaths in 100 injuries in Saturday's protests, Sunday appeared to be a day of fitful calm in the Iranian capital.

Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader, is urging his followers to show "restraint" even as he continues to call the election a fraud looking for a correction. He's not the only one sending mixed signals.

State television announced that five members of former president and current leader of the Assembly of Experts, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, were briefly arrested. Rafsanjani is on Mousavi's side against "supreme leader" Ali Khamenei and supreme lackey Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Seizing and releasing members of the Iranian leadership can mean two things: Khamenei flexing what muscle he has left in his one functioning arm (like Bob Dole, he lost function in the other, though unlike Bob Dole he did so in an failed assassination attempt against him in the 1980s, not in battle against Nazis in the 1940s). By arresting family members of his chief rival, Khamenei could be trying to say that he will still cow whom he pleases, no matter their title. But it could also mean that Khamenei is losing authority, as the arrest and release could just as easily signal indecision and power struggles inside Khamenei's power structure. My guess is as good as Nancy Reagan's astrologer.

Meanwhile foreign reporters have been banned from covering events in the streets. The BBC's Jon Leyne, permanent correspondent in Tehran, was kicked out, Neweeek's Maziar Bahari, a Canadian, was arrested, and Reporters Without Borders is calling Iran the "world's biggest prison for journalists" (along with China, anyway), as 33 journalists have found themselves imprisoned. So those left will do their job at their own peril, leaving the bulk of the work to amateur videographers, tweeters, bloggers and tea-leaf readers.

That hardly stopped The Times' Roger Cohen from filing a remarkable column from the streets on Saturday, beginning with these two paragraphs:

The Iranian police commander, in green uniform, walked up Komak Hospital Alley with arms raised and his small unit at his side. “I swear to God,” he shouted at the protesters facing him, “I have children, I have a wife, I don’t want to beat people. Please go home.”

A man at my side threw a rock at him. The commander, unflinching, continued to plead. There were chants of “Join us! Join us!” The unit retreated toward Revolution Street, where vast crowds eddied back and forth confronted by baton-wielding Basij militia and black-clad riot police officers on motorbikes.

Chances are, as this video broadcast on CNN suggests, the violence in Iran is far more widespread, and the price being paid for far heavier, than anything we've learned so far. And the day ends with the Khamenei regime still, for all the wishful solidarity, in control.

If I were a tea-leaf reader (I'm not: I stick to reading the bottom of espresso cups, which are far less reliable when brewed in the West), I'd have to say that the opposition's moment has passed. What I said several days ago holds true today: there is no coalescing, charismatic leadership to carry through a sustained, coherent movement that has the power not only to protest, but to topple the establishment.

Short of a decisive event, a turn-around of sorts, a more public deterioration of the regime's leadership (none of which appears in the offing), the next few days seem condemned to be a mixture of fizzling hopes and back-alley brutality. A lot of people will die, a lot of people will be hurt, but out of the public eye. Tehran's spring will have ended on the first day of what will be a long, bloody summer.

See Also:

• Budapest '56, Prague '68, Beijing '89, Tehran '09
• Reporters Without Borders
• The Meaning of Ahmadinejad's Victory