Why "People Power" won't work in Iran

(and why it may also not work for us this time around too. Remember Tiananmen and who we're dealing with here.)

From Strategy Page:

March 15, 2006: Since last year, the United States has been more energetically trying to build a trained democracy movement to overthrow the Iranian religious dictatorship. Using democracy as a weapon has gained a lot of believers since the late 1980s. Back then, the East European governments, all run by communist dictators (and backed up by the Soviet Union), collapsed when most of the people just stood up and said, "enough, we want change." By 1989, Eastern Europe was democratic, after over four decades of communist police states. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself collapsed the same way. This was scary stuff. Since then, there have been similar, and more deliberate, instances of this change in Serbia and Ukraine. And before that, you had a similar overthrow in the Philippines, where the term "People Power" was invented..

The moves necessary to make "People Power" work have now been turned into techniques that have been set down on check lists and presented in seminars. There's a drill that can make this happen if two conditions apply. First, most of the population must want democracy. Second, the security forces must be willing to stand down in the face of mass demonstrations. The first condition applies in Iran, the second doesn't. While the Islamic conservatives in Iran have the support of, at most, a third of the population, they do have over a hundred thousand armed men who are willing to kill to keep their religious leaders in power.