Ahmadinnerjacket's Victory met with real unrest. [krakatoa]

This is damn near unheard of.

I've long heard about the future of Iran -- the Youth that was pro-Western and chaffed against the fundamentalist strictures of its theistic government. How they would lead reform and, inevitably, create change through sheer demographic inevitability.

That opportunity has passed them by in the last decade as they licked their wounds after every political setback (read fixed election) and promised themselves: Next Time.

Well next time has come, with an extremely unpopular president somehow pulling out a victory, and the "Iranian Youth" (now comprised of by a large 30 to 40 - something demographic) seems to have had enough.

The brazen and angry confrontations — including stunning scenes of masked rioters tangling with black-clad police — pushed the self-styled reformist movement closer to a possible moment of truth: Whether to continue defying Iran's powerful security forces or, as they often have before, retreat into quiet dismay and frustration over losing more ground to the Islamic establishment.

Exit Question: Has a tipping point been reached? My gut says even if that's true, it probably won't matter without strong US support for any popular revolt. And my brain says our current administration wouldn't support that for all the quatloos in Klingon space.

posted by xgenghisx at 06:37 PM

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