Nada Agha Soltan's face is seen on a picket sign

During the violent government crackdown over the weekend, reporters estimated over thirty peaceful protestors lost their lives. Armed with tear gas, water cannons, batons, and guns, the iranian police force displayed unrestrained brutality in response to continued demonstrations. One of these horrific attacks was caught on film, the shooting death of Neda. She was a young woman, an unarmed protester, and she bled to death on the streets of Tehran.

Her tragic death is a moving tribute, and a chilling reminder, of the desire for, and the price of, freedom.

Just a few days after the American political bloggers united in condemnation of the rigged Iranian elections, American politicians have splintered along partisan lines about how best to approach the situation. The first to urge the President to directly denounce the electoral results was Rep. Mike Pence (R, IN). Some might assert that members of the House of Representatives are steeped in foreign policy, and some think that the House is full of crazy people, on both sides of the aisle. In an attempt to prove the latter group correct, the House will vote today on a resolution voicing support for the opposition in Iran.

While a noble sentiment, and one seemingly supported by the majority of Americans, allowing the American government to become immeshed in Iranian affairs at such a critical juncture can only harm the opposition. President Obama outlined this rationale while he threaded the needle of showing support without entangling himself politically on Tuesday. He elaborated in an interview with CNBC:

“. . .I think [it is] important to recognize is that the easiest way for reactionary forces inside Iran to crush reformers is to say it’s the US that is encouraging those reformers.

So what I’ve said is, ‘Look, it’s up to the Iranian people to make a decision. We are not meddling.’ And, you know, ultimately the question that the leadership in Iran has to answer is their own credibility in the eyes of the Iranian people. And when you’ve got 100,000 people who are out on the streets peacefully protesting, and they’re having to be scattered through violence and gunshots, what that tells me is the Iranian people are not convinced of the legitimacy of the election. And my hope is that the regime responds not with violence, but with a recognition that the universal principles of peaceful expression and democracy are ones that should be affirmed. Am I optimistic that that will happen? You know, I take a wait-and-see approach. Either way, it’s important for the United States to engage in the tough diplomacy around those permanent security concerns that we have–nuclear weapons, funding of terrorism. That’s not going to go away, and I think it’s important for us to make sure that we’ve reached out.

While Republicans from Pence to Sen. John McCain (R, AZ) called on President Obama to act more forcefully toward Iran, Henry Kissinger, the dean of political realism, opined that the President was acted just as he should:

KISSINGER: Well, you know, I was a McCain supporter and – but I think the president has handled this well. Anything that the United States says that puts us totally behind one of the contenders, behind Mousavi, would be a handicap for that person. And I think it’s the proper position to take that the people of Iran have to make that decision.

Of course, we have to state our fundamental convictions of freedom of speech, free elections . . . and even that is considered intolerable meddling. [Obama has] carefully stayed away from saying things that seem to support one side or the other. And I think it was the right thing to do because public support for the opposition would only be used . . . against Mousavi.

(From Think Progress)

The GOP and conservative bloggers would have the American people think that by not immediately bombing Iran, President Obama is signaling his support for Ahmadinejad. Terrible sentiment, but not surprising. Hopefully, the American attention span is just long enough to recall what happened the last time we allowed war-cheerleaders and neo-cons to dictate our foreign policy.

UPDATE

Seems that President Obama’s analysis of the role Western condemnations would play in the Iranian conflict was spot-on. While the Washington Post published op-eds by eternally enthusiastic war-mongers Paul Wolfowitz and Charles Krauthammer castigating the President for his nuanced approach to Iran, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei gave a speech illustrating Obama’s statement that “the easiest way for reactionary forces inside Iran to crush reformers is to say it’s the US that is encouraging those reformers.” Notably, neither column actually addressed this specific concern.

Today, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei gave a speech in which he warned the opposition to stay off the  streets or risk violent reprisals should the protests continue. Ratcheting up the rhetoric, Khamenei stated opposition leaders would be “responsible for bloodshed and chaos” if they did not cease demonstrating in the streets.

Khamenei insisted that voter turnout, estimated at 85 percent, proved that Ahmadinejad’s supposed victory was the national will and not fraud. The margin of victory, at 11 million votes, too large to have been rigged, Khamenei claimed.

Accusing the West of undue interference in stark terms, Khamenei criticized “media belonging to Zionists, evil media” for seeking to portray Iran as divided and accused Western power of attempting to sow seeds of revolt. Claiming the election was a contest between candidates who wholly support the regime, Khamenei railed against “enemies and dirty Zionists tried to show the election as a contest between the regime and against it.”

Thursday marked the fifth consecutive day of protest marches in Iran. Mousavi supporters took to the streets, dressed mostly in black and largely silent, in a day of mourning for those slain during the past week.

The Iranian soccer team displayed support for the opposition during a World Cup qualifying match on Wednesday, donning green wristba

New Yorkers showed solidarity in a protest at Union Square:

While protesters gathered in Austin, and held a candlelight vigil in Montreal

(Nico)

(YouTube)

Protests are expected to continue in Iran and across the globe this weekend, while the Guardian Council has agreed to meet with the opposition on Saturday to discuss their grievances.

Massive protest in Tehran

On Friday, June 12, an astonishing 85% of the Iranian electorate went to the polls to vote for President. Iran’s ruling body of clerics, the Guardian Council, had allowed four candidates to run for President, the two main contenders being incumbent and Western agitator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and  reform candidate and former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. After an enthusiastic and contentious campaign, voter turn out was so overwhelming polls remained open hours later than planned. Although in the weeks leading up to the election opinion polls indicated the opposition candidate Mousavi pulling away from incumbent Ahmadinejad, most expected the vote to go to a run-off. In Iran, the government typically announces election results the morning after the election, but within two hours of polls closing the state-run news declared Ahmadinejad the winner by a shocking 2 to 1 margin.

By late Friday evening, both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi declared victory, with Mousavi quickly sending out a letter voicing his intent to oppose the official results. The landslide result for Ahmadinejad appeared anomalous: in Mousavi’s hometown province of Tabriz in north-west Iran, the government claimed Ahmadinejad received more than 60% of the vote. In a surprise move perhaps designed to quell any nascent unrest, the Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Khamenei confirmed the election results almost immediately, stating “The chosen and respected president is the president of all the Iranian nation and everyone, including yesterday’s competitors, must unanimously support and help him.” Soon Mehdi Karroubi’s campaign had taken to Twitter to decry the results. Bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan and the mainstream British media took note of the growing conflict almost immediately, while American news outlets like CNN took little notice. As Saturday dawned in Iran, outraged voters took to the streets to protest the suspicious electoral outcome, and consensus formed among bloggers across the political spectrum from Huffington Post, Juan Cole, and Matt Yglesias on the left to Hugh Hewitt, Rich Lowry, and Hot Air’s Allahpundit on the right, that the election had been rigged, clumsily and audaciously, in favor of  Ahmadinejad.

As the day unfolded, Iranian authorities moved to shut down all avenues of opposition communication in an attempt to stifle the organizational efforts of Mousavi supporters. Lacking the ability to communicate through text messages or via telephone, the opposition turned to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to organize protests echoing slogans from the 1979 Revolution. With state-run television in Iran, and major news organizations in the US ignoring the spontaneous riots in the streets, hundreds of Iranians became citizen-journalists, snapping cellphone photos and video, uploading the documentation of events to sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Rumors ran rampant that Mousavi, along with other influential reformist leaders had been placed under house arrest.

Over the course of the weekend, the Internet’s disappointment with the lack of mainstream news coverage developed into outrage. Twitter users expressed their frustration by tagging their status updates with the #cnnfail label, even as the network finally began to dedicate significant amounts of airtime to the story. The slow reaction of the cable news channels contrasted starkly with the near-constant real-time updates of raw news from blogs and social networking sites.

On Monday, Mousavi supporters marched en masse through the streets of Tehran, in defiance of a government ban on protest. Mousavi himself made an appearance, his first since election night, speaking to supporters from the roof of a car. The number of protesters was staggering, with Iran’s own state-sponsored news channel reporting the number in the hundreds of thousands. The march was peaceful, but violence erupted later in the day, with the Basij, a hard line volunteer militia, opening fire on the crowd. As the situation grew more perilous, Mousavi called on Iran’s Guardian Coucil to invalidate the election results, and blogs noted the possibility of a behind-the-scenes power struggle developing among Iran’s religious elite. Grand Ayatollah Khamenei  reversed his position on the elections after Iran’s citizens made their voices heard, backing off from his earlier statements ratifying the election results and instead calling for an examination of the vote. At the same time in the US, Twitter rescheduled planned maintenance of its site that would have taken it offline for part of the morning in Iran, in recognition of the key role the site plays for the Iranian protesters (and at the behest of the State Department).

The violence increased on Tuesday, after reformist clerics and foreign governments openly questioning the election results and citizens of Iran once again taking to the streets to protest. In an attempt to regain control, Guardian Council stated it would review some of the votes cast on Friday, while the government banned international journalists from reporting on the streets. Even with most journalists unable to report freely, information continued to flow out of the country. Iranians filmed and uploaded images of the brutal attacks and peaceful marches, bypassing traditional media. Additionally, opposition forces began to fight back electronically, initiating Denial of Service attacks against government websites. DDOS attacks essentially overload a website with external communications requests, slowing it down or shutting it down completely. The value of this tactic has been hotly debated in the last 48 hours. Another form of aid rendered by internet-savvy Americans involves setting up proxy servers for their Iranian counterparts to utilize, granting them bandwidth and allowing the circumvention of government filters.

Yesterday saw yet another mass protest, with huge crowds walking silently through the streets of Tehran. Once again in the evening, protesters commenced to shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) from rooftops, a form of protest reminiscent of the 1979 Revolution. Tomorrow Mousavi supporters plan another huge rally, with supporters dressed in black, mourning those who have died during the election protests.