For the West, One Loss, One Gain

Short of a bolt of lightning from Qom, there will be no game-changing opening between the West and Iran. The politics in neither Tehran nor Washington will allow one, not after all the bloodletting, both past and what is still to come. Yet, all is not lost. Kyrgystan's agreement to allow U.S. use of a military base is a reversal for Moscow, and a comparatively less-important but still an unexpected boon for Washington.

In Iran, some reporting -- over at Eurasianet, for instance -- has had it that a highly irritated former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has been in the holy city of Qom, working to persuade its powerful clerics to turn against paramount leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Unless they do -- and this report frankly appears to reflect wishful thinking by regime critics rather than a credible news leak -- there is no logical reason to anticipate any change in the current crackdown, and thus any thaw of U.S.-Iran relations.

There simply is no political scenario in which either the Obama administration, or Tehran, can be seen locally as making concessions to the other side. That includes talks on Iran's nuclear program. According to a report by Barbara Slavin in The Washington Times, the Obama administration sent a letter last month to Khamenei suggesting "cooperation in regional and bilateral relations." But the events since June 12th put the kabbosh on this notion.

Not incidentally, the Iranian crackdown about shuts off the last ray of hope for the Nabucco pipeline, the leading western option for balancing off Russian petro-power in Europe.

Then there is Kyrgyzstan. Since the Soviet collapse, U.S. influence has been on the ascent in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Kyrgyzstan has no natural resources to speak of, but managed to grab western attention by embracing the free market earlier and more tightly than anyone else; the cliche became that this nation bordering China was the Switzerland of Central Asia. That link to the west was cemented by 9/11/, when the U.S. opened the Manas Air Base to serve troops in Afghanistan.

Yet in February, Kyryz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev went to Moscow and, while standing next to Dimitri Medvedev, announced that the U.S. was out; and Russia would now get the base. Oh, and incidentally Moscow was granting $2 billion in economic assistance to Kyrgyzstan.

The loss of the base was another blow in U.S. influence in the region after the Russian defeat of Georgia in last August's war. There seemed to be no arresting the slide, either.

Knocked back on its heels, the U.S. didn't see much wiggle room. Yesterday, though, both sides confirmed that the U.S. will keep the base. The base's name will change to a "transit center," and the U.S. will pay a lot more ($60 million a year outright, in addition to various other sweeteners, compared with $17 million previously).

Over at RFE-RL, Bruce Pannier quotes Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev as putting down the shift to the turbulence in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

"Unfortunately, it needs to be stated that despite the efforts of forces of the government of Afghanistan and forces of the international coalition, the situation in [Afghanistan], especially in light of the events in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, show a tendency toward becoming worse. And in the event of instability in the future, this could have an effect on the security situation in the states of Central Asia, in particular on Kyrgyzstan."

Is Sarbayev providing the whole, or even any, of the genuine reason for the shift? That's impossible to say. Other elements of the Kyrgyz decision must have been after-the-fact remorse over losing its careful U.S.-Russia balance by lurching to one side. In Moscow itself, the Kremlin is trying to put the best face on the shift, with one official claiming that Russia itself agreed to the quick-switch.

Whatever the case, the bigger picture is how rapidly events can shift in the region. It also underscores that, though most events seem to point to lessening U.S. influence in the region, Washington remains an important player.

Iran: 'I'm Not So Sure I Want to Die Yet'

A simple calibration underlies the diminishing of protests in Tehran: The regime's bet -- correctly -- that those unhappy with the June 12th election results aren't prepared to pay the ultimate price for the right to express their opinion.

As an example, my former Wall Street Journal colleague Farnaz Fassihi quotes a 33-year-old woman who is rethinking her participation in the street demonstrations of the last week: "It's now crossed the line. If you come out it means you are ready to become a martyr. And I'm not so sure I want to die yet," the woman says.

While his dispatch isn't poetry, Sky News correspondent Tim Marshall has it about right: "In the short term it still looks like game over; in the medium term it looks like game on."

Like Russia, Uzbekistan and other dictatorship-based governments, this regime has learned from the mistakes of brethren in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, and is seeking as a priority to knock out the pillars of any resistance before they are set in place.

Indeed, in his long public speech last Friday denouncing the protesters and their alleged foreign supporters, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei explicitly cited the 2003 uprising that ousted Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze. Foreigners backing the Iranian demonstrators “thought Iran is Georgia," Khamenei said. "Their problem is that they don’t know this great nation yet.”

So, the regime has threatened to execute and try alleged offenders of public order; it has interfered with communications between would-be protesters by blocking Internet, telephone and television; and it has blocked mourning of those killed. The regime understands the last item most profoundly since the actions leading to the 1979 revolution were in part sustained by 40-day mourning periods for victims of the Shah.

Karin Laub of The Associated Press reports that on the possible show trials. Quoting state-run radio, she writes that Ebrahim Raisi, a top judicial official, said, "Elements of riots must be dealt with to set an example. The judiciary will do that."

Yet small demonstrations of defiance continue. "Protesters came up with new techniques, such as turning on the lights in their cars at certain hours of the day and honking their horns or holding up posters," Laub writes. She quotes an unidentified Tehran resident whom the AP staff got on the phone saying, "People are calmly protesting, more symbolically than with their voices."

The most frequent report in terms of next steps that one hears involve a general strike -- the shutting down of industries, public transportation, shops in the bazaars, for instance. Reports say that Mousavi's own Facebook page calls for a general strike, though I don't see this notice there. Such strikes could be effective since they would be far harder to stop than protests.

One notable aspect of these events is that, contrary to reporting leading up to the elections, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no rogue or loose cannon. The remarks by Khamenei last Friday, along with subsequent comments by the Revolutionary Guards, eerily resemble the president's.

So that when Ahmadinejad trails off on yet another incoherent diatribe on foreign conspiracies and perfidy -- the outbursts that many, including at O&G, regarded as the main impediment to a diplomatic breakthrough with the West -- he has simply been parroting his bosses.

Iran: The Virtue of Clarity

To be sure, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a gambler. Yet, by making clear that he intends to crack down hard should street protests continue over the June 12 presidential elections, Iran's supreme leader has also done a service by clearing up confusion about the direction of events. By reiterating that the election was fair -- and doing so before an official reply to his request for a verdict on the polling from an oversight board -- Khamenei also underscored that the issue isn't whether the votes were counted correctly; rather, it's the sanctity of his own authority.

He intends to stay in power. And he intends for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to remain president.

The ball is now in the court of opposition candidate Mir Hosain Mousavi, and the hundreds of thousands of green-clad protesters who have marched through Tehran for the last week. A new rally is scheduled tomorrow after a one-day interregnum.

If the crowds return to the streets in the same numbers, they provide their own clarity.

Brinksmanship in Iran

Yesterday, a close friend told me that he ultimately expects the Iranian regime to crush the street protests in Tehran using "a Tiananmen." One can validly reach that conclusion, hearing government officials threatening execution of protesters, and continuing to raise the specter of the Velvet Revolution to describe what they clearly regard as a mob.

Yet, the government continues to concede ground to the protesters; despite the blockage of Internet and so forth, the Guardian Council -- the body designated to investigate allegations of election fraud last Friday, has offered a meeting the day after tomorrow with the opposition presidential candidates including Mir Hosain Mousavi.

And then there are the compellingly large, continued street demonstrations.

Since brinksmanship is not a matter of simple arithmetic, there in fact is no way to project how this ends up.

In a smart analysis At RFE-RL, the perspicacious Geneive Abdo sees a power shift coming from the tumult, but the balance of power remaining in current hands for at least another decade -- until the leaders of the 1979 revolution leave political life. Support of Hamas and Hezbollah will remain, in addition to development of nuclear technology. What do the younger generation want once they do have power? Not "a government that shuns Islamic principles or even a state that does not include clerics, as some in the West might think," writes Abdo.

"Instead, they want free and fair elections to choose their own leaders; social freedom, now denied them by strict interpretations of Islamic law; and they want Iran’s militias to stay out of their private lives. They also want uninterrupted access to technology, which includes the Internet and social networks."

Update: The Wall Street Journal's Jerry Seib, who has deep experience in Iran, weighs in with a list of possible outcomes, both optimistic and pessimistic. Seib, too, thinks the situation is impossible to predict.

Iran: The Power of Memory

As suggested in previous days, the decisive factor in who prevails in Iran is command of public perception. Regardless of the true result of last Friday's election, if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can persuade sufficient numbers of Iranians that he is the legitimate victor, the game is over. If he cannot, the opposite is true -- he and the entire clerical and military edifice behind him are in trouble. Defensive measures would then be required in order to save the regime.

Events of the last two days appear to show that Ahmadinejad is losing this battle. This is why we are witnessing such astonishingly rapid-fire concessions from the heretofore stone-faced government. That includes supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's order that the election be probed, the subsequent repetition of this order every 15 minutes over state-controlled radio, and the announcement today of a partial vote recount.



So what is in the minds of Khamenei, the powerful clerics who stand alongside him, and the rest of the regime?

It has to be 1979. It is the subtext of the entire drama in Iran.

Both those backing Ahmadinejad and those behind Mousavi recall viscerally that they once brought down a seemingly immovable regime, that of Shah Reza Pahlavi. And the youth who are too young themselves to have observed or participated in the taking down of the Shah have heard sufficiently detailed stories about it from relatives, friends and teachers to possess vicarious experience of the event.

Knowing and feeling how it was once done -- quite recently indeed -- makes both sides grasp what those crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands mean. Once you've done it once, the usual doubts about capability -- from one side, can we really do it; from the other side, there is no way that mob can unseat us -- vanish.

What unfolds next will be reaction to this potent memory.