Jeune Street

The massive mobilization in Iran is prompting lots of analysis about what it might mean. By now, it is clear that the protests are about much more than disputed election results. The elections were the trigger for people to empty into the streets. But what do they want? How will the protests be resolved? Here are a few interesting perspectives from across the web:

1. "Between a Coup and a Reformation" (Andrew Sullivan):

This is more like the American revolution than the French one. They are asking that the regime live up to its own commitments - i.e. an election that is actually fair within the circumscribed rules... I do not know where this ends. But I am not sure it ends with either total crackdown or total revolution. What the Mousavi movement wants is a revolution within the system. What they want it perestroika and glasnost.

2. "An Insider Turned Agitator is the Face of Iran's Opposition" (New York Times):

Mr. Moussavi, 67, is an insider who has moved toward opposition, and his motives for doing so remain murky. He was close to the founder of Iran’s Islamic Revolution but is at odds with the current supreme leader. Some prominent figures have rallied to his cause, including a former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. So it is not clear how much this battle reflects a popular resistance to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s hard-line policies, and how much is about a struggle for power.

3. "An illiberal election" (Ramin Jahanbegloo):

At moments like this, it should not be forgotten that each time democracy is intimated, silenced and postponed for another day by a show of force in a country like Iran, it is a loss of credibility for those in charge and a crisis of legitimacy for the entire political system.

4. "The new politics of people power" (Timothy Garton Ash):

This young, increasingly educated and urban population wants jobs, homes, opportunities and more freedom. Anyone who has travelled around Iran talking to these young people knows how discontented they are. Last week the whole world saw it, above all in the unforgettable faces and words of those Iranian women who, as women in an Islamic state, are doubly in need of the power of the powerless.

5. "Crushed Hopes" (Reza Fiyouzat):

To have witnessed and tasted the feel of some 'openness' in the political atmosphere during the campaign weeks, to have participated in mass debates in the streets, in the squares, to have felt that their votes would really count and that they could force some 'change', to have held impromptu rallies and expressed themselves freely in hopes of persuading others, all of which sent them to euphorically high places, and THEN to have had their hopes crushed in a matter of hours after the closing of polling stations, ... that must be a huge disappointment to bear. No wonder then that street protests were so swift to come about.

6. "Iran Uninterrupted" (Hamid Dabashi):

On 15 June 2009, the uprising has assumed an entirely different dimension and may have already transmuted into a full-fledged civil disobedience movement.