Unrest in Iran

The seeds for the downfall of the Iranian regime may already lie within Iran. One of the Bush Administration's most egregious mistakes has been its negligence in encouraging and supporting dissidents in Iran. And yet, the tighter the mullahs try to squeeze its citizens, the more they struggle and fight back. Here are some examples of the hatred for the regime simmering beneath the surface.

Ahfaz - Arabs in SW Iran

Young demonstrators in Ahwaz, provincial capital of Khuzistan, Southern Iran, attacked the 19th precinct's police station and hurled stones at police vehicles.

According to latest reports from Ahwaz, demonstrators clashed with the police in and around the 19th district of the city on Saturday.

Hamid Mashaal, deputy commander of Ahwaz Police, said: Assailants hurled hand grenade at the police station in an Arab neighborhood of the city injuring one police officer.

NW Iran - Kurds

"The Iranian government's plan to create a global Islamic state is destroying our people's culture and -values," said Akif Zagros, 28, a Persian literature graduate who serves on Pejak's seven-strong ruling council. "But we want all nations to be democratic, to live together and learn from each other." Pejak, the Party for Freedom and Life in Kurdistan, is fast becoming a threat to Teheran. The group, founded in 1998, claims to have hundreds of thousands of followers among Iran's estimated four million Kurds, and has been denounced as a terrorist organisation by Teheran for carrying out attacks within the borders of the Islamic republic.

SE Iran - Baluchs

Armed rebels have killed two army officers, and shot a top cleric in troubled Sistan-Baluchistan province in southeastern Iran, a press report said.

A report in hardline Jomhuri Eslami newspaper said rebels on Friday shot and "seriously wounded" Hojatoleslam Yusef Mohammadi Soleimani, who represents the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the Center for Higher Education in Iranshahr.

Mostafa Ahmadi and Behzad Qolipour, non-commissioned army officers, were shot over the weekend.

Eshaq Nezamdoust, another local official in charge of distributing oil products in Iranshahr, was reportedly abducted Saturday morning by six armed men.

The other day in the Corner, Michael Ledeen touched on the labor unrest that is brewing in Iran, referring to a report in Spiegel Online. (Rasht is in north-central Iran, just in from the Caspian Sea shoreline.)

Angered by unpaid salaries and generally low wages, workers in the northern Iranian provincial capital Rasht blocked streets and protested in front of government offices a fortnight ago brandishing banners that read: "We are hungry!" It wasn't the first time that thousands of employees at the country's largest state-owned textile factory had laid down their tools. But this time they were joined by dam workers in the western province of Elam and employees of a pharmaceutical factory in Tehran. Recently, workers have also gone on strike against harsh work conditions and impending layoffs in mines and petrochemical plants across the country, with hundreds of coal miners from the northern province of Gilan protesting the fact that they have not been paid for 13 months. Workers were also on strike in the car factories of the Iran-Khodro company, already the site of a massive work stoppage on last year's Day of Social Welfare and Securities (July 16), when strikers demanded t he introduction of a minimum wage.

In December 2002, then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said "Iran is a democracy." That statement was a howler, and would've been funny if it didn't so wildly mischaracterize this regime.

The dissatisfied people above are not free to change their plight through the free exercise of democracy. Why isn't the US doing more to encourage the rise of true democracy in Iran?

(As an aside, blogger Austin Bay said this on Hugh Hewitt's radio show last Friday.

I said I'm not a particular Rumsfeld fan. I thought from the beginning that someone like Rich Armitage ought to be Secretary of Defense.

What could Mr. Bay possibly be thinking? We do not need a SecDef so willfully blind to the nature of the Iranian regime, and I'm disappointed in Mr. Bay for his comments.)