Al Arabiya: Will Iran's Ahmadinejad Reach for the Zimbabwe Option?

The news service Al Arabiya which has been banned is making a decent guess at a best case scenario on what can be done to help Iranians recover their democracy, at least a reduced form of it.

The service suggests that Ahmadinejad might use Robert Mugabe's  tricks to subdue a group representing the majority of voters and initialy employing a brutal crackdown and other manipulations to force Mousavi to accept the lesser role in a power sharing agreement in "How the ‘Mugabe option’ figures in Khamenei’s strategy ".

It would be disheartening to think that Mousavi and his followers should have to take a minor portion of power since they seem to have won the election or at least won a way to a second round. The Al Arabiya piece notes that the Iranian people have used their presence on the street to effect a real regime change bdfore (well duh!) and others have noted that Iranian leaders that seem to be in line with the wishes of some of the most powerful leaders who engineered the 1978-79 revolution.

Nicholas Kristoff noted in an online q&A session I can't find again that the key is with whom the military or at least the major portion will side.  Does that include the extra military militia which seem to have firearms, too.  Some of them appear to be non Iranians, maybe even Hezbullah according to people on Twitter align with protestors.  Some of those who are in the streets chanting  have been protecting riot police who get isolated and attacked.  But will those without a stake in the people of Iran switch.  Apparently the regime hopes that won't happen. Still one wonders how much killing a person is willing to do for a paycheck.

From what I'm hearing and reading apparently Iran has gone ahead with a hard suppression of demonstrations.  I'm skeptical that a crackdown could be as brutal as the one in Zimbabwe where Mugabe's people actually let the families and followers of the opposition starve and drink tainted water that killed thousands in his morbid determination to retain power.  I don't think even Ahmadinejad has that much greed for power in him.

 Still I understand that for families in Iran who are feeling the effects of the crackdown, the effects could be devastating.  

Yet there may be hope that some of this could ease within months if the reformists can get the Khameini-Ahmadinejad to return to putting the people first.

tags: iranelection  iran  demonstrations  1979 revolution  khamenei  ahmadinejad  

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