Iran
I was planning to kick off the week with a few ramblings on my use of social networking sites. With events in Iran-including reformers’ use of Facebook as a messaging tool and the regime’s blocking of the site-that feels like something that ought to wait.
The regime’s clumsy election stealing and brutal show of force have increased the stakes. If the reformers prevail, they’ll be able to go much further than if Mousavi had been allowed to take the Presidency. The reformers face heavy odds. Modern totalitarian states crumble either when the leadership exhausts itself, or when the security forces lose their will to inflict mass casualties on civilian protesters. The turning point comes not when the regime loses the support of the governed, but when they or their proxies are unwilling to muster the violence required to secure renewed acquiescence. Burma is a recent example of what happens when a well-rewarded and emotionally isolated enforcer class looses itself on a rebelling populace. If we see hopeful signs here, it will be of backpedaling by the high leadership or their abandonment by cops, militias and soldiers.
On a note of lesser importance, the failure of all three US cable news networks to engage with the story as it unfolded shows how increased competition can lead to a degraded product. To keep up with Fox and MSNBC, CNN gutted its expensive foreign bureaus and international coverage in favor of much cheaper in-studio chatter. The Turner-era CNN would be all over this. Here competitive pressure led to a cheaper, not a better, product.