Brezhnevian Iran: obsessing with the surface
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 12:08AM 
WAPO piece that highlights an uptick in "morality police" activity.
Gist:
Iranian authorities have begun police patrols in the capital to arrest women wearing clothes deemed improper. The campaign against loose-fitting veils and other signs of modernism comes as government opponents are calling for rallies to mark the anniversary of the disputed presidential election, and critics of the crackdown say it is stoking feelings of discontent.
But hard-liners say that improper veiling is a "security issue" and that "loose morality" threatens the core of the Islamic republic.
This is so pathetically transparent that it would laughable absent all the other nasty stuff that Tehran's ruling militarized government does to serious dissidents. But it gives you the same sense I had as a budding Sovietologist when I lived a summer in Leningrad in 1985. The government made this huge effort to maintain the appearance of control over a fairly sophisticated population whose hearts and minds it has lost long ago (maintaining the loyalty really only among the isolated rural folk who knew no better), but the compromise was clear: you pretend to obey in public and we pretend to rule over all. The more obsessed you see the government become with appearances, the less control it really has. It's all just the Potemkin village effort that everybody, on both sides of the power equation, engages in.
I know a lot of people see Iran's reach for nukes as a grand culmination of a threat, but I view more as the last gasp of a failed revolutionary movement. Yes, just like the Brezhnev crowd, the Revolutionary Guard crew harbor all manner of beyond-border ambitions. That's just part of the fantasy.
Reader Comments (1)
"I know a lot of people see Iran's reach for nukes as a grand culmination of a threat, but I view more as the last gasp of a failed revolutionary movement."
I couldn't agree with you more on this, which raises some questions: Since Iran is run by people with a Millenarian theology and the failure of their regime equates to the failure of their God, doesn't their acquisition of a nuke lead to a "use 'em or lose 'em" last ditch effort to preserve their theology even as their system crumbles? In other words, how do we prevent them from trying to precipitate the apocalypse if they know they are collapsing? How do we prevent such an eventuality if/when containment no longer has any meaning?