EDITORIAL: "Iran protests turn into open rebellion: Sanctions should carefully target Iranians' oppressors," Financial Times, 31 December 2009. MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA: "Iran's turmoil: Growing signs of desperation; The latest bout of increasingly fierce repression suggests that the Islamist regime has begun to fear for its future," The Economist, 2 January 2010.

Nice call-out text in the editorial:

The theocrats are revealed as a fig leaf cloaking an emerging military dictatorship.

Thus I stick with my 2003 prediction in Pentagon's New Map that Iran's mullahs suffer(ed) an actual loss of rule by 2010. The FT opines: "A showdown looks inevitable," meaning a showdown between the reform movement and the consolidating military dictatorship known as the Revolutionary Guard. The regime has always feared for its future, but up to last year those fears were decidedly centered on regime-change efforts by the US. Now the regime fears its own people more--a glorious revolution-in-the-making, if ever there was one. And the more the regime fancifully blames it on Western powers, the more their own deep fears are revealed. I do most definitely believe that history will judge this historic shift as part and parcel of the Big Bang effort/vision launched by Bush-Cheney. After not screwing up relations with China, I think, decades from now, B-C will be accorded a great deal of credit for making the call, which, as I have argued for years now, was not a "diversion" whatsoever--but rather a focusing closer to the ideological center of gravity in this Long War, meaning the Gulf.