I want to wish all of our readers a very happy New Year.

Now, by "happy" I don't mean to exclude those who, for cultural reasons, may not accept the concept of happiness, seeing it as a false emotion devised to insure the survival of an oppressive, capitalist system.

And by "New Year" I certainly don't mean to exclude those whose new years occur at another time on the calendar, or who reject the entire concept of "year" on grounds that it is an artificial measurement forced on us by white European males, with their overpriced Swiss watches. 

So, to be Ivy League about it, may I wish all of you the feeling of your choice at this moment, which may or may not be a moment of significance to you.  And I sincerely respect your beliefs.

(The above greeting was approved by the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, secrectary, as meeting departmental standards for cultural sensitivity and moral blindness.)

THURSDAY,  DECEMBER 31,  2009

THE BRIT REPORTERS ARE PULLING NO PUNCHES, AGAIN - AT 8:08 P.M. ET:  One of the most interesting media developments of 2009 was the extent to which British reporters took aim at the Obama administration, often beating their American counterparts to the heart of the story.  On New Year's Eve, London's Daily Mail continues the tradition, looking for a good place to put the chopping block in 2010:

Heads are set to roll in the U.S. intelligence community as an angry Barack Obama fends off criticism over the attempted bombing of a passenger plane on Christmas Day.

Publicly the White House is standing by the top spymaster in the U.S., intelligence chief Admiral Dennis Blair.

The four-star admiral, who is responsible for coordinating intelligence gathering between 16 agencies, has the full confidence of the president, aides are insisting.

It's remarkable that Blair has escaped scrutiny by the American press.  Earlier this year he was involved in a huge flap when he tried to name Charles Freeman, an Israel-hating, Chinese-government-loving "scholar" to a key intelligence post.  The move was blocked when Freeman's views came out.  However, the move raised serious questions about Blair's judgment.

But speculation was rife that Blair or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano could be forced to resign after Mr Obama said on Tuesday there had been a systemic failure by the country's security agencies to prevent the botched Christmas Day attack.

Napolitano has been lambasted by Republican critics, and in the media, for initially saying the air security system worked. She quickly back-pedalled, claiming she had meant the system of beefing up measures worked after the incident had occurred.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Napolitano had the president's support, and Obama referred to her in his public comments on Tuesday, supporting her statement that correct actions were taken after the attempted attack.

COMMENT:  At the same time, it's being widely reported that a new bus pulled up to the White House last night, with plenty of room underneath.  The first White House bus had too many people thrown under it by Barack Obama, so a new one had to be ordered.

Both Blair and Napolitano, or either, could wind up looking up at bus axles.  The State Department was also involved in the huge security failure that led to the airliner bombing, but Ms. Hillary knows how to duck, which she's been doing since the incident.

December 31, 2009   Permalink 

INCREDIBLE LOSSES - AT 7:09 P.M. ET:  Not to spoil anyone's New Year's Eve, but I wanted you to be aware of the extent of the losses to the U.S. Treasury that Freddie and Fannie have cost us.  This is what happens when normal, common sense rules of finance and lending are not followed, and are replaced by political and social objectives:

Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Taxpayer losses from supporting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will top $400 billion, according to Peter Wallison, a former general counsel at the Treasury who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“The situation is they are losing gobs of money, up to $400 billion in mortgages,” Wallison said in a Bloomberg Television interview. The Treasury Department recognized last week that losses will be more than $400 billion when it raised its limit on federal support for the two government-sponsored enterprises, he said.

And...

The U.S. seized the two mortgage financiers in 2008 as the government struggled to prevent a meltdown of the financial system. The debt of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks grew an average of $184 billion annually from 1998 to 2008, helping fuel a bubble that drove home prices up by 107 percent between 2000 and mid-2006, according to the S&P/Case- Shiller home-price index.

COMMENT:  High home prices may be temporarily exhilarating for some people for a time, but ultimately, if prices get too high, communities are destroyed, the most creative people are driven out, and the future is severely compromised.  It's happened in New York City and in communities around New York, and it's one of the reasons why New York State is losing its most productive population. 

I gently point out that Fannie and Freddie are Democratic Party pets.  Haven't heard any apologies yet.

December 31, 2009   Permalink

ESCALATION IN TEHRAN – AT 10:25 A.M. ET:  New opposition demonstrations are planned, and a general strike has been called for early January.  The regime is responding, as Reuters reports:

An Iranian opposition website said on Thursday the government was moving troops and armored military vehicles to the capital on the day supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi planned to hold a rally.

"Hundreds of military forces and tens of armoured vehicles ... are moving towards Tehran. Some of the vehicles are used for suppressing street riots," the Jaras website said.

The use of military vehicles is an ominous sign.  The situation in Iran is escalating.  No one knows exactly where the tipping point is, but it took many months of street demonstrations and confrontations to bring down the Shah in the late 70s. 

And President Obama's "deadline" for the regime to show progress in talks over its nuclear program expires midnight tonight.  There are press reports that the United States is trying to organize new sanctions, but it's difficult to find anyone who believes that genuinely tough sanctions will be agreed upon by the "international community," especially by Russia and China.  Even if some new sanctions are imposed, they're unlikely to sway the regime.

It appears that only regime change has the potential to ease Western concern about the Iranian nuclear program.  That may be a gift of the Iranian people to Obama in 2010.  It's undeserved, but we hope he gets it, just the same.  That will depend on the success of the democracy movement, which is getting far too little outside support.

December 31, 2009   Permalink

FINAL RAS FOR 2009 – AT 9:48 A.M. ET:  Rasmussen has just published his final tracker for 2009.  They will not want to give this to the president just before a big Hawaiian dinner:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows that 24% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18 (see trends). Twenty-nine percent (29%) now say the country is heading in the right direction.

Happy New Year, Mr. President.

Overall, 46% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. At the time of his Inauguration, the President’s approval rating was at 61%.

Fifty-three percent (53%) now disapprove.

COMMENT:   It's been pointed out before that no president in modern history has suffered the loss of support that Mr. Obamas has.  What is troubling to Obama supporters is that there doesn't seem to be anything on the horizon to reverse the trend. 

I noted a couple of days ago that the president doesn't seem to like his job very much.  These numbers will not help the alienation.  The notion of a one-term presidency, which would have seemed a joke a year ago, is starting to seem a possibility.  That is speculation, of course, but it's so much fun. 

The eager footsteps the president hears behind him belong to the secretary of state. 

December 31, 2009   Permalink

THE OBAMA RECORD – TROUBLING - AT 8:52 A.M. ET:  We've seen no finer observer of Barack Obama's foreign policy than Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins, whose work is a refreshing contrast to the ideological mush that often comes out of the academic world these days.  Ajami, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has Mr. Obama for lunch:

With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. This is the genuine calling of Barack Obama, and of the "progressives" holding him to account. The false dichotomy has taken hold—either we care for our own, or we go abroad in search of monsters to destroy or of broken nations to build. The decision to withdraw missile defense for Poland and the Czech Republic was of a piece with that retreat in American power.

If Ajami were a theater critic, the Obama Revue would have already closed.

In the absence of an overriding commitment to the defense of American primacy in the world, the Obama administration "cheats." It will not quit the war in Afghanistan but doesn't fully embrace it as its cause. It prosecutes the war but with Republican support—the diehards in liberal ranks and the isolationists are in no mood for bonding with Afghans. (Harry Reid's last major foreign policy pronouncement was his assertion, three years ago, that the war in Iraq was lost.)

No punches are pulled here.  This is the most clear-eyed critique of Obama's foreign adventures that I've read.

In retrospect, that patina of cosmopolitanism in President Obama's background concealed the isolationism of the liberal coalition that brought him to power. The tide had turned in the congressional elections of 2006. American liberalism was done with its own antecedents—the outlook of Woodrow Wilson and FDR and Harry Truman and John Kennedy. It wasn't quite "Come home, America," but close to it.

People around the world were fooled.

The joke is on the enthralled crowds in Cairo, Ankara, Berlin and Oslo. The new American president they had fallen for had no genuine calling or attachments abroad. In their enthusiasm for Mr. Obama, and their eagerness to proclaim themselves at one with the postracial meaning of his election, they had missed his aloofness from the genuine struggles in the foreign world.

It was easy, that delirium with Mr. Obama: It made no moral demands on those eager to partake of it. It was also false, in many lands.

Finally...

But to go by the utterances of the Obama administration and its devotees, one would have thought that our enemies were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not the preachers and masterminds of terror. The president and his lieutenants spent more time denigrating "rendition" and the Patriot Act than they did tracking down the terror trail and the latest front it had opened at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Our own leaders spoke poorly of our prerogatives and ways, and they were heard the world over.

Under Mr. Obama, we have pulled back from the foreign world. We're smaller for accepting that false choice between burdens at home and burdens abroad, and the world beyond our shores is more hazardous and cynical for our retrenchment and our self-flagellation.

Great piece.  If you have time today, read the rest.  Jack Kennedy was able to right his ship of state in his second year.  We have asked this before:  Is Obama capable of doing a Kennedy?  And does he want to? 

Only the president's Oslo speech gave me encouragement.  His performance since has not.

December 31, 2009   Permalink

CUBA SI, OBAMA NO – AT 8:24 A.M. ET:  One of the major stories of 2009 has been the stunning collapse of President Obama's "outreach" policy.  Obama reaches out, no one reaches back.  Now add Cuba to the list of nations – or regimes – where love has not made a difference.  Again, from The New York Times: 

When President Obama came to office, the unflattering billboards of George W. Bush, including one outside the United States Interests Section of him scowling alongside Hitler, came down and the anti-American vitriol softened...

...But the tenor here has changed considerably, and Mr. Obama, whose election was broadly celebrated by Cuba’s racially diverse population, is now being portrayed by this nation’s leaders as an imperialistic, warmongering Cuba hater.

And that is major heartbreak for Obama's base, the left wing of the Democratic Party, which always had a soft spot in its collective, or collectivist, heart for Fidel and his guys.

In one of his recent written commentaries in the state press, Fidel Castro, who has not appeared in public in nearly three years, wrote that Mr. Obama’s “friendly smile and African-American face” masked his sinister intentions to control Latin America.

Well, the good news is that there's someone who believes Barack Obama may be capable of controlling something.

Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla also recently accused Mr. Obama of behaving like an “imperial chief” at the climate change talks in Copenhagen, displaying “arrogant” behavior aimed at quashing developing countries.

I assume the president is shown these comments, and possibly realizes how foolish some of his "outreach" has been.  The bottom line is that dictatorships are not interested in any foreign leader who challenges them in any way.  They will grasp the outstretched hand only when nothing has to be given back.

December 31, 2009   Permalink

MORE ON AFGHAN ATTACK – AT 8:10 A.M. ET:  It seems that the CIA bore the brunt of the suicide bombing in Afghanistan, suffering its worst losses in many years.  From The New York Times:

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest and an Afghan National Army uniform killed at least eight American civilians, most of them C.I.A. officers, at a remote base in southeastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, according to NATO officials and former American intelligence officials.

The bomber who struck the base in Khost Province was wearing an Afghan National Army uniform, said two NATO sources on Thursday. Both of them asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject. A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack.

COMMENT:  There will be as many questions asked about this attack as about the airline bombing.  How did this man get onto the base and so close to CIA operatives?  Was he targeting the CIA, or was it only coincidental that those killed worked for, or allegedly worked for, the agency? 

Four Canadian soldiers were killed in another attack.  Canada is withdrawing from Afghanistan, and the deaths of four Canadian soldiers will do nothing to encourage other NATO nations to fill the gap. 

Our foreign enemies have gotten more, not less, aggressive in 2009.  I wonder why.

December 31,  2009   Permalink

WEDNESDAY,  DECEMBER 30, 2009

LOONEY TUNES – AT 7:48 P.M. ET:  We can only hope that psychiatry makes BDS, Bush Derangement Syndrome, a recognized ailment in 2010.  And Obamacare should provide free treatment for those afflicted, starting with its own troops.  From The Hill:

Democratic strategists Wednesday asserted President Barack Obama "has been far more aggressive in fighting al Qaeda" than the previous administration.

We've noticed the dramatic results.  We noticed them at Fort Hood, we noticed them last Friday over Detroit...

In an e-mail this afternoon to supporters -- which incidentally excoriated Republicans for politicizing the attempted bombing of Flight 253 -- the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) stressed it was President George W. Bush, not his successor, who relegated the fight against the terrorist network to the back burner by turning "its focus from al Qaeda to Iraq."

Again, Bush.  Always Bush and, of course, Cheney.  It's a BDS epidemic.  Swine flu is nothing compared to this.

The outrage here, among others, is that the Dems never noticed that we fought al Qaeda in Iraq, and defeated it.  We've seen that al Qaeda travels from place to place.  It doesn't have just one address on Cave Boulevard in Afghanistan.

Bush can be criticized for many things, but there's been a dramatic increase in terror attempts since Obama took office, and it may not be a coincidence.  When you flash weakness, an enemy notices.

It's odd that the Dems accuse the GOP of politicizing terror and then go on to attack the Bush administration on the same subject.  It's unlikely that the Democratic political planners anticipated that terror would erupt once more as a political issue, but it has.  Defense is not exactly an Obama strong point.  Add that fact to the general unpopularity of some of the domestic issues he's pushing, and Democratic political concern is likely to grow.  A year ago the Democratic Party was in political heaven.  Now it's headed in the other direction, where global warming is a constant reality.

December 30, 2009    Permalink

NEW SUICIDE ATTACK - AT 7:33 P.M. ET:  There's been a new suicide attack in Afghanistan, and the circumstances are unusual:

KABUL (AP) -- A suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest at a military base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing eight American civilians, U.S. officials said. The explosion occurred at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province near the Afghan border with Pakistan.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly confirmed that eight Americans died in the attack.

''We mourn the loss of life in this attack, and are withholding further details pending notification of next of kin,'' he said.

COMMENT:  Horrible, of course.  But was this simply a suicide attack, or an act of terrorism directed at civilians?  We don't hear of many American civilian casualties in Afghanistan.  If civilians are now being targeted, especially those involved in reconstruction, we could have an expanded security problem that might involve tying down troops or housing our people in ever-more-isolated locations.

December 30, 2009   Permalink

NO CONFIDENCE – AT 6:59 P.M. ET:  In countries with parliamentary systems, this might lead to a no-confidence vote:

Belief that the bad guys are winning the War on Terror is now at its highest level in over two years, and nearly half of U.S. voters say America is not safer than it was before 9/11.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 30% of voters think the terrorists are winning the War on Terror. That’s the first time the number holding that pessimistic view has reached 30% since October 2007.

Just 18% believed the terrorists were winning the week President Obama took office in January. At that time, 55% said America and its allies were on top. Now, just 36% say the United States and its allies are winning the War on Terror. Only once since July 2007 have voters had less confidence.

This speaks powerfully to the loss of confidence in the Obama administration.  Obama was sold to us as the man who understood the world.  Unfortunately, it's not the world any of us actually live in.

Just 27% now say that the United States is safer today than it was before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. However, 47% say it is not, That latter figure marks a nine-point jump from earlier in the month and is the highest negative finding on the question since Rasmussen Reports began surveying on it in 2002.

The people are speaking.  But will the boys in Washington listen?  Maybe not.  These figures are startling:

Seventy-five percent (75%) of the Political Class say the United States and its allies are winning the War on Terror. Mainstream voters are more narrowly divided on the question.

Similarly, 72% of the Political Class says the United States is safer today than before 9/11, but 54% of Mainstream voters disagree.

I suspect that the "political class" is more optimistic simply because its members don't want to deal with terrorism.  Not chic.  Not hip.  Not edgy.

I'll trust the people on this one.

December 30,  2009   Permalink

OH DEAR, THE BRITS NAIL OBAMA AGAIN – AT 12:58 A.M. ET:  British writers are coming down hard on Obama, a man most of them don't like anyway, over the terror issue.  Tony Harnden, in The Telegraph, nails the president:

Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a “B+” for his 2008 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn into his underpants. He said today that a “systemic failure has occurred”. Well, he’s in charge of that system.

Actually, the White House thinks that Bush is still in charge of that system.

In his studied desire to be the unBush by responding coolly to events like this, Obama is dangerously close to failing as a leader. Yes, it is good not to shoot from the hip and make broad assertions without the facts. But Obama took three days before speaking to the American people, emerging on Monday in between golf and tennis games in Hawaii to deliver a rather tepid address that significantly underplayed what happened. He described Abdulmutallab as an “isolated extremist” who “allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body” – phrases that indicate a legalistic, downplaying approach that alarms rather than reassures.

And...

Today’s words showed a lot more fire and desire to get on top of things – we’ll see whether Obama follows through with action. In the meantime, he went snorkeling.

Whenever there's a flap, Obama thinks he can fix it with words.  It isn't working. We've heard the CD too many times before. 

There has been a pattern developing with the Obama administration trying to minimise terrorist attacks. We saw it with Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Muslim convert who murdered a US Army recruit in Little Rock, Arkansas in June. We saw it with Major Nidal Malik Hassan, a Muslim with Palestinian roots who slaughtered 13 at Fort Hood, Texas last month. In both cases, there were Yemen connections. Obama began to take the same approach with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. We’ll see whether this incident shakes him out of that complacency. Whether it’s called the war on terror or not, it’s clear that the US is at war against al-Qaeda and radical Islamists.

The president does not want to admit that.  It's a visceral thing. 

Janet Napolitano, Obama’s Homeland Security Chief, has been a disaster in this, exhibiting the kind of bureaucratic complacency that makes ordinary citizens want to go postal.

She should go, but I doubt if Obama has the guts to fire a female department head.

There’s a continued, unfortunate tendency for everyone in Obamaland to preface every comment about something going wrong with a sideswipe against the Bush administration.

The public is on to this.  Obama can't get away with it much longer.

Will there be US air attacks against targets in Yemen? Watch this space. It’s safe to say that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP, described to me by a senior intelligence official today as “officially recognised and in corporate terms a sanctioned franchise of al-Qaeda” that is plainly now seeking to become an international rather than just a regional Islamist player.

COMMENT:  The president cannot seem to use words like "victory" or "Muslim extremist."  He wants to fight a politically correct war.  So far it's been a failure.  Next year, almost upon us, will be decisive.  If Obama is perceived as weak and drifting at the end of two years, he might have to check out the want ads.

December 30, 2009   Permalink

SOUNDS LIKE PRE 9-11 – AT 8:52 A.M. ET:  After 9-11 we learned there'd been serious warnings about Middle Easterners learning to fly at American flight schools, under unusual circumstances.  The warnings had been ignored.

As Yogi Berra said, this looks like déja vù all over again:

THE CIA was tracking a person of interest known as "The Nigerian" - who was in fact airline bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - as early as August, CBS News reports.

The connection between “The Nigerian” and Mr Abdulmutallab was not made when the 23-year-old's father contacted the US embassy in Nigeria in November to warn them of his son’s radicalisation.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the intelligence agency did not have Mr Abdulmutallab’s name until November.

And they did not know he was “The Nigerian” until after his attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day.

"In November, we worked with the embassy to ensure he was in the Government's terrorist database-including mention of his possible extremist connections in Yemen,” Mr Gimigliano said.

COMMENT:  There will be investigations, as there were after 9-11.  Will anything change?  We don't know, but if you were a government employee looking at this administration's attitude toward terrorism – I mean "man-made disasters" – how encouraged would you be to work harder?

December 30, 2009   Permalink

THE WHITE HOUSE JOINS THE NATION – MAYBE – AT 8:21 A.M. ET:  There are things you read that makes you wonder if the Obama administration is partially detached from the United States, a country in the Western Hemisphere.  From the Washington Post:

The president and his top advisers now believe there is "some linkage" with al-Qaeda, and the administration is "increasingly confident" that the terrorist group worked with suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to secure the deadly chemical mixture that he took aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253, a senior administration official said Tuesday.

Some linkage?  Some linkage?  They're out there bragging about it.  The perp's daddy visited the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria twice to warn us.  And these guys are talking about "some" linkage.

White House officials also said the government had intelligence suggesting a possible attack on the United States by al-Qaeda around Christmas, although the reports were not specific.

They could've warned us.  They could have raised the threat level.  But that would have meant using the threat-level system developed by BUSH (!!) and CHENEY (!!!!).  Can't do that.  Of course the reports weren't specific.  If they were specific, we could have stopped the plot in its tracks.  But the public could have been alerted, assuming the White House wasn't focused on planning the president's vacation, with accompanying menus.

Obama has now admitted a "systemic" failure.

Obama's stark remarks came two days after his homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, said information provided by the suspect's father before the failed bombing plot was so vague that it did not merit further investigation. Napolitano also said that "the system worked" in this incident, drawing a political outcry from Republican lawmakers and national security experts.

As the Obama administration reviewed the government's actions, investigators in Yemen on Tuesday visited an Arabic language institute attended by Abdulmutallab and asked about his ties to a mosque in the capital's historic section.

That's nice.  I'm glad they're visiting.  They should take pictures for their travel scrapbook.  Even Yemen's foreign minister admits the country is crawling with terrorists, and we're now just waking up.

Yemen is where the USS Cole was attacked...nine years ago.

December 30, 2009   Permalink

THE PRESIDENT FLOPS – AT 8:12 A.M. ET:  President Obama is getting a large number of failing grades over his handling of the airline terror attack.  Clear-headed analyst Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations puts it well, via The Politico:

A lot of the things that presidents have to do are hard. That is all the more reason why they should do the easy stuff well. Handling an incident like the Christmas bombing is something they teach in White House management 101. The easy part is managing your response to the news and making sure you get the optics right. The hard part is the policy: figuring out what went wrong, taking the right steps to address the problem, and pressing on with your strategic vision of how to deal with the threat. The problem for the White House at this point is that when you fluff the easy part, the public starts to wonder if you have what it takes to do the hard part of the job.

Ouch. 

What the White House seems to be missing is that this sort of moment is an opportunity to connect with the public while its attention is focused and to get out the message about this administration's approach to the terrorism threat. In particular, it's a chance to connect with women. He's lost the angry white male vote -- not that he ever had much of it. His danger is that he'll lose the soccer moms: voters who like a lot of what this President stands for but who are worried about security and worried about debt.

COMMENT:  More ouch.  If Obama loses women over the security issue, he's a one-termer, which may be the case anyway.  You get the feeling that he's overwhelmed by the job, not that interested in actually doing it, and enjoys the perks rather than the challenge.  Sometimes it appears he'd rather be basketball commissioner, or a restaurant critic. 

December 30, 2009   Permalink

PANIC IN TEHRAN – AT 7:53 A.M. ET:  There are signs the regime in Tehran is starting to panic, aware that both its legitimacy and its longevity are being seriously challenged.  From Martin Fletcher at the Times of London, via the superb Planet Iran website:

Iran’s panicking regime is once again seeking to suppress the Green Movement by decapitating it.
Just as it did after June’s hotly-disputed presidential election, it is arresting high-profile reformists, academics and journalists who support the opposition...

...The tactic will prove as futile now as it did in June. Decapitation will not work because the opposition is a bottom-up movement run not by Mr Mousavi or Mehdi Karroubi, its nominal leaders, but by its grassroots members. It is a massive campaign of civil disobedience.

The response of the president of the United States has been some gosh-darned nice words about the right to protest.

“Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards still don’t get it,” said one Iranian academic. “The Green Movement is a decentralised popular front run by local cells and local leaderships across the country. The main opposition figures do not control it. They are spiritual leaders, but do not provide any direction in regard to demonstrations or slogans.”

And...

One activist said: “Do Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and the elite of the Revolutionary Guards really think that I, or anyone else, after being beaten by the police, witnessing the murder of Iranians on the streets, hearing stories of rape and murder in the prisons, and knowing of electoral cheating, will ever remain passive and quiet? None of us will ever accept the rule of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei after what they have done.”

Tehran's police chief today promised increased brutality toward the demonstrators.  That is likely to make matters worse for the regime.

The pot is boiling.  An informed source told me that March may well see the tipping point. 

We're making a list and checking it twice, and noting the silence of "human rights organizations," especially those who've been obsessed with Guantanamo. 

And, by the way, we haven't heard a word from the secretary of state. 

We're following this.  Iran may well be the biggest foreign story of 2010.

December 30,  2009   Permalink