Iran: "Arrests" and the Regime's Sword of Damocles

It is now 9:30 a.m. in Tehran, and the arrest of Mir Hossein Mousavi has still not occurred. After a weekend of tension, nervousness, and speculation, he remains free, or rather restricted given the Government's efforts to limit his mobility and communications. The students are still demonstrating on their campuses, and plans are still being made for a show of protest during the holy month of Moharram, beginning Friday.

At the same time, the warning from the regime was clear. Perhaps the line on the Revolutionary Guard's website about punishing the leaders of dissent can be dismissed as bluster, but the Supreme Leader's speech yesterday, even with its invocation to his audience to "keep calm", has to be recognised --- with the live broadcast and attendant publicity --- as a high-profile message to those who continue to take to the streets and defy the injunction to be quiet.

Iran Analysis: Sifting the Propaganda – Government About to Arrest Opposition Leaders?

So what does it all mean, if we are still in this state of political suspension, the Sword of Damocles still dangling above the head of the Green movement(s)?

First things first: threats like these are not made from a position of strength. If victory is assured or imminent, you don't need to keep up the fist-shaking. Instead, you can strike a tone of triumph or  even reconciliation with vanquished foes. Ayatollah Khamenei may have put on his "Dirty Harry" face --- as Mr Smith summarised, it was a "Make My Day" speech --- but he did so after six months of failure to put away the bad guys.

More and more it appears that the protests of 16 Azar have shaken the regime. At first glance, I found that curious because the demonstrations were largely confined to students on and around campuses. Mousavi, Karroubi, Khatami were nowhere to be seen, and even amidst the tens of thousands who turned out last Monday, there was the hanging question, "Where next?" with the objectives of the movement.

But, trying to read it from the regime's side, even that defiance is beyond a disturbance and verging on a perpetual threat. We have written repeatedly of the Supreme Leader, the President, the Revolutionary Guard, and other security forces throwing their best punch and failing to knock out the opposition. So it proved again on 16 Azar. And this time, there were the visual signs that the protesters were upping the political challenge --- once again, Khamenei's image was defaced and mocked and now Iranian flags without the central symbol of the Islamic Republic were being waved.

So anxious and worried, the regime's media began running over and over again the one video clip that showed not only Khamenei but Imam Khomeini being symbolically immolated, their portraits lit up by a "protester" with a lighter. We may never know if that incident was genuine --- what mattered is that it would now be displayed as the "real", ugly face of the Green movement for days by the regime. And what mattered even more is that it seems to have failed to extinguish the protest. Indeed, it does not even seem to have tarred it as "anti-Republic"; after a series of statements from prominent individuals and groups denying the burning of Khomeini, his picture was being waved with acclamation by demonstrators yesterday.

So anxious and worried, elements in the regime began muttering that it was time to stop this once and for all. Hard-line newspapers raised the rhetoric against Mousavi and Karroubi. State television devoted blocks of broadcast time to the "threat". The Revolutionary Guard made its threat. This might not have constituted a "plan" to detain Mir Hossein Mousavi, but it was enough for his website to issue its alert on Saturday night.

And then, most importantly, the Supreme Leader decided to give a partial stamp of approval to the threats with his speech yesterday.

(There may or may not be a dramatic side issue here: as the regime was playing its Khomeini card, the claimed letter/audio from Army and Air Force units, "standing with the Iranian people" if violence continued, emerged. It is still a matter of heated debate whether the letter and audio are genuine. The point is that, if the regime believes it might be genuine, then the prospect of military dissent arises. And this in turn might have been a supporting catalyst for the Supreme Leader's invocation for everybody to shut up and get in line.)

We've been here before. A week after the election, Khamenei stood up at Friday prayers in Tehran and said it was time to accept the election and stop the complaining. He stretched out a hand to Hashemi Rafsanjani but made it clear that all should accept President Ahmadinejad.

The outcome? The next day there were mass protests in Tehran. Neda Agha Soltan was killed and became a symbolic martyr. And a crisis of days had become one of weeks and possibly months.

Strategically, Khamenei's move yesterday may also be compared with a private initiative he took in September, despatching Ali Larijani to Mehdi Karroubi to tell the cleric to stay out of sight before the protests of Qods Day in Spetember. In that sense, the escalation of private message to public warning yesterday could be a "decapitation" strategy: split off Mousavi and Karroubi from the Green movement and, leaderless, it will run itself into the ground.

It should not be underestimated that, to an extent, the regime has achieved this aim since June. Through the disruptions of the high-level reformist and Green organisations, extending to the detentions of its top officials, it has fragmented the demonstrations, preventing a single, mass gathering. It has kept Mousavi, Khatami, and, more recently, Karroubi off to the side of those demonstrations.

Ironically, however, that partial success may have led to a risky miscalculation. It is not just the possibility that Mousavi's arrest might spur the Green movement(s) through the creation of a political martyr. Even more, it is the belief that the movement cannot exist without a publicly-active Mousavi.

All the opposition discussion of "Where Next?", with its heated and sometimes confused consideration of objectives, should not obscure one of the emerging motives for that discussion: the belief that the movement is now beyond a single figure like a Mousavi. Ironically, that belief has only been reinforced with the regime's efforts to suppress and decapitate the opposition: the marches still took place, they still had an impact even as its supposed leaders were shut away in their offices.

So Mousavi and Karroubi may not have to risk a central presence in the forthcoming public activity from the start of Mosharram (18 December) through Ashura (27 December) and beyond. They can issue statements from a distance and let the "grassroots" of the movement take the public lead.

Then the crunch question: what if, despite the Supreme Leader's threats, the protesters still come out? What if they persist in challenging the legitimacy of this regime (but not necessarily the "Islamic Republic")?

What does the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard then do with a Sword which, for all the detentions and all the propaganda, dangles not as a sign of its threat but of (for now) its impotence?