New York Times' Analysis June 30

from today's New York Times

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, who recently visited Iran and filed several stories on Iran’s contested vote and its aftermath is among the Times staffers answering readers’ questions.

Will Protest Movements Have an Effect?

Question: I would like to know if you think this green movement will lead to regime change?

Bill Keller: I’ll gladly defer to my colleagues who have spent far more time in Iran than I have, although I trust all of us will shy away from making predictions. One thing that struck me forcefully, though, as a novice watching the country move from pre-election euphoria to post-election outrage and repression, was that for Iranians themselves this month has been an eye-opening look behind a thick curtain. They have seen prominent figures in the modern history of Iran, veterans of the Islamic revolution, quarreling fiercely among themselves. They have seen the supreme leader, for the most part an unchallenged voice of civic and religious orthodoxy, openly (if, for the most part, subtly) challenged. They have seen their elections, which are designed to confer a gloss of popular legitimacy on theocratic power, derided as fraudulent. They have seen a significant cohort of their compatriots take to the streets. They have flocked to alternative information sources — foreign TV broadcasts, the Web, social networks.
The day before the election we interviewed a reformist presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, and asked what would happen if the opposition lost. He said he couldn’t predict whether the popular energy unleashed by the electoral campaign would continue or whether the nation would “go into a coma.” Indeed, the educated middle class that provided much of the impetus for change does have a history of slipping into disenchantment and disengagement after defeat. Many of them deliberately sat out the election that brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power in 2005. But I wonder whether an experience like the one Iran is going through now cannot help having an eventual corrosive effect on the regime itself.