1. The West is not behind these protests. Iranians are making their own judgements, and taking matters into their own hands. Barack Obama’s foreign policy strategy in the region was premised upon the idea that he would still be dealing with Ahmadinejad after the election, who was the devil they knew. The U.S and others like Britain are basically playing catch up, and decidedly unsure on whether to support the uprising;
2. Blogging, You Tube, Twitter and other social media have been central to getting the message out to the wider world. The idea that this is all apolitical fluff that is about following Ashton Kulcher around and “are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism [but] are directives from the Central Software Committee” (to quote a recent pooh-poohing manifesto from the land of Digital Media High Theory) is actually being exposed in a sharp light on the streets of Teheran right now;
3. The mainstream media are not a monolith in relation to these matters. Several people have commented on the appalling lack of coverage on the U.S. cable networks, the BBC has been great, as has The Guardian and the New York Times news blog The Lede. Moral: don’t write off media outlets that invest in serious coverage of international affairs. Bloggers are not filling this gap at this stage.

I’m not certain that anyone has been writing off the MSM coverage in toto. It’s very rare that Australian media organisations these days fund good foreign correspondents, but clearly the quality of the reporting from a number of media outlets, particularly some of the British ones, is very high. It seems to me a mistake on either side to reduce this sort of thing to a dichotomised opposition between journalists working in the media and citizen activists and those who mediate their contributions. I think also this sort of dichotomy tends to get confused and conflated in value judgements made about the respective validity of bloggers and citizen journalists in countries with repressive regimes and countries like this one. That’s the case both on the left – say, with Antony Lowenstein to some degree, and certainly on the right – as with David Burchell.

One of the cautions worth noting with this event is that while there is validity in the argument that blogs and social media can play a really positive role in countries with repressive regimes, we also tend to miss the fact that a lot of blogs (for example in Egypt) are full of misogynistic, violent and narrow minded ranting, which would be most distasteful to most Western readers. There’s a tendency to pick up on the ones written by educated middle class folk, particularly those that express themselves in English. It would be wise to exercise some prudence in extrapolating only from those blogs, or from the Twittersphere.

There is actually a lot of dissatisfaction with Ahmadinejad outside the middle class for basically economic reasons. But I’d be wary about making too quick a judgement about whether the protesters, twitterers etc. are representative of Iranian opinion more generally. That, of course, is not to say that their cause, insofar as that cause can be identified with democratisation and liberty, is not worthy of our support. Of course, it is.

The other comment I’d make is that Netanyahu would be quite happy to have Ahmadinejad stay, because the ability to portray him as a dangerous lunatic actually serves the interests of the Israeli state, and for that matter, those other governments who want strong action on the nuclear issue. International realpolitik also needs factoring into the analysis of any political upheaval.

Related post on LP: Open and links post on the Iranian election.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett.

Update: Via Terry Flew, an article in the Graudian about the reliability and ambiguity of the information coming from Iran through social media.

WASHINGTON — President Bush deflected a secret request by Israel last year for specialized bunker-busting bombs it wanted for an attack on Iran’s main nuclear complex and told the Israelis that he had authorized new covert action intended to sabotage Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, according to senior American and foreign officials.

White House officials never conclusively determined whether Israel had decided to go ahead with the strike before the United States protested, or whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel was trying to goad the White House into more decisive action before Mr. Bush left office. But the Bush administration was particularly alarmed by an Israeli request to fly over Iraq to reach Iran’s major nuclear complex at Natanz, where the country’s only known uranium enrichment plant is located.

Instead, the US stepped up attempts to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program by tampering with the goods it procured from foreign suppliers, and kept the Israelis informed on their efforts.

Iran’s nuclear program is going to be an issue again this year, or, if not, 2010 at the latest. Despite the US efforts, Iran has already produced enough low-enriched uranium to (with further processing), arguably, make one bomb. If they keep operating their centrifuges, and expand their enrichment plant, they will be in a position to turn their stockpile into an arsenal at short notice.

There’s obviously plenty of room to debate what should be done about these continuing developments; frankly, the best option might be “nothing”. But it’s important to keep an eye on the facts of the situation. And, on the basis of the fairly conservative IAEA’s reporting, Iran is going to have a for-real capability to make nuclear weapons pretty soon. And, given its past history, it’s unlikely that Israel will be blithely accepting of that idea, even if they were warned off this time around.