"Domestically," reports the Council on Foreign Relations, "the government’s plan for gas rationing, in a country that exports the second-largest amount of crude oil, sparked protests and chants of 'Ahmadinejad should be killed!'"
You know what you can't do in totalitarian countries? Lead chants saying that the president should be killed. In front of the press.
Iran is a repressive country. It is not a totalitarian dictatorship, no matter how many people want to simply assert otherwise. And that's really all there is to the contrary: Assertions. In his post on the subject, Kevin Sullivan wrote, as a parenthetical aside, "(and [Ahmadinejad] is a totalitarian, Ezra)," an odd argument given that Ahmadinejad isn't even the most powerful person in the country. Elsewhere, Ken Baer told me that he didn't think such arguments even needed to be made, which shows how safe folks feel in the Iran-is-totalitarian-consensus, but struck me as unsettling.
Meanwhile, as the CFR article shows, the sanctions are having a significant impact in Iran. Maybe if we were to open bilateral talks and give them a face-saving way to cut a deal, we could make some progress. But why do that when we can ensure that cooperation will look like capitulation, and thus remain politically impossible for the Iranian regime? Iran, after all, is such a good political issue....
