Good piece by Martin Longman about the echoes of the 1978 revolution in today's protests. All the stuff about the 40 mourning cycle is spot on.
One thing I would add: the Shah fell because the military refused to support increasingly brutal crackdowns. Longman argues that the Revolutionary Guard will not turn on the regime, because they literally are the regime. What this leaves out was the role America and Jimmy Carter had in reining in the worst responses the Shah could have reached for. We encouraged reform and, as Tocqueville said, "the most dangerous moment for a bad regime is the moment it tries to reform itself."
There is no external force that can rein in the Revolutionary Guard. There is only the clerics - the ulema - who can break with the regime and deny it legitimacy. Iranian clerics are not monolithic.
If the Iranian regime falls, it will fall the way every other Iranian regime has fallen since 1900: because the ulema decides it has had enough.
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