In Iran it’s less and more an internal rift. What does calls up sinister memories are the ‘rival rallies’ that are going on in Teheran: the supporters of A’Nejad and those of Musavi, cf. the rival rallies of the Communist Popular Front versus the United Tajik Opposition in Dushanbe back in 1991.

@Transitionland: Cf. “Iran is a complicated place maybe not entirely full of evil, nuke-happy, irrational Persian Hitlers.”

You know what the irony is? Many may associate the Islamic republic with the Third Reich after Ahmadi-Nejad’s little ‘choquez le bourgeois’ games about the Holocaust and Israël. Yet in reality, the most cozy relations between Iran and the Third Reich occured under the very secular Reza Pahlavi senior. In 1936-37 Germany was Iran’s first trade partners and ideologically, the Nazis and the cult of Persian Arians had a match.

@Paritosh: Interesting question indeed. To me though, the most important dynamic within Islam in Pakistan is not between Sufism and Wahhabism, but between Sufism (which is followed by >50% of the population but stagnating) and the Sunni Deobandiyya movement (less than 30% but increasing) which is not Saudi-backed Wahhabism.

As for Georgia… I dunno, I still think it’s pretty major news that a country we choose to lavish with billions of dollars, free military assistance, and so on, is rather violently cracking down on its own political opposition. The Iranian situation is absolutely a huge deal, but at the same time we kind of expect there to be upheaval (the pundits were buzzing about this for weeks ahead of time). Georgia? Well, even though they’ve had their own share of democracy protests, to me that’s just as big a deal.

I am not a foreign policy analyst or expert but there is a question that bothers me – along the same lines. And I hope I am not misusing this forum to ask for your thoughts…

In Pakistan, there is a distinction made between Sufi (or the gentler) Islam vs. the more stringent Saudi Wahabbism sponsored and emanating from Saudi Arabia.

So, when talking about striking the roots of Islamic extremism, why are we not seeing any action against the Saudis – state or non-state actors, as people like to differentiate nowadays? I guess the answer is probably oil…

Is my line of thought totally screwed or whether there really does exist a fundamental barrier to containing Islamic extremism?

These are much bigger than what happened even in 1999. The level of fraud is far greater, the challenge to the old guard revolutionaries by Ahmadinejad is much more threatening. The backdown by Khamanei did not happen in 1999.

I like the wait and see attitude, but to so who-cares dismissive of what is occurring in Iran is ridiculous. The level of violence alone in the past 24 hours, with reports of several people being killed in Tehran and around the country, far exceeds what we have seen in Georgia.