Iran's Green Movement is one year old this Sunday, the anniversary of its first massive demonstrations in the streets of Tehran. Greeted with great hope in much of the world, a year later it's weaker, the country is more repressive, and its hardliners are in a far stronger position -- and some of their success can be credited to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sanctions hawks in the Obama administration. If, in the past year, those hardliners successfully faced down major challenges within Iranian society and abroad, it was only in part thanks to the regime's skill at repression and sidestepping international pressure. Above all, the ayatollahs benefited from Israeli intransigence and American hypocrisy on nuclear disarmament in the Middle East.

Source: The Platypus Review by Ian Morrison January 8, 2010 Despite unrelenting state repression, there have been rumblings throughout the 2000s of renewed labor organizing inside the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). One result of this upsurge in labor organizing was the May 2005 re-founding of the Syndicate of Workers of the United Bus Company of Tehran and [...]

Source: Agence France-Presse January 1, 2010 TEHRAN – Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi said on Friday that he was ready to sacrifice his life in his campaign to have the disputed June re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad overturned. “I am not unwilling to become a martyr like those who made that sacrifice after the election for their [...]

by Robert F. Worth September 18, 2009 BEIRUT, Lebanon — Tens of thousands of protesters chanted and carried banners through the heart of Tehran and other Iranian cities on Friday, hijacking a government-organized anti-Israel march and injecting new life into the country’s opposition movement. The protests, held in defiance of warnings from the clerical and military elite, served [...]

by Roger Cohen July 16, 2009 The least that could be said, in the sunny morn after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s emphatic reelection as president of Iran, was that festivities of the kind associated with a victory by two thirds of the vote were on hold, discarded in favor of a putsch-like lockdown. Baton-wielding riot police in thigh-length black [...]

by Sasan Fayazmanesh July 21, 2009 We often have a tendency to reduce complex social situations to simplistic scenarios, where there is only black or white and no shades of gray, only heroes or villains and nothing in between. Such seems to be the attitude of many Iran analysts, particularly those on the progressive side, toward the [...]

Woman claims to have seen piles of corpses, as tension rises in Tehran over Rafsanjani speech

The Islamic Revolution Faces the Classic Dilemma of All Revolutions By Dilip Hiro June 28, 2009 By marshalling the regime’s coercive instruments, Iran’s 70-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, has, for now, succeeded in curbing the popular, peaceful challenge to the authenticity of Iran’s fateful June 12th presidential election. But he has paid a heavy political price.

VIDEO: Protests In Iran – June 15-16, 2009 Doctors and nurses protest outside of a hospital in Tehran.

by Juan Cole June 13, 2009 Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen