[siavosh]

i think the reason some people are throwing around the cia/black-ops hypothesis is that all they've ever heard about iran is in the last couple years. which basically meant pursuit of nuclear weapons and a holocaust denying Ahmadinejad. but i think it might help to put the whole thing in a broader context.

what we're seeing right now is another chapter of the iranian revolution. it's been a long story that it started in '79. and these protests themselves are morphing from simply an electoral protest to one that is a continuation of the student protests during khatami's presidency a decade ago.

america has had zero to no presence in iran, much less any tangible way of 'destabalizing' the regime. the money the cia has been throwing at this problem for the last decade has been at things like VOA (voice of america radio broadcasts inside iran) or tacit moral support for minority separatists in iran.

this is not to deny that the west has huge stakes on the outcomes of this, as evidenced by the US government's intervention with the twitter downtime thing and the significant media coverage, or maybe even fake twittering and blogging.

but given the choice of whether an autocratic paranoid regime has rigged the vote to suppress its young population OR a secret cia operation is pulling the levers of what by all accounts seems like an organic grass roots social uprising--i choose the former.