Russian TV is reporting that according to unnamed sources Mubarak is now in a coma. As soon as I heard that, I began suspecting that he was killed by somebody in the security or military. Indeed, on Thursday evening he categorically refused to leave power, and yet he stepped down the very next day, though unlike all the other announcement which he delivered personally, this one was delivered by Suleiman. I mean - I know the man was sick, but still, this is one heck of a weird coincidence in timing don't you think?
Also, according to the BBC, Mousavi has finally been arrested by the Iranian authorities. I have to say that literally from "day 1" I suspected that Mousavi was a puppet of anti-Iranian forces (please check my posts on that topic here and here written one and two days following the election in Iran). But going after the puppet is not enough - the government needs to proceed carefully, of course, but it needs to finally hold Rafsanjani accountable for his role in destabilizing Iran and threatening the very existence of the Islamic Republic. Here is what I wrote about this on the day following the election when Mousavi annouced that he had won without even waiting for the elections result:
Also keep in mind that the post of President holds no real power in Iran to begin with. Why bother with fraud? No, the fraud accusation is an insult to everybody's intelligence. Either that or, which is far more likely, it is a carefully orchestrated destabilization operation against Iran. I say that this is the latter. Mousavi is no idiot for sure (check out his resume here), and since he is not an idiot, he must know that he lost this election and that, in fact, Ahmadinejad won by an un-fakable landslide. Still, he choose the destablilize his own country at a moment when that country is facing a possible military agression from abroad. What does that tell you about Mousavi? It tells me that he is objectively the tool of yet another US backed destabilization campaign. It matters little whether Mousavi himself is a paid CIA agent, or whether his entourage is carefully using his ego to push him towards the kind of action he has taken now. The bottom line is still that Mousavi is now hurting his country and helping to destabilize it.
And as I predicted, Mousavi and his puppeteer Rafsanjani failed, completely. But this is hardly a reason to let them continue their campaign. It is quite clear that these two will now use any, and I do mean any, pretext, crisis or difficulty as a pretext to attempt to destabilize Iran again. For them, the sole guideline henceforth will be "the worse, the better". I do think that Iran is stable enough to neutralize such efforts, but to let the Guccis keep on with their campaign would be fundamentally wrong. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is in the same situation has Hugo Chavez - by ignoring the very real threat of US-run destabilization campaign they do risk ending up in the same situation as Mossadegh in 1953 or Allende did in 1973. This being said, both Chavez and Khamenei should not conflate any and all opposition movements with the ones controlled by the USA. Thus, the crackdown should be very selective and not a pretext to turn Iran or Venezuela into dictatorships. A difficult balancing act for sure, but a vital one nonetheless.
