> ...Anyway my question
> to the list ultimately is, what is so special about Iran and why is
> there all this banal bickering over that society rather than any
> other? I ask this especially because it doesn't seem that anyone is
> all that concerned with the rather clear evidence that the US
> government is involved in aiding the destabilization.
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Part of the anticapitalist intelligensia since the Industrial Revolution has
always had a soft spot for the peasantry and a particular contempt for the
bourgeoisie in the cities, including those most like themselves. They have
idealized rather than lamented "the idiocy of rural life", and identified
the cities with capitalism and liberal individualism. Where you stand on the
recent elections turns, IMO, on whether you primarily view the Islamic
regime and Ahmadinejad government as representing rural backwardness at it's
worst - superstitious, ignorant, patriarchal, authoritarian, and cruel - or
as representing traditional "populist" values, and as being on the front
line against US imperialism. It has combined all of these elements.
No one disputes that the US has an interest in exploiting these divisions and that that it engages in covert operations in Iran as elsewhere. The issue, however, is whether the US orchestrated the recent developments, or whether the social explosion triggered by the election was essentially a sharply heightened expression of the alienation of the more liberal-minded urban masses from the conservative Ahmadinejad government based in the countryside. Like some others, you appear to see the protesters as the cat's paw of imperialism, an urban elite drawn to so-called "Western" (and, by implication, alien) values. Most others on the left, including myself, view it as a characteristic urban-based mass movement whose democratic demands against the rural-based clerical regime are fundamentally progressive.
Of course, the "bickering" over these important issues wasn't "banal", as was the effort to reduce them to the right to wear a bikini in public.