Izvestia on the Potomac

I didn't want to hold my breath too long about reports of U.S. intervention in Iran, but here you have it. Izvestia reports:

"Can this revolution a "colored" one to be put on a par with the Serbian, Georgian, Ukrainian, and Kyrgyz? On formal grounds it seems that yes, the reason for people's performances in each of these cases was the outcome of the election, accusations of fraud. But in fact, this is not the case. Iran is too specific a country. There are other factors in this present revolution. Causes of the Iranian Revolt are their own and purely internal. And the infamous "hand of the West" is not visible.

Even the leaders of the CIA have to admit that they have very little leverage on the impact of the situation in Iran. There are no surrogates. Don't think that the Iranian Yushchenko and Saakashvili is the opposition leader, former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. He was once a colleague of Ayatollah Khomeini (another friend of America!). And now his supporters are on a demonstration by shouting "Allah akbar." In general, if one refers to the Iranian revolution's "color," it can be only one color -- Islamic green."

While Izveztia says that the West and CIA hold little leverage in Tehran, the op-ed pages of the Washington Post say that Obama "subtly encouraged" ferment in Iran. Nonetheless, before exhaling, I discovered a straw internet poll in the Russian daily revealing that 46% believe that the situation in Iran is "an 'orange revolution' planned in the West'."



Phew. I thought the world went all topsy-turvy.

Nonetheless, we have the usual arguments trying to debunk the "orange revolution" with the shoots of a "green" one. Unfortunately, many of these commentaries espouse the typical view from Washington and/or the Kremlin that the U.S. had a "hand" in the orange revolution, without doubting the actual effectiveness of technical assistance versus more major factors (i.e. the Constitutional Court annulled the vote on 12/3/04). Iran is not Ukraine -- except in the minds of those who wish to prop up the ideologically-driven, and arrogant, argument that the U.S. must have a hand in everything:

"Over the last couple of decades, the U.S. has actually gotten good at nudging along regime change through elections. In Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, U.S. advisers harnessed popular rage at the theft of an election and provided a variety of technical assistance to help engineer revolutions."

Considering the impending media blackout in Iran, for now I am comfortable with Izvestia's simplistic analysis that Iran is "too specific" to be compared to Ukraine.