All eyes are on Iran. On December 28, as if from nowhere, protests broke out in Iran’s second most populous city, Mashhad – out in the far east, near the Turkmenistan and Afghanistan border. The protests moved with deliberate speed across the country, to Kermanshah in the west and Bandar Abbas in the south. Tehran was not spared, although it is not the epicenter of the protests. This is unlike the Green Movement of 2009, when Tehran’s reform-minded citizens came onto the streets angry with what they saw as a stolen election. It is unlike the student uprisings of 1999, again centered in Tehran, when students protested over the closure of the reform newspaper Salam.
Those were protests of a rising middle-class, throttled by social sanctions and by political limitations. Their protests culminated in the election of President Hassan Rouhani, who is the current standard bearer of their hopes. Social sanctions have been eased in Tehran – women openly sit in public without the veil (the police in Tehran had said earlier last year that they would not arrest women who did not wear the hijab). Even political rights are now somewhat available to the reformers. Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the National Security Council, said that restrictions on imprisoned reformist leaders would be lifted.
The current wave of protests is characterized not so much by a desire for an expanded political system, the terms of previous ‘reform’ protests. This…