1) Where did Ahmadinejad get the money to preposition and equipment for foreign forces?

2) Can the mercenaries be removed by removing their pay?

I see a few consequences. The civilian Basenji who emulate the Saudi model of enforcing Sharia behavior in dress codes, etc are the thugs that have been shooting most of the victims. The people know these Basenji. The first to be killed is these hated Basenji.

IRG may not be a factor since loyalties are divided.

This is not a fight to put Mousavi in power but to eliminate Khamenai and installed a different Supreme Leader.

Khamenai has sided with secular military forces of Ahmadinejad who is conveniently out of the country. This is a coup to create a military dictatorship and the other mullahs are contesting that. However rousing the mob is dangerous tactic and no one knows where or what a mob will do. They are riding the tiger and may get eaten.

I am hopeful that the mob will throw all the bums out and institute a more liberal freedom democracy. Some sort of republic and get rid of the religious hierarchy as secular power.

It’s sickening to consider the brutalizing and intimidation that must have been imposed on parents to drag their children away. Iran’s population is NOT the same as the “rabid-dog Palestinians.” On the other hand, Saddam Hussein came close to victory in some of those battles.

It’s also difficult to imagine that surviving family members (and even Martyrs) have forgotten those sacrifices, squandered doubly by a regime that continues to brutalize them in victory, while seeing the hated Saddam toppled in weeks by the USA (“The Great Satan”), after Iran spent EIGHT YEARS in a war comparable to the Trench Warfare of WWI just to achieve a draw…

Of all the various clan and tribal affiliations the most fierce are the Baluchi on the border of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. They tried to assassinate Ahmadineajad, before. And have suffered multiple indignities at Iranian hands but I don’t know that they have yet to be subdued by the IIRC.

The Kurds in the North and West are easier to gather news about, and we know that late last year the Iranian Air force flew into Iraq to bomb Kurdish forces there. With Iranian treasure being spent to keep Hezbollah and Hammas afloat a victory by the velveteers would certainly be a defeat for those forces as well as resulting in the denuclearizing a lot of Iranian defense plans. I think the situation in North Korea would change dramatically as well.

It is easy to see why we would want the velveteers to be ultimately victorious. It is also easy to understand why Khamenei and Ahmadineajad are not going to give up easily. This is for all the marbles, and no one has indicated they are going home yet.

Why does he hold back? There must be a deeper agenda here as far as goes Obama’s part.

Pure evil. When will the American people wise up.

Is the geopolitical setting of Iran as unique as indicated? If so does that explain their impact?
The Russians and Germans have historically followed the pattern of exploding out onto their neighbors. The difference from Iran is that in the European cases it is the lack of secure natural borders that has been used to explain their tendency to expand. So which model is correct, strong boundaries breed instability or weak ones?

China has tended to dominate the hinterlands by expelling minority nomadic communities who wrecked havoc as they traveled outwards. The Huns were only the most prominent of a series of such migrations who could be viewed as slow moving primitive weapons of mass destruction. The Chinese did not care where the barbarian hordes landed as long as they headed outbound.

My expectation is that it will be seen that the Iranians have been punching way above their weight while traveling a self destructive road that denies them the resources that match their pretensions. They can not use their resources and numbers to expand on the Russo-Germanic model (a past model that those two no longer have the demographics for) and they cannot dominate their neighbors or minorities so thoroughly as to use them as weapons to spread destabilization in the Chinese way. The expectation that nuclear weapons will prove a magic bullet to ensure their authority is also flawed.

The Iranians are facing a world where larger and wealthier neighbors have access to equal or superior technology and the surrounding ethnic or imperial communities, Chinese, Indian, Turkish and Arab, will manuever to carve up the resources of the Iranian periphery.