[Urbane Guerrilla]

For an example of the mullahs and only the mullahs ruling in Iran, and keeping Iran from any semblance of being a democracy, here's something David Frum quotes:

A few weeks ago, the veteran Newsweek reporter Michael Hirsh wrote a series of online diary entries from Iran that convincingly argued for American engagement with Tehran. Hirsh found Iran to be less repressive than one might expect, reporting that women find stylish ways around the regime’s dress code, the recent arrests of four Iranian-American scholars “scarcely provoke much discussion,” and the crackdown on dissent “is most often accomplished in subtle rather than savage ways.” Hirsh’s entry for June 20th called Iran “a country that supposedly puts dissenters in jail.” Even a cleric in Qom took Hirsh to task for not being critical enough.

Meanwhile, on July 9th, fifteen Iranian students and the mother of another were beaten and jailed after demonstrating in commemoration of an assault on student activists in 1999.

On July 10th, the leader of an independent trade union, who spent most of last year in prison, was abducted from a Tehran bus.

On July 11th, the Iranian judiciary banned a moderate news agency, just a few days after shutting down a newspaper that had resumed publication only two months earlier, following a seven-year ban.

In the spring, a hundred and fifty thousand Iranians were briefly detained for wearing clothes or hairstyles deemed un-Islamic. According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Iranian news organizations have been instructed not to report negative news regarding social unrest, gas rationing in the world’s fourth-largest oil exporter, the nuclear program, or the impact of U.N. sanctions on Iran.” Recently, Iran has lifted a moratorium on stoning, and has ramped up the number of executions of adulterers, homosexuals, and minors. Westerners in Iran report that Iranians no longer can accept invitations to cultural exchanges, overseas conferences, or social events at which Western diplomats will be present. Those who do are seen by the state as collaborating with the enemy.

This new crackdown by the regime is, Iran experts say, as severe as any in two decades. Women’s-rights activists, students, trade unionists, journalists, and those with connections to the West are under assault by the full extent of the state’s repressive apparatus—the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia. Torture of the growing number of political prisoners is routine.

Why did a journalist as experienced as Michael Hirsh not notice? Because, justifiably arguing for dialogue and against fantasies of easy regime change, he wants to be able to say that things are not as bad as you think in Iran. The truth is, things are worse than you think for any Iranian who tries to exercise minimal political rights. Just as the neoconservatives concocted a simple case on Iraq and, now, Iran—claiming that the locals would welcome regime change from outside—people like Hirsh want to make a simple case, too. It’s a great temptation to say that, because X is true, Y, which seems to point in a different direction from X, must be false. We all want total vindication. But in politics there is no total vindication, on Iran or anything else. The regime there is brutal, and we should talk to it.

Scroll down about a third of the way.