Sir Richard Dalton who served as HM Ambassador in Iran gives his view on the drama unfolding there:

Despite how individuals may have voted – and notwithstanding brave acts of individual protest, such as resignations – the government apparatus, the parliament, the clergy, the commercial elite and most civil society organisations have not declared for change. So the power of the street has to face the power of the state and its many-layered and ruthless security forces.

A successful challenge to Khamenei and the faction supporting Ahmadinejad would require three things: a coalition united behind the aim of adjusting Iran’s constitution or rewriting it; a countrywide leadership; and a broad strategy. Not enough people seem ready to act in this way.

A pessimistic view. But hard to argue with it?

Here via Andrew Sullivan is what is much of the text of Ayatollah Khamenei’s vile speech the other day. As well as his ravings against the UK he has these two passages:

The competition for the election was very clear. Enemies and dirty Zionists tried to show the election as a contest between the regime and against it. That is not true, all four candidates support the regime… (Note: ie the whole business is a sham anyway]

We don’t claim there is no corruption in our regime. But this is one of the most healthy systems in the world. Zionists claims of corruption are not right.

For a spiritual leader he does a busy line in lumpen anti-Semitism. And if not enough Iranians are (yet) ready to rise up against this wicked man and topple all he represents, so much the worse for Iran – and the rest of us.

Mark Steyn looks at the Western/Obama approach to Iran based on its careful phrasing aimed at avoiding any impression of ‘interfering’. And is unimpressed:

What would you make of that “equidistance” if you were back in the palace watching it on CNN International? Maybe you’d know that, on domestic policy, Obama uses the veneer of disinterested arbiter as a feint. Or maybe you’d just figure that no serious world leader can ever be neutral on vital issues.

So you’d start combing the speech for what lies underneath the usual Obama straw men — and women: “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”

Very brave of you, I’m sure. But what about the Muslim women who choose not to cover themselves and wind up as the victims of honor killings in Germany and Scandinavia and Toronto and Dallas? Ah, but that would have required real courage, not audience flattery masquerading as such.

And so, when the analysts had finished combing the speech, they would have concluded that the meta-message of his “equidistance” was a prostration before “stability” — an acceptance of the region’s worst pathologies as a permanent feature of life.

The mullahs stole this election on a grander scale than ever before primarily for reasons of internal security and regional strategy. But Obama’s speech told them that, in the “post-American world,” they could do so with impunity.

Blaming his “agents” for the protests is merely a bonus: Offered the world’s biggest carrot, Khamenei took it and used it as a stick.

Hard to argue with that either?