The pressure is piling up on Iran – from below, as people demand greater freedoms;
from the region, where Iran is about to lose its one ally, Syria, to a popular revolt; and from the international community, which is tightening the economic sanctions in response to Tehran’s
illegal nuclear programme.
So Iran is hitting out the only way it knows how – through the use of state-sanctioned and illegal violence. They hope to divert attention from the country’s problems and internecine struggles, reheating old tropes about Britain as the ‘Little Satan’ and maintaining the decades-old decolonialisation rhetoric that all the problems of the region can be explained by outside interference.
This time Britain was the target, as a government-controlled mob ransacked the compound in which the British embassy sits. The Iranian state would have the outside world believe that – while it is capable of preventing the Green Movement from gathering, harassing pro-democracy protesters and imprisoning activists – it was powerless to stop the ransacking of the British embassy.
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