In the crowd at Azadi Square, Green Movement supporters who unfurled banners or chanted “down with the dictator” were said by dissident web site Kalemeh.org to have been swiftly arrested by plainclothesmen stationed in the crowds for this purpose.

Interestingly, the authorities did permit former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami to attend the huge rally at Azadi Square. Did these two give undertakings that they and their followers would not attempt to use the occasion to promote protests? Why were they treated so differently from Mousavi, whom they support?

Mousavi’s, wife, prominent “Islamic feminist” leader Zahra Rahnavard, attempted to attend a protest rally at Sadeghieh Square, but she was likewise surrounded by plainclothesmen, who began cursing and beating her. Supporters her spirited her away. At Sadeghieh Square itself a small rally was broken up by security forces and plainsclothesmen, who arrested a number of people. AFP quotes opposition sources saying that tear gas and the brandishing of knives were used in the repression. Other rallies of oppositionists were treated with similar brutality.

As this unverified video shows, anti-riot police in full battle gear were also inserted strategically into the crowds.

The Guardian quotes a disheartened dissident: “There were 300 of us, maximum 500. Against 10,000 people,” one protester told the Associated Press. “It means they won and we lost. They defeated us. They were able to gather so many people. But this doesn’t mean we have been defeated for good. It’s a defeat for now. We need time to regroup.”

Mehdi Karroubi, another dissident and former presidential candidate, was also stopped by plainclothesmen from reaching Sadeghieh Square, by regime tear gas. He is said to have developed difficulty breathing. He was also hit on the head by a stone cast at him, but was not seriously wounded. His bodyguards are said to have been injured. In an interview, his son describes his father’s condition and expresses concern about the whereabouts of his brother (Mehdi Karroubi’s other son), Ali. Some say the latter was arrested.

AP reports on the pro-regime rally at Freedom Square on Thursday:

I have to admit puzzlement about the actions of the leadership and rank and file of the Green Movement on Thursday. Mousavi, Rahnavard and Karroubi appeared to think they would be allowed to go to anti-regime rallying sites, and proceeded in public so that they were easily identified and stopped. The demonstrators also appear to have acted predictably, such that the regime was ready for them and successfully broke up the rallies. I have to wonder whether the regime has not managed to insert spies into the informal leadership of the inchoate Green Movement, or tapped their phones or something, because they appear to have have anticipated their every move.

Some Green Movement supporters objected to my characterization of Thursday as a ‘failure to mobilize,’ saying that I wasn’t taking into account the sheer brutality of regime measures. But it is a given that this regime is brutal. It was brutal on Ashura (December 27, 2009), but the Greens nevertheless managed to make an impressive showing, and despite regime foreknowledge that it would be a flash point.

What I would say is that coming off the Ashura protests, the Green Movement had the momentum and the regime was under pressure. The rallies had spread to a number of cities, including conservative ones like Isfahan and Mashhad. The crowds seemed to be turning on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

After Thursday, the momentum is now with the regime. Either the Revolutionary Guards are getting better at countering the dissidents or movement members are tired of getting beaten up with no measurable political impact. As I wrote yesterday, the regime blocked the “flashmobs” by interfering with electronic communication (Gmail, Facebook, Twitter). They also thought strategically about how to control the public space of major cities, resorting to plainclothesmen rather than just uniformed police squads. It is also possible that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s brinkmanship with the West over Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program is causing the Iranian public to rally to the regime in the face of American, Israeli and European threats.

The Green Movement cannot depend on being able to go on indefinitely mounting big public demonstrations, especially since the cost to the protesters is rising, with beatings, firing of live ammunition, mass arrests and executions. It also cannot continue to depend on informal networks to organize, since these can be fairly easily disrupted.

Mousavi has said he refuses to form a political party. There are such parties or at least vague groupings in Iranian politics — former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani leads one — and they have members of Parliament. By refusing to develop a grassroots political organization, Mousavi may be making the same mistake as former president Abo’l-Hasan Bani-Sadr, who was toppled from the presidency in summer, 1981, because he declined to seek a mass organization, whereas his enemies had the “Hezbollah” popular militia and the Islamic Republican Party that grouped key hard line clerics. Ahmadinejad has his Alliance of Builders in Tehran, and is backed by the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij paramilitary, and other security forces. Mousavi has the little flashmobs who couldn’t, at least on Thursday.

Those who insist that Iran is trying to get a bomb have a difficult time explaining why Khamenei forbids it as un-Islamic and why the president and others all deny it. It is possible that they are lying, but their denials at least have to be noted and analyzed. The skeptics also have to explain away why the 16 US intelligence agencies say after exhaustive espionage and investigation that there is no weapons program now and that there hasn’t been one for some time.

Those who agree with the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as with the International Atomic Energy Agency, that there is no evidence for Iran having a nuclear weapons program have to explain Iran’s insistence on closing the fuel cycle and being able to enrich uranium itself.

The answer I propose, which explains all the anomalies elegantly and concisely, is that Iran is seeking nuclear latency. Latency is the possession of a nuclear energy program and of reactors, which would allow the production of an atomic bomb on short notice if an extreme danger to national autonomy reared its ugly head. Nuclear latency is sometimes called the ‘Japan option,’ because given its sophisticated scientific establishment and enormous economy, Japan could clearly produce a nuclear weapon on short notice if its government decided to mount a crash program.

The reason for the construction of the Qom facility, in this reading, would be that the Natanz facility is too easily bombed or struck with missiles. Moreover, the Israelis and some Americans have repeatedly threatened to strike it. A nuclear enrichment program such as that at Natanz, which is subject to being wiped out by a military strike, cannot truly provide nuclear latency. The Qom facility was necessary in the regime’s eyes if the latency strategy was to be preserved.

The regime has every reason to maintain latency and no reasons to go further and construct a nuclear device. The latter step would attract severe international sanctions.

I was on an email list where someone expressed suspicion of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s 2005 fatwa against the possession and use of nuclear weapons by an Islamic state.

One suggestion was that Khamenei is not a real Shiite jurisprudent and has eschewed having followers inside Iran. But, no, Khamenei is a mujtahid or independent jurist and has the standing to issue a fatwa or considered ruling on the law.. A mujtahid may always decline to accept muqallidun or followers, which Khamenei appears to have done for Iranian nationals, without that affecting his legitimate right to issue fatwas. The theory of ijtihad or independent jurisprudential reasoning holds that the law inheres in the reasoning processes of the jurisprudent; whether the jurisprudent has followers or not is irrelevant to the discovery of the law in a particular instance. Moreover, as rahbar or supreme leader,, Khamenei’s pronouncements on such matters might even be seen as a hukm or standing command. Finally, since he sets policy on such matters, what difference, in any case, would it make what exact jurisprudential standing his fatwas enjoy?

The only real question is whether he is lying and insincere. That would be a dangerous ploy on his part, in a state premised on Islamic jurisprudence, as Fareed Zakaria has pointed out.

As for the general Islamic law of war, it forbids killing innocent non-combatants such as women, children and unarmed men; ipso facto it forbids deploying nuclear weapons. It was suggested that Iran has chemical weapons and that these would as much violate the stricture above as nuclear warheads. I do not agree that Iran has a chemical weapons program, but in any case chemical weapons have for the most part been battlefield weapons used against massed troops or in trenches. Having such a program does not imply intent to kill innocent civilians. Whereas making a bomb does imply such intent and is therefore considered by most Muslim jurisprudents incompatible with Islamic law.

Khamenei seems to me to have decided some time ago on a policy of nuclear latency, for two reasons. Nuclear reactors lend Iran a hope of energy independence. Iran produces 3.8 million barrels per day of petroleum and uses about 2 mn. b/d itself. It is likely that soon Iran will use up all of its daily petroleum production, leaving it without the petroleum income windfall upon which its government depends. At that point, Khamenei fears, Iran would be dragooned back into the neo-liberal, America-centric order that had dominated Iran under the shah. Second, nuclear latency would help fend off aggressive attempts at regime change by the Western powers or Israel.

Nuclear latency has all the advantages of actual possession of a bomb without any of the unpleasant consequences, of the sort North Korea is suffering.

Even if my thesis that Iran seeks nuclear latency were accepted, isn’t there a chance that in the future the leaders of the Islamic Republic might seek a weapon?

Scott Sagan noted in one of his essays that one impetus to seek an actual bomb is regime and national pride in the country’s modernity. But this motivation does not exist in the case of Iran, since the Islamic Republic is a critic of the alleged horrors of modernity and because it defines nuclear bombs as shameful, rather than something to boast about.

Moreover, latent nuclear states sometimes give up their latency and foreswear even a nuclear option. Brazil and Argentina mothballed their programs in the 1980s, either because they saw each other as insufficiently threatening or because their move to democratic rule lessed the power of the military-industrial complex in each country that had been plumping for nukes (Sagan thinks it is the latter).

The problem for the West is that nuclear latency is not illegal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And conveniently for Khamenei, nuclear latency is not incompatible with Islamic law. That is why the US and its close allies have to pretend that Iran is actually going for a bomb, despite the lack of good evidence for serious weaponization; they are using this pretense as a way to attempt to forestall a Japan option, which is what they really object to, since it is a geostrategic game changer for the region in and of itself. Unfortunately for them, the General Assembly is unconvinced, and China and Russia are reluctant.

Obama chaired the U.N. Security Council at the summit level on Thursday, and managed to get through an important resolution on nuclear disarmament. 

United Nations Television has video:

The BBC notes that there are increasing fears that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is breaking down. It was originally pitched as a bargain between the nuclear powers and the rest of the world, such that the countries with nukes would gradually get rid of them, while sharing expertise in nuclear-energy generation, while the other countries would agree not to acquire them.

Israel was the first non-European country to refuse to sign and then to go on to develop nuclear weapons by the early 1970s, with French and British help.

Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency censured Israel for its estimated 200 warheads, acquiescing in a resolution introduced by Arab states. The vote was another sign, in the wake of the damning Goldstone report on Israeli atrocities in Gaza, that the international community is fast losing patience with unilateral Israeli policies.

In the 1990s, India and Pakistan got the bomb (India had done some low-yield test as early as the 1970s). More recently, North Korea has. Many countries have or seek what is called the “Japan option.” It is generally thought that Japan could construct a nuclear weapon very rapidly if it felt threatened enough. This emergency capacity is also thought to be sought by Iran, which denies that it currently has a weapons research program. 

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev signaled on Thursday that his country could eventually support further UNSC sanctions on Iran if Tehran declines to be more transparent about its nuclear research program with the IAEA. His position appeared more open to increased sanctions than that expressed recently by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is widely regarded as the de facto ruler of the Russian Federation.

Russia Today has video:

Medvedev’s flexibility comes in the wake of the Obama administration’s cancellation of plans for missile shield installations in Eastern Europe. Although both countries deny that there is any quid pro quo, it seems obvious that Obama’s goodwill gesture has yielded positive results in Moscow with regard to Iran policy.

Washington’s earlier push at the United Nations against the Iranian nuclear research program foundered when Iran charged hypocrisy on the part of the nuclear powers and insisted that its program is solely peaceful (an allegation that as far as U.S. intelligence can tell is probably true). Obama’s stress on new nuclear disarmament agreements is in part intended to blunt any further Iranian diplomatic campaign and to put Iran in the position of looking obstreperous if it is not forthcoming in the upcoming negotiations with the five permanent UNSC members plus Germany.

U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown took a hard-line position, urging further U.S. sanction, according to ITN:

Brown erred in charging Iran with having a nuclear weapons program, which U.S. intelligence can find no evidence for. But because it is using centrifuge technology that is open-ended and could be suitable for dual use, Western leaders such as Brown are suspicious that the program has weapons implications down the road.

China disagreed with Brown’s stance, and is opposed to further sanctions on Iran. But China has a doctrine of “Harmonious Development,” which prescribes that it stays out of the way of the other great powers and avoid political adventurism while it grows its economy. The Chinese might well be susceptible to U.S. and U.K. pressure to move against Iran if the outcome of the forthcoming 5 + 1 talks is disappointing.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s appearance at the U.N. was decried by Israeli liberals as clownish. He seemed to take Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s bait by trying to offer documentary proof of the Holocaust (the event is not in doubt and doesn’t need to be proven) and then by referring to little Hamas in Gaza (pop. 1.5 million) as Nazis. Isn’t there a rule that if you make an analogy to the Nazis in your argument, you automatically lose? And since Israel declined to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has a couple hundred warheads, and has occasionally brandished them against other countries, Netanyahu altogether lacks credibility as a critic of Iran’s peaceful civilian nuclear research program.

Andrew Butters at Time magazine explores the issue of whether making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, as some have suggested, is a realistic goal. He concludes that it is more realistic than might be at first assumed.

Iran’s inflation rate is still over 20 percent. Oil prices have been down this year. Unemployment and underemployment are alleged by regime critics to be massive. The country lacks refining capacity and imports 40 percent of its gasoline, producing occasional rationing. Oil and gas majors such as Royal Dutch Shell and Total S.A. have been scared off from developing Iran’s enormous natural gas fields by the threat of U.S. sanctions. The country has been rocked by massive demonstrations by protesters who insist that the June presidential elections were stolen. On Friday, thousands of protesters came into the streets of the capital and of other cities for yet more anti-Ahmadinejad rallies. Although a recent poll suggests that the president has the support of some 60 percent of Iranians, the poll was conducted from abroad by telephone and likely its results were skewed by fear of reprisals on the part of respondents.

Abroad, the president made himself an international laughingstock with his questioning of the full extent of the Holocaust and his expressed conviction that the “Zionist state” in Israel will collapse (widely misinterpreted in the West as a threat to “wipe Israel off the map”). There is increasingly severe talk by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and German Chancellor Angela Merkel of ratcheting up sanctions, over Iran’s insufficient cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, especially with regard to its missile development programs.

Given its economic woes and the box in which the international community has placed its development prospects, you would think the Iranian government would be eager for the direct talks with the United States that are being proffered for the first time in years by the Obama administration, and would go into them trying to make a good impression. Instead, Ahmadinejad gave a major speech on Friday, Jerusalem Day, an annual event devoted to Palestinian solidarity, in which he ventured still deeper into Holocaust denial and further harmed his government’s credibility. He called the Holocaust, which he characterized as a mere pretext for Zionist expropriation of Palestine and expulsion of the Palestinians, a “lie” and a “fable.”

In preparation for renewed direct talks with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, Iran had released in September a non-document that did not so much as even mention the main point of contention, its nuclear research program. In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Ahmadinejad replied to a question about whether Iran was prepared to be flexible on its nuclear program, saying, “If you are talking about the enrichment of uranium for peaceful purposes, this will never be closed down here in Iran.”

Iran has the right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to learn how to produce enriched uranium to fuel the reactors it is building. But the centrifuges it is using are an open-ended technology, such that if a nation can learn to use them to enrich uranium to 22 percent (enough for reactor fuel), there is no absolute bar to its learning to enrich to the 95 percent required for a nuclear bomb. Iran can therefore only allay suspicions that it actually wants a bomb by allowing thorough (and even surprise) U.N. inspections and by granting greater access to its scientists, engineers and equipment. Iran was caught doing undeclared weapons-related research in 2002, which is forbidden in the NPT, so it is on a kind of probation from the point of view of the West.

None of this Iranian performance could have been comforting to the UNSC members and Germany. The United States rejected the Iranian proposal concerning the resumption of talks. Perhaps alarmed at the way Ahmadinejad had introduced new uncertainties concerning Iran’s nuclear ambitions at an awkward time, Supreme Leader Khamenei underscored in his sermon for the holy day, Eid al-Fitr, on Sunday, that Iran will never countenance, possess or deploy nuclear weapons because they directly contradict Islamic ideology (which forbids killing innocents in war).

Iran may be counting on Russia and China to come to its aid. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad would be foolish to make that bet. Although Russia’s prime minister (and de facto leader), Vladimir Putin, recently spoke out against further sanctions on Iran, President Dmitry Medvedev indicated in a CNN interview on Sunday that Russia’s patience is not infinite. He said, “Iran must cooperate with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], this is an absolutely indubitable thing, if it wishes to develop its nuclear dimension, nuclear energy program.” It is possible that Russia will be more flexible on the Iran sanctions issue now that President Obama has canceled plans to build missile shield facilities in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic, plans to which Moscow had vehemently objected. Likewise, Obama is seeking to blunt Iran’s propaganda campaign concerning the nukes of the great powers by pushing for further nuclear disarmament in the U.S. and Russia.

Further unilateral U.S. sanctions and collective UNSC measures should be taken more seriously than they are by Iran. Ahmadinejad defiantly told NBC, “We think for one or two countries to think that they own the world and they are the ones that make the major global decisions and others should follow — that period has come to an end.” But Iraq’s economy was ruined by U.S. and U.N. sanctions in the 1990s, and the lack for some period of time of chlorine for water purification and of some medicines is thought to have been responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. Targeted sanctions on North Korea interdict military and technological equipment, exclude luxury goods, and constrain the country’s finance system. This summer, the UNSC went further and urged member nations actually to board suspect North Korean ships. China, which had earlier blocked such moves, agreed to this resolution because its leaders were furious about North Korea’s underground nuclear test. The Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime risks making Iran a pariah on the North Korea model if it goes on defying the international community. Iran’s people will be the real losers if that happens.