Discontent with Ahmadinejad's re-election still smolders on campuses

BEIRUT — Students in the southwest Iranian city of Ahvaz recently launched an impromptu protest in a campus auditorium. In Kashan on Monday, they took over the campus cafeteria, singing anti-government songs. A couple of weeks ago in Tehran, they cheered as someone threw a shoe at President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's former culture minister.

On Monday, they shouted down the ex-minister, Mohammad-Hossein Saffar-Harandi.

Largely absent from international media reports and discounted by Western policymakers more focused on Iran's nuclear program, the protest movement that erupted after Ahmadinejad's disputed June 12 re-election has continued to smolder, mostly on college campuses.

Today, defying warnings by security officials, protesters plan to stage their first large public gatherings in six weeks. They hope to turn a march commemorating the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy into an anti-government rally.

In anticipation, authorities have issued widespread warnings.

The head of Tehran's anti-riot units said police would use all their "power and capacity" against protesters. The powerful Revolutionary Guard — which led the postelection crackdown — issued a similar warning Monday.

"Death to Israel" and "Death to America" are the only officially sanctioned slogans, state-run television said. "All other slogans are illegal."

But the opposition is determined not to lose the moment. Pro-reform Web sites have issued appeals to join protests. The calls were given a boost last week by defiant statements from opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and former President Mohammad Khatami.

In the West, however, some analysts have begun to discount the opposition's ability to affect the regime's decision-making calculus. Some say months of repression have gutted the movement of its organizational capacity and leadership.

"Our view is that the regime has largely neutralized the opposition," said Mark Fowler, a former CIA analyst who now heads Persia House, a service run by the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting company in Washington, D.C. "It seems to us that they have pretty much decapitated the opposition in terms of leadership. I don't think the government is particularly worried about it."

Many also doubt the opposition's ability to serve as an alternative to the hard-liners who hold power in Tehran.

In a series of opinion pieces and public speeches, Hillary and Flynt Leverett, former Middle East analysts for the CIA, National Security Council and State Department, have urged the Obama administration to abide by the results of Iran's election and to engage with its current leadership.

Analysts say dismissing Iran's civil society as a factor in formulating Iran policy makes it much more palatable politically either to cutting a nuclear deal with Ahmadinejad or upping sanctions against Iran that could undermine the opposition.

But the U.S. government has yet to write off Iran's so-called Green Movement, a network of individuals and groups who oppose Ahmadinejad, several analysts say. Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University who served as national-security adviser in the Carter administration, recalled that there were long stretches "when nothing seemed to be happening" in the months before Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was deposed.

In either case, Iran's nuclear program remains a top U.S. priority. And few American officials expect the opposition to cause any shift by the Iranian government on nuclear policy in the next year, a critical period in which many fear Iran could move dramatically closer to building an atomic bomb.

The Obama administration "can't hang its hat on the Green Movement," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "But they don't dismiss it. They are aware that they need to consider the possibility of reconciling with Iran without pouring cold water on the momentum of the movement."

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.