Digital David fights theocratic Goliath.

Here is an interesting article by Timothy Garton Ash at the Guardian:

Whatever happens next, Iran has already written a new chapter in the history of people power. Every single Iranian woman or man who has broken through a personal barrier of fear to protest peacefully on the streets of Tehran, Isfahan or Shiraz, wearing some strip of green, is making history.

Alone, each individual is powerless. Together, by the sheer power of numbers, they can – if only for a few hours – utterly confound the violent repressive power of the state. Even the brutal thugs of the Basij militia simply cannot beat so many human beings over the head. So long as the green-clad protesters remain non-violent, which the great majority of them do, and so long as they keep coming out in large numbers, Mahatma Gandhi will be applauding from beyond the grave. For they will have learned Gandhi's fundamental lesson about the power of the powerless.

The quintessence of people power remains the same, but every new chapter in its history brings some new development. This year's Iranian innovation is the deployment of the latest information and communication technologies.

Details of demonstration venues, tactics and slogans are passed round via Twitter, social networking sites like Facebook and text messages. Videos of demos and shootings are uploaded on to YouTube and other websites, whence they can be accessed from outside the country and broadcast back into it. Digital David fights theocratic Goliath.

None of which is to say that the young Iranians tweeting for freedom will succeed in the short term. Or that more of them will be not be assaulted and murdered in their student dorms by those Basij goons, as some already have been. Or that we in the west should rush to label this "the green revolution", and over-hastily compare it to the toppling of the Shah 30 years ago. Or that we should be naive about the motives of clerical schemers like Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose backroom manoeuvering is an important part of this story.

People power movements often do fail, at least in the short term. Like the Burmese protests of 2007, they then live on as memories and touching images of a brief people power moment – until, maybe decades later, they finally take their place in the retrospective mythology of a liberated country.

In this case, I have no doubt that the young men and women who provide much of the energy of the opposition demos will win in the end. Two out of every three Iranians is under 30. Many were born at a time when the mullahs were urging families to have more children – little "soldiers of the hidden Imam", propagandists called them – to strengthen the new Islamic regime and replace the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war. Thanks to a big expansion of higher education under the Islamic Republic, millions of them have been to university. Roughly half of those graduates are women. And more than two thirds of Iran's people live in cities.

This young, increasingly educated and urban population wants jobs, homes, opportunities and more freedom. Anyone who has travelled around Iran talking to these young people knows how discontented they are. Last week the whole world saw it, above all in the unforgettable faces and words of those Iranian women who, as women in an Islamic state, are doubly in need of the power of the powerless.

So this Islamic revolution has created the children who will eventually devour it. Those who were meant to be "soldiers of the hidden Imam" will one day see off the self-styled officers of the hidden imam, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But that day seems unlikely to be today or tomorrow.

For now, we should concentrate on the stolen election. It was only the scale and brazenness of the electoral fraud that turned a moment of politics into a moment of history. If the regime had fixed it so Ahmadinejad scraped back with, say, 52% while the opposition candidates won in their home areas, there would have been protests – but probably nothing on this scale. Many, including western governments, might have accepted the result, recognising that Ahmadinejad does have a significant level of genuine support. Instead, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, licensed this bogus landslide and even blessed it as a "divine assessment".

As a result of the Supreme Leader's supreme political misjudgment, the protagonists of change now have two great advantages. First, there is a clear, simple appeal which attracts the ­support of millions of ordinary Iranians who may not agree on much else: "My vote was treated with contempt. It must be respected." Second, and crucially for the success of many people power movements, the regime itself is deeply divided.

For those Iranians who want significant change, the challenge now is to maintain the peaceful popular pressure and to keep it strategically focused on Mir Hussein Mousavi's demand for a fresh election. A crucial moment will come if the Guardian Council, which is now revisiting the "divine assessment" to the extent of countenancing a partial recount, decides over the next week or two that Ahmadinejad did win, albeit by a smaller margin of divine falsification. What then? Is there sufficient energy, somewhere between a self-mobilised, networked youth, the Mousavi camp and disaffected factions within the regime, to sustain the demand for a new election? Or will it all fizzle out, defeated by a combination of repression, censorship, exhaustion and disunity?

Only the people of Iran can answer this question. Only they have the right to answer it. For western governments to come out explicitly in support of Mousavi and the protesters – as George W Bush would have done, and John McCain now urges – would only give the regime a stick with which to beat Iranian democrats. This is, after all, a state that for decades has blamed all evil things on the ­machinations of the great (American) and little (British) satans. By contrast, to follow China and Russia in recognising Ahmadinejad's fraudulent victory – misguidedly putting a short-term interest in pursuing nuclear negotiations before the longer term interest of democratisation – would be a slap in the face of disenfranchised Iranians.

As so gratifyingly often over the last five months, Barack Obama has thus far got the balance just right.

There is, however, one thing our governments can and should do, ­without needing to say anything in direct relation to the authorities in Iran. This is to maintain and enhance the 21st-century global information infrastructure which allows Iranians – whichever candidate they support – to keep in touch with each other and to find out what is really happening in their own country. Earlier this week, I spent some time in the studio of the BBC Persian TV service, watching them upload and air electrifying video footage, blog posts and messages generated by Iranians from inside Iran.

Probably the single most important thing the US state department has done for Iran recently was to contact Twitter over the weekend, to urge it to delay a planned upgrade that could have taken down service to Iranians for some crucial hours of people power protest. Welcome to the new politics of the 21st century.

This is an excellent article. It hits all the right notes. It is cautious. It puts things in historical context. It urges the focus to be kept on the immediate in order to make the long term possible. Too many attempts at social change go off the rails because social demands explode into the utopian and too many voices confuse the populace. Finally, this article points out that change is hard, that change may not come quickly, that his may be yet another false dawn. It encourages but reminds people to be realistic. It points out that most things in life an achievement takes hard work and long term commitment. Too often easy "victories" are hollow. Real change requires real commitment and a sustained focus. This is an excellent article.