See also Iran in the 80s, if my neighbor with Kurdish family in the region is correct.

The story, which I don’t have time to confirm right now: there were power fights among leaders of the revolution. Those who lost were murdered and declared “martyrs” for public consumption.

(And note well the fact that, once the inevitable happens and the rebellion is crushed, that there might be such a patriotic fervor — artificially manufactured or not — that some kook in the Iranian army might go ahead and bomb Israel. The odds of this actually happening are very long. But they could get shorter… and too close for comfort.)

[ON SECOND THOUGHT: maybe not. Maybe the anti-Israel rhetoric is designed purely for show and for domestic consumption. And maybe they'll just keep using Hezzbollah or Islamic Jihad or whoever else to do the dirty work for them. I mean, there has to be a calculation somewhere within the hierarchy which says that Iran cannot withstand air strikes from the US/Israel, and that whatever nascent nuclear technology they have would surely be Target No. 1. I don't know. This is hard to figure.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_7GPBiikFM

(1) The Ayatollahs can order a brutal, repressive, murderous carackdown, including midnight raids, death squads, and tens of thousands of “dissapearances” of young politically active reformist students (see Argentina in the 1970 and 80s).

(2) We can follow the advice of American neo-conservatives and attack the country, thus uniting the vast majority of the population behind the Ayatollahs (again, see Argentina during the Falklands war*).

*of course, the Falklands war was started by the Argentine military to consolidate their power, so following the neo-cons here would be like doing the Ayatollahs’ dirty work for them.