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Regime supporters and critics alike who want to see what it takes to turn a country like Iran around must read Robyn Meredith's "The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means to All of Us."   

The regime's plans for June 12th demonstrate how badly this regime is doing everything wrong by comparison.   Two things will come as no surprise: 

--Three of the men behind it are the Supreme Leadere, his son Mojtaba (Little Caligula) and Jannati (the man who whitewashed the election rigging in his subsequent "investigation").  Khamenei's family has acquired over $37 billlion while Mojtaba and Jannati have become multi-millionaires while the public goes payless.   While per capita income as increased as much as 20 , times since 1979 in some former 3rd world country iit has actually gone down under the mullahocracy.

--Self-proclaimed moral role models don't hesitate at extremely unIslamic behavior if they think they can benefit.  Having watched death squads, rigged elections, show trials rape, murder an unjust imprisonment, Iranians say, "What else would you expect?"  It's obvious to all that Khamenei gave full approval for all behind the scenes.

Forced to depend on force alone "temporarily, the regime calculates that it can recover public support LATER just as Chinese leaders did after Tianneman.  Alas, Iran's situation is so different there's no chance of that since June 12th, 2009.

1. The regime's crimes have been far greater and more widely exposed.

2. The regime targeted a far broader segment of the population--not just students in one city (Beijing).  

3. The regime did so over a longer period with no end in site.   To recover enough public trust that force alone is no longer needed for survival, regimes of this sort need two things: a respite and an ability to use that respite to produce enough weralth to produce some satisfaction.  In Iran there is no prospect of either.

4. The economic incompetence and corruption under Khamenei, the Revolutinary Guard and Basilj  appears far greater than in China.   The latter at least had some gifted leaders capable of an englighted authoritarianism unlike Iran.  

5. Iran's infrastructure sucks.  That includes higher education where Iran had been making progess.  Purges under  "islamization" and "basilj-ization" recall the devastating effects of Mao's "cultural revolution" on  China's universities. Talented professors are fired and replaced with mere propagandists.  Meanwhile the best and the brightest flee as Iran leads the world in "brain drain."  Their return is critical to future economic success.

6. To duplicate the economic success of India and China (and thereby pacify the people) would require similar massive reforms (replacing anti-business policies with pro-business policies, replacing economic nationalism with globalism, replacing xenophobia with an open and friendly attitude to investors).  

Instead Iran appears headed in the opposite direction in evey way possible.   Khamenei sees any reform is seen as a crime and a threat and those who propose such things as enemies.   The Islamic Republic's greatest irony is that a Moussavi victory might have saved the regime in much the same way as Deng's reforms changed China.  

6. Massive investment by outsiders has been CENTRAL to the economic miracles occurring in China and India.  Yet everything about this regime, especially its xenophobic rhetoric (similar to India under the Gandhi's and China under Mao), repels nvestors who can easily find more attractive alternatives elsewhere.  Even if western firms wanted to invest in Iran and even if there were no sanctions, public revulsion in the West would lead to widespread boycotts of firms that did so as happened to firms who tried to conduct businss as usual with apartheid South Africa.