Word: classing
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...leader who proceeded to gut the country's economy and sully Iran's reputation in the world. Reformist politicians, whose candidates had fared badly at the polls, told moderate Iranians that they were to blame for Ahmadinejad's victory. If the so-called silent majority - the millions of middle-class, educated Iranians who seek more freedom and economic opportunity - had voted, the emerging wisdom went, then the country wouldn't have been lost to the lunatic with the peculiar Windbreaker. (See pictures from the tumultuous Iranian election...
...professionals. People's anger and despair over Ahmadinejad's mismanagement of the economy pulsed throughout Tehran. People were not just discontent; they were punching-the-wall furious. Dismissing opposition to Ahmadinejad as a north Tehran phenomenon, limited only to affluent urban areas, is insulting to the millions of middle-class Iranians who have suffered the most under his tenure. As a rule, affluent Iranians aren't much affected by high inflation and unemployment. As the foreclosure crisis in the U.S. has shown, it is people of modest or low income who feel the pinch when an economy falters...
...segment of the revolution's political establishment. Just as Mao Zedong, in China's Cultural Revolution, unleashed a campaign of terror carried out by poorer young people against what he decried as the more liberal, "bourgeois" elements of the communist party, so does Ahmadinejad claim to be waging a class war, with the backing of the poor and the security forces, against a corrupt political elite brought to power by the revolution. And he clearly has Khamenei's backing...
...case of a safety valve is that of China after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. In effect, for 20 years, China has been able to buy off the pressure for political reform expressed in 1989 by hugely expanding economic opportunities and enhanced life-chances for its growing middle class. So far, growing prosperity has acted as a dampener, not a multiplier, on aspirations for political liberalization. (Check out a story about how Tehran's streets became a battleground...
...controlled, nondemocratic internal political system and an economy that was open to the world. China, after all, has managed something rather similar. An Iran that pursues its ambitions to be a nuclear power, however, will in the very best case be a country where an outward-oriented middle class feels increasingly disenfranchised, and hence likely to challenge the regime. The worst case, of course, is war, if Israel and the U.S. decide that the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is intolerable...