(via Instapundit)  Michael Ledeen over at National Review Online seems to be the only quasi-mainstream member of the press consistently reporting on what's happening in Iran.   Glenn Reynolds comments:

I've been puzzled about why almost no one besides Michael Ledeen (and some bloggers) is talking about this. I'm almost ready to conclude that the Administration is deliberately downplaying it, because they think the mullahs are on their way out anyway, and that (visible) U.S. support for the revolution will do more harm than good. (There is, I strongly suspect, some invisible support.) Either that, or they're just idiots.

Using Glenn's favorite phrase:   Indeed.

Ledeen's latest OpEd is entitled "How Tyrannies Fall."  He describes his disgust at the lack of attention the Iranian situation has been receiving here (I had a blog entry about this here)

If the American government, or the chatterers, or the academy were at all serious about trying to understand the real world, we would be in the midst of a discussion of the potentially earth-shaking events in Iran. And the main topic of discussion would be how close we are to the downfall of the mullahcracy in Tehran. Last Friday something like half a million Iranian citizens took to the streets to demonstrate their disgust with the regime of the Islamic Republic (the very same Islamic Republic with which some of our diplomats unaccountably continue to make deals, and which our secretary of state unaccountably refuses to condemn in the same clear language used by the president, the national-security adviser, and the secretary of defense). Contrary to what little you have been able to read in the popular press, these demonstrations were not limited to Tehran, but spread all over the country, with amazing results. And it was particularly noteworthy that there were very large numbers of female participants; in Tehran, some people I spoke to estimated that between one-half and two-thirds of the demonstrators were women.

When your own police forces are suspect, the clocks' a-tickin:

But it is by no means clear that the regime has the blind loyalty of the security forces any longer; during the recent demonstrations there were several instances of defections to the demonstrators' side, and even the Revolutionary Guards have been subjected to repeated purges, as the mullahs seek desperately to find willing killers and torturers.

And then, Ledeen's extremely insightful thesis:

Which brings us back to the debate-that-is-not-happening. How can we tell when a regime is about to fall? The key ingredient is not the sort of thing that the political scientists talk about in the academies, because it can't be measured, only smelled: It is a combination of failure of nerve at the top, and resolute desperation from below. On both counts, the trends are encouraging, but brutal repression is invariably successful if it is delivered with overwhelming strength, and the would-be revolutionaries cannot effectively cope with it.

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UPDATE: Parapundit offers this commentary on the piece which basically sums up to the last thing the Bush administration needs right now is yet another front VERY good point.

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