?Would MLK Back Iran's Protesters

In an opinion survey, funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund three weeks before the recent elections, pollsters Ballen and Doherty found that the "only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians." Mousavi's most influential backer is industrialist and former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is best known for pushing privatization and deregulation packaged as "citizen empowerment." Rafsanjani ran against Ahmadinejad and lost by a wide margin four years ago. Mousavi has not distanced himself from Rafsanjani's overt hostility to government spending on subsidies and social welfare, which is expressed in a language similar to right-wing denunciations of "welfare queens" in the United States. Martin Luther King, Jr. would not likely approve of such a position.

Ervand Abrahamian, a world authority on modern Iranian history and known critic of the theocracy, recently attributed the longevity of the Islamic Republic to its constituent services and subsidies. In an article in Middle East Report, Abrahamian examined and dismissed other common explanations, including intimidation and the use of force against government opponents. If Abrahamian's analysis is accurate, it can explain the reluctance of a large sector of the Iranian society to throw away the baby (social programs) with the bathwater (morality police). Nevertheless, another candidate among the three who challenged Ahmadinejad this spring, Mohsen Rezaei, denounces the incumbent's spending on the infrastructure needs of common folks as "communism" and calls for "radical surgery" on the economy so as to please investors

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