The Iran protests are almost two weeks old. What began on Dec. 28 as a demonstration against rising food prices escalated quickly into a protest that has shaken the core of the regime. The late Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Islamic Revolution in 1979, famously quipped that “This revolution was not about the price of watermelons,” but his successors may soon learn that the next one could be.
Almost immediately, talking heads took to the airwaves to fit the Iran protests into their own existing narratives. In essence, the Iranian protests became a political football for American politicians and European officials. The protests, however, provide many other lessons both to understanding what’s going on inside Iran now and to recognize what, 38 years after the Islamic Revolution, Western policymakers and intelligence services still don’t understand about Iran. Here are just a few:
