Iran: New Opposition Demonstrations Bring New Violence: Via TIME Magazine.

The quiet enforced on Tehran's streets by the postelection crackdown was shattered on July 9 in dramatic clashes between opposition activists and security forces. Plans had circulated for days on Internet social-networking sites calling for demonstrations to be staged to observe the 10th anniversary of the violent suppression of pro-reform protests at Tehran University in 1999. Opposition supporters were told to carry nothing more threatening than a rose. But the event failed to draw the huge crowds that had turned out to protest the June 12 election result, and numerous reports out of Iran suggest that the hundreds of protesters who took to the streets on July 9 were greeted with more brutality by the regime's enforcers.

Earlier in the day, Tehran governor Morteza Tamaddon had promised a "crushing" response to any protests

, and opposition supporters who braved the streets were met by baton-wielding riot police and plainclothes security forces, who arrested or dispersed the crowds before their numbers had time to build. Unconfirmed reports out of Tehran suggest widespread violence against suspected opposition supporters.

The crackdown has not necessarily harmed the Iranian regime's prospects for dealing with the West. While condemning Iran's handling of its election, the Group of Eight industrialized nations on July 8 nonetheless called for negotiations on the country's nuclear program. And the U.S. on July 9 released five Iranian diplomats who had been held in Iraq since 2007 on suspicion that they were involved in supporting attacks by Shi'ite militias on American soldiers. Although their release may have been in the works for some time as a confidence-building measure between the U.S. and Iran, its timing has also raised hopes that it may help secure the freedom of an Iranian employee of the British embassy in Tehran. The embassy staffer remains in custody after the release of eight others arrested by Iranian authorities and accused of fomenting demonstrations against election fraud.

The Tehran regime has blamed the unrest in its streets on the Western media and foreign governments, especially the British, whom the Iranian government accuses of attempting to overthrow it through a "velvet revolution." The Iranians have also long been irked by the millions of dollars the U.S. openly spends on regime-change propaganda targeting Iran and the Bush Administration's admission that the U.S. is running covert operations inside the country aimed at destabilizing the regime. On July 9, the government-owned Press TV alleged that Jundullah, an extremist organization of Sunni Muslim ethnic Baluchis that engages in terrorist attacks inside Iran — including several bombings in the weeks before the election — has received money from U.S. intelligence operatives. (ABC News in 2007 alleged that while the CIA denied having a formal relationship with the group, U.S. intelligence officers had secretly met with Jundullah leaders, offering advice and encouragement of their efforts to destabilize the Iranian regime.) Iran's state media have used allegations of U.S. and British covert action to drown out the voices of the movement challenging Iran's election.

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