Roundup

The best defense is a good offense, but too much offense is just offensive. Are Iran's show trials backfiring by alienating their intended audience?

Mojtahed-Zadeh, who is far from a radical operative of the “velvet revolution” — he is a professor at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran — offers the advice, “Perhaps the regime would be wise enough to put some facade of legality on this, because these show trials are not acceptable in any way, by anyone.”

Except, maybe, to the Republican Guard and the Basiji -- who represent the biggest challenges at the moment and are the reason fuel sanctions on refined petroleum products are a bad idea. The Guard reportedly controls Iranian smuggling, in a region of the world that is a smuggler's paradise, and would just get richer while most other Iranians suffered under increased sanctions. The world must find more creative ways to convince the Guard and their brutish underlings that their economic and other interests are better served by a democratic Iran where people's human rights are respected and people's talents are fostered and honored, not extinguished.

More on the purge of the Intelligence Ministry, as Ahmadinejad replaces more experienced people with loyalists, here.

And, In Iran a Hostage-Taker Becomes a Hostage.