April 22, 2011
As anti-government protests are sweeping the Arab world, it’s easy to forget that less than two years ago Arabs looked on in amazement as the people of Iran took to the streets to demand their rights.
Following an obviously rigged election in the summer of 2009, the Iranian "Green Movement" – which united conservatives, and even Islamists, disenchanted with the regime with opposition groups of various kinds – formed as a nonviolent civil rights movement. Many Arab commentators, myself included, wrote about why this apparently could happen in Iran but not in Arab states, and asked what it would take for Arabs to emulate the Iranian example.
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