Iran on the brink? Demonstrations and their suppression much worse than those that topped the Shah

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

54% : The SCO accession places Iran more deeply under the influence of Russia and the economic umbrella of the People's Republic of China (PRC), a true victory for Moscow which, during the "Great Game" of the 19th and 20th centuries, had resisted the southward expansion of the Russian Empire and its successor, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
53% : That era had cost Persia -- Iran -- vast swathes of its own empire, including Azerbaijan to the immediate north.
53% : Meanwhile, Iran has also been providing its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs and combat UAVs) to Russia for use in Ukraine.
52% : Getting Starlink terminals into Iran may prove to be a challenge on a par with the U.S. Cold War provision of fax machines into the Soviet Union to break Soviet information controls.
52% : Early September 2022 saw Iran openly confirming that it was negotiating with Moscow for the acquisition of 24 Sukhoi Su-35SE advanced combat aircraft, and pave the way for a larger order.
52% : The emergence of a stronger and more cohesive "Eurasian bloc" of allies for Iran with the SCO Summit of September 2022 means that the window for Iranians to break from "the East" and resume their ties with "the West" is shrinking.
49% : Russia, which has gradually become "comfortable" with Iran's clerics (although historical suspicions exist between Iran and Russia, for obvious reasons), has gradually approved more and more advanced defense sales to clerical Iran.
48% : At the very least, Iran has turned its back completely on the West, and any thoughts the U.S. Biden Administration might have entertained about a revival of the "nuclear accord" -- the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- must be considered, comprehensively, dead and buried.
45% : In many respects, the clerical rule of Iran has become exhausted -- and has exhausted the country -- but is sustained by the inertia of the inability of agents of change to enter the system.
44% : This time, Tehran ordered the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC: Pasdaran) artillery to shell Kurdish refugee camps across the border in Iraqi Kurdistan.
39% : The Shah of Iran abdicated in 1979 with far fewer protests, and with far less suppression of free speech.
39% : Nonetheless, significant video did escape Iran to show protestors attempting to remove portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei from a university at Babol, in northern Iran, while protestors called for "death to the dictator".
36% : His successor, Ruhollah Khomeini, had no such scruples, and violently beat, arrested, imprisoned, and killed as many as a million Iranians when they protested the clerical take-over of Iran.
35% : But there are no indications as yet that the September 2022 protests spell an imminent threat to the clerics' control of Iran.

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