Khamenei's Speech

Nico gets an e-mail:

I am in Sweden and have so many iranian students around me. Today everybody was desperate after hearing Khamenei's speach. They didn't expect the leader to come to their side, but to search for a little more time and give a more ambiguous speach to the country. Now nobody knows what will happen, but they know that it will be bloody: either people will stop the uprising, in which case there there will be so much violence and arrests towards the people, or they will try to overthrow all the system, in which case there will be a bloody revolution, successful or unsuccessful. It is not so clear what people want to do now. My girlfriends' parents in Tehran say they think people will give up. Nobody wants to die, with families still remembering the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. But it all depends also on Moussavi-Kathami-Karroubi-Rafsanjani and what they will say. Are they ready to wage war to the country? The hope of everybody is in an internal split in the leadership, the deposition of Khamenei, or at least some big sectors of army joining the people, but everybody agrees this will be very difficult to realize.

(Photo: Iranian men pray after listening to the Friday prayer sermon, delivered by the Islamic republic's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on June 19, 2009 at Tehran University. By Olivier Laban-Mattei/Getty.)