But although the opposition has lost some well-known leaders, their return to the fold represents a hollow victory for Khamenei. Notwithstanding their recent opportunism, these figures remain part of the fanatical old guard of Iranian society. Despite attempts to repackage themselves publicly, they symbolize fundamentalist Shiism and intolerant nationalism, rather than lasting transformation and the hope for a better future. ~Prof. Jamsheed Choksy

Had someone said seven months ago that the Green movement would no longer be able to count Khatami, Karroubi, Rezai and Rafsanjani among its supporters or sympathizers, and had someone said that by early 2010 Mousavi will have significantly watered down his demands, this would have been denounced by pro-Green commentators as a cynical or even “pro-regime” argument. Now we are treated to a sympathetic interpretation of all of these setbacks. We are meant to believe that losing practically every prominent political figure of any importance is really a boon for the Green movement. Now that they’ve cleared away all the dead brush of the old guard, the movement can really start making some headway! Why does this not seem persuasive?

Prof. Choksy refers to the “recent opportunism” of all of these figures, and this is right. These men were playing the part of opposition leaders or at least sympathetic supporters when they thought there might be something gained in doing so. As the fortunes of the movement have grown worse, the opportunists have been abandoning it or distancing themselves from its more outspoken members. As the regime has cracked down harder, the movement has started splitting along the fault lines that existed within it from the beginning. Regime-approved reformers and Khomeini-era functionaries who found common cause with the protesters in opposing Ahmadinejad’s victory have now started returning to full support for the regime. If these are hollow victories, the Green movement probably cannot afford to let Khamenei have many more.

When skeptics of the movement’s significance pointed out that Mousavi et al. were deeply compromised by past involvement with the regime and not meaningfully different in their policy views from Ahmadinejad, their arguments were sometimes met with angry rebukes from movement sympathizers. How dare Obama say that Mousavi and Ahmadinejad weren’t very different! Having spent much of the last seven and a half months insisting that it really would have made a difference had Mousavi won and been permitted to take office, movement sympathizers are hastening to remind us that Mousavi et al. wouldn’t have represented any meaningful change from the past.

Prof. Choksy claims that the reason these old regime hands are now giving up on the movement is that they did not want to “risk being swept aside by the wide-ranging changes the movement’s success would usher into Iran.” Put another way, we now see that several major political actors in Iran, whose alienation from Khamenei and the regime was readily taken as proof of the regime’s crumbling legitimacy, have chosen to defend the status quo rather than take their chances with whatever a successful protest movement might create. If we took their alienation to mean that the regime was weakening, their reconciliation with the powers that be has to be seen as a real win for the regime. In order for the movement to broaden its appeal and advance towards some significant political change in Iran, it cannot afford to lose the former regime loyalists that it once had. On the contrary, it needs to be winning over more of these loyalists and convincing the loyalists that the movement is a not a threat to their interests. Instead we see almost all of their main leaders have decided that the movement does not serve their self-interest. Is this the picture of a movement going from strength to strength? It seems increasingly clear that it is not.