The Seven-Point Manifesto is a document that has circulated on a number of English blogs and first appeared in the conservative Pajamas Media blog; it supposedly was distributed among Iranian protestors in the hundreds of copies before being translated from Farsi into English for an international audience.

However, despite being linked from Commentary Magazine and the Guardian, the comments in the original PajamasMedia post raise doubts about the document’s extense of internal usage within the reformist movement, let alone the authenticity or verifiability of the document. Plus, its demand for Grand Ayatollah Montazeri (rather than Rafsanjani, as I initially posited) to replace Khamenei as transitional Supreme Leader seems rather far-fetched at the moment, given that Montazeri, a more liberally-oriented cleric and veteran of the Iranian Revolution, has been in internal exile and under house arrest until fairly recently.

So at best, this manifesto can only stand recognized as an expression of a minority of the protest movement’s less influential rungs, far from a guiding internal document that is being used by the movement as the sort of basic, direct articulation for which I requested in the last post.

The newest cause celebre from the Iranian crisis, Neda Agha-Soltan’s bloody, 40-second expiration on camera, has made the rounds on both television and Internet within the last two or three days. There’s outrage, there’s sadness, there’s the arms-length solidarity from overseas, and all such emotional capital is being translated into……nothing.

I mean, there’s not much that Obama can, could or should do, despite the incessant Republican haranguing: the current reasoning is that anything which he says (let alone does) regarding the crisis is a blind foreign policy gamble, one which could end up like previous electoral disputes under the previous administration into which the U.S. chipped with words of encouragement for the ill-fated opposition.

Furthermore, there’s no remotely-transparent way to measure the desires or strengths of the opposition. The reformists currently figuring in the opposition’s leadership are only being depicted as wanting a limited, timid change of guard, with Mousavi replacing Ahmadinejad (no indication on whether it extends to replacing Khamenei with Rafsanjani, as you’re not hearing anything advocating such a drastic change from the protesters); its only among the ostracized rebel militant organizations in the more hinterlands of Iran and in the diaspora, including the Tudeh party and the People’s Mujahideen (currently based in Iran), who are calling for a change of regime, for a total overthrow of the clerical-military apparatus, and no ones paying attention or giving coverage to such voices from the latter camp. The reformists have also been stereotyped as urban, educated, middle-class types who have not connected with the poorer, rural majority of Iranians, the latter of which may or may not want a continuance of the current status quo under Khamenei-Ahmadinejad and who are less accessible from the Western press due to media restrictions.

Finally, as I was telling a friend in Atlanta earlier last week, we aren’t seeing any vocal endorsements or spearheadings for the reformist opposition from the local governments of the country, including the mayors and governors. Swinging them from one side to another may make for a better clarification, expansion and articulation of demands (especially those of an economic nature which could appeal to the larger masses) from the opposition. Such may have been key in Madagascar earlier this year, when the Mayor of Antananarivo managed to rally a no-name party’s support from masses of protesters and elicit enough sympathy from the military to force the then-president from office and into exile.

Right now, no such swing is happening. The military and paramilitaries are arresting and shooting protesters and bystanders, such as Neda and the family members of Rafsanjani (Mousavi’s backer and the head of the Assembly of Experts which elects the Supreme Leader who authorized the military, paramilitary and police out onto the street to arrest such individuals as Rafsanjani’s family members…..WTF?).

So….comparisons are already being drawn between this series of events and other events which ended in tragedy due to the opposing side not being able to win over key members of the military apparatus: Tiananmen, Saffron Revolution, the whole Zimbabwe debacle, and so on. And all that the West can do is reach, emotionally and frightfully, into the dark.