Mahmoud Ahmedinajad has issued a presidential order demanding that bans on Western music, even classical music, get full enforcement in Iran. The hard-liner has decided to follow Ayatollah Khomeini's example and castigate Western music as "intoxicating" and un-Islamic:

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned all Western music from Iran's state radio and TV stations — an eerie reminder of the 1979 Islamic revolution when popular music was outlawed as "un-Islamic" under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. ...

[T]he official IRAN Persian daily reported Monday that Ahmadinejad, as head of the Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, ordered the enactment of an October ruling by the council to ban all Western music, including classical music, on state broadcast outlets.

"Blocking indecent and Western music from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is required," according to a statement on the council's official Web site.

Ahmadinejad will have his hands full trying to enforce this ban. The sales of Western music have long been tolerated, if not made explicitly legal, during the relatively moderate Khatami administration. Unlike in 1979, when Iranians were seized with religious and revolutionary fervor, they're unlikely to buy into the new prohibition. Many Iranians have access to Western entertainment through their satellite dishes. How many will simply eschew the entertainment delivered by their content provider? Not many anymore, and the sheer silliness of the order to do so will further undermine the authority of both Ahmadinejad and the Governing Council which plays marionette for him.

With all of the unrest occurring in Iran at the moment, this could provide a push for students to demand real change in Iran -- regime change, hopefully, or at least real reform and an elimination of the Governing Council. That band of unaccountable clerics has done all the damage it can do short of nuclear annihilation, and it looks more and more certain that a nuckear exchange with either the US or Israel or both is its endgame. When it comes down to that, Iranians had better decide whether they want to perish in a flash of light for a madman and his co-conspirators, or whether they want to take their country back before the button can get pushed.

In this case, it is a race against time, and Michael Ledeen's exhortation rings more and more true: Faster, please!

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