REMEMBER IRAN? That disputed election seemed like a big deal for a few days, didn’t it? For two weeks my Twitter feed was full of green icons and locations set to Tehran, as if a posse of faraway microbloggers might help take down a totalitarian government. Chairman Mao, who once said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” must have been grinning in his grave. How right he was. All those cogently worded tweets and blog posts collectively posed as much threat to the Iranian election as blades of grass to a hurricane.
However, the election fallout did illustrate two interesting things. One is that dictators are frightened of the internet. And the other is that ...
