Iranian soccer revels

Here are some intriguing pictures of the revelries at various spots around Teheran on Wednesday night, after the Iranian soccer team beat Bahrain and thus secured a spot in the World Cup playoffs.
Basically what seems to have happened there is that masses of young people (and some, as you can see from the photos, not so young) took to the streets to express their delight, just as people in many other countries might have.
But in Teheran on Wednesday night, there were women and men celebrating together. And some of the young women seemed to have just about lost their headscarves, altogether.
From the point of view of the hardline clerics who’ve been running the country for 25 years, this must have seemed like the height of decadence. (They should see what goes on in most US college towns during the students’ three-day weekends…)
But significantly, the baseej, that is, the Revolutionary Guards who act as a kind of “morals police” in Iran, have been reported by many sources as having nearly all just sat around watching, or even, making themselves scarce… And so the revels continued.
Why was this? An interesting question that I don’t feel qualified to answer. But here are a couple of guesses:

(1) There’s an important election in Iran next week. One might surmise that the mullahs don’t want to alienate a great chunk of the youth by cracking down on them so close to the day; and that the regime’s relatively light touch toward the revelers may be designed to entice members of the younger generation into the voting booth, at least, rather than sitting the election out as so many have been threatening to do; and
(2) The overwhelming theme seems to have been an Iranian-nationalist one. This is not, by any means at all, bad for the mullahs at a time when they still feel themselves under threat by the Americans. The revelers certainly weren’t waving the Stars and Stripes, or holding aloft representations of the “Statue of Liberty”. Instead, their biggest symbolism was the three colors of the flag. Iranian nationalism? That’s by and large quite okay by the mullahs.

On the other hand… I hate to sound like a grouch here… But just how much of a victory is it, really, if a country with a population of 67 million can field a soccer team that beats one from a country with a population of 700,000?