India, Jan. 12 -- West Asia seems headed for another round of crisis and uncertainty as Tehran threatens to crush street protests against the government over rising unemployment and inflation. Unconfirmed reports - the regime has enforced an internet blackout - estimate that over a 100 deaths in police action since people started mobilising on the streets beginning late December. What can further complicate the situation is any US intervention; Washington has long seen the Islamic Republic as an ideological foe and a threat to its interests in the region. President Donald Trump posted Saturday on Truth Social that "Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!" Tehran has already sought to malign the protests as instigated by the US and Israel, both countries that bombed Iran last year during the war in Gaza. Any military measure by the US or its allies has the potential to change the discourse in Iran and intensify action by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Iran has been rocked by protests over students' concerns, women's rights and jobs, over the decades. Washington's attempt to appropriate the dissent in Iran has always helped the clerics who have dominated the Islamic republic since the revolution of the late 1970s, to rally conservative sections of the society and block the reformist tendencies even in the clergy. Any outside intervention can only strengthen their argument that the protests are a US-Israeli conspiracy and that the protestors have no agency. Left to itself, Tehran will have no option but to address the concerns flagged by the restive citizens or make way for new political forces. The history of external interventions in Iran - the 1953 coup instigated by the US and UK to depose Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, or the attempt to prop up the Shah in the 1970s - suggests that conservative forces stand to gain in the event of political uncertainty and economic distress. Iraq and Afghanistan taught the world that democracy is not an exportable commodity. And, one less conflict will be better for this chaotic time....