Thursdays’s events in Iran dealt a serious political blow to a beleaguered re gime unable to either accommodate its opponents or crush them by force.

It was billed as the biggest show in the history of the Islamic Republic, and the celebrations marking the 31st anniversary of the seizure of power by the mullahs were planned like a military operation with the code name Simorgh (a mythical Persian bird) under the direct control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

What Iranians saw on live TV, however, was a chaotic gathering of tens of thousands of rent-a-mob elements — along with guardsmen, all with standard and easily recognizable beards, and members of the Baseej professional street fighters.

The spokesman for the operation, the Revolutionary Guard’s Ali-Asghar Abkhizr, all but admitted the failure of the enterprise: He announced that pro-regime demonstrations had been confined to 33 “public places” in Tehran — leaving the rest of the vast capital to the opposition.

Abkhizr also admitted that this year’s anniversary gatherings were limited to 637 towns and cites — out of a total of more than 4,000 localities with populations of 10,000 or more. The regime’s profile was even lower in rural Iran, where pro-regime demonstrations were confined to 3,000 villages out of a total of 50,000.

In several major cities, among them Isfahan, the country’s second largest in population, and Ahvaz, official ceremonies had to be curtailed as pro-democracy marchers seized control of major thoroughfares.

For three decades, the Feb. 11 demonstrations provided an occasion for the Khomeinist establishment to flex its political muscle in streets throughout the country. This year, the occasion only underlined the regime’s increasing isolation.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had hoped that his announcement that Iran was now able to enrich uranium up to 80 percent would divert attention from the regime’s domestic difficulties. But the old trick of provoking an external conflict to cover internal problems didn’t work.

So dismal was Thursday’s show that some regime supporters are already calling for an end to the exercise. The official events were boycotted by a majority of Iranians — and many senior regime figures also failed to show, including two former presidents, the mayor of Tehran and several retired generals of the regular armed forces.

“What is the point of an exercise that shows how divided our nation is today?” asks a member of the Islamic Majlis, Iran’s ersatz parliament. “Unless a political solution is found to bring the two camps together again, we should forget about anniversaries and demonstrations.”

A “political solution” is precisely what several key regime figures are urging “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei to adopt. Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani and his brother Sadeq, who heads the judiciary, are among those advising Khamenei to meet some opposition demands, even if that means shortening Ahmadinejad’s second term as president.

But Khamenei is also coming under growing pressure from those within the establishment who urge an early and massive crackdown. “Those who demonstrate against the system are waging war on Allah,” says Gen. Muhammad-Ali Aziz Jaafari, the guard commander and the chief advocate of an “iron fist” policy.

Khamenei is wavering. Always weak and indecisive, for years he depended on stronger men, like former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, to help him face difficult situations. But now Rafsanjani is flirting with the opposition, leaving Khamenei alone and exposed to pressure from rival factions within the regime.

Opposition leaders are also coming under pressure from rival groups within the broad anti-Khomeinist movement.

A number of parties representing ethnic minorities (such as Kurds, Baluchs and Arabs) urge a recourse to armed struggle to force the Revolutionary Guard to move out of Tehran and the major cities, leaving them exposed to a takeover by pro-democracy groups.

The two main figures of the opposition, ex-Prime Minister Mir-Hussein Mussvai and former Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, however, refuse any recourse to violence and insist that they can defeat the regime by political and social pressure alone.

Other groups, including monarchists and a half-dozen leftist parties, are trying to organize industrial strikes as another source of pressure on the regime. A particular target is the vital oil industry, which provides some 75 percent of the government budget. A foretaste of this came Thursday when workers at a gas refiner in Aghajari and oil refineries in Tabriz and Shiraz stopped work for four hours.