Iran Elections Thread

[Straha]

There's a lot of conflicting reports going around now. Half of them say that Mousavi and Khatami have declared that there should be no march/protest today. Some say that they're saying there shouldn't be a protest, but that they'll be showing up anyway to provide protection to the protesters. Others are saying that the protest is tentatively back on. We should see what's happening in about two hours...

English Language Story about Khameini ordering investigation

Edit:


I want to puke.

[Kane Starkiller]

Edit:
Iran Tehran Girl Got Shot by the Police Cops

Disturbing but this video was posted a year ago. It has nothing to do with the current protest.

[Straha]

Edit:
Iran Tehran Girl Got Shot by the Police Cops

Disturbing but this video was posted a year ago. It has nothing to do with the current protest.

You're right. My bad. I should have checked that. I didn't sleep well, and part of me really doesn't want to sleep right now.

[Straha]

Mousavi has met with Khameini. He is attending the protest. And the Guardian Council will have a ruling on the election in ten days.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Mousavi has met with Khameini. He is attending the protest. And the Guardian Council will have a ruling on the election in ten days.

I suspect that in the end, either they indulge in a Tiananmen style crushing of a revolt (or like the 1993 Moscow one), or they come to a compromise, after much hush and hush and forced shaking of hands.

[Straha]

Heard message from man I respect very much regarding Iran (grew up there, demonstrated in the '79 revolution, fought at Abadan, has more degrees than we have letters in our names, now living in America), says he thinks Khameini is behind the rigging and "wont back off now". If Khameini is behind it, and wasn't either a passive plotter or a victim, then I very much doubt he'll back down at all. He'll have to go all-in or face losing all the respect and prestige he's earned since taking over twenty years ago.

Also, unconfirmed reports on Iranian twitters (Twitter is now shit, by the by, because all the users are Americans or European) are saying that Rafsanjani has gone to Khameini and declared "I put you here, I can remove you if you don't shape up." If true this means are really fractious behind the scenes and the spam may be about to hit the rapid oscillator.

I suspect that in the end, either they indulge in a Tiananmen style crushing of a revolt (or like the 1993 Moscow one), or they come to a compromise, after much hush and hush and forced shaking of hands.

There are hundreds of thousands of protesters right now. Things are much too serious and public for there to be a behind the scenes hush hush shaking of hands. If they don't pull a Tienanmen square (where they actually run over Tienanmen square guy) there are going to be a lot of repercussions.


EDIT: People are deliberately DDOSing government and government media websites Scurvy knaves.

[Straha]

Khatami has openly declared that the elections should be declared null and void. Funnily enough there is a way to do this. Article 131 of the Iranian constitution says that if a President has not been elected due to an impediment then the President's first deputy (or, should he be unsatisfactory to the leader, someone else) will become interim president and a council will arrange for an election to select a new President within 50 days. Could be an out if they're really looking for one.

[Falkenhayn]

The BBC reports shots fired at today's protests. One person is reported killed, and more feared so.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8101098.stm

[CmdrWilkens]

Wilkins, problem with the graph off the top of my head: The Iranian election is ordered by the timing of vote results (chronologically), the timing of the U.S. election is done by random (or, alphabetical order.) If you were to look at the U.S. results chronologically it'd show far more deviation along the way then what's shown there I'm willing to bet.

Yes but you'd need to get somehow around 16% of the vote in each time and while it would be tough to go back and construct a chronological discourse of actual (as oppossed to network projected) votes where in blocks that large (roughly 21 million) its would be highly unlikely that you would find much deviation from the final percentage in any randomn sample of that many ballots. So lacking any ability to do it chronologically doing it alphabeticaly makes the point that blocks of votes can, and do, regress towards the mean when the blocks are large enough portion of the whole. The reason why the alphabetical model works is because it takes the US as a whole and puts it in randomn order which negates the differences between the two elections caused by the varrying time zones and closing times in the US. Essentially it changes the US to a single clsoing time (a la Iran).

The point being you can't construct a time model of the US that is reflective unless you already allow for the variance in closing times which don't exist in the Iranian election.

[Pablo Sanchez]

There are hundreds of thousands of protesters right now. Things are much too serious and public for there to be a behind the scenes hush hush shaking of hands. If they don't pull a Tienanmen square (where they actually run over Tienanmen square guy) there are going to be a lot of repercussions.

Tianenmen just isn't a useful precursor to this situation. Not only are there actually more individuals on the streets in this protest, they also have the active backing of most of the country, and the regular army's fidelity has always been a little too iffy to trust them in riot control. If the regime is going to put this down violently, they have to do it with the ideological militias, and they have to plan for Tehran to be totally trashed and probably thousands of deaths. Not only that, but from the day they pull the trigger forward, there's no longer any pretense of legitimacy, they'll have to rule as a fascist junta with it's support based in pro-Ahmadinejad rural areas.

[Chris OFarrell]

And if they really let the fanatical militias loose on the people who are doing nothing but protesting, with a horrific death toll as a result, you might just swing the Army behind them in response.

And if THAT happens, its game over.

[Straha]

The reason why the alphabetical model works is because it takes the US as a whole and puts it in randomn order which negates the differences between the two elections caused by the varrying time zones and closing times in the US. Essentially it changes the US to a single clsoing time (a la Iran).

It's not just changing the U.S. to a single closing time, it's changing the U.S. to a single mass voting bloc. When you count dozens of states together at once of course it's going to average out with a relatively solid Obama lead over the long run. But, if you work it out via time in, say, an individual state you'll see blips and oddities as particular regions or cities votes are counted and added to the tally. (Like seeing Indiana jump all over the place on election night.) The lack of any real blips is what makes the Iranian official tally so weirdly disturbing.

Tianenmen just isn't a useful precursor to this situation. Not only are there actually more individuals on the streets in this protest, they also have the active backing of most of the country, and the regular army's fidelity has always been a little too iffy to trust them in riot control.

A Tienanmen style solution has a lot of problems if implemented here. Namely that Iran is a democracy, and you can't crush 1 - 3 million people and claim it represents the people's will. That being said, if they were to roll out in the streets the Artesh would stay home under lock and key, they'd use the Pasdaran instead. As the Pasdaran are an army in and of itself it would be the same damn thing as Tianenmen Square.

(It's actually a common misconception. Iran has two armies, two navies, two air forces, etc. The Pasdaran were being formed in 1980 to take over as the "real" armed forces of Iran, to have the old army merged into it. However those plans were put on hold when Iraq invaded in late 1980, and suddenly the fears of the Artesh's political leanings no longer mattered. At the end of the Iran-Iraq War it was no longer possible to get rid of the Artesh, so it just hung around. There are doctrinal and some material differences between the two forces, but they're both the same damn thing in the end, especially when it comes to repressing dissent.)

If the regime is going to put this down violently, they have to do it with the ideological militias, and they have to plan for Tehran to be totally trashed and probably thousands of deaths. Not only that, but from the day they pull the trigger forward, there's no longer any pretense of legitimacy, they'll have to rule as a fascist junta with it's support based in pro-Ahmadinejad rural areas.

I agree. But the problem is that they've worked themselves into a corner. Ahmadinejad's clique can't possibly claim the election results are valid. But if they declare the election invalid they've essentially admitted that there was a coup attempt, and completely destroyed any credibility Khameini and Ahmadinejad had. And if Khameini's credibility goes the last vestige of the Khomeinist supreme leader orientated state is being put under the sword of Damocles, and most of the clerics do not want that. Working this out through the bureaucrats is unacceptable to all parties. While putting these protests down violently destroys any last vestige of popular support for the regime. It's lose, lose, lose. But the first two wreck the power of the Pasdaran and the Supreme Leader. The last one does not. If the regime wants to hold on and doesn't suffer a counter-coup (perhaps orchestrated by Rafsanjani who is, apparently, in Qom right now working up support for just such a thing) that's their only serious option. Yes it completely destroys the character of Iran, but what can they do?

And if they really let the fanatical militias loose on the people who are doing nothing but protesting, with a horrific death toll as a result, you might just swing the Army behind them in response.

If it gets to the point where the Artesh are marching against the Pasdaran it's civil war time. Hopefully it wont come to that.

[TimothyC]

Nightwatch, always a reliable source, has the following:

Iran: The protests in Tehran continued for a third day. They have succeeded in prompting the Supreme Leader and the leader of the Parliament to order investigations of voter fraud, but not much else. Anti-government demonstrations also have been reported in the cities of Shiraz, Karaj, Esfahan, Tabriz, Gorgan, and Karaj.

Comment: The investigations are significant because they represent a concession that an honest government does not need to make. Now the concession might have been made to placate the crowds, but even that concession is a use of power in response to street action, i.e., a sign of weakness.

One thing to watch for is whether the protests continue. The government banned the protests but has been forced to tolerate them because of their size. That is an incongruity. The theocracy can suppress the demonstrations but doing so contradicts almost every principle of the regime.
A massive crackdown signifies the Iranian revolution is no more righteous than the Egyptian “revolution” or the Saudi Kingdom. The crowds are not yet calling for systemic change = revolution, but for an honest vote with the existing political architecture. If the existing political structure proves sclerotic and inflexible, the next step is to replace the people at the top. The step after that is to replace the architecture itself, meaning a revolution.

Iran, then, could be on an escalating staircase, but it is too soon to make that determination. The size of the youth vote has always been a political powder keg in a country that has too few opportunities, too few jobs for so many young people and which is led by a clerisy that is out of step with modern personal technology.

The situation is not revolutionary yet, but something is seriously flawed when the favorite son of East Azerbaijan fails to carry his own constituency: Mousavi, according to al Jazeerah. The least credible electoral outcome and most persuasive evidence of massive voter fraud is that the Azeris of Tabriz voted for Ahmadi-Nejad by four to one, instead of for Mousavi, who hails from Tabriz. Everyone knows the Azeris are ultra-clannish and always vote for an Azeri. Mousavi is one of their own.

Juan Cole makes the point that the hardline constituency supporting Ahmadi-Nejad never represented more than 20% of the electorate. It is inconceivable that that his appeal could swell to 63% in four years. Moreover, all analysts assessed that a large turnout would favor Mousavi, carried on the votes of women and the youth. The result supposedly is counter-intuitive.

Cole argues persuasively that the divide between the urban elite and the rural farmers is not as important as the voting pattern of the youth and the women. Cole implies that Ahmadi-Nejad and his friends in the Revolutionary Corps subverted and negated this vote in ways not yet determined, but clearly massively.

If Cole’s Holmesian inferences prove true, this election will be the greatest scandal since the fall of the Shah. Every informed observer knows something is wrong with the results. The landslide outcome is statistically impossible based on voting patterns of the past two decades. Ahmadi-Nejad is in trouble, but it might take a few weeks to sort it out.

According to blogger reports, as reported by Escobar in Asia Times Online, Mousavi actually obtained more than 19 million votes and Ahmadi-Nejad obtained 7-8 million votes, a near flip flop of the official results. That measures the potential enormity of the electoral fraud.

As an aside, it is worth noting how religiously- inspired authoritarian regimes feel the need to lie, steal and bribe to keep themselves in power. Zealots never trust the will of the voters. If the protests continue and the clerisy senses its authority is eroding by backing Ahmadi-Nejad, it will dump him in order to save itself, meaning he will resign in disgrace. An outcome to be pursued and praised.

Pepe Escobar suggests that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei himself may now be at risk from a coalition of Grand Ayatollahs based in Qom, who no longer have confidence in his leadership largely because of the harsh crackdown in the major towns.

[CaptainChewbacca]

From CNN

Iranian authorities today agreed to recount disputed presidential votes as the country faced intensifying unrest in the wake of a claimed victory by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that opponents say was the result of a rigged ballot. But Ahmadinejad's challenger, Mir Hossein Moussavi, rejected the vote recount, calling instead for a fresh election, an official close to the opposition leader's camp told CNN.

So... now what?

[Straha]

5,000 Lebanese thugs have been brought in via Hizbollah to support the government. The Basiij are planning a protest today in an hour in the same place where the Mousavi supporters will be marching in three hours. Basiij headquarters in some parts of the country have been burned. Further, a number of new government and cleric officials have come out against the vote count.

There are also unconfirmed reports and scans of letters going around saying that senior Pasdaran generals have been arrested for plotting to march in the streets with the Artesh on behalf of the protesters. If true this has escalated rather far and we should see some major events of force in the near future.

There are two possibilities as to what's happened and how the future can unfold in my opinion:

1. This is a coup orchestrated by Khameini and Ahmadinejad, with Khameini in on it at the ground level:

If true, this can only end in violence. Horrific violence. If true then the clerical regime's very authority is being risked on the acceptance of this election, and the longer the protests last in the streets the more unstable it becomes. So the clerical regime would need to clear the streets, remove the reformists from a position of public prominence, and purge dissidents both from the Majlis (the Iranian parliament) and the body of clerics. The regime has done things similar to this in the past, notably when it put Grand Ayatollah Montazeri under house arrest when he was no longer deemed politically reliable, and with the first post-Khatami Majlis election. The problem here is that those were either isolated incidents, or sidelinings orchestrated by the regime through constitutional means with time on their side. They have neither constitutional methods for quashing dissent, nor time here. As such they would need to immediately end the dissent either through compromise (which is highly unlikely) or jackboots.

The problem for Iran as a result of this is twofold. First, it removes any shred of popular legitimacy the regime has left. To westerners unfamiliar with Iran this is an odd thought, but popular legitimacy has always been the foundation of the regime. Removing this popular legitimacy makes it so that the clerics have to rule by the strike of the baton and the barrel of the gun. This is not something which a popular democracy can transition to overnight without suffering major aftershocks. The clerics as a whole, to say nothing of the military, do not want to be forced into that situation. Second, it removes any shred of international legitimacy that Iran might have had. What has kept a lot of sanctions at bay is the fact that Iran is a democracy, and punishing its leadership because western nations don't like what it has to say makes everyone uncomfortable. With such a naked coup as this that restraint goes away. Now the rulers would be viewed as dictators, oligarchs, and thieves of popular sovereignty free to be punished as publicly as possible. Moreover, if Iran turns into a military dictatorship the idea that the best way to reach common ground with it is through negotiation goes away. This has a very concrete meaning in that Israel and the Arab states (who remember 1979 and its aftermath very well) will no longer be restrained from lashing out against it. If this takes place I would not be surprised to see an Osiriak style strike against Iran in a few months.


2. This is an outright coup. This means that Ahmadinejad and others have threatened Khameini into accepting the results as accurate, and Khameini is going along to retain as much power as he can. This is less bad, and here's why: First, it means Ahmadinejad's support is going directly against the clerical establishment, and even some (if not most) of the military establishment. Unless he can shore up powerful public supporters on his side (and so far it looks like nobody is coming to his aid publicly, for a variety of possible reasons) the clerics and part of the military might move against him, make him an offer he can't refuse and pull off a counter-coup. I wont speculate as to the nature of this push, but as long as the protests keep up they can take some time in organizing. If this is the case let us hope they don't wait too long.

If Ahmadinejad is not removed, the result is the same situation as above, but worse. The clerics will be marginalized as soon as the Ahmadi-clique can move. With them will go most of the moderates in the regime and the Iranian government will become blatantly more aggressive and assertive outside its border.

Why a countercoup might be difficult: Amongst other things, Ahmadinejad views himself as, and I oversimplify here, divinely chosen and expressing the will of the Mahdi in his actions. This is a peasant approach to Islam which isn't well liked by clerics, but it produces an incredible intensity of faith. This will make any compromise with him difficult, if not impossible.

Why a countercoup right now might not be so difficult: Ahmadinejad is in Iran right now.


On a side note: I'm absolutely sickened by the reactions of many public conservatives. With some notable exceptions they range from saying "No! This is the proper result. If this hadn't been the proper election ballot people would have said something by now." to "Well, what do you expect? It's Iran!" I have always defined myself as a conservative, but the linchpin of that conservatism has always been that when freedom of expression and freedom to vote are inviolably protected, all else will fall into place as it should. These people, who don't even bother to go through the motions of defending those invaluable freedoms, make me sick. Though I don't consider them as conservative, I feel almost as if I cannot identify myself as conservative out of disgust for the company which I would keep.

[Straha]

There are, again, reports that Mousavi has called off what was supposed to be a protest today. The last time this was reported it was a hoax. No indication either way this time.

Foreign reporters have been given a blanket ban on all activity on Iranian streets in an attempt to cut off reports to the outside world.

Meanwhile, thugs in Tehran have been breaking into houses and stealing Sattelite Dishes, to make sure the outside world doesn't get back to Iran.

[Kane Starkiller]

An interesting article by George Friedman on Stratfor:

Western Misconceptions Meet Iranian Reality
June 15, 2009 | 1745 GMT
By George Friedman

In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.

The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.

The second group of Iran experts regarded the shah as a repressive brute, and saw the revolution as aimed at liberalizing the country. Their sources were the professionals and academics who supported the uprising — Iranians who knew what former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini believed, but didn’t think he had much popular support. They thought the revolution would result in an increase in human rights and liberty. The experts in this group spoke even less Farsi than the those in the first group.
Misreading Sentiment in Iran

Limited to information on Iran from English-speaking opponents of the regime, both groups of Iran experts got a very misleading vision of where the revolution was heading — because the Iranian revolution was not brought about by the people who spoke English. It was made by merchants in city bazaars, by rural peasants, by the clergy — people Americans didn’t speak to because they couldn’t. This demographic was unsure of the virtues of modernization and not at all clear on the virtues of liberalism. From the time they were born, its members knew the virtue of Islam, and that the Iranian state must be an Islamic state.

Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.

There are undoubtedly people who want to liberalize the Iranian regime. They are to be found among the professional classes in Tehran, as well as among students. Many speak English, making them accessible to the touring journalists, diplomats and intelligence people who pass through. They are the ones who can speak to Westerners, and they are the ones willing to speak to Westerners. And these people give Westerners a wildly distorted view of Iran. They can create the impression that a fantastic liberalization is at hand — but not when you realize that iPod-owning Anglophones are not exactly the majority in Iran.

Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.
Ahmadinejad’s Popularity

It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.

First, Ahmadinejad speaks of piety. Among vast swathes of Iranian society, the willingness to speak unaffectedly about religion is crucial. Though it may be difficult for Americans and Europeans to believe, there are people in the world to whom economic progress is not of the essence; people who want to maintain their communities as they are and live the way their grandparents lived. These are people who see modernization — whether from the shah or Mousavi — as unattractive. They forgive Ahmadinejad his economic failures.

Second, Ahmadinejad speaks of corruption. There is a sense in the countryside that the ayatollahs — who enjoy enormous wealth and power, and often have lifestyles that reflect this — have corrupted the Islamic Revolution. Ahmadinejad is disliked by many of the religious elite precisely because he has systematically raised the corruption issue, which resonates in the countryside.

Third, Ahmadinejad is a spokesman for Iranian national security, a tremendously popular stance. It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war — something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.

For a time on Friday, it seemed that Mousavi might be able to call for an uprising in Tehran. But the moment passed when Ahmadinejad’s security forces on motorcycles intervened. And that leaves the West with its worst-case scenario: a democratically elected anti-liberal.

Western democracies assume that publics will elect liberals who will protect their rights. In reality, it’s a more complicated world. Hitler is the classic example of someone who came to power constitutionally, and then proceeded to gut the constitution. Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s victory is a triumph of both democracy and repression.
The Road Ahead: More of the Same

The question now is what will happen next. Internally, we can expect Ahmadinejad to consolidate his position under the cover of anti-corruption. He wants to clean up the ayatollahs, many of whom are his enemies. He will need the support of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution. Ahmadinejad does not want to challenge Khamenei, and we suspect that Khamenei will not want to challenge Ahmadinejad. A forced marriage is emerging, one which may place many other religious leaders in a difficult position.

Certainly, hopes that a new political leadership would cut back on Iran’s nuclear program have been dashed. The champion of that program has won, in part because he championed the program. We still see Iran as far from developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, but certainly the Obama administration’s hopes that Ahmadinejad would either be replaced — or at least weakened and forced to be more conciliatory — have been crushed. Interestingly, Ahmadinejad sent congratulations to U.S. President Barack Obama on his inauguration. We would expect Obama to reciprocate under his opening policy, which U.S. Vice President Joe Biden appears to have affirmed, assuming he was speaking for Obama. Once the vote fraud issue settles, we will have a better idea of whether Obama’s policies will continue. (We expect they will.)

What we have now are two presidents in a politically secure position, something that normally forms a basis for negotiations. The problem is that it is not clear what the Iranians are prepared to negotiate on, nor is it clear what the Americans are prepared to give the Iranians to induce them to negotiate. Iran wants greater influence in Iraq and its role as a regional leader acknowledged, something the United States doesn’t want to give them. The United States wants an end to the Iranian nuclear program, which Iran doesn’t want to give.

On the surface, this would seem to open the door for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former U.S. President George W. Bush did not — and Obama does not — have any appetite for such an attack. Both presidents blocked the Israelis from attacking, assuming the Israelis ever actually wanted to attack.

For the moment, the election appears to have frozen the status quo in place. Neither the United States nor Iran seem prepared to move significantly, and there are no third parties that want to get involved in the issue beyond the occasional European diplomatic mission or Russian threat to sell something to Iran. In the end, this shows what we have long known: This game is locked in place, and goes on.


This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to http://www.stratfor.com

Link

[Straha]

I get Friedman's daily e-mails. Friedman has many talents and many problems. His track record in the Middle East ain't good (he was very ardent that not only were there WMDs in Iraq, but the U.S. administration had incontrovertible proof on where they were, and would find them just as soon as we went in,) and that e-mail of his is what made me right about conservatives.

Allow to me dissect a little.

Americans and Europeans have been misreading Iran for 30 years. Even after the shah fell, the myth has survived that a mass movement of people exists demanding liberalization — a movement that if encouraged by the West eventually would form a majority and rule the country. We call this outlook “iPod liberalism,” the idea that anyone who listens to rock ‘n’ roll on an iPod, writes blogs and knows what it means to Twitter must be an enthusiastic supporter of Western liberalism. Even more significantly, this outlook fails to recognize that iPod owners represent a small minority in Iran — a country that is poor, pious and content on the whole with the revolution forged 30 years ago.

This is a strawman of the most profound order. People say (and I include myself among them) that there is a movement for liberalization in Iran, that this movement has wide support in Iran, and that if this movement is given free reign Iran will liberalize. He says "Bull shit! They ain't western liberals. Get your head out of the clouds!" To which I retort that, NOBODY WITH ANY CREDIT SAID THEY WERE WESTERN STYLE LIBERALS. Liberal is a relative phrase, and in Iran people like Mousavi, Karroubi, Khatami, etc. are liberals. If allowed to form a government with real viable support (which Khatami almost did) they would improve Iran, make it friendlier to the west, and increase human rights. Does this mean that Iran suddenly turns European overnight? No, of course not. But it means that it becomes a more liberal country.

If I may use a slightly flawed analogy, it's like someone on Fox News saying that Britain doesn't have any real conservative choice in its politics because even if the Tories win, they support things like the national health care, and that's not real conservatism.

Moving on:

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this.

You want the mechanics for this? JACKBOOTED THUGS RAIDED THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR AND TURNED INTO FORTIFIED CAMP! They marched in to where the people who were supposed to be counting the votes were, threatened to beat the shit out of them, and then gave them the real numbers.

As for people who called them on it. Two Grand Ayatollahs have openly declared the election a fraud. The Speaker of the Parliament is calling for investigations, there's an open letter from Ministry of Interior employees saying the elections were "not healthy," and the Guardian Council has promised to investigate for election fraud after the supreme leader declared the results to be valid. THAT'S BEING CALLED ON IT!

This line above: " would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. " is laughable, because the numbers don't match. Karoubi got crushed in his home town, where he has monumental support, Mousavi was crushed in his base of support in Tabriz, and the Kurds are put down as supporting Ahmadinejad by over 60% of the vote. This is like saying that Ralph Nader won Alabama in a landslide.

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Upper East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.

No. Two years ago there were hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets because of Ahmadinejad's destruction of the economy. It wasn't the rich who were marching then, but the poor and unemployed. Moreover, Ahmadinejad is genuinely popular in the ethnically Persian countryside. Those people are won over by him, and do adore him. No one denies that. But Ahmadinejad is not popular in the cities (Tabriz, Tehran, Qom, Isfahan), nor in the ethnic minority sections. To say he had the majority of the vote there is ludicrous, in the extreme.

And the last sentence above is most stunning. "Whether he cheated or not, he still won!" doesn't cut it. If he lost the election, but cheated the result HE STILL LOST. Friedman is usually smarter than this, it's a shame he's being such a moron today.

[Straha]

A number of twitter accounts in Iran have reported that armed forces have entered Tehran.

[CJvR]

A number of twitter accounts in Iran have reported that armed forces have entered Tehran.

It seems to be a border line revolutionary situation. But I don't think there is a hard core of fanatics willing to wade through a river of blood to wrest power from the current regime - and without such a core of activists I think the regime have a good chance of riding out the storm. As long as it doesn't do anything to stupid...

[Straha]

A number of twitter accounts in Iran have reported that armed forces have entered Tehran.

It seems to be a border line revolutionary situation. But I don't think there is a hard core of fanatics willing to wade through a river of blood to wrest power from the current regime - and without such a core of activists I think the regime have a good chance of riding out the storm. As long as it doesn't do anything to stupid...

The protesters aren't marching to change the regime, they're marching to get the proper result of the election recognized. They don't need to wade through a river of blood to get that done, just prove they aren't going away and make it very clear that unless Iran acts like a democracy the clerics wont have any democratic legitimacy.

[CJvR]

The protesters aren't marching to change the regime, they're marching to get the proper result of the election recognized. They don't need to wade through a river of blood to get that done, just prove they aren't going away and make it very clear that unless Iran acts like a democracy the clerics wont have any democratic legitimacy.

IMPO. The regime nailed it's dick to the mast the moment Khatami publicly blessed Amadjihadii's "election victory". If the fraud had been a few % they might have been able to backtrack via an "error in counting" but it wasn't. The Iranians will only get the proper result under different management, and I doubt Khatami and Amadjihadii will go quietly. Not while they have guns and the opposition don't.

EDIT: There are those who claim that the result might well be valid, but it hardly matters since the Iranian regime have no credibility left on the election issue anymore.

[Straha]

The protesters aren't marching to change the regime, they're marching to get the proper result of the election recognized. They don't need to wade through a river of blood to get that done, just prove they aren't going away and make it very clear that unless Iran acts like a democracy the clerics wont have any democratic legitimacy.

IMPO. The regime nailed it's dick to the mast the moment Khatami publicly blessed Amadjihadii's "election victory". If the fraud had been a few % they might have been able to backtrack via an "error in counting" but it wasn't. The Iranians will only get the proper result under different management, and I doubt Khatami and Amadjihadii will go quietly. Not while they have guns and the opposition don't.

Khatami came out very publicly saying the election was rigged. You're thinking of Khameini. Different fellow altogether.

That being said, see my post above (the long one). There's going to be serious repercussions for this one way or another and people are going to suffer. But I doubt the regime as a whole will change, and I doubt the protesters want that to happen either. Honnestly, the best thing the clerics could do right now is have Rafsanjani pull off a vote to remove Khameini, and if people keep marching he may just get that support. The lack of planning and the fact that so many serious clerics have come out against the regime prove that the "regime" as a whole hasn't gone behind this, and that it's only got a partial backing up top.

[CmdrWilkens]

The reason why the alphabetical model works is because it takes the US as a whole and puts it in randomn order which negates the differences between the two elections caused by the varrying time zones and closing times in the US. Essentially it changes the US to a single clsoing time (a la Iran).

It's not just changing the U.S. to a single closing time, it's changing the U.S. to a single mass voting bloc. When you count dozens of states together at once of course it's going to average out with a relatively solid Obama lead over the long run. But, if you work it out via time in, say, an individual state you'll see blips and oddities as particular regions or cities votes are counted and added to the tally. (Like seeing Indiana jump all over the place on election night.) The lack of any real blips is what makes the Iranian official tally so weirdly disturbing.

Yes the finer and finer you grind things down the greater the number of blips but if you had exactly 6 readings on the returns and they were all roughly equal in terms of portion of the vote then you aren't looking fine enough to expect that sort of blip. Again its not that I don't think there are irregularities but when the sample size in each release is 16% of the whole then you are naturally going to lose roughness. I hate to say this but the model Nate presented proves the point and the counter argument about timeline...has no data just speculation.

[Straha]

I hate to say this but the model Nate presented proves the point and the counter argument about timeline...has no data just speculation.

That's a fair point, and I'll gladly give it to you. Considering all the other evidence for rigging I don't think this is that big of an issue, and I'll happily concede the point for now, until I get around to checking it against my suspicions.

EDIT so I don't double post: Andrew Sullivan has some great video of protests today.