One forgets that every country has their own version of the right. And despite the efforts of our right wing nutcases to align liberals and those on the left with Iran’s hard line conservative regime, the truth is that many hard core Fundamentalist Christians would be thrilled if they held the kind of power that the ultra-conservative Imams do in Iran. The only beef they really have is with the dogma of Islam. The power to impose their own brand of religion, and the imposition of laws based on a holy book (in the case of our fundies, the Bible) which deny women, gays and other minorities basic human rights would be exactly the sort of thing our most extreme right wing Christian fundamentalists would kill for.
So, it is regrettable that it appears the ruling mullahs in Iran and the radical conservatives who backed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appear to have rigged the election and have now declared a massive electoral victory by Ahmadinejad against his more moderate opponent, Hossein Mousavi, according to this report by McClatchy:
Iran’s government announced an overwhelming re-election victory Saturday for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but his chief opponent called the results a fraud and confrontations broke out between students and security forces.
Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli said Ahmadinejad won more than 62 percent of the vote, or about 24 million ballots, compared with about 34 percent for former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, his principal challenger and a relative moderate who attracted intense support from many young people.
Mousavi, his advisers and his supporters called the election a fraud.
“They cheated and rigged the election,” Saeed Laylaz, a prominent reform economist and adviser to Mousavi, said by telephone.
I might have believed a narrow victory by Ahmadinejad was legitimate, but a margin of 2 to 1 in his favor is preposterous on its face. Mousavi had attracted massive crowds to his rallies in the larger urban areas, such as in Tehran, and I simply find it impossible to believe that he garnered only 34% of the vote unless massive vote fraud occurred. As the McClatchy report indicates, there are already scattered reports of protests and confrontations with police and Mousavi supporters. A description of those protests and police clashes with the protesters is also being reported by UPI:
TEHRAN, June 13 (UPI) — Riot police
charged on protesters Saturday in Tehran as the Iranian government declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected president, sources said. […]Police with riot batons charged thousands of Mousavi supporters gathered in central Tehran Saturday, but it was unclear if there were serious injuries.
Other than neocons like John Bolton, no one can be happy about this development. This is just the result they were praying for — literally. Now they can use the election result to intensify their campaign against Obama’s policy of reaching out to Iran diplomatically, while also raising the specter of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which Bolton had already fantasied about before the election results were known on the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page.
Mousavi is calling for his supporters to oppose the election results. Here’s the statement he made available to Reuters:
“I’m warning I will not surrender to this dangerous charade. The result of such performance by some officials will jeopardise the pillars of the Islamic Republic and will establish tyranny[.]”
According to Reuters a scheduled Mousavi press conference to address his charges of fraud did not happen, as journalists were told it had been canceled by police when they arrived at the building where it was to be held. Not, as they proverbial saying goes, a good sign.
During the election campaign Ahmadinejad had demonized his opponent as a “dangerous extremist” whose foreign policies would endanger the security of Iran. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A common tactic of right wing politicians world wide apparently is to play on the fears of the electorate that their more moderate opponents are treasonous radicals whose policies are dangerous and unpatriotic.
Sadly, this “tainted victory” by an Iranian right wing extremist is only playing into the hands of right wing politicians both in America, and in Israel, as well. Here are the comments of Israel’s deputy Foreign Minister to the election results:
“If there was a shadow of hope for a change in Iran, the renewed choice of Ahmadinejad expresses more than anything the growing Iranian threat,” Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in a statement. “The international community must stop a nuclear Iran and Iranian terror immediately.”
Obama’s ability to pressure Israel to back down on its settlement policy and its aggressive security approach in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank has been dealt a severe blow. And overall, his job to bring peace and stability to the entire region just got a whole lot tougher. Netanyahu can now point to Iran as a justification to continue Israel’s policies of territorial expansion and pre-emptive wars, such as last year’s invasion of Lebanon. Ahmadinejad will in like manner now feel emboldened to maintain a hard line stance regarding Iran’s nuclear program, since it is clear to me that he could not have perpetrated this fraud without the direct assistance of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei and the other imams who control the military and security forces. In effect, democracy, to the extent it existed at all, is dead in Iran. Only those who thirst for more and more wars and more innocent blood to be shed can be happy at this outcome.
Congratulations: your level of knowledge, insight and self-satisfied pathos is once again right up there with that of the post-Buckley National Review…
So, what’s your take? I’m seriously asking.
I just posted over you. Perhaps we should leave them both up, since our reactions are similar but different in emphasis and tone.
One correction, though. The invasion of Lebanon did not occur last year.
Steven, do you know how the famous film critic of the New Yorker, Pauline Kaël, reacted, when she learned that Richard Nixon had won the 1972 election by a landslide?
“But that’s impossible,” she exclaimed, “everybody I know, voted for McGovern!”
One possibility is that the election results worked out in a similar way to the Bush/Kerry results. A foreign journalist in 2004 would have been easily seduced into thinking Kerry was way ahead in the polls if they spent all their time in our cities.
However, the results are not 51-49. They are quite a bit more lopsided.
You have no basis, though, for insulting Steven’s intelligence and vouching for the quality of the count.
Where did I vouch for the quality of any Iranian vote count in my exchanges with either you or Steven, especially since, to my knowledge, no official count has even been released yet?
Even though so-called Westerners like to pretend otherwise, yesterday’s Iranian elections took place following 58 years of colonialist meddling by the West in Iran’s affairs (1921-1979), and following 30 years of all-out efforts primarily by the United States to undermine the sovereignty of the Iranian republic.
In this context, Moussavi’s election would have been convenient for a lot of people in the West who champion soft power imperialism (including Steven and Booman?), but (a) that was never likely after Guardian Khamenei had given his thinly veiled endorsement to Ahmedinajad and (b) it was never likely, because Moussavi never presented a foreign policy strategy that makes sense for an Iran that wants to maintain its independence and sovereignty.
Moussavi’s election would have opened up the road to all sorts of Western shenanigans in Iran, flower revolutions and otherwise. Our media were already gearing up to cast Moussavi as the next Gorby. And we all remember how convenient that naive dude was for the West, don’t we?
I can’t claim to be an Iran expert in any way, have never visited the country, don’t speak the language, but… I very much doubt that, morality police and headscarf edicts aside, there is a large minority that stands against “the regime”. I don’t believe it, because I know first-hand from Lebanon how complete atheists from Shi’a families nonetheless side with Hezbollah, simply because they know that whatever its shortcomings and sectarian backwardness, this is a party that won’t sell them out to the West.
I have no idea if there was vote fraud in Iran and, if so, to what extent. It certainly seems plausible that the authorities may have manufactured a somewhat clearer mandate for the re-elected Ahmadinejad than he really achieved. But then again, how credible is a guy (Moussavi) who claims to have won an election, at a time when the vote count hasn’t even started yet?
he based that on reports from his poll watchers. 85% turnout was exactly what he was looking for, and he presumably knew what precincts were his and which were not.
Would you agree that a clean win is better than a large one if no one accepts the legitimacy of the large one? If Ahmedinejad was going to win anyway it would be stupid to pump up his vote to implausible levels.
You assume he won. I don’t. I think the fact that Rafsanjani resigned over this is pretty telling.
Since when do poll watchers know how people voted in a given precinct in a secret election? I read somewhere (can’t find the link now) that Moussavi’s wife Zahra Rahnavarad is supposed to have claimed in an interview that her husband received three quarters of the vote. Also a pretty outlandish number. The Iran stories Juan Cole has, of how Friday night the regime was completely surprised that the unthinkable had happened and was caught without a plan b short of the most massive vote fraud in history (adding/disappearing millions and millions of paper ballots, all executed impromptu in a matter of hours) doesn’t seem particularly solid either. What’s clear is that Ahmedinajad was the incumbent and favorite going into the election. Inside Iran there was no reason to see his term as a massive failure.
That there is a power struggle underway in Iran is clear, but who is forging which result for what purpose and is shooting for what politically is something I’d like to know rather than speculate on. One thing though: Hashemi Rafsanjani is no democratic choirboy. If there is a coup attempt underway in Iran, it might just as well be his as anyone else’s.
Anyway, I think it’s best to let the dust settle on this one, before concluding anything.
Uh, I used to make a living analyzing precinct data, and I can tell you in most cases exactly which precincts are going to vote how. The only uncertainty is margin, and that is best gauged by observing the turnout.
Because of past voting and registration patterns. This doesn’t really apply here and to the very limited extent that it does it would support Ahmedinajad’s victory since he ran and won previously and was the only known electoral quantity.
you need to give up now. Both candidates were known quantities, as were the bases of their support.
Booman o Booman: to the extent that the candidates were known quantities as were their bases of support, Ahmadinajad was clearly favored. But no, hysteria is so much more fun. Juan Cole for example wonders how Ahmedinejad is supposed to have done so well in (relatively) affluent Teheran, preferring to forget that the man used to be the fucking mayor there…
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On Sunday, a group of employees in the Interior Ministry, which oversees the polls, and top officials from the campaigns of the two reformist candidates, Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, sent a letter to Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, chair of the country’s powerful Guardian Council, citing discrepancies in the run-up to the election.
According to the letter, the actual number of ballots printed for the first round of voting is 59.6 million, but the Interior Ministry officially says the number is 56 million.
Ali Akbar Mohtashami Pour and Morteza Alviri, of the Mousavi and Karroubi campaigns’ committees on poll supervision, also said that the number of electoral stamps circulating is “twice the number of polling sites plus 10 percent”.
“The stamps have been dispatched without any written procedures and this is a most dangerous and worrisome event,” they said in the letter.
“If organised fraud is to take place, this will not happen at polling branches, nor on site, and not at the ballot casting or counting, but through use of extra ballots and stamps and through use of additional boxes and mobile ballot boxes, especially as we have been informed that soldiers’ birth certificates have been collected at military bases,” it said.
Saeed Razavi Faghih, a spokesperson for the Karroubi campaign, told IPS, “Inviting the [pro-Ahmadinejad] Revolutionary Guard Corps to supervise ballot box security instead of the police has raised serious doubts for us.”
The reformist campaigns also charge that a contract has been signed between the Ministry of Information and Ministry of Telecommunications to send out four million confidential text messages on Friday.
“What top-secret orders are to be issued on Election Day and to whom? Why can’t people know about this [contract]?” the letter asks.
Iran Vote Results Spark Violence
≈ Cross-posted from my diary — Theocracy Intervenes – Election Results on Hold ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."German speakers could do worse than read this post-election interview that Iran specialist Flynt Leverett, former senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council, gave to Spiegel Online today.
He states that he fully expected Ahmedinejad’s victory and then goes on to accuse the Western media of wishful thinking and wishful reporting. He too sees Ahmedinejad as the clear winner of the television debate with Moussavi.
On the actual election result he has this to say: “I myself am a little surprised that the result is so clear-cut. But basically this merely convinces me that the election overall went down fairly. Look at the irregularities Moussavi points to: that in some precincts there weren’t enough ballots, that some precincts weren’t open long enough. All this can’t really change the outcome of the election.If one compares this with the irregularities of the US presidential election in 2000 in Florida, it seems hardly serious.”
There is more on the repercussions of the election (and I am too lazy to translate it all) but Leverett’s bottom line is: Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is non-negotiable for the regime as a whole and that includes all the presidential candidates. He closes by stating one more time that in his opinion people in the West who believe that Ahmedinejad didn’t have the necessary support to win this election under normal circumstances are wrong.
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From the British, not the Iranian: Wishful thinking from Tehran
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Not that this scenario plays out in a nation which is not under attack. It’s been how long since we knew about black ops at play in Iran ? Their assassination targets comprise both military and political figures.
In Iraq an instructive pattern played out : infrastructure of a modern society was destroyed ( and sanctions played a part in this ) ; medical facilities lost supply and staff : electrical power supply was disrupted : and universities were raided and professors killed.
AfPak , Somalia and more show a pattern complying to the advertised objectives of the PNAC.
Anyone who doesn’t strongly suspect intrigue including foreign interference based on known activities and past performance isn’t showing much imagination.
I read the whole international sanctions as a replay of Iraq. It attacks power generation. Consistent with this is blockade on oilfield infrastructure replacement. Try it on for size as a waypoint in the Great Game – in particular tying up the same resource which helped defeat Hitler and targeting Asia.
I continually refer back to the War Game ‘Desert Crossing’ a.k.a. Post-Saddam Iraq. It posits a pattern of destabilizing governments to allow resouce access by transnationals.
The U.S.-based ( often ) international conglomerates have the money to run amok. I don’t discriminate between Israel/Pakistan, North and South Korea,Boliva or Peru – which just had riots killing dozens in a fight between 1000 natives trying to keep out multinationals and 600 security forces.