What if the Iran vote was not rigged? The counter-argument is here. This echoes my argument that Iran and US are awfully similar. Recall that Al Gore lost Tennessee in 2000, and John Kerry won the urban areas but lost out in the rural ones. For the record, I am not saying the elections were not rigged, I am saying I don’t know and no one really does. Were the US elections in 2000 and 2004 fair? Not if you ask Florida and Ohio, respectively. Anyway, some of James Petras’ points below:
- There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.
- What is astonishing about the West’s universal condemnation of the electoral outcome as fraudulent is that not a single shred of evidence in either written or observational form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count.
- This poll revealed that among ethnic Azeris, Ahmadinejad was favored by a 2 to 1 margin over Mousavi, demonstrating how class interests represented by one candidate can overcome the ethnic identity of the other candidate (Washington Post June 15, 2009).
- the fact that the incumbent candidate was drawing his support from the far more numerous poor working class, peasant, artisan and public employee sectors while the bulk of the opposition demonstrators was drawn from the upper and middle class students, business and professional class.
- The only group, which consistently favored Mousavi, was the university students and graduates, business owners and the upper middle class. The ‘youth vote’, which the Western media praised as ‘pro-reformist’, was a clear minority of less than 30% but came from a highly privileged, vocal and largely English speaking group with a monopoly on the Western media. Their overwhelming presence in the Western news reports created what has been referred to as the ‘North Tehran Syndrome’, for the comfortable upper class enclave from which many of these students come. While they may be articulate, well dressed and fluent in English, they were soundly out-voted in the secrecy of the ballot box.
- The open attacks by opposition economists of the government welfare spending, easy credit and heavy subsidies of basic food staples did little to ingratiate them with the majority of Iranians benefiting from those programs. The state was seen as the protector and benefactor of the poor workers against the ‘market’, which represented wealth, power, privilege and corruption.
- Recent events suggest that political leaders in Europe, and even some in Washington, do not accept the Zionist-mass media line of ‘stolen elections’. The White House has not suspended its offer of negotiations with the newly re-elected government but has focused rather on the repression of the opposition protesters (and not the vote count). Likewise, the 27 nation European Union expressed ‘serious concern about violence’ and called for the “aspirations of the Iranian people to be achieved through peaceful means and that freedom of expression be respected” (Financial Times June 16, 2009 p.4). Except for Sarkozy of France, no EU leader has questioned the outcome of the voting.
Read more.
In 2000, Al Gore was believed to have won the Elections, but Florida proved otherwise and George W. Bush was chosen as the winner by the Supreme Court in what was a political decision to maintain peace and order.
In 2004, John Kerry was expected to defeat the allegedly unpopular George Bush, but surprising to many and shocking to foreigners, Bush retained the Presidency.
In 2008, change was the theme, and leveraging technology, Barack Obama was swept into power.
Reading the post mortems in US and British media, you cannot help but realize that there is
- a brewing hatred for the sitting President in the respective periods (Ahmedinehad in Iran and Bush in USA)
- a power struggle going on amongst the clericals (who basically represent the neoconservatives in American politics).
I think this just reiterates the role of religion in politics. During Bush’s regime, the US swayed towards right wing religion, Iran did the same thing at the government level even though the population sought more secularism and democracy. What is happening now is the friction between the forces of religion and secularism. America had its own struggle in the 2008 elections, Iran tried to in 2009, to no avail… but don’t expect those lingering issues simply disappear.
If these images of Clerics joining the protesters are real, then the Regime is beyond doomed:
Juan Cole points to some more odd things about Iran’s elections:
‘ · In two Conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of
more than 100% was recorded.· At a provincial level, there is no correlation between the increased
turnout, and the swing to Ahmadinejad. This challenges the notion
that his victory was due to the massive participation of a previously
silent Conservative majority.· In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that
Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, and all
former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former
Reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two
groups.· In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and
Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas.
That the countryside always votes conservative is a myth. The claim
that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces
flies in the face of these trends.’
Here is a pdf to the full study. Mind you, the British have always been vilified in Iran, this won’t do anything to endear them to the Regime… but that is besides the point when you see all of those marchers on the streets.
Before former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani hatred for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, he actually helped him become the Supreme Leader, see for yourself in this old video:
And here is an interview with Rafsanjani when he was President in 1997:
In this video, you sense the arrogance on both sides, but particularly CBS’ Wallace when he insists that the US will stay “in this area”, this mentality explains a lot of what is going on today around the world.
Some extremely powerful words and sights from Tehran, in the wake of the Iran Elections:
So long as the protesters shield themselves with Islam and stay united, indeed the Regime will fall.
The chanting can be translated to:
“God is Great!”
Followed by (this is when the chorus is at its loudest at 0:36), if you speak and understand Farsi, you cannot help but get chills here
“Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid! We are all together!”
And then
“Death to the Dictator!”
By now, you can imagine the dictator they’re referring to isn’t the President Ahmadinejad.
The Iran Elections and its aftermath have little to do with the elections itself. It boils down to oil.
Because in most Middle East states, power grows out of the barrel of a gun and out of a barrel of oil — and that combination is very hard to overthrow.
Oil is a key reason that democracy has had such a hard time emerging in the Middle East, except in one of the few states with no oil: Lebanon. Because once kings and dictators seize power, they can entrench themselves, not only by imprisoning their foes and killing their enemies, but by buying off their people and using oil wealth to build huge internal security apparatuses.
There is only one precedent for an oil-funded autocrat in the Middle East being toppled by a people’s revolution, not by a military coup, and that was in … Iran.
I always said that Reagan was as instrumental to taking down Communism as I am to ice melting. In other words, if I happen to be there at the right time, I can take the credit. Despite what the vocal ignorant Republican minority is saying, President Obama is playing this masterfully. He will be able to take credit for regime change in Iran even though he will have played no part in it per se. Why? This article by Time outlines it fairly well.
The events of the past week are really the beginning of the end for the Regime as we know it.
Although it is not yet clear who shot “Neda” (a soldier? pro-government militant? an accidental misfiring?), her death may have changed everything. For the cycles of mourning in Shiite Islam actually provide a schedule for political combat — a way to generate or revive momentum. Shiite Muslims mourn their dead on the third, seventh and 40th days after a death, and these commemorations are a pivotal part of Iran’s rich history. During the revolution, the pattern of confrontations between the shah’s security forces and the revolutionaries often played out in 40-day cycles.
(…)
The belief in martyrdom is central to modern politics as well as Shiite tradition dating back centuries in Iran. It too helped propel the 1979 revolution.
(…)
Indeed, protest and martyrdom are widely considered duties to God. And nowhere is the practice more honored than in Iran, the world’s largest Shiite country.
More on Iran elections:
Khamenei acted so crudely and rashly on June 12 because he’d already seen this movie. What’s happening in Iran now is all about democracy, about the contradictory and chaotic bedfellows that it makes, about the questioning of authority and the personal curiosity that it unleashes. Khamenei knows what George H.W. Bush’s “realist” national security adviser Brent Scowcroft surely knows, too: Democracy in Iran implies regime change. Where Iranians in the 1990s could try to play games with themselves–be in favor of greater democracy but refrain from saying publicly that the current government was illegitimate–this fiction is no longer possible. Khamenei has forced Mousavi and, more important, the people behind him into opposition to himself and the political system he leads. Unless Mousavi gives up, and thereby deflates the millions who’ve gathered around him, a permanent opposition to Khamenei and his constitutionally ordained supremacy has now formed. Like it or not, Mousavi has become the new Khatami–except this time the opposition is stronger and led by a man of considerable intestinal fortitude.
From Robert Fisk:
[The protest] is absolutely not against the Islamic republic or the Islamic revolution.
It’s clearly an Islamic protest against specifically the personality, the manner, the language of Ahmadinejad. They absolutely despise him but they do not hate or dislike the Islamic republic that they live in.
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