Monday, June 15, 2009

Cole: Stealing the Iranian Election, Margolis: Obama Fails to Impress

These two articles are inter-related and should be read as such,
however your time allows. A complex, dynamic and sad situation.

And, though I'm no fan of Berlesconi, in yesterday's eamail
I meant to write 'totalitarian', not 'totalitalian," re Iran -Ed

http://www.truthout.org/061409Z

Stealing the Iranian Election

by: Juan Cole
original @ Informed Comment: Saturday 13 June 2009

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His
main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of
which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in
Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular
in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for
an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense.
In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor
presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is
not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in
part because his policies have produced high inflation and high
unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real
questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have
won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed
home rather than voting.)

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist
candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western
provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west,
including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first
round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his
support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he
would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at
least done well in the west, which he did not.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at
all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as
Karoubi.

5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces.
In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial
variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before
certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform
Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day
delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In
this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some
explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud.
For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading
around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but
somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me
like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on
Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman
abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even
contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population
for this victory. The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this
outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so
confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for
what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to
falsify the vote counts.

This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an
Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.

The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such
implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote
and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would
have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and
forestall further tampering with the election.

This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with
what we know of the major players.

More in my column, just out, in Salon.com: "Ahmadinejad reelected under
cloud of fraud," where I argue that the outcome of the presidential
elections does not and should not affect Obama's policies toward that
country - they are the right policies and should be followed through on
regardless.

The public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that
big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when
challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the
horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when
faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that
generation.

My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the
revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before
you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers.

So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij
paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some
heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well
get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy
will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened,
over the next decade or two.

What I've said is full of speculation and informed guesses. I'd be glad
to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be.

PS: Here's the data:

So here is what Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli said Saturday about the
outcome of the Iranian presidential elections:

"Of 39,165,191 votes counted (85 percent), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the
election with 24,527,516 (62.63 percent)."

He announced that Mir-Hossein Mousavi came in second with 13,216,411
votes (33.75 percent).

Mohsen Rezaei got 678,240 votes (1.73 percent)

Mehdi Karroubi with 333,635 votes (0.85 percent).

He put the void ballots at 409,389 (1.04 percent).

***

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/14-1

Obama Fails to Impress

by Eric Margolis: June 14, 2009
The Toronto Sun:

SIFNOS, GREECE -- President Barack Obama's masterfully written, artfully
delivered recent speech in Cairo was filled with just what the Muslim world
had been waiting for.

After eight years of the George W. Bush administration's relentless
anti-Islamic hostility, the world's 1.5 billion Muslims at last heard an
intelligent, respectful speech from President Obama calling for normalized
relations with the Muslim world, including former "betes noires" Iran and
Syria, co-operation, and advancement of democracy and human rights.

Very nice. But the Muslim world was not as taken by Obama's silver-tongued
oratory as many Americans. The general response there was, "actions speak
louder than words. Show us."

Rather than a friendly, helpful U.S.A., many Muslims saw Obama expanding the
war in Afghanistan that he could easily have ended upon taking office. They
saw the U.S.-rented Pakistani army create three million refugees in its Swat
offensive against rebellious tribesmen, continuing U.S. occupation of Iraq,
and CIA's covert campaign to destabilize Iran and Syria.

Muslims saw Israel's rightist government thumbing its nose at Obama's
sensible calls for a halt to its colonization of the West Bank and Golan,
and the U.S. Congress applauding Israel's hard line like trained seals.

These facts speak a lot louder than the president's mellifluous oratory.

We would like to give the new president the benefit of the doubt. He has
been in office only four months and will need a lot more time to begin
repairing the catastrophic damage inflicted by the Bush administration on
U.S. interests and standing in the Muslim world and Europe. Here in Greece,
for example, anti-U.S. sentiment reached an all time high, but is now
declining thanks to Obama.

However, the White House's recent actions belie the new president's
promises.

Exhibit A: Obama unfortunately chose Egypt from which to deliver his message
to Muslims of amity, democracy and human rights.

Egypt's U.S.-backed dictator, Husni Mubarak, has ruled for 37 years and is
grooming his son to replace him. This leading Arab nation is run by a
corrupt oligarchy, the military and secret police.

Torture

Egypt has become notorious for torture and human rights violations.
Opponents of the regime are intimidated or arrested and tortured. Elections
are crudely rigged.

Egypt is America's most important Muslim ally, along with Saudi Arabia. Are
these repressive states what Obama means when he calls for democracy and
human rights? He should have given his speech from democratic Indonesia, or
the progressive United Arab Emirates and Qatar, rather than Egypt, a pillar
of America's Mideast raj.

Exhibit B: Lebanon's June 7 parliamentary elections. A
U.S.-French-Saudi-backed coalition of Sunni, Christians, and Druze was
pitted against a Syrian-Iranian backed Hezbollah-led coalition that included
Armenians and a Christian splinter faction.

Late last month, U.S. Vice-President Joseph Biden went to Lebanon and
threatened to cut off all U.S. aid to that nation of 3.9 million if the
democratically elected Hezbollah coalition won. Hillary Clinton made similar
crude threats.

Imagine the uproar if the Saudi crown prince came to the U.S. just before
elections and threatened to raise oil prices if Democrats won.

The United States, Saudi Arabia and France spent millions of dollars bribing
Lebanon's rentable politicians and voters. The U.S. has been mucking around
in Lebanon since 1957.

Iran spread some money around as well. Nothing new about that: Lebanon's
politicians are among the most corrupt and easily bought on earth.

Vote rigging

All the western "baksheesh" and some fancy vote rigging helped the
U.S.-backed May 14 coalition, headed by Saad Hariri, win 71 seats. The
Hezbollah-led coalition, which speaks for the nation's Shia, won only 57
seats. This left sectarian, fragmented Lebanon just where it was before this
sleazy election.

Is this what Obama means by promoting good government in the Muslim world?

Many Muslims and non-Muslims alike see Obama as an honest, decent,
well-intentioned leader who has not yet managed to impose his will on the
aggressive financial-military-industrial complex that seemingly remains the
real power in Washington.

© 2009 Toronto Sun

Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. A veteran of many
conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special
appearance on Britain's Sky News TV as "the man who got it right" in his
predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in
Iraq. His latest book is American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving
the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World

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