Book of the Month

acanuck's picture

Iran: all tree, no forest

by acanuck 6/13/2009 - 5:09 pm   |

For those of us who, like Mir Hosein Mousavi, are wondering what happened to our projected landslide green revolution, Josh Marshall links to an interesting Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/iranian-election

The cab driver picking up the reporter at the airport has the takeaway line: "Iran is not Tehran." In announcing the results, the election official confirmed that Mousavi had indeed beaten Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the capital. (If he gave the specific percentage, I didn't see it reported.)

Tehran rivals Cairo as the biggest city in the Middle East, but it still has just one-tenth of Iran's total population (double that if you count suburbs). Its residents are the country's business, political and academic elites -- literate, educated and outward-looking. Even though Ahmadinejad was once the city's mayor, it is no longer his power base.

That would be the rural hinterland and the smaller, more traditional urban centres. Think of Mousavi's party as the Democrats, and Ahmadinejad's as the GOP. Except the Reagan-era GOP, not the post-George Bush one. The strength of that Republican Party would not be obvious to a reporter on the ground in New York or (horrors!) San Francisco.

So that's where Joe Klein and other Tehran-based pundits may have gone wrong in predicting a Mousavi sweep. The reported extent of Ahmadinejad's win (62 per cent) is shocking and dis-spiriting. But I can see how it could occur without massive vote fraud.

Not to say that the electoral process was entirely fair: state control of the media and the internet kept Mousavi from getting his message into the hinterland (where it might not have resonated anyway). Mousavi had to campaign with one hand tied -- but that's not the same as rigging the actual vote results.

So we're stuck with Ahmadinejad for four more years. Despite Andrew Sullivan's expressed hope for an Iranian civil war, the handful of clashes that occurred in Tehran aren't the start of a movement that will bring down the government. If we're lucky, Ahmadinejad will address some of the criticisms of his rule by moderating his hard-line policies.

But he could just as easily go the other way. Unconfirmed reports out of Tehran today say Mousavi is under house arrest, and that his most powerful backer, ex-president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsnjani, has resigned as chairman of the Expediency Council, which resolves disputes between the Majlis or parliament and the religious Council of Guardians.

If true, one of Iran's most pragmatic voices will be silenced. Not at all a good sign.

Just to get the discussion started, here's Juan Cole on why he suspects voter fraud. He makes a good, if circumstantial, case: http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/stealing-iranian-election.html

In passing, he quotes election officials as saying Ahmadinejad won in Tehran, which conflicts with what I initially read (and stated above). Meanwhile, the mainstream media are remarkably quiet on what's happening in Iran, leaving it to Andrew Sullivan and Hugh Hewitt to try to gin up a civil war. I don't give that possibility much credence. And if it did occur, I greatly fear the moderates -- and the rest of the world -- would lose.

by acanuck 6/13/2009 - 6:33 pm

What's the tree and what's the forest in this scenario?

by Genghis 6/13/2009 - 11:49 pm

I interpret the tree to be Tehran.

by elliottness 6/14/2009 - 1:26 am (re: Genghis)

Yeah, Tehran. Sorry if the hed was too cryptic.

Middle East expert Flynt Leverett and Newsweek's Christopher Dickey also seem to think Western journalists operating inside the capital-city bubble indulged in wishful thinking about Mousavi's popular appeal. They are far outnumbered by pundits like Juan Cole who are more or less certain the election was stolen. Neither camp has presented incontrovertible evidence, so it's impossible to know. (Though as an ex-journalist, I lean toward the Western media getting it totally wrong.)

On the bright side, Mousavi has now formally appealed the election results to the Council of Guardians, and called on supporters to protest only peacefully and legally. So it doesn't sound like he's under house arrest after all. He's also asked for permission to hold a rally to protest the results; I'd be really astonished if he gets an OK for that.

by acanuck 6/14/2009 - 11:53 am (re: elliottness)

Here's Robert Fisk's take: Ahmadinejad may indeed have won, but he's still a brutal thug in populist clothing:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-iran-erupts-as-voters-back-the-democrator-1704810.html

by acanuck 6/15/2009 - 12:48 am

fivethirtyeight.com on fishy numbers: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/iran-does-have-some-fishy-numbers...

I've been mulling over my response. While I can imagine that Western analysts may have been led by wishful thinking to exaggerate Mousavi's chances, Ahmadinejad's 63% just seems way too high for a first round vote

In the first round of the 2005 election, Ahmadinejad only received 19% of the vote. OK, so he's an incumbent now, and the conservative vote was split in 2005. But if you were to give him all the other conservative votes, he'd still have had only 39%.

Let's look at the opposition. In 2005, Reformists received 36% in the first round of a pessimistic campaign. In 2009, it dropped to 33%, despite a highly energized reformist campaign. The total reformist votes only grew from 10.5M to 13.5M, whereas the conservative votes grew from 11.5M to 25M. (Reformist candidate Karroubi mysteriously dropped from 17% to less than 1%.)

The one block missing from 2009 has been Rafsanjani, a pragmatic conservative who was not officially affiliated with either side in '05. In the first round of '05, he received 10M votes or 21%. Ahmadinejad might have attained his 63% by snapping up Rafsanjani's 2005 supporters. But Rafsanjani has come out very, very strongly for Mousavi, so it's very difficult to imagine that almost all of his supporters in 2005 would switch to Ahmadinejad in 2009.

So there are three scenarios under which Ahmadinejad could have achieved such massive growth in the support:

1) Almost all of Rafsanjani's previous supporters voted for him (unlikely given Rafsanjani's opposition to Ahmadinejad.)

2) Almost all the new voters in this election voted for Ahmadinejad (unlikely given the enthusiasm of the reformists this year and general principles of probability)

3) Massive changes in allegience from reformists to conservative (also seems unlikely given that Ahmadinejad is not wildly popular)

I've got no evidence to prove fraud, but let's just say that I'm extremely suspicious.

by Genghis 6/15/2009 - 12:44 pm

Well put.  Quit making my comments first, dude.

by Articleman 6/15/2009 - 12:52 pm (re: Genghis)

Quit the ass-kissing, pseud. Acanuck is on to us.

by Genghis 6/15/2009 - 12:59 pm (re: Articleman)

You can't tell a pseud to stop doing something, you'd just do it, wouldn't you?  I mean, I'm just saying.

by Articleman 6/15/2009 - 3:18 pm (re: Genghis)

By jove, you've discovered the inner contradiction of the joke! (Of course, I would never stoop to using a pseudonym to reveal the inner contradiction of a joke. Ergo, you must not be my pseud.)

by Genghis 6/15/2009 - 3:29 pm (re: Articleman)

I should add that the second round of 2005 was also suspicious. Ahmadinejad received 5.7M votes in the first round and 17.2M votes in the first round, meaning that he had to have won not only the 5M votes from the other conservative first round candidates but the majority of the 10M votes that went to first round reformist candidates.

Karroubi, the guy whose support went from 17% in '05 to less than 1% in '09, alleged fraud in '05. Here's what happened according to Mr. Wiki:

After the first round of the election, some people, including Mehdi Karroubi, the pragmatic reformist candidate who ranked third in the first round but was the first when partial results were first published, have alleged that a network of mosques, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps military forces, and Basij militia forces have been illegally used to generate and mobilize support for Ahmadinejad. Karroubi has explicitly alleged that Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, was involved. Ayatollah Khamenei then wrote to Karroubi and mentioned that these allegations are below his dignity and will result in a crisis in Iran, which he will not allow. As a reply, Karroubi resigned from all his political posts, including an Advisor to the Supreme Leader and a member of Expediency Discernment Council, on both of which he had been installed by Khamenei. The day after, on June 20, a few reformist morning newspapers, Eghbal, Hayat-e No, Aftab-e Yazd, and Etemaad were stopped from distribution by the general prosecutor of Tehran, Saeed Mortazavi, for publishing Karroubi's letter.

by Genghis 6/15/2009 - 1:09 pm (re: Genghis)

I appreciate your taking the question seriously, Genghis, and obviously doing your homework. What we in the West conclude about the election isn't going to change anything in Iran, but it will definitely color how we deal with that country's leadership. So it's important to get it right.

This was a particularly polarizing election, drawing in millions who didn't vote in 2005. So there's a problem extrapolating from previous results. It wasn't just Mousavi's supporters who were energized; Ahmadinejad also pulled out all the stops. And pulled the traditional levers of power, especially the state's control over the media and the internet.

A 2-1 victory sounded very improbable to me too. But today's Washington Post says that's exactly what their polling predicted: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757.html The Post seems very confident of their survey's reliability.

There are a few somewhat hopeful signs: Mousavi did get to hold his big protest rally, and Khamenei's office says it will look into the fraud allegations. Maybe we can avoid another Tiananmen Square, which would just embolden the hardest of hard-liners.

by acanuck 6/15/2009 - 2:01 pm (re: Genghis)

Interesting about the WaPo poll. I could be wrong for sure. For the record, I wasn't suggesting that all the new voters went to Mousavi, only that it would be very strange if hardly any of them when to Mousavi. There were 10M new voters in 2009, and Rafsanjani had 10M votes in the 2005 first round, but the reformist candidates only received 3M of more votes than they did in 2005.

So in an energized campaign, with Rafsanjani pushing hard for the reformists, they only get 15% of new voters and former Rafsanhani supporters?

If there was fraud, I doubt that any hard evidence will appear. I'm not sure that it matters anyway. Whomever is president, the hardline clerics still control the courts, the cops, and the military.

by Genghis 6/15/2009 - 2:16 pm (re: acanuck)

Yeah, Khamenei and his clique still call the shots. Mousavi was obviously more receptive to the pent-up demand for political reform, internal liberalization, and international co-operation -- all things the same WaPo poll shows Iranians want. But any changes would have been incremental.

Some voters may have simply written off Mousavi after seeing how the regime stifled the efforts of popular reformist president Khatami. Who knows, maybe Ahmadinejad will surprise us all and use his new mandate to pull his own "Nixon in China." I'm not overly optimstic, though.

by acanuck 6/15/2009 - 3:34 pm (re: Genghis)

Do you think the U.S. could have done more to support the Iranian people after it was widely reported that the election had been rigged?

http://moderatescope.blogspot.com/

by BCA (not verified) 8/19/2009 - 12:40 pm
By the way, I really do enjoy the blog. I think it covers a good array of topics which makes it interesting.
by BCA (not verified) 8/19/2009 - 12:40 pm (re: BCA)

Latest Comments

more