A World at the Edge of Its Seat

Have to hand it to Al again, for honing right in on what matters out of Iran, how the Iranians  react to  the circus, rather than the circus itself (i.e., it doesn't really matter which of the proposed figureheads the ayatollahs will deign fit to allow to serve... the hardass Holocaust denying figurehead or the "reformist" possibly "pro-Western modernist" figurehead...)

While Americans by and large think that because  the title supposedly being contested  is called "president" that it somehow conveys the meaningful power that the title "president" means here (which is  why we  take the outrages out of Ahmadidjad as in themselves having significance, which they don't, rather than as indicative of  what the mullahs might be thinking, which is its actual use).  But the Iranians know better-- they know that they have both freedom to have satellite dishes and private parties and religious thought police, both "democracy" to vote in this sort of farcical thing, and the reality of a  theocracy really running the place... they know that what really matters is what the mullahs do, and just how reactionary and repressive they are going to be, and whether  or not they will at  least allow aspirations to be expressed via "elections."

For good measure, a huge part of Afghanistan's  opium exports  go right into Iran, where it is consumed  liberally.  Frankly, that's probably a major factor in preventing Iran from exploding to date... along with the other limited "wink wink" freedoms that have been permitted in a largely repressive society.

And so... we have to see what will happen next... to see if Iran's people react to the expression of their aspirations being quashed (as opposed to the USA in 2000 where we largely sat on our  tushes  while one party's Congressional staffer thugs saw the moon over Miami while they helped quash our aspirations).

Stay tuned!

Al is quite right to question the legitimacy of the election process in Iran, since an unelected body of religious leaders were able to veto presidential candidates.  Imagine if a high council of evangelical preachers in the U.S. had been able to decide whether Barack Obama was eligible to run for president last year, and you'll see the ludicrousness of the claim that the Iranian system is anything more than a quasi-democracy.

But even within those constraints, the enormous, unprecedented outpouring of public support for the reformist presidential candidacy of Mir-Hossein Moussavi showed that demand for systemic change is being powered from below in Iran.  Not known for incendiary rhetoric, Moussavi claimed immediately after the Iranian Interior Ministry announced an Ahmadinejad landslide that the election results had been manipulated. Indeed, almost all observers inside and outside Iran had expected a run-off between the two candidates, with a good possibility that Moussavi could have won a plurality, and so the reported results were shocking.

Controlled by Ahmadinejad's hardliners, the Interior ministry's vote tabulations would be suspect anyway, but the hope was that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would require fair vote tallying at least in the first round, in order not to insult the obvious popular groundswell of support for Moussavi.  But instead it seems that that groundswell frightened the regime, which may have decided that allowing a run-off was too great a risk.

The reality is that there are hard-core rightists in both Iran and America that want a confrontation between the two countries, and Moussavi's election would have prevented that.  American neo-con promoters of military action against Iran spent weeks before this election helping their favored anti-regime groups inside Iran to promote a boycott of the election.  Why?  Because they preferred the hard-core, Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad as the symbol of an extremist Iran, over the reformist, intellectual Moussavi, with whom President Obama would almost certainly have agreed to meet, had he been allowed to win.  One right-wing American group even denounced the Voice of America for refusing to allow Iranian election-boycotters on its programs (as if the U.S. State Department should give equal time to those who don't want people to vote in elections).

I've scanned international news sources this morning, and the two commentaries below seem closest to getting it right today.  First, this article in the left-of-center Guardian captures the ferment for change in Iran and casts doubt on the election's legitimacy, but is realistic in noting that Iran's authoritarian clerics are unlikely to back down from their re-anointment of Ahmadinejad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/iran-middleeast

Second, this article in London's Daily Telegraph predicts that Moussavi will try "behind the scenes pressure and protest" in pressing his claim that the election was stolen:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/5523988/Iran-e...

But whatever happens in the coming days, the genie of mass self-organizing for decisive change in Iran is out of the bottle.  Already widely detested in Iran for his incompetent management of the economy and derided on Iranian blogs for his belief that he has a divine mandate (hmmm, sound familiar?), Ahmadinejad will not have an easy second term...

It's been 30 years since the Shah was overthrown, and over 50 since the US nudged the Shah down a more oppressive path. Given the history of the Iranian people, I'd say an uprising like this was overdue...

I have been following this story more closely than I expected. Despite the limited nature of the change allowed by this reaction (funny how certain neoconservatives realize this when talking about how much power Moussavi would have, but then ignore it when fearmongering about Ahmadinejad), it is how the Iranian people react in the hours and days to come that may put their country on a new course.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/6/13/742004/-Updated-IV:-Breaking:-Ay...

This diary is linked to a Farsi blog that has new information. Apparently, Moussavi has been placed under arrest. That the goverment is locking down dissent and now telephone conversations to and from Tehran to the other parts of Iran, forget international, can not occur. Larua Rozen at FP links to a great artical about how maybe Khomeni's grip isn't as secure as most think it is and he's under pressure from the Guards and fears Moussavi. It doesn't help that he and Moussavi have a 30 year feud between them.

It takes a lot to fight the state; but it looks like the makings for a real and sustained conflict within the country is there. I guess we'll know more by Monday.

It seems these protests were very much anticipated, even baited to a degree, by the Iranian government.

From a recent news report – prior to the Iranian election.

The political chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard has warned reformists in the country against seeking what he called a "velvet revolution", vowing that it would be "nipped in the bud.”

Yadollah Javani's comments appeared aimed at Mir Hossein Mousavi, a reformist candidate in the country's presidential elections and followed another day of bitter exchanges between Mousavi and his rival and current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Revolutionary Guard is one of the pillars of the Iranian establishment and controls large military forces as well as a nationwide network of militia.



In a statement on its website, Javani drew parallels between Mousavi's campaign and the "velvet revolution'' that led to the 1989 overthrow of the communist government in then Czechoslovakia.



"There are many indications that some extremist [reformist] groups, have designed a colourful revolution ... using a specific colour for the first time in an election," the statement said.

That color, for Mousavi, is green. You’ll notice a generous spattering of it in many of the videos on the Net now.

After Ahmadinejad was declared the victor in the election by the state propaganda machine, his supporters took to the streets, according to an Al Jazeera report.

… Supporters of Ahmadinejad also took to the street following the announcement of his victory, waving Iranian flags and honking car horns in celebration of his winning a second, four-year term.

Ahmadinejad also went on TV, sparking a ratcheting up of the opposition protests, Al Jazeera reports. As part of that, he set the table to blame the democracy protests on foreign powers — setting up a justification for a draconian response.

… The protests intensified following a televised speech by Ahmadinejad in which he said the vote had been "completely free" and the outcome was "a great victory" for Iran.

"Today, the people of Iran have inspired other nations and disappointed their ill-wishers," he said.

This is a great victory at a time when the ... propaganda facilities outside Iran and sometimes inside Iran were totally mobilised against our people."

Then the state begins to methodically take control of the communications that allow a horizontally organized protest movement to react and grow strategically.

Again, from the Al Jaezeera report:

Fearing the protests might spread, authorities blocked access to some news websites and Facebook, the social networking site.

"Text messaging has been closed all day and now it’s very difficult to even get a mobile telephone line," our correspondent said.

And, as it turns out, there might well be a good reason the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader seems so confident that any “velvet revolution” in Iran will be “nipped in the bud.”

It seems last year [curiously timed in advance of this year’s election], with the help of some European companies, one with U.S. connections, Iran put in place a surveillance system that will allow government agents to track down anyone involved in the protests, particularly if they used any form of modern communications in organizing the protests.

From a story early this year in the Washington Times:

Two European companies — a major contractor to the U.S. government and a top cell-phone equipment maker — last year installed an electronic surveillance system for Iran that human rights advocates and intelligence experts say can help Iran target dissidents.

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens, delivered what is known as a monitoring center to Irantelecom, Iran's state-owned telephone company.

A spokesman for NSN said the servers were sold for "lawful intercept functionality," a technical term used by the cell-phone industry to refer to law enforcement's ability to tap phones, read e-mails and surveil electronic data on communications networks.

… Iranian dissidents reacted with anger to the news about the sale.

Mohsen Sazegara, a founder of Iran's Revolutionary Guards who became a democracy advocate and was arrested in 2003 for his opposition to the Islamic republic, said there were rumors in Iranian opposition circles that the Germans had sold the state powerful new technology that would make their monitoring efforts more effective.

"My first reaction is, 'Wow! Why do they do this?' Don't they know that this will be used against the people of Iran?" said Mr. Sazegara, who now lives in the United States.

"They facilitate a regime which easily violates human rights in Iran and the privacy of the people of Iran. They have facilitated the regime with a high technology that allows them to monitor every student activist, every women's rights activist, every labor activist and every ordinary person."

Bill's right that the regime has long feared a "velvet revolution" but they didn't expect it from supporters of a moderate reformist who'd been an advisor of Ayatollah Khomeini.  They had concocted a fantasy that Western agents were trying to subvert Iranian youth, so they've been accusing a whole variety of bloggers and women's rights protesters and visiting Western academics and journalists of being subversive agents.  Yet people power can only come from the people, not from outside agents. 

But however well an authoritarian regime prepares its repressive apparatus, it is not infallible, or else such regimes wouldn't have fallen to popular movements, as they have so many times.  The Iranian regime didn't expect the size of the enormous wave of support for Moussavi that came from all walks of life.  They couldn't have wanted the enormous embarrassment of having dissident clerics, students, merchants and ordinary people in the hundreds of thousands filling the streets for days on end in the recent campaign.

And what's different now from earlier waves of protest in the past 20 years in Iran is that it goes way beyond typical dissidents and revved-up students.  Islamists like Sazegara and former Islamic Revolution true believers like Moussavi separated themselves from the existing power elite in recent years because they hated the rising suppression of media, literature and culture, their wives and daughters began to hate the harassment of the religious police, and they came to the conclusion that Ahmadinejad was a loose cannon who had already tanked the economy and might get them into a war with the Americans and Israelis.  Their opposition is not based on some idealism about Western-style political freedom, it's based on returning to the purity of the original revolutionary ideals and developing a stable, open, sensibly managed society.  The Moussavi candidacy came to represent a possible path to this. 

Given the cathartic and tragic events of the last several days (and perhaps of the coming days), it's highly unlikely that the status quo ante will be restored.  Either a series of events will unfold that will lead to a split in the existing power structure that permits the election to be re-done, or a harsher though not necessarily long-lasting period of repression lies ahead -- which will only further expand the constituency for decisive change.  Imagine if after leading in all the polls, Barack Obama had lost last November by 60-40, there were huge statistical irregularities in the voting results, and the federal government shut down the internet, cell phones and all mobile devices.  That wouldn't have nipped change in the bud -- it would have made the demand for it truly revolutionary.