There’s been some dispute about the recent election in Iran. The contest had seemed to some outside observers to be going toward the challenger. Yet, the balloting was said to favor the incumbent by a wide margin. The rioting in the streets is supposedly inspired by the challenger’s supporters who feel, we are told, that the election was stolen.
I want to show that people are recommending that we now ‘wait and see’ what will happen to Iran after their recent election. Then, I’ll point out that there are reasons why the ‘wait and see’ recommendation may just be a way of furthering a malicious strategy of ‘regime change’ in Iran. The way to see that we cannot just ‘wait and see’ is suggested by a story written by Isaac Asimov, The Gentle Vultures.
There has been some ‘progressive’ analysis that, well, the challenger has a case. But, alongside that argument there are people who say, based on polling they’d done, the incumbent was ahead all the time. Here, for example,
The Iranian People Speak
By Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty
Monday, June 15, 2009
The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.
While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.
Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/14/AR2009061401757.html
There is some skepticism about this poll and the results it supposedly supported, by Prof. Cole, argued here,
Monday, June 15, 2009
Terror Free Tomorrow Poll Did not Predict Ahmadinejad Win
I think Prof. Cole’s argument is interesting, that is, the poll does not support any win by the incumbent to the extent claimed by the election results, hence, one should be skeptical and wonder whether there was fraud. I was impressed by the responses he received, one being this by anonymous,
I think I'm on board with your contention that the elections were fraudulent, but my own experience in Iran makes me call into question some of the assumptions you make in this post.
First, I know many, many Iranians who would say yes to the question of whether they favor political reform, but their conception of reform would be much different than what you're assuming it is. Many Iranians see Ahmedinejad as a reformer of the system--a non-cleric committed to battling corruption.
Also, in corresponding with my Iranian friends, both Moussavi supporters and otherwise, I've heard again and again that Moussavi's poor and "weak" performance in the debates was a huge, huge factor for many Iranians in areas and classes to which Western media has very little access. It makes sense that this would sway the votes of the undecided towards Ahmedinejad; Iranians' perception that their country is under siege and that they need a strong leader to keep from being taken advantage of is very real.
Also, I find your conclusion that those polled who didn't express an opinion were more likely reformist supporters than AN supporters. I think it's all about who did the polling, and how those polled perceived them. In Iran I saw many, many situations in which reformist supporters effectively silenced those who supported Ahmedinejad. In my experience, which is admittedly a couple of years old, reformist supporters generally had a class and education advantage and were quick and vocal about denouncing as stupid those who disagreed with them. This had the consequence that people not well equipped to articulate their political leanings chose silence in public and then expressed their views with their vote.
I too don't find it all that credible that AN won with the margin he claims. But I do think it's at least plausible.http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/terror-free-tomorro-poll-did-not.html#c6284275328455394452
There were other comments, on Prof. Cole’s blog, also worth reading.
The question at this point is, what happened with Iran’s elections, and what should the United States do from now into the future?
One argument is that, well, we need to step back and let the Iranians sort out their election. We need to let them know we are not trying to meddle. This viewpoint is explained here, on Open Left,
Everybody Stand Back
by: Natasha Chart
Mon Jun 15, 2009 at 21:27
This excerpt,
…It's a terrible crime to take democracy away from a country.
When the Shah fell, deposed by a broad coalition of groups, many who were secular, the only contingent focused and organized enough to seize power were the hardline ayatollahs.
Imagine, if you will, that following the stolen election of 2000, that Canada had invaded, set up a monarchy in Washington, DC, and dismantled all political parties, political action committees, independent political news sources and tortured or killed anyone who expressed interest in setting up new ones. Then imagine that, about 20 years later, the fed up populace rebelled and took back the government, only to have it taken over by a well-organized bloc of Catholic bishops - because they were the only organized group still standing.
Would that represent the will of the American people? Even the people who'd opposed Bush? No. Emphatically no.
Iranians used to worry about the predations of Britain and Russia. Now they worry about the United States. The US is seen as having, almost seamlessly, picked up the baton of imperial rule from right where the British dropped it.
The US embassy was seized in 1979 because Iranians fully expected that another coup would be arranged against them to destroy their autonomy and bring back the Shah.
Iran's clerical government has used that wholly reasonable concern, as well as the US' publicly known, permanent covert operations campaign against them, as a club against any opposition. It's all too easy in Iran to brand someone as 'soft on the United States,' as it were, if not as an outright tool of our government.
It's fear of foreign meddling as much as anything that has kept the extremely unpopular clerical government in power. Do you start a family argument when someone is trying to break down the front door? You do not.
Nonetheless, the Iranian people have diligently continued trying to build democratic institutions. They've achieved as much under the circumstances as probably anyone could. In spite of being terrorized by the regime, in spite of a horrible war with Iraq, they never gave up.
The Obama administration has, so far and very sensibly in my opinion, stayed out of this. Obama had not expressed an interest in one outcome or another of the election, he hasn't threatened to come in guns blazing to rescue people who don't want that kind of rescuing. The neocon response is merely stupid, as usual, as it always was under Bush.
There's some chaos right now, but for love of God (ed.), the best gift we could give to the people of Iran would be to let them know that they don't have to worry about external threats right now. That we'll be patient and let them figure it out.
If it should happen that the stolen election holds? Well, I'm still glad no one invaded the US in order to interfere in the 2000 results. Look what's happened since: at the incredible progressive movement we've built, at the president we elected.
Let them be, let them sort it out, let them own their country. It's the right thing to do.
The sentiment that we should not interfere is restated here,
What should the U.S. do? I would say: nothing. Supporting the overthrow of a moderate Iranian government in 1953 was a mistake. Supporting the Ayatollah Khomeini and stirring up militant Muslims worldwide was a mistake. Meddling in Iran, as we certainly did during Bush and are probably still doing under Obama, is a mistake. A military attack on Iran would be a big mistake.
http://coverthistory.blogspot.com/2009/06/situation-in-iran-was-iranian-election.html
I have to admit that it does seem reasonable to recommend that we do this ‘stepping back.’ We’ve been threatening Iran through the Bush administration, now the Obama admin, and, it’s time we let them figure out what’s what.
But, I have to remind myself that we’ve been told that not only have we been putting pressure on Iran with sanctions and public relations assaults, we’ve accused them of being responsible for the deaths of American troops in Iraq, but, we have been sending in spooks into Iran to organize revolts and to scope out targets for military attacks. Seymour Hersh wrote here,
Preparing the Battlefield
The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.
by Seymour M. Hersh July 7, 2008
L ate last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program….
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh
What kind of work have these teams been doing in Iran during all this time? Hersh spoke with Amy Goodman about this on Democracy Now. They ended their discussion talking about covert activities,
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Seymour Hersh, what are the groups the U.S. is running right now in Iran, the opposition groups?
SEYMOUR HERSH: You know – the enemy of my enemy is your enemy. Certainly, we have been doing a lot of stuff with the MEK [People’s Mujahedin of Iran], the whackos that we have been doing stuff with inside Iran from their little base in Iraq for years, doing cross-border kind of stuff. They are still doing a lot of stuff. They’re a pretty corrupt organization. They’re banking a lot of money that we’re giving them. As you know, Iran is a Shiite-dominated country but you have a number of Sunni groups, who live on the borders with the Sunni Kurds, who do not like the government, many elements of them do not, and they’re getting funded. Another group of Shias, who are 50% of the population—there is some dissidence there. So we’re dumping a lot of money into various groups. ….. You can always pay them money to kill people. Many of their young people have gone to the same madrassas and the Taliban—in the Taliban. There’s a lot of other stuff going on in the name of al Qaeda. Their number of course we probably would not look at it all. We are funding the because they’re against the central government. You know what it’s like? Someone once said to meif the Iranians are coming in there and looking around for grabs, it is as if the Iranians came to America and wanted to cause trouble. Here’s is critical the sons of the revolution in the south and have this flag and it cannot even fly the rebel flag anymore. Wow obviously this would be a great group to go up to and get them to go against the government, not knowing the sons of the revolution are totally loyal to America in every sense. We are flying blind. We do not know who we’re giving money to. The idea that Iran is not a tribal country, not an Arab country, it is a Persian country, a country with a solid in terms of its national identity as France, Germany. The idea you will cause significant trouble internally is a smoke dream. What this White House wants to do with these new operations, yes, continuing the old command collecting intelligence and causing trouble. The real thing I think they want from JSOC, which are the junta killer teams of America, I think Cheney would love to get a scientist, nuclear scientists and bring them back to America and have them publicly testify to the fact that yes, indeed, Iran has 36 bomb factories, just like Vice President Cheney goes to bed with in his dreams. They would like to have that. They would also like to create enough chaos in the country, bombings, sabotage, which is going up since this operation began. There’s always the connection but I do not have any empirical evidence for it. In the last four months, the latest incidents in terms of domestic violence, bombings, in attacks have gone up exponentially. We would like to the Iranian central government crackdown but in some vigorous weighed against these groups include a situation where there is sort of open dissidents, open warfare, then perhaps begin come in. The problem America has with the Bush/Cheney administration, is the American public overwhelmingly is not very interested in the bombing of Iran, despite all of the biblical talk.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/30/hersh_congress
_agreed_to_bush_request
Hersh focused on the prospect of the U.S. supporting fringe dissident groups. He also mentioned the goal of ‘regime change.’ What would this involve? It involves any strategy that would change the political culture in Iran into something that would not oppose American goals for the region. Here’s a discussion of this idea, from this article in Commentary,
Getting Serious About Iran:
Amir Taheri
For Regime ChangeNovember 2006
What to do about Iran? The question has haunted successive administrations in Washington since the raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the seizure of its diplomats in November 1979.
The article explains how both negotiations with the current regime won’t work, because the religious culture will not change ideologically,
Why does the Islamic Republic behave as it does? The answer is that, as the spearhead of a revolutionary cause, it can do no other.
Negotiations won’t work because this just supports the Islamic political movement,
An alternative to the do-nothing option is the one favored, today as yesterday, by the apostles of dialogue: namely, to reach an accommodation with the Islamic Republic on its terms, in the hope that this will somehow, in time, help to modify its behavior. Some Europeans, including France's President Jacques Chirac, clearly back this option. What matters, they say, is to engage the Islamic Republic as a partner in some kind of international arrangement that, over an unspecified period, will end up imposing restraints on its overall behavior.
The risk here is equally obvious. Having won an initial concession from the “infidels,” the Khomeinist leadership would instantly and reflexively demand more. The Khomeinist revolution, after all, dreams of conquering the world in the name of Islam, just as Hitler aimed to do in the name of the Aryan master race and the USSR in the name of Communism. Indeed, Khatami's idea of a “Yalta-like” accord with President Clinton was itself inspired by the mullahs' claim to be the legitimate successors to the USSR as the global challengers to American imperialism.
Proponents of “dialogue” like to cite the “Nixon in China” moment as a model for dealing with the Islamic Republic. But they forget two facts. The first is that, during Nixon's presidency, the initiative for normalizing relations came not from the United States but from China, which was then trying to recast itself as a nation-state among nation-states. The Islamic Republic is not in that position, or anywhere near it. In fact, precisely because it bases its legitimacy as a revolutionary power on the teachings of Islam, something it does not fully control in doctrinal terms, it cannot abandon its revolutionary pretensions as easily as did the Maoists in Beijing, who “owned” their own ideology and could alter it at will.
There remains another option: regime change. The very mention of this term drives some people up the wall, inspiring images of an American invasion, a native insurgency, suicide bombers, and worse. But military intervention and pre-emptive war are not the only means of achieving regime change.
What matters is to be intellectually clear about the issue at hand. The U.S. will not be safe as long as Iran, a key country in a region of vital importance to the world economy and to international stability, remains the embodiment of the Khomeinist cause. Nor can the U.S. allow the Khomeinist movement, itself a version of global Islamism, to achieve further political or diplomatic gains at the expense of the Western democracies.
For consider the consequences if that were to happen. The most immediate would be to strengthen the mullahs and demoralize all those inside Iran who have a different vision of their country's future and an active desire to bring it about. In 1937 and 1938, many professional army officers in Germany, realizing that Hitler was leading their nation to disaster, had begun to discuss possible ways of getting rid of him. But the Munich “peace” accords negotiated by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain handed Hitler a diplomatic triumph and, with it, a degree of international legitimacy that, from then on, any would-be putschists could hardly ignore.
Without going into details, Taheri talks about whether it would be possible to change the Iranian regime without having to invade or attack the country,
But—some might object—even granting the virtue of the idea, how realistic is regime change in Iran? Can it happen?
The short answer is yes. Without underestimating the power still held by the mullahs over the Iranian people, let alone their ability to wreak devastating havoc in places near and far, a number of factors suggest that, like other revolutionary regimes before them, their condition is more fragile than may at first appear.
One sign is the loss of regime legitimacy. The Islamic Republic owed its initial legitimacy to the revolution of 1979. Since then, successive Khomeinist administrations have systematically dismantled the vast, multiform coalition that made the revolution possible. The Khomeinists have massacred their former leftist allies, driven their nationalist partners into exile, and purged even many Islamists from positions of power, leaving their own base fractured and attenuated.
The regime's early legitimacy also derived from referendums and elections held regularly since 1979. In the past two decades, however, each new election has been more “arranged” than the last, while the authoritarian habit of approving candidates in advance has become a routine part of the exercise. Many Iranians saw last year's presidential election, in which Ahmadinejad was declared a surprise winner, as the last straw: credited with just 12 percent of the electorate's vote in the first round, he ended up being named the winner in the second round with an incredible 60 percent of the vote.
Still another source of the regime's legitimacy was its message of “social justice” and its promise to improve the life of the poor. This, too, has been subverted by reality. Today, more than 40 percent of Iran's 70 million people live below the poverty line, compared with 27 percent before the Khomeinists seized power. In 1977, Iran's GDP per head per annum was the same as Spain's. Today, Spain's GDP is four times higher than Iran's in real dollar terms. As the gap between rich and poor has widened to an unprecedented degree, the corruption of the ruling mullahs, and their ostentatious way of life, have made a mockery of slogans like “Islamic solidarity.”
A second sign is the presence of a major split within the ruling establishment itself. The list of former Khomeinists who have distanced themselves from today's regime reads like a who's who of the original revolutionary elite. It includes former “student” leaders who raided the U.S. embassy in 1979, former commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and dozens of former cabinet ministers and members of the Islamic Majlis (parliament). Most have adopted a passive stance vis-à-vis the regime, but a surprising number have clearly switched sides, becoming active dissidents and thereby risking imprisonment, exile, or even death. Any decline in the regime's international stature could deepen this split within the establishment, helping to isolate the most hardline Khomeinists.
A third harbinger is that the regime's coercive forces have become increasingly reluctant to defend it against the people. Since 2002, the regular army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the professional police have refused to crush workers' strikes, student demonstrations, and other manifestations of anti-regime protest. In many instances, the mullahs have been forced to deploy other, often unofficial, means, including the so-called Ansar Hizballah (“Supporters of the Party of God”) and the Baseej Mustadafeen (“Mobilization of the Dispossessed”).
A fourth sign is the emergence of alternative sources of moral authority in Iranian society. Even in religious matters, more and more Iranians look for guidance to non-official or even anti-official mullahs, including the clergy in Iraq. (Admittedly, this is partly due to the fact that the present “Supreme Guide,” Ali Khamenei, is a mid-ranking mullah who would never be accepted by senior Shiite clergy as a first among equals.)
As for non-religious matters, there was a time when the regime enjoyed the support of the overwhelming majority of Iran's “creators of culture.” Today, not a single prominent Iranian poet, writer, filmmaker, composer, or artist endorses the Khomeinists; most have become dissidents whose work is either censored or banned. Opposition intellectuals, clerics, trade-union leaders, feminists, and students are emerging as new sources of moral authority.
Finally, there are at least the outlines, although no more than the outlines, of a political alternative. Like nature, society abhors a vacuum. In the case of Iran, that vacuum cannot be filled by the dozen or so groups in exile, although each could have a role in shaping a broad national alternative. What is still needed is an internal political opposition that can act as the nucleus of a future government.
Unfortunately, such a nucleus cannot be created so long as the fear exists that the U.S. and its allies might reach an accommodation with the regime and leave Iranian dissidents in the lurch. And that fear has roots in reality. In the years 1999-2000, President Khatami succeeded in splitting the opposition by boasting of the terms of his forthcoming “grand bargain” with President Clinton. His message was ingeniously twofold: the deal would help solve the nation's economic problems and open the way for less repressive measures in social life and culture, but it would include a stipulation that America would never help opponents of the Khomeinist regime. Although, as we have seen, the “grand bargain” itself came to naught, the message and its implications have hardly been forgotten.
If many of the preconditions for regime change are in place, is the time right? To this, too, the answer is yes. Again without underestimating the power in the hands of the mullahs, the truth is that Iran today, far from being the island of calm portrayed in some leading American newspapers, is more nearly like a heaving volcano, ready to explode.
In the words of Muhammad-Mahdi Pour-Fatemi, a member of the Islamic Majlis, Iran today is passing through “the deepest crisis our nation has experienced in decades.” Because of “policies that have produced nothing but grief for our nation,” Pour-Fatemi has courageously said, “the Islamic Republic today is isolated.” The fall in value of the Iranian currency—despite rising oil revenues—and the massive increase in the rate of unemployment over the past two years signal an economic crisis already heralded by double-digit inflation. In some cases, the government has been unable to pay its employees—including over 600,000 teachers—on time. In March, at the start of the new Iranian year, it was having difficulty financing over half of its projects, forcing hundreds of private contractors into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, fear of an international crisis over the nuclear issue, and the possibility of new sanctions imposed by the UN and/or the U.S., have put a damper on the economy's only buoyant sector: real estate. According to Ayatollah Shahroudi, the regime's chief justice, the flight of capital from the Islamic Republic, which started as a hemorrhage, has been transformed in the past two years into “a flood.”
It is not only on the economic front or in his confrontations with labor unions and women's and student organizations that Ahmadinejad is coming under pressure. His regime also faces growing ethnic unrest that has led to bloodshed in provinces with non-Persian majorities: the Azeris in the northwest, the Kurds in the west, the Arabs in the south, and the Baluch in the southeast, among others. Over the past eighteen months, hundreds of people have been killed in clashes with the central security forces. Dozens of ethnic leaders have been executed, thousands have been put under arrest, and many more have been driven into exile in Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. So uncertain is the security situation in the affected areas that Ahmadinejad has been forced to cancel planned visits to eight of the nation's thirty provinces.
Ahmadinejad is now desperate to provoke a mini-conflict with the United States to divert attention from the gathering storm inside Iran. At the same time, he is raising the “wipe-Israel-off-the-map” banner, lately all but abandoned by most Arab leaders, in the hope of winning a position of leadership for his Shiite theocracy—something otherwise unthinkable to the Sunni majority in the Islamic world. Finally, he is trying to position himself as the leader of the so-called non-aligned movement, in the hope of creating an alliance of all the anti-American and anti-democratic forces in the world, including in the West itself.
His strategy is premised on the assumption that the West has no stomach for a real fight, and that the worst that could happen to his regime is a few attacks on its nuclear sites—something that would have the advantage of diverting the focus from his domestic problems and bestowing on his regime a veneer of victimhood. Most of all, he is hoping that, once President Bush is out of office, the next American President will revert to the policies pursued by all previous U.S administrations.
What to make of all this? I tend to think we have set the Iranians up to destroy themselves. Unlike the Hurrians, we are quite willing to isolate the Iranians, do various things like pluck out their eyes, and then wait for them to do themselves in. Here’s the Asimov take on the Iranian question,
The Hurrians, a small, tailed, vegetarian small-primate species have found on their space travels that large, non-tailed omnivorous intelligent ape species always end up destroying themselves in a nuclear war. The Hurrians adopted the policy of helping to rebuild the remains of these planetary societies after their nuclear wars, while extracting tribute and genetically modifying the inhabitants into more peaceful races. They are not acting completely selflessly, either: as is discovered in the subsequent conversation with a captured human, each race "helped" in this fashion pays the Hurrians a "modest" contribution, choosing the product that this race is best at. In one case, an otherwise poor race pays in its own members, by forfeiting a set number of individuals into servitude each year.
The Hurrians learned of Earth at the beginning of the Cold War but were surprised that an atomic war did not immediately develop. They establish a base on the Moon to wait for Earth's civilization to destroy itself. However, despite their calculations, after fifteen years the war has not come. The Hurrians cannot simply leave either: their calculations indicate that if the people of Earth do not destroy their civilization, they will soon develop space travel and, presumably because of their violence, quickly set chaos among the Hurrians' civilization.
In desperation, the Hurrians kidnap a human to try to discover why the nuclear war has not happened. The human taunts the Hurrians by calling them vultures, since the Hurrians never try to prevent the nuclear wars, but wait for them to occur and then assist the survivors. After conversing with the human and analyzing his conversation, the Hurrians reach an astounding conclusion. As the inspector, who came to supervise such an unusual case, tells to the resident director of the base, the war will not start by itself; it needs to be "helped". Refusing to understand the meaning of the word, the director fearfully asks for clarification, and is told that the Hurrians need to drop an atomic bomb themselves, in order to initiate the conflict which will then escalate on its own. Such a method, while computed to be the only way to start the war, and thus prevent the destruction of advanced space civilizations, is nevertheless completely unacceptable to the Hurrians, a race of absolute pacifists who cannot envision killing a sentient being.
Even though such an act is needed, explains the director, it simply cannot be done, for no Hurrian will be able to drop the bomb himself, or even order someone else to do so. Unable to solve this dilemma, the Hurrians are forced to return home, plagued by the visions of humans conquering space.
It may be that neither the Bush or Obama people have the scruples of Hurrians. One might suspect that the 400 million dollars spent on regime change went into undermining the legitimacy of Iranian elections.
So, given that our leaders are like the Hurrians in being ‘vultures,’ though, unlike them, willing to pluck out Iranian eyes to provoke their self destruction, should we, as critics of the Obama and Bush strategy of ‘regime change,’ advocate a ‘wait and see’ strategy? It would seem that ‘waiting and seeing’ would be to go along with the neo con strategy of ‘regime change.’
We are not just ‘waiting and seeing.’ We are sanctioning and provoking and isolating and undermining and, most likely, spending our money to manipulate their elections. Then, we are standing back to ‘wait and see.’
We are like these vultures in Asimov’s parable.
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