observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for Mousavi's smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the last 12 years of Iranian history.
Today, the situation in Iran seems very much in flux, as street demonstrations continued for a second day. Before discussing Iran specifically, though, I want to address the the larger world historical background.
In yesterday's discussion of what's happening in Iran, there was a lot of back and forth that seemed to me to be of the "Blind Men and the Elephant" kind--the Elephant being liberal social democracy. The diary I wrote was about the events unfolding in Iran as part of a centuries-long struggle for liberal social democracy punctuated with several such crucial moments which I referred to, and since it seems the Elephant got lost a bit in that discussion, I thought it worthwhile to begin saying a few words about it.
First off, stealing elections is not democratic. That's more or less ground zero for me. Democracy that's not liberal does not protect individual rights. It would allow a democratic majority to arbitrarily put someone to death. And, of course, the right to vote--which of course includes the right to have it counted--os one of those rights. Democracy that's not social does not recognize protect social and economic rights. It would allow any number of people to starve to death.
That's why I see liberal social democracy as the minimal acceptable form of government. And I see the struggle to achieve LSD on a worldwide basis as the great struggle of the past 250 years--a struggle we are still very much in the midst of.
The post-WWII expansion of widespread prosperity, leading to the first truly mass middle class, first centered in Western Europe and North America, then spreading around the globe, has seen a reorientation toward what are called "post-materialist values". There is a great potential here, as this represents a great maturing in the potential for collective self-government, but there is a danger as well, to the extent that people born into conditions of basic material security may not appreciate what it has taken to achieve that state, or what it means that so many still live outside of it.
First, Juan Cole yesterday posted "Stealing the Iranian Election", which presented cogent evidence that the election results were not credible on their face. Here are just the last two:
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.
Now a longer excerpt from Juan Cole today, which explains quite well why this election should be seen as an outrage for the Iranian people, rather than an example of Western myopia (as if there weren't enough of those already):
Some comentators have suggested that the reason Western reporters were shocked when Ahmadinejad won was that they are based in opulent North Tehran, whereas the farmers and workers of Iran, the majority, are enthusiastic for Ahmadinejad. That is, we fell victim once again to upper middle class reporting and expectations in a working class country of the global south.
While such dynamics may have existed, this analysis is flawed in the case of Iran because it pays too much attention to class and material factors and not enough to Iranian culture wars. We have already seen, in 1997 and 2001, that Iranian women and youth swung behind an obscure former minister of culture named Mohammad Khatami and his 2nd of Khordad movement, capturing not only the presidency but also, in 2000, parliament.
Khatami received 70 percent of the vote in 1997. He then got 78% of the vote in 2001, despite a crowded field. In 2000, his reform movement captured 65% of the seats in parliament. He is a nice man, but you couldn't exactly categorize him as a union man or a special hit with farmers.
The evidence is that in the past little over a decade, Iran's voters had become especially interested in expanding personal liberties, in expanding women's rights, and in a wider field of legitimate expression for culture (not just high culture but even just things like Iranian rock music). The extreme puritanism of the hardliners grated on people.
The problem for the reformers of the late 1990s and early 2000s was that they did not actually control much, despite holding elected office. Important government policy and regulation was in the hands of the unelected, clerical side of the government. The hard line clerics just shut down reformist newspapers, struck down reformist legislation, and blocked social and economic reform. The Bush administration was determined to hang Khatami out to dry, ensuring that the reformers could never bring home any tangible success in foreign policy or foreign investment. Thus, in the 2004 parliamentary elections, literally thousands of reformers were simply struck off the ballot and not allowed to run. This application of a hard line litmus test in deciding who could run for office produced a hard line parliament, naturally enough....
Ahmadinejad's 2005 victory was made possible by the widespread boycott of the vote or just disillusionment in the reformist camp, meaning that fewer youth and women bothered to come out.
So to believe that the 20% hard line support of 2001 has become 63% in 2009, we would have to posit that Iran is less urban, less literate and less interested in cultural issues today than 8 years ago. We would have to posit that the reformist camp once again boycotted the election and stayed home in droves....
So observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for Mousavi's smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the last 12 years of Iranian history. It was about culture wars, not class. It is simply not true that the typical Iranian voter votes conservative and religious when he or she gets the chance. In fact, Mousavi is substantially more conservative than the typical winning politician in 2000. Given the enormous turnout of some 80 percent, and given the growth of Iran's urban sector, the spread of literacy, and the obvious yearning for ways around the puritanism of the hard liners, Mousavi should have won in the ongoing culture war.
And just because Ahmadinejad poses as a champion of the little people does not mean that his policies are actually good for workers or farmers or for working class women (they are not, and many people in that social class know that they are not).
10:02 AM ET -- Tossing away the notebook. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has a powerful report from Tehran:
She was in tears like many women on the streets of Iran's battered capital. "Throw away your pen and paper and come to our aid," she said, pointing to my notebook. "There is no freedom here."
And she was gone, away through the milling crowds near the locked-down Interior Ministry spewing its pick-ups full of black-clad riot police. The "green wave" of Iran's pre-election euphoria had turned black. [...]
Majir Mirpour grabbed me. A purple bruise disfigured his arm. He raised his shirt to show a red wound across his back. "They beat me like a pig," he said, breathless. "They beat me as I tried to help a woman in tears. I don't care about the physical pain. It's the pain in my heart that hurts."
He looked at me and the rage in his eyes made me want to toss away my notebook.
And perhaps the most weighty post overnight, concern possible future developments in the next few days:
3:28 AM ET -- "There will be blood." I posted below on Trita Parsi's belief that Iran's reformists are "widely assumed" to be planning to challenge Ayatollah Khamenei.
Now Steve Clemons (of the New America Foundation and a HuffPost blogger) writes about a discussion he had in London with "a well-connected Iranian who knows many of the power figures in the Tehran political order."
[T]he scariest point he made to me that I had not heard anywhere else is that this "coup by the right wing" has created pressures that cannot be solved or patted down by the normal institutional arrangements Iran has constructed. The Guardian Council and other power nodes of government can't deal with the current crisis and can't deal with the fact that a civil war has now broken out among Iran's revolutionaries.
My contact predicted serious violence at the highest levels. He said that Ahmadinejad is now genuinely scared of Iranian society and of Mousavi and Rafsanjani. The level of tension between them has gone beyond civil limits -- and my contact said that Ahmadinejad will try to have them imprisoned and killed.
Likewise, he said, Rafsanjani, Khatami, and Mousavi know this -- and thus are using all of the instruments at their control within Iran's government apparatus to fight back -- but given Khamenei's embrace of Ahmadinejad's actions in the election and victory, there is no recourse but to try and remove Khamenei. Some suggest that Rafsanjani will count votes to see if there is a way to formally dislodge Khamenei -- but this source I met said that all of these political giants have resources at their disposal to "do away with" those that get in the way.
Finally, from Gary Sick. For those too young to remember, he was a rather prominent public figure during the Iran hostge crisis. Wikipedia notes:
Sick served on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, and was the principal White House aide for Persian Gulf affairs from 1976 to 1981, a period which included the Iranian revolution and the Hostage Crisis.
He has since worked in academia. Yesterday, Sick wrote:
Iran's political coup
If the reports coming out of Tehran about an electoral coup are sustained, then Iran has entered an entirely new phase of its post-revolution history. One characteristic that has always distinguished Iran from the crude dictators in much of the rest of the Middle East was its respect for the voice of the people, even when that voice was saying things that much of the leadership did not want to hear.
In 1997, Iran's hard line leadership was stunned by the landslide election of Mohammed Khatami, a reformer who promised to bring rule of law and a more human face to the harsh visage of the Iranian revolution. It took the authorities almost a year to recover their composure and to reassert their control through naked force and cynical manipulation of the constitution and legal system. The authorities did not, however, falsify the election results and even permitted a resounding reelection four years later. Instead, they preferred to prevent the president from implementing his reform program.
In 2005, when it appeared that no hard line conservative might survive the first round of the presidential election, there were credible reports of ballot manipulation to insure that Mr Ahmadinejad could run (and win) against former president Rafsanjani in the second round. The lesson seemed to be that the authorities might shift the results in a close election but they would not reverse a landslide vote.
The current election appears to repudiate both of those rules. The authorities were faced with a credible challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had the potential to challenge the existing power structure on certain key issues. He ran a surprisingly effective campaign, and his "green wave" began to be seen as more than a wave. In fact, many began calling it a Green Revolution. For a regime that has been terrified about the possibility of a "velvet revolution," this may have been too much.
Looking forward tentative, Sick writes:
It is still too early for anything like a comprehensive analysis of implications, but here are some initial thoughts:
The willingness of the regime simply to ignore reality and fabricate election results without the slightest effort to conceal the fraud represents a historic shift in Iran's Islamic revolution. All previous leaders at least paid lip service to the voice of the Iranian people. This suggests that Iran's leaders are aware of the fact that they have lost credibility in the eyes of many (most?) of their countrymen, so they are dispensing with even the pretense of popular legitimacy in favor of raw power.
The Iranian opposition, which includes some very powerful individuals and institutions, has an agonizing decision to make. If they are intimidated and silenced by the show of force (as they have been in the past), they will lose all credibility in the future with even their most devoted followers. But if they choose to confront their ruthless colleagues forcefully, not only is it likely to be messy but it could risk running out of control and potentially bring down the entire existing power structure, of which they are participants and beneficiaries.
With regard to the United States and the West, nothing would prevent them in principle from dealing with an illegitimate authoritarian government. We do it every day, and have done so for years (the Soviet Union comes to mind). But this election is an extraordinary gift to those who have been most skeptical about President Obama's plan to conduct negotiations with Iran. Former Bush official Elliott Abrams was quick off the mark, commenting that it is "likely that the engagement strategy has been dealt a very heavy blow." Two senior Israeli officials quickly urged the world not to engage in negotiations with Iran. Neoconservatives who had already expressed their support for an Ahmadinejad victory now have every reason to be satisfied. Opposition forces, previously on the defensive, now have a perfect opportunity to mount a political attack that will make it even more difficult for President Obama to proceed with his plan.
In their own paranoia and hunger for power, the leaders of Iran have insulted their own fellow revolutionaries who have come to have second thoughts about absolute rule and the costs of repression, and they may have alienated an entire generation of future Iranian leaders. At the same time, they have provided an invaluable gift to their worst enemies abroad.
However this turns out, it is a historic turning point in the 30-year history of Iran's Islamic revolution. Iranians have never forgotten the external political intervention that thwarted their democratic aspirations in 1953. How will they remember this day?
How indeed. What about you?
Here's my one thought to kick things off: America can do very little, even in the way of saying anything, given our atrocious history, most importantly, our role in overthrowing Mosadegh in 1953. I learned about this ten years later, as a young teen, when an Iranian foreign exchange student came to live with us. So this isn't merely a piece of academic history to me. I still feel the sense of outrage that this was done in our name that I felt when Said told me about it 46 years ago. We have never done anything to mitigate this terrible crime, we have only added to it. It would be an enormous benefit if Obama were to start owning up to our past in the Middle East. His continued covering up of Bush era crimes is not keeping our troops safe there, but is only limiting our capacity to have a beneficial influence. Were he courageous enough to speak candidly of how we have gone astray in the past, he would open an enormous space for honesty, repentance, and renewed trust. That could give us real influence that would be invaluable in a situation like that in Iran today. But instead, we have virtually nothing.
It's time for us to free ourselves from the mistakes of our past to the best of our abilities. It's time for truth. If we're willing to take our first step, others are eager to follow. They're tugging on us even now to follow our own best instincts.
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