Comments on: Iran

By: skurm

skurm — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:01:35 +0000

Joe.

they say a picture paints a thousand words.

Here are a few pictures.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/irans_disputed_election.html

By: Son of Apes and Pigs

Son of Apes and Pigs — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:33:06 +0000

Election? Like a thing exists in Iran. The Mullahs pick a handful of men to contest in this side-show and have the true leader picked long before a single farcical “vote” is ever cast.

See EUReferendum’s “The Loathsome Chirade”: http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/06/loathsome-charade.html

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:37:49 +0000

I’m not convinced. My suspicion is that we do to Iran what we do to our own countries far too often: assume the middle class is representative of a country’s views. This allows us to inflate the support for Mousavi’s views (reformist, better on women’s rights, pro-free speech etc).

Iran is a highly literate (80%), urbanised (67%) nation, but that does not make it middle-class or Westernised. My suspicion is that we too often say “metropolitan population” when we mean middle-class population; that we conflate the views of the latter with the numbers of the former.

I hold this view partly because I am wary of dismissing support for hard-line leaders like Ahmadinejad as ‘rigging’ (as many wished to do with Mugabe a few years ago), but also partly because I think it makes sense in a country like Iran. Iran is wealthy because of oil but still relatively poor (GDP/cap comparable to Serbia and Namibia, not Kuwait or Bahrain) and conservative. Ahmadinejad wasn’t referred to as a populist in his first election for nothing, there is massive support for his approach and views.

Or at least there was. I concede that the protests and recent trends raise questions, I am merely hesitant to wish away his support. We’ll have to see what comes of Khamenei’s investigation into the allegations of electoral fraud.

By: Laurence Caromba

Laurence Caromba — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:23:03 +0000

Joe, I think Ahmadinejad’s huge margin of victory should probably be seen as evidence of rigging, rather than the reverse. Ahmadinejad is deeply unpopular among Iran’s metropolitan population (as evidenced by the current bout of protests) and pre-election polling, such as it was, predicted that Ahmadinejad should have won at most a plurality, and should have struggled to win a first-round victory by more than a very small margin. But suddenly, this translates into a massive 63% victory? It’s hard to explain this except by massive election rigging.

That said, it is logically possible that both statements are true: that Ahmadinejad was both the beneficiary of rigging and the genuine choice of a majority of Iranians.

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:27:40 +0000

You call the elections ‘rigged’. I don’t contest that there appears to have been interference. But very few commentators I’ve been reading are willing to say that the full gap between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi could be a result of this. It is just too large.

No matter how much we hate to say it, it seems likely that a majority of Iranians did actually vote Ahmadinejad back into power.