News from Iran? Good? Bad? Who knows?

[Martinus]

Iran hand tells

Is this like the Mouth of Saron, only done by a guy with a sockpuppet? 

[Sheilbh]

This. "True colors" and all that jazz; it would let us drop the pretense of having to be friendly to Iran if they're exposed in large-scale vote fraud and violent suppression.

It does rather undermine them.  Egypt and Syria, for example, have never had any pretensions that they were genuinely or significantly democratic.  Iran always has.  If the regime continues what it started last night then that's gone.

It explains the mentions of 'colourful revolutions'; they were planning to steal the election which is what's prompted every colourful revolution so far.

I think the BBC article's interesting.

Ahmadinejad wins Iran presidential election

Ahmadinejad declared winner of presidential election

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been re-elected as president of Iran in a resounding victory, the interior minister says.

He won some 62.6% of the vote in an election marked by a high turnout of 85%, official figures show.

Supporters of pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi have cried foul and clashed with riot police in Tehran, while public protests have been banned.

Iran's Supreme Leader congratulated Mr Ahmadinejad on his win, and urged his rivals against "provocations".

In a statement, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised the high turnout and described the count as a "real celebration" and called for calm in the aftermath of the result.

"Enemies may want to spoil the sweetness of this event... with some kind of ill-intentioned provocations," the ayatollah said.

Mr Mousavi has also claimed victory, calling the result a "dangerous charade", as his backers vowed to appeal for a re-run.

But observers say this would have little chance of success.

Riot police have used batons against Mr Mousavi's supporters, wearing his campaign colour of green and chanting "Down with the dictator", news agencies say.

Four police motorbikes were set on fire near the interior ministry, the BBC's John Simpson in Tehran says.

He adds that this is the worst public violence in Tehran since the Islamic revolution 30 years ago, with protesters chasing away secret policemen who were infiltrating the crowds.

The authorities had earlier sealed off Mr Mousavi's campaign HQ, preventing his supporters from holding a news conference.

Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli said that any demonstrations needed official permission, and none had been given.

The AFP news agency quoted a senior police official as saying: "The time of dancing and shouting is over."

One opposition newspaper has been closed down and BBC websites also appear to have been blocked by the Iranian authorities.

Mr Mousavi was hoping to prevent Mr Ahmadinejad winning more than 50% of the vote, in order to force a run-off election.

However, Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli said his share of the vote was 33.75%.

Danger of 'tyranny'

Mr Mousavi, a former prime minister, dismissed the election result as deeply flawed.

"I personally strongly protest the many obvious violations and I'm warning I will not surrender to this dangerous charade," the Reuters news agency reported him as saying.
   
"The result of such performance by some officials will jeopardise the pillars of the Islamic Republic and will establish tyranny."

Mr Mousavi had said there was a shortage of ballot papers and alleged that millions of people had been denied the right to vote.

His election monitors were not allowed enough access to polling stations, he added, saying he would deal seriously with any irregularities.

The head of the Committee to Protect the People's Votes, a group set up by all three opposition candidates, said the group would not accept the result, alleging fraud.

They have asked Iran's Guardian Council - a powerful body controlled by conservative clerics - to cancel the results and re-run the elections. A second opposition candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, declared the results "illegitimate and unacceptable".

Our correspondent says the result has been greeted with surprise and with deep scepticism by many Iranians.

The figures, if they are to be believed, show Mr Ahmadinejad winning strongly even in the heartland of Mr Mousavi, the main opposition contender.

The scale of Mr Ahmadinejad's win means that many people who voted for a reformist candidate in the previous presidential election four years ago have apparently switched their votes to Mr Ahmadinejad, he adds.

Police presence

Supporters of Mr Ahmadinejad took to the streets on Friday night as their candidate declared his own victory.

"I am happy that my candidate has won - he helps the poor and he catches the thieves," sandwich seller Kamra Mohammadi, 22, told the AFP news agency.

BBC Iranian affairs analyst Sadeq Saba says the result means that hope for peaceful reform in Iran may die for a long time.

Large turnout

There had been a surge of interest in Iran's presidential election, with unprecedented live television debates between the candidates and rallies attended by thousands.

There were long queues at polling stations, with turnout said to be higher than 80%.

Four candidates contested the election, with Mohsen Razai and Mehdi Karroubi only registering about 1% of the vote each.

President Ahmadinejad draws support mainly from the urban poor and rural areas, while his rivals have support among the middle classes and the educated urban population.

Iran is ruled under a system known as Velayat-e Faqih, or "Rule by the Supreme Jurist", who is currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

It was adopted by an overwhelming majority in 1979 following the Islamic revolution which overthrew the autocratic Western-backed Shah.

But the constitution also stipulates that the people are the source of power and the country holds phased presidential and parliamentary elections every four years.

All candidates are vetted by the powerful conservative-controlled Guardian Council, which also has the power to veto legislation it deems inconsistent with revolutionary principles.

I also read that all of the reformist/opposition aligned papers declared Mousavi the winner in their first editions and were then told to pull the story so most of them have blank front pages, or blank spaces where those stories were.

Sadly though I don't think the regime's lost the ruthlessness necessary to survive.

[Neil]

This Mousavi guy is a total fucking moron.  How does he think he can avoid execution if he keeps criticizing the state?

[Darth Wagtaros]

Good news from Iran!

[jimmy olsen]

All the power is in the hands of the Ayatollah, so why do they care who wins the presidency enough to rig it and provoke unrest?

[Neil]

All the power is in the hands of the Ayatollah, so why do they care who wins the presidency enough to rig it and provoke unrest?

Apparently because the Mousavi guy was planning on overthrowing the regime and becoming dictator in his own right.

[Delirium]

The Reformists are playing a dangerous game.

[The Brain]

We should bomb them back to the Jazz Age.

[jimmy olsen]

We should bomb them back to the Jazz Age.

Sound the trumpets of war!

[Sheilbh]

All the power is in the hands of the Ayatollah, so why do they care who wins the presidency enough to rig it and provoke unrest?

That's what's interesting.  I don't think it was Mousavi that mattered.  From what I understand his views are well within Khomeinism.  What seemed to frighten the regime was the campaign itself and the movement behind him rather than his candidacy.  If that was the problem they wouldn't have let him run and he could continue to run some state-sponsored artistic committee which is, I think, what he's been doing for the past 20 years.

[Darth Wagtaros]

We should bomb them back to the Jazz Age.

NO! You imbecile! We! Should send! THEM! Back to the!!!! BIG! BAND! AGE!!!!

[derspiess]

We should bomb them back to the Jazz Age.

[jimmy olsen]

Thought this was a pretty interesting breakdown.

http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/stealing-iranian-election.html

Saturday, June 13, 2009
Stealing the Iranian Election

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers.

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

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.

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.

As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.

The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.

They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.

This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.

The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election.

This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players.

More in my column, just out, in Salon.com: "Ahmadinejad reelected under cloud of fraud," where I argue that the outcome of the presidential elections does not and should not affect Obama's policies toward that country-- they are the right policies and should be followed through on regardless.

The public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that generation.

My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers.

So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two.

What I've said is full of speculation and informed guesses. I'd be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be.

PS: Here's the data:

So here is what Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli said Saturday about the outcome of the Iranian presidential elections:

"Of 39,165,191 votes counted (85 percent), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 24,527,516 (62.63 percent)."

He announced that Mir-Hossein Mousavi came in second with 13,216,411 votes (33.75 percent).

Mohsen Rezaei got 678,240 votes (1.73 percent)

Mehdi Karroubi with 333,635 votes (0.85 percent).

He put the void ballots at 409,389 (1.04 percent).

[Josephus]

This Stratfor link is about 24 hours old, but still noteworthy. It predicts trouble.

The Iranian election is currently in turmoil. Both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi are claiming to be ahead in the vote. Preliminary results from the presidential vote show Ahmadinejad leading; Iranian Election Commission chief Kamran Danesho held a press conference at 11:45 p.m. local time and announced that with some 20 percent of the votes counted, the president was leading with 3,462,548 votes (69.04 percent), while his main challenger, Mousavi, had 1, 425,678 (28.42 percent). Sources tell STRATFOR that these preliminary numbers pertain to the votes from the smaller towns and villages, where the president has considerable influence, as he has distributed a lot of cash to the poor.

However, Iran's state-run Press TV is saying that only 10 million of 24 million votes, or around 42 percent of the vote, have been counted. At the same time, they are also claiming that 69 percent of the vote has been counted. Obviously the numbers are not adding up, and the agencies themselves appear to be in chaos.

Prior to the announcement of the results, Mousavi held a press conference in which he said he was the winner of the election. The opposition camp is greatly concerned about fraud, and STRATFOR has been told that Mousavi has vowed to resist any fraud, even if it entails taking to the streets. This means there is considerable risk of unrest should Ahmadinejad emerge as the winner. But so far there is no evidence that the government is mobilizing security forces to deal with any such eventuality.

The situation is being monitored carefully, as it is potentially explosive.

[Sheilbh]

Apparently Rafsanjani's resigned as head of the expediency council which is the group that mediates between the Supreme Leader and the President if they disagree over things.  Though not of the Assembly of Experts which is the body that elects the Supreme Leader.

Ahmedinejad attacked him pretty vociferously in the Presidential debate.