For those of you who live in caves, here's a quick bump up to speed on what's happening in the wake of Iran's Presidential Elections: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/200...ion_nh_sl.shtml

An excellent article on 538 on how this victory was/would have been achieved if his victory was indeed legitimate: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/if-he-did-it.html

And most recently: the Ayatollah's address to Iran: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8108499.stm


And what role does the United States have to play in this? President Obama has decided to let things work themselves out for the most part, saying "Either way, the United States is going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons."

Eric Cantor, my favorite of the opportunistic brick-thrower crowd, leaped on the chance to say "I would like to see a strong statement from him that has moral clarity." When roughly translated from Politician to English, this can be interpreted as "NO U."

One thing that I heard a Republican strategist say on TV the other day was that it's best for America to keep out of this scenario, on the basis that this conflict needs to be resolved as Iranians versus Iranians, because if it becomes Iranians versus Americans, we've lost. We cannot compete for the hearts and minds of Iranians, and although a reformist candidate would probably thaw relations with the West, it's been American mistakes time and time again than have caused the tension between Iran and the US (see: limited cooperation with US after 9/11, followed by the "Axis of Evil" comment. THEN they elect a nutcase in 2005.) I'm 100% in agreement with that strategist, and so as part of this thread, what should we be doing right now?

Discuss the 2009 Iranian elections, and all that's goin' down in Tehran.

I think our political focus must be to impede any possible intervention irrespective of it's form (e.g. 'democracy promotion' or whatever) and allow Iranians to choose their own leaders out in the streets.

It's dangerous that the protests are being driven by ‘moderate’ Mousavi—a man as 'authoritarian' as his electoral challenger, and an advocate of privatization and counter-inflationary measures that would would largely affect poor and working-class people. The hope that any progressive person should have, is that the demonstrations are kept outside of legalist battles for reforming the very same state that is shooting down students in the streets, and is transformed into a large revolutionary movement that would fight for real reforms and create an independent political pole outside of the islamist establishment. But I'm pessimistic of that prospect.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...ws-1710762.html

Read Robert Fisk. He's there and he actually goes to talk to people outside of the luxury hotels.

Ahmedinajad probably did win, but not by 63%. Probably more like 51-52%. There is so much crap going on, it's like a JFK conspiracy theorist convention... the US needs to STAY AWAY. We're already being accused of backing both sides, opposing both sides, and our spies are reputedly everywhere. If we stay the heck out, then the rumors - and damage to our PR and position - will subside.

Even that I find rather hard to believe, looking at the past records of how first-round elections go in Iran.

Ahmadenejad received only 20% of the vote in the first round of the 2005 election, in a field of seven candidates where no candidate earned more than 22% of the vote. For him to win 51-52% of four candidate votes isn't impossible, and I'd say as an incumbent he stands a good chance of winning a plurality of the votes in the first round, but pulling a majority in the first round sounds incredibly difficult.

Some of the largest voter turnouts on record in Iran have yielded very surprising results, but in an opposite trend. It seems like basic political science that exceptionally large, unexpected turnouts tend to favor reformists over hard-liners and sometimes radicals over moderates. In 1997, reformist Mohammad Khatami was elected with 70% of the vote, and 80% of the electorate turned out (compared to 50% in 1993), for example. Now, most incumbents have seen a lot of success in Iranian elections, but there is a good reason for a lot of unrest and unhappiness with the current president. Economists estimated in 2004 that the unemployment rate in Iran exceeded 20% (though only 13% was officially reported), with that rate being especially high among young people. Inflation in 2008 was a massive 28%, and the government had to dip into the Oil Stabilization Fund and its foreign exchange reserves to stay afloat to fund its activities.

The public sector that dominates the Iranian economy is highly inefficient and attempts to introduce new policies recently haven't been very popular. To give two quick examples, the institution of a VAT last October was actually met with protests, according to the CIA, as did rationing of fuel in the summer of 2007. A lack of skilled labor and a brain drain are severely inhibiting economic growth in Iran, and policies put in place by Ahmadenejad are not exactly popular. I would be quite shocked if he had the support of 51% of the electorate right now. I don't think Mousavi is necessarily a better economic alternative, but I expect people to be more upset with the current state of affairs.

Remember, there were four candidates, but two of them were very minor (1 to 2%). It was basically a two-candidate field. Winning 51-52% of the vote doesn't sound that hard.

I've seen a fair amount of analysis of this on 538, and what I get out of that is that there is little or no concrete statistical evidence that the election was rigged. However, I'm not going to pretend to be well informed about Iranian politics or be able to guess at public sentiment as you have. I frankly marvel at how people are able to keep up with such complex issues not only in our own country but in others as well.

This is true, I'm operating entirely on logical conjecture. However, there are a lot of things that make my suspicions pretty well founded, I believe.

The fact that those other two candidates are so minor is also very fishy. One of the reform candidates, Karroubi, was the leading reformist candidate who ran in 2005 and actually captured the largest chunk of the round one totals. He was polling (admittedly Iranian polling is deemed less credible than American polling, which is a slightly scary prospect) at 7-10% nationally, according to five polls taken the first week of June.

Karroubi won eleven of Iran's thirty provinces in 2005 with numbers that looked like this:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_O6yyBo1yA_o/SjYT...00-h/iranb3.PNG

In 2009, he was polling 20-25% of the vote in these areas. When the final results came in, those same eleven areas looked like this:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_O6yyBo1yA_o/SjYV...00-h/iranb4.PNG

To quote 538's Renard Sexton (emphasis mine):



He also mentions the "historical trend away from electoral domination in the first round by one candidate," which is part of why I think your observation should not be viewed as part of a reason why Ahmadinejad's victory is plausible, but rather another cause for suspicion.

I also forgot to mention that there is absolutely no body to oversee elections. It is conducted entirely by Iran's interior ministry. In addition, according to middle eastern analyst and author Amir Taheri



So, on the same note as that there is no evidence to suggest the election is rigged, there is also no evidence that it is legitimate. We are trusting the Iranian government's word only, and that government is the mouthpiece of...Ahmadinejad.

That's about the same percentage that Gore won when the Supreme Court gave W. the presidency >:{

No, it isn't. Gore only got 48.38%.

Here's my point: We are eager to support the oppressed Iranians (read with sarcasm) when their leader was elected with a majority of the vote (who are we to say that the election was fraudulent?) when we were less concerned when the courts decided the presidency in this country when no one will dispute that the person given the victory admittedly lost the popular vote.

The situation seems to be escalating as well, to more than just protests of the election.
Especially with Ayatollah Khamenei's sermon on friday, saying that the leaders of the opposition groups would be held responsible for deaths resulting from the rallies (AKA Mousavi). Then Mousavi saying he would accept martyrdom (Or his facebook page anyway ). It's more than just some people that voted for Mousavi angry he didn't win the presidency. It's anger with the oppression.

There are plenty of people in this country that are oppressed as a matter of practice as well. The oppressed Iranians should have voted Mousavi in. Now they should wait for the next election as I endured W's regime.

1. We all know the electoral college sucks.
2. We also know that American presidential elections are pretty transparent.

Logical conjecture is all we need to be pretty sure that the election was rigged. Karroubi received less than 1% of the vote in 11 districts which he won in 2005 outright, many of which have a heavy presence of an ethnic majority to which Karroubi belongs. A Middle Eastern analyst said this would be like John McCain decimating Barack Obama in the African American vote.

Right, but the Pope didn't install George W. Bush into power saying he won 60% of the vote in California and refusing to allow any oversight of that process.

Maybe it was rigged, and maybe it wasn't. Even if it wasn't rigged in any explicit manner, Iran's democratic process is grossly underdeveloped (e.g. no secret ballots, probably no proper voter identification) so the results can't be considered all that reliable anyway. Which is an interesting thing to think about...how different the U.S. look today if our elections had been fair during the 19th and early 20th centuries? I'll bet a LOT of results would have gone the other way. Iran right now is probably about where we were then, except it also has a Supreme Leader who can do just about whatever he likes.

But the electoral college doesn't suck. That's a silly thing to say.

Which opens the door to possibilities like...election fraud.

And: I dislike the electoral college strongly, after weighing its merits against its strengths.

Whether it was stolen or not, I think people have grown tired of the oppression that they face on a dialy basis. There's been a student movement that's been in the works for a few years now. The push for change was going to happen eventually.

What system would you prefer to use?

The popular vote seems to work well for, oh, I don't know, every state, county, and local election...

Yeah, this. What's one practical advantage of the electoral college?

I agree with CaptainK on this political issue.






...screenshotted and saved.

Actually, one of the advantages of the electoral college has a lot to do with one of the problems in Iran's electoral system. See here for what I mean. If we were to use the popular vote to determine presidential elections, that would require a federal-level elections division, which would not only be expensive but require a great deal of precautions to make sure it remained independent and unbiased. The current system, in which state elections divisions do the ballot processing and the electoral votes are tallied before Congress, is a lot easier to maintain. Of course, there are plenty of allegations of state election processing being corrupt, which has undoubtedly been justified in the past, but at least that keeps the unrest more localized.

I guess since we're supposedly a union of states, bottom-up governance of elections appeals to me more than top-down. I could get into other reasons too, if you like.

I don't see why each of the fifty states couldn't give popular vote tallies, and then some dude with a calculator can figure out the rest.

Iran's Guardian Council admits 3 million more voters than are eligible in 50 cities:





"Okay, so we only stole 3 millions votes, guys, it's cool. Divinely inspired elections happen to do that sometimes. You know, God likes statistical rigor."

Didn't I say something about "Allah gets 3 million votes in close iranian elections," or was that somewhere else?

LOL at the notion US elections run fairly. 1960, anyone? Or how about 1968? 1980 had some great stunts, as well... but let's not forget 1876! Or 1860... or 1824... Pick a year, any year and you'll find shenanigans. Some are worse than others, I freely admit, but it's all a dirty, dirty business.

The electoral college is an antidemocratic bulwark meant to protect the untitled aristocracy. No, I'm not Tsjr. When the electoral college failed in 2000, our Supreme Council (Court, council, whatever...) voted 5-4... it came down to one person choosing the president that year. Honestly, I can't find anywhere in the Constitution where it says the Supremes get to call an election. It's supposed to go to the House, and they keep voting until we get a president. (See 1876 and 1800)

I know everyone wants to cheer on the kids in the streets, but step back and take a look at which kids those are and which streets they're running on. Most journalists are based in North Tehran. It's a more affluent area of town and it supported Moussavi strongly. In South Tehran, the working-class people came out in droves for Ahmadinejad. (Let me say that I believe the next release of Firefox will include Moussavi, Khameini, and Ahmadinejad in its spell-checker...) Those guys, along with a lot of voters outside Tehran, really came out strong for Ahmadinejad. They really did vote for the guy and they believe they truly did have the majority vote - why should their vote be stolen because they didn't receive the tacit support of the USA?

Older Iranians remember 1953, when the USA engineered the destruction of the Mossadeq regime. The USA took out a leader it didn't like and put in one they did. Everyone knows the USA doesn't like Ahmadinejad and prefers Moussavi. How is this not a manipulated outburst? How is this not the USA playing the kids in Iran like pawns? Or, more likely, how is this outburst in Iran being taken advantage of by the various players?

The USA didn't start this fire, but it's gonna toss some logs on via the CIA. Russia will be interested as well, quite likely China and Saudi Arabia as well. Pakistan's ISI probably has its hands full, but will likely take advantage of this distraction to crack skulls at home. The internal players in Iranian power politics will either exploit or quash this uprising as it suits their needs.

I have no doubt this is why a lot of people have a biased idea of exactly what's going on in Iran, (and as usual in foreign affairs, all major Western media outlets have a hefty bias in their coverage) but as I've already shown, there are hotbeds of support for reformists in many other non-Tehran provinces with exceptionally fishy poll numbers being tallied. Even within Tehran, there are indeed supporters of Ahmadinejad who are dancing in the streets, but the enthusiasm and ability to draw crowds to these events is hardly even comparable to the movement against these election results.

Supreme Leader Bush didn't stuff ballot boxes so that two states had more votes than voters, and give John McCain a 63% victory with a crushing victory in every district heavily populated by African Americans, so by comparison here, things look pretty good.

I'd like some links about what happened in 1960, 1968, and 1980, though.

Nope. Those pro-Ahmadinejad crowds are quite substantial and quite genuine, which has led reporters witnessing them to agree with the guess that Ahmadinejad won, but not by enough margin to look right. The election was slightly rigged, instead of the 98% approval votes that happen in real dictatorships.

But back to the pro-A. crowds... they're not getting beaten down, they don't live near the hotel the Western reporters are staying at, they don't have cell phones with video, and they don't have access to English-language internet audiences. That's why they're not seen. But they ARE there, and there's enough of them for Khameini to choose to side with them in his power struggle. By the same token, Moussavi's support is not minor: that's why other clerics are backing his faction.

The kids aren't going to win this one. They're pawns and are going to be crushed as soon as one party or another has firm control of the government.

As for the elections... I recommend wiki to start...

Khameini had a great deal of latitude to ensure his longevity in various ways, but by pulling the mandate of heaven card (if you will), I think he's both damaged the underlying ethic of the Islamic Revolution and eliminated any path of recourse against his positions. Ahmadinejad is his man, and I think that's because of principle, or else in the paraphrased words of Nate Silver, he's just not a very intelligent reactionary thug.

Antidemocratic? Yes, perhaps, but I don't know that democracy is always a good thing, and I think the Founding Fathers felt the same way. After all, since when has the majority of the American population been well-informed and rational?

As for the Supreme Court's right to call an election, they weren't directly calling an election. They were settling a lawsuit that happened to be related to the tallying of votes, and the court does have the right to settle a lawsuit. Interestingly, studies have shown that had the Florida recounts continued under the methodology Gore's campaign wanted, Bush would have won, while if they had used Bush's methodology, Gore would have won.

What's the point of having democracy if it's not truly democratic?

And the Founding Fathers spoke in rational terms for their own class:

To talk of "the rabble" or a "uninformed and irrational" public, is to not see that people have class interests. Everyone is politicized in some way, based on their economic interests. Even after the Revolution, the illiterate, 'ignorant', mass of people rose up in creative ways to demand lower taxes, the cancellation or readjustment of their debts, the payment of loss wages, and etc. Of course, they didn't know how to reorganize society to their own benefit, which was the downfall of such movements in the post-revolution era.

Even if they don't vote in support of their economic interests...

I don't know what Dean is talking about with 1980, but I'm pretty well read on 1960, because the numbers are interesting and it's a good teaching example. JFK beat Nixon by roughly 100,000 votes in the popular vote. Nixon crushed Kennedy in the farm belt and the rocky mountain states, and had a solid lead in the Appalachian region. He narrowly won the midwest and the pacific, getting something like 51-50% in both of those to Kennedy's 48-49. Kennedy won three regions in the U.S. He got Nixon's goat in the northeast (56-44) and edged him out in the old south with a 52% majority. He also won the mid-atlantic in a 51-49% victory. Despite that, he swept the mid-atlantic's electoral votes.

Historians vary in how they look at it. Theodore White said something along the lines of Kennedy having pulled it out because his planning was brilliant, and that he orchestrated a pitch-perfect campaign strategy that got him votes in all the right places. I've never really bought that. Kennedy won Texas -- LBJ's home state, where he had an intense political machine -- by 40,000 votes. He won Illinois, the land of the Daley machine, by 9,000 votes... despite the fact that Nixon won 92 out of the 101 counties in the state. He won New Mexico by 2300 votes out of roughly 300,000. He won Hawaii by 100 votes out of almost 200,000. Kennedy won five states by margins that were less than one percent of the state's popular vote -- Nixon won one. Furthermore, Kennedy won 13 states by margins that were less than five percent of the state's popular vote -- Nixon won six. Elections used to be a great deal closer than they are today, yes.

But the 1960 election is one of those murky historical problems that undermines our democracy, and the fact that nobody really discusses it due to Kennedy's enduring popularity is a poor reflection on today's culture. It's considered passe to discuss the fact that Kennedy got into office in a crooked election, one that he most likely didn't win -- it fits the zeitgeist better to effuse about how he was swept into office on a tide of positive change. Even though that's completely false. But it's not just a poor reflection on today's culture. It's a poor reflection on all culture, for every year after 1960. Everyone who sees fit to ignore the fact that the election was filled to the brim with fraud. Enough so that it's really impossible to say who won it. Nixon chose to ignore calls to challenge the election results, and later on would cut off republicans who were trying to get court cases through about specific instances of fraud (a county in Texas where more people voted than there were registered voters, for instance). Bush v. Gore was nowhere near as fraudulent as 1960, and virtually anyone who says it was is completely insane, or completely uninformed.

I'll dangle these clues... Nixon got the 1968 election thanks to Claire Chennault and her visit to Hanoi.

1980 was the year of the infamous hostage crisis... and when people in the Reagan campaign got falsified Irish passports to meet with Moderate Iranians... and Secord and North ran the botched rescue operation, only to turn up later in the think of the Iran-Contra arms/drugs scandal...

Not all election shens are in the ballot process.

I had heard bits and pieces of that, but never he whole hing. Thanks for the details. My already moderate opinion of JFK as a politician just went down a little.

What about your opinion of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon (okay, that probably can't get much lower)?

I knew about the Reagan stuff and I don't approve of that kind of shady diplomacy. That's right, I don't think Reagan is God. And I guess they didn't cal him Tricky Dick for nothing.

Tricky Dick


Oh goodness, sorry, it's 3 AM.

I usually figure anything more than a few paragraphs not written by Doc Roffles is a copy and paste lol.

I write all my own stuff