Telephones Cut Off, Mousavi Arrested, Rafsanjani Resigns

[Percival]

Tin soldiers and Ahmedinejad coming.
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming
Thousands dead in Tehran...

[JackRiddler]

Ben D:

It seems to me that in the final paragraphs the very, very interesting article by Amb. Bhadrakumar confuses its Khameneis and Khatamis. One or two might be Khatami, but others definitely sound like Khamenei. Any clarifications?

"I am expecting you to resolve the situation in order to extinguish the fire, whose smoke can be seen in the atmosphere, and to take action to foil dangerous plots. Even if I were to tolerate this situation, there is no doubt that some people, parties and factions will not tolerate this situation," Rafsanjani angrily warned Khamenei.

Simultaneously, Rafsanjani also rallied his base in the clerical establishment. A clique of 14 senior clerics in Qom joined issue on his side. It was all an act of desperation by vested interests who have become desperate about the awesome rise of the IRGC in recent years. But, if Rafsanjani's calculation was that the "mutiny" within the clerical establishment would unnerve Khatami, he misread the calculus of power in Tehran. Khatami did the worst thing possible to Rafsanjani. He simply ignored the "Shark".

The IRGC and the Basij volunteers running into tens of millions swiftly mobilized. They coalesced with the millions of rural poor who adore Ahmadinejad as their leader. It has been a repeat of the 2005 election. The voter turnout has been an unprecedented 85%. Within hours of the announcement of Ahmadinejad's thumping victory, Khatami gave the seal of approval by applauding that the high voter turnout called for "real celebration".

He said, "I congratulate ... the people on this massive success and urge everyone to be grateful for this divine blessing." He cautioned the youth and the "supporters of the elected candidate and the supporters of other candidates" to be "fully alert and avoid any provocative and suspicions actions and speech".

Khatami's message to Rafsanjani is blunt: accept defeat gracefully and stay away from further mischief. Friday's election ensures that the house of Supreme Leader Khamenei will remain by far the focal point of power. It is the headquarters of the country's presidency, Iran's armed forces, especially the IRGC. It is the fountainhead of the three branches of government and the nodal point of foreign, security and economic policies.

Obama may contemplate a way to directly engage Khamenei. It is a difficult challenge.
-----------------
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

[Ben D]

Hi Jack, yes I noticed that and felt inclined to edit it.

Still it helped me to better understand the internal politics involved as I had to reread the article a few times before I reached the same conclusion you did.

Thanks for confirming that, I have gone back to edit and draw attention to the error.

"I am expecting you to resolve the situation in order to extinguish the fire, whose smoke can be seen in the atmosphere, and to take action to foil dangerous plots. Even if I were to tolerate this situation, there is no doubt that some people, parties and factions will not tolerate this situation," Rafsanjani angrily warned Khamenei.

Simultaneously, Rafsanjani also rallied his base in the clerical establishment. A clique of 14 senior clerics in Qom joined issue on his side. It was all an act of desperation by vested interests who have become desperate about the awesome rise of the IRGC in recent years. But, if Rafsanjani's calculation was that the "mutiny" within the clerical establishment would unnerve Khatami *(Khamenei?), he misread the calculus of power in Tehran. Khatami*(Khamenei?) did the worst thing possible to Rafsanjani. He simply ignored the "Shark".

The IRGC and the Basij volunteers running into tens of millions swiftly mobilized. They coalesced with the millions of rural poor who adore Ahmadinejad as their leader. It has been a repeat of the 2005 election. The voter turnout has been an unprecedented 85%. Within hours of the announcement of Ahmadinejad's thumping victory, Khatami* (Khamenei?) gave the seal of approval by applauding that the high voter turnout called for "real celebration".

He said, "I congratulate ... the people on this massive success and urge everyone to be grateful for this divine blessing." He cautioned the youth and the "supporters of the elected candidate and the supporters of other candidates" to be "fully alert and avoid any provocative and suspicions actions and speech".

Khatami's*(Khamenei?) message to Rafsanjani is blunt: accept defeat gracefully and stay away from further mischief. Friday's election ensures that the house of Supreme Leader Khamenei will remain by far the focal point of power. It is the headquarters of the country's presidency, Iran's armed forces, especially the IRGC. It is the fountainhead of the three branches of government and the nodal point of foreign, security and economic policies.

Obama may contemplate a way to directly engage Khamenei. It is a difficult challenge.
-----------------
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

ON EDIT: * Please note that Bhadrakarumar appears to have confused the names of Khatami and Khamenei, but it should read Khamenei.
Ben D.

[Ben D]

From PressTV,...

Detailed list of votes cast abroad in Iran election

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:38:19 GMT

Press TV has obtained the Interior Ministry's detailed list of the votes cast abroad in the country's 10th presidential election held on Friday, June 12.

A total of 234,812 votes were cast outside Iran, out of which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won 78,300; Mehdi Karroubi won 4,647; Mohsen Rezaei won 3,635 and Mir-Hossein Moussavi won 111,792 votes.

Breakdown by cities,..... Link

and..

Pakistan general: US interfering in Iran affairs

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:10:24 GMT

Former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig claims the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has distributed 400 million dollars inside Iran to evoke a revolution.

In a phone interview with the Pashto Radio on Monday, General Beig said that there is undisputed intelligence proving the US interference in Iran.

"The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful-hollow revolution following the election," he added.

Pakistan's former army chief of joint staff went on to say that the US wanted to disturb the situation in Iran and bring to power a pro-US government.

He congratulated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election for the second term in office, noting that Pakistan relationship with Iran has improved during his 4-year presidency.

"Ahmadinejad's re-election is a decisive point in regional policy and if Pakistan and Afghanistan unite with Iran, the US has to leave the area, especially the occupied Afghanistan," Beig added.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=98 ... =351020401

and..

In Tehran, anti-West protests erupt too

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:26:27 GMT

An Iranian protester holds a sign with the slogan "Down with the USA, UK and France" during a demonstration on June 15, 2009 outside the French embassy in Tehran against European interference in the Islamic Republic's latest election results.

As pro-Moussavi supporters staged a civil rally in Tehran, demonstrators from the opposite camp have gathered outside the British and French embassies in Tehran.

Waving Iranian flags and chanting anti-US and British slogans, the demonstrators gathered on Monday to protest what they called western involvement in Iran's internal affairs.

"We have gathered here to protest a hidden agenda (by Britain and the world), aimed at creating chaos in our country," said a protester in front of the UK embassy.

"We say to all oppressive governments not to intervene in the future of our country. We will stand in their way with all our strength," said another protestor in front of the French embassy.

The protests came on the day that Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei ordered an investigation into allegations of election fraud.

The Leader also urged defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Moussavi to pursue his appeal against Friday's vote result legally.

Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Monday the Tehran government which is dealing with post-election riots "seems to be state violence against its own people in Tehran and elsewhere".

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=98 ... =351020101

[smiths]

Those are who more experimental by nature could also download a shady software called "Low Orbit Ion Cannon" (that sounds like something dreamt up in computer labs of the Scientologists or, at least, to fight the Scientologists, no?), have it installed (disregard the alerts of your anti-virus , input a few targets, and, perhaps, also customize a message that you would like to "send" to Iranian servers, and hit "Launch Attack"! (it also displays some unknown call in a foreign language - I presume it is there to make it look more authentic; after all, you can't expect to be part of the Cyber-Jihad without some loud exclamations in Arabic or Farsi). There are calls to use an even more sophisticated tool called "BWraep", which seems to exhaust the target web-site out of bandwidth by creating bogus requests for serving images (many of these tools appear to be described and linked to from a shady web-site called the Insurgent Wiki).

There is a lot of Twitter hyperactivity surrounding these DDOS-attacks, including a dedicated Twitter handle "DDOSIran" and several frequent posters who share tips and links to new "tools" (some of these sites also carry some truly useful information, like the list of proxies that are currently working in Iran, so I assume there are quite indispensable at the moment, no matter what your take is on DDOS attacks). One interesting innovation that I've noticed is the use of Delicious to compile links to attack-sites; check http://delicious.com/freeiran for more - this strikes me as a very interesting use of social bookmarking, even though I am not sure that Delicious admins will let this stuff stay online if it gets really popular.

Evgeny Morozov, originally from Belarus, is a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York (http://www.soros.org/)

http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/post ... tupid_idea

[smiths]

and what a ruckus its caused in the comments at MofA, even to the degree that the cardinal Rig sin of j'accusing the agentes provocateurs is brought up
(from the comments to the thread that alice already posted, connecting some dots)

Actually, what's shameful are the utterly spurious and entirely unjustified attack's against this Blog's gracious host, b, and various posters ...

Furthermore, the repeated attempted hijacking of these threads by individuals who appear incapable of courteous discourse based on mutual respect or basic civility. Assertions, allegations and emotive personal attacks abound ... debate and an exchange of views, opinions, analysis and supportive references, many of these posts, are Not

A couple of posters, upon review of thier contributions in total, are almost certainly, I humbly suggest, online agents provocateur ... though not very capable ones, at that ... greater internal and structural consistency matched with intellectual self-discipline is required in maintaining the fictional persona boys ... with practice they will, regretfully, invariably improve

Respect, civility, courtesy, diversity, tolerance are usually the hallmarks of MOA ... to wit,to agree tocivilly disagree ... lately uncouth ruffians just seem to wish to barge in and vomit on the bar ...

Events, immediate and of the moment, will move on, and so likely shall they ...

Heartfelt well wishes to all at the Bar.

Peace, Salaam, Shalom.

[Percival]

Manifesto rumored to be passed around in Tehran today:

This list was being passed around among the resistance in Iran today:

1. Remove Khamenei from supreme leader because he doesn't qualify as a fair supreme leader

2. Remove Ahmadinejad from president because he took it forcefully and unlawfully

3. Put Ayatollah Montazeri as supreme leader until a review group for the ghanooneh asasi ( "constitution" ) is set up

4. Recognize Mousavi as the official president

5. A goverment by Mousavi and start a reform of the constitution

6. Free all political prisoners without any ifs ands or buts, right away

7. Call off any secret organization such as "gasht ershad"

Saw this on BBC about an hour ago.

[praeclarus]

.
Wow, I am so out of my depth on this one. Clueless.
...
3) There will or will not be an uprising in Tehran...

Yep. Couldn't agree with you more.

[aimdrained]

I'm with you guys too.
This stuff has all been over my head since 2001.

But basically, what I can see from my rough viewing of the posting on the forum is that it seems that international opinion over the authenticity of the election is starting to split along the old familiar lines, West vs. East. Now most certainly that split isn't total, I'm not sure what Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, and all those others guys have to think about this, but if that previous post about the former Pakistani general holds true for a general Pakistani opinion then we could be in for some real hot new days for awhile.

Does anybody have any idea what the other Middle Eastern countries' opinions seem to be on this?

Basically, in my opinion, the "JFK by Oliver Stone" side of me thinks, well hell, gets excited thinking this might be a CIA color-revolution.

Nope, I'm not apologizing.
Without conspiracies the Internet wouldn't be half as fun.

[smiths]

to be taken with moderate amounts of salt, (better than most western media)

Two critically important questions need to be asked in the wake of Iran's disputed election.
What does this result mean in terms of the Iranian elite's relationship with the Iranian people?
And what does it mean in terms of the coherence of that elite, its ability to stick together and to maintain itself in power?
In a sense, it hardly matters now what does or does not emerge about the conduct, or misconduct, of the count.
If fraud is proved, the regime will face a huge crisis of legitimacy.
But, even if is not, and it has to be said that some evidence from independent polling suggests the results may have been legitimate, the crisis will hardly be less grave.
The supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi have already made up their minds about what happened, as indeed have those of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The already frayed bonds of trust that tie people to government will be, in either case, stretched to the limit, especially if Ahmadinejad continues to attack his opponents on the grounds that they are "against the nation".
A government in an adversarial relationship with a large number of its citizens, possibly even a majority of them, is not going to be a stable or effective government.
Equally, the polarisation of the society - between those who cling to the revolutionary tradition, whether out of interest or ideology, and those who have entirely lost faith in it - points to deep trouble ahead for the Islamic Republic.
And if the regime is forced to use its formidable coercive powers on the streets, if it kills people in any number, that will make it worse.

No wonder that even some conservative groupings in Iran say the country is in danger of losing its "republican dimension". In fact, it has been losing that dimension for years. Each succeeding political chapter has seen Iran's democratic arrangements further demoted, either in the elections themselves or in the hobbling of the relatively progressive governments that have sometimes been elected.

Yet Iranians over the years have either retained or regained the hope that the system could be made to respond to popular demands for change. And the more intelligent among the Iranian elite have always known that it is absolutely essential to keep that hope alive.
It was never, of course, in doubt which would trump the other if democracy and theocracy came into conflict, theocracy being in this case shorthand for a mixture of religious belief, loyalty to the revolution, and substantial material privileges.
But the shrewd men who run Iran knew that the trick was to avoid ever having to play that theocratic card.

The Iranian elite has always been split between competing groups.
Once Ayatollah Khomeini was gone, such divisions, part ideological, part personal, and part the product of competition for the spoils of office, became sharper.
Elections were shaped by these behind-the-scenes conflicts, and the recent campaign was no exception.
Mousavi was supported by former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who must have calculated that, as Mousavi represented no real threat, the establishment would be ready to accept him, if he won, as just another figure who could be used to manage popular expectations.

The best guess must be that divisions within the elite overcame their common interest in keeping the system in balance.
In permitting Ahmadinejad all kinds of advantages during the campaign, and perhaps in a final act of fraud, they went too far.
Discussions about how to rescue the situation must be intense.
In the past it could be said that those who had ultimate power in Iran were ruthless but not stupid. Now they must decide between oppression and concession.
Ahmadinejad's threats, and the armed police on the streets, point in one direction, while the decision of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, to order an inquiry into the election results, points in the other.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... hmadinejad

[Jeff]

What would have happened if the "Bomb Iran" contingent had its way?

Tuesday June 16, 2009
Glenn Greenwald

I'm going to leave the debate about whether Iran's election was "stolen" and the domestic implications within Iran to people who actually know what they're talking about (which is a very small subset of the class purporting to possess such knowledge). But there is one point I want to make about the vocal and dramatic expressions of solidarity with Iranians issuing from some quarters in the U.S.

Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country -- actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People. During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran. The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary's Norman Podhoretz entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran," and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he "hopes and prays" that the U.S. "bombs the Iranians." John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol -- with typical prescience -- hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.

Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way -- just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least. Hopefully, one of the principal benefits of the turmoil in Iran is that it humanizes whoever the latest Enemy is. Advocating a so-called "attack on Iran" or "bombing Iran" in fact means slaughtering huge numbers of the very same people who are on the streets of Tehran inspiring so many -- obliterating their homes and workplaces, destroying their communities, shattering the infrastructure of their society and their lives. The same is true every time we start mulling the prospect of attacking and bombing another country as though it's some abstract decision in a video game.

...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/16/iran/

[marmot]

Thanks Jack and Alice and everyone else (minus what's-his-name's famous pig) for all your checks and balances here. This is the first I've given myself time to read up on the Iranian situation and (if it were possible for me to do a cost-benefit-analysis of my meager time and energies - i.e., poring through gobs of googled online news sources -vs- coming here) I believe with a good deal of certainty that this RI thread has been the best bang for my buck. Thank you RI for keeping me informed.

Here's what jumped out at me as being the key factor in all of this.

So the question occupying the international media, "How did Mousavi lose?" seems to be less a problem of the Iranian election commission and more a matter of bad perception rooted in the stubborn refusal to understand the role of religion in Iran.

...

In the future, observers would do us a favour by taking a deeper look into Iranian society, giving us a more accurate picture of the very organic religious structures of the country, and dispensing with the narrative of liberal inevitability. It is the religious aspects of enigmatic Persia that helped put an 80-year-old exiled ascetic at the head of state 30 years ago, then the charismatic cleric Khatami in office 12 years ago, the honest son of a blacksmith – Ahmedinejad – four years ago, and the same yesterday.

Mr Ahmadinejad, the first non-clerical president in more than 25 years, basks in the support of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called on Iranians to vote for an anti-Western candidate. The Ayatollah ultimately calls the shots in Iran, where the president can only influence policy, not decide it.

[JackRiddler]

.
Wow, I am so out of my depth on this one. Clueless.
...
3) There will or will not be an uprising in Tehran...

Yep. Couldn't agree with you more.

Enlighten me, asshole.

[AlicetheKurious]

Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?

Why the US Wants to Delegitimize the Iranian Elections

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

June 16, 2009

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?

[Alice: He's got a point; how many heard about the 2005 presidential "elections" in Egypt, which Hosny Mubarak won by 94%? How about that absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia? -- along with Swaziland and Brunei, it's one of the last three on earth]

Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the U.S. media.

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status in the 1950s, was overturned by the U.S. government. The U.S. government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.

The U.S. “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the U.S. puppet government and held hostage U.S. embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even though there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

Leaders of the puppet states of Great Britain and Germany have fallen in line with the American psychological warfare operation. The discredited British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, expressed his “serious doubt” about Ahmadinejad’s victory to a meeting of European Union ministers in Luxembourg. Miliband, of course, has no source of independent information. He is simply following Washington’s instructions and relying on unsupported claims by the defeated candidate preferred by the U.S. Government.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, had her arm twisted, too. She called in the Iranian ambassador to demand “more transparency” on the elections.

Even the American left-wing has endorsed the U.S. government’s propaganda. Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfus’s presents the hysterical views of one Iranian dissident as if they are the definitive truth about “the illegitimate election,” terming it “a coup d’etat.”

What is the source of the information for the U.S. media and the American puppet states?

Nothing but the assertions of the defeated candidate, the one America prefers.

However, there is hard evidence to the contrary. An independent, objective poll was conducted in Iran by American pollsters prior to the election. The pollsters, Ken Ballen of the nonprofit Center for Public Opinion and Patrick Doherty of the nonprofit New America Foundation, describe their poll results in the June 15 Washington Post. The polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and was conducted in Farsi “by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award.”*

The poll results, the only real information we have at this time, indicate that the election results reflect the will of the Iranian voters. Among the extremely interesting information revealed by the poll is the following:

“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 Moussavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

“The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our pre-election survey. During the campaign, for instance, Moussavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

“Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

“The only demographic groups in which our survey found Moussavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.”

There have been numerous news reports that the U.S. government has implemented a program to destabilize Iran. There have been reports that the U.S. government has financed bombings and assassinations within Iran. The U.S. media treats these reports in a braggadocio manner as illustrations of the American Superpower’s ability to bring dissenting countries to heel, while some foreign media see these reports as evidence of the U.S. government’s inherent immorality.

Pakistan’s former military chief, General Mirza Aslam Beig, said on Pashto Radio on Monday, June 15, that undisputed intelligence proves the U.S. interfered in the Iranian election. “The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful but hollow revolution following the election.”

The success of the U.S. government in financing color revolutions in former Soviet Georgia and Ukraine and in other parts of the former Soviet empire have been widely reported and discussed, with the U.S. media treating it as an indication of U.S. omnipotence and natural right and some foreign media as a sign of U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Mir Hossein Moussavi is a bought and paid for operative of the U.S. government.

We know for a fact that the U.S. government has psychological warfare operations that target both Americans and foreigners through the U.S. and foreign media. Many articles have been published on this subject.

Think about the Iranian election from a common sense standpoint. Neither myself nor the vast majority of readers are Iranian experts. But from a common sense standpoint, if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as is Iran from the U.S. and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender and elect the preferred candidate of the U.S. and Israel?

Do you believe that the Iranian people would have voted to become an American puppet state?

Iran is an ancient and sophisticated society. Much of the intellectual class is secularized. A significant, but small, percentage of the youth has fallen in thrall to Western devotion to personal pleasure, and to self-absorption. These people are easily organized with American money to give their government and Islamic constraints on personal behavior the bird.

The U.S. government is taking advantage of these westernized Iranians to create a basis for discrediting the Iranian election and the Iranian government.

On June 14, the McClatchy Washington Bureau, which sometimes attempts to report the real news, acquiesced to Washington’s psychological warfare and declared: “Iran election result makes Obama’s outreach efforts harder.” What we see here is the raising of the ugly head of the excuse for “diplomatic failure,” leaving only a military solution.

As a person who has seen it all from inside the U.S. government, I believe that the purpose of the U.S. government’s manipulation of the American and puppet government media is to discredit the Iranian government by portraying the Iranian government as an oppressor of the Iranian people and a frustrater of the Iranian people’s will. This is how the U.S. government is setting up Iran for military attack.

With the help of Moussavi, the U.S. government is creating another “oppressed people,” like Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who require American lives and money to liberate. Has Moussavi, the American candidate in the Iranian election who was roundly trounced, been chosen by Washington to become the American puppet ruler of Iran?

The great macho superpower is eager to restore its hegemony over the Iranian people, thus settling the score with the ayatollahs who overthrew American rule of Iran in 1978.

That is the script. You are watching it every minute on U.S. television.

There is no end of “experts” to support the script. For one example among hundreds, we have Gary Sick, who formerly served on the National Security Council and currently teaches at Columbia University:

"If they'd been a little more modest and said Ahmadinejad had won by 51 percent," Sick said, Iranians might have been dubious but more accepting. But the government's assertion that Ahmadinejad won with 62.6 percent of the vote, "is not credible."

"I think,” continued Sick, “it does mark a real transition point in the Iranian Revolution, from a position of claiming to have its legitimacy based on the support of the population, to a position that has increasingly relied on repression. The voice of the people is ignored."

The only hard information available is the poll referenced above. The poll found that Ahmadinejad was the favored candidate by a margin of two to one.

But as in everything else having to do with American hegemony over other peoples, facts and truth play no part. Lies and propaganda rule.

Consumed by its passion for hegemony, America is driven to prevail over others, morality and justice be damned. This world-threatening script will play until America bankrupts itself and has so alienated the rest of the world that it is isolated and universally despised.

* You can find the Ballen-Doherty report here.

http://jnoubiyeh.blogspot.com/2009/06/a ... nized.html

[JackRiddler]

Ahmadinejad Won. Get Over It
By Flynt Leverett, New America Foundation
with Hillary Mann Leverett

Politico | June 15, 2009

Without any evidence, many U.S. politicians and “Iran experts” have dismissed Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s reelection Friday, with 62.6 percent of the vote, as fraud.

They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The “Iran experts’” shock at Friday’s results is entirely self-generated, based on their preferred assumptions and wishful thinking.

Although Iran’s elections are not free by Western standards, the Islamic Republic has a 30-year history of highly contested and competitive elections at the presidential, parliamentary, and local levels.

Manipulation has always been there, as it is in many other countries.

But upsets occur – as, most notably, with Mohammed Khatami’s surprise victory in the 1997 presidential election. Moreover, “blowouts” also occur – as in Khatami’s re-election in 2001, Ahmadinejad’s first victory in 2005, and, we would argue, this year.

Like much of the Western media, most American “Iran experts” overstated Mir Hossein Mousavi’s “surge” over the campaign’s final weeks. More importantly, they were oblivious – as in 2005 – to Ahmadinejad’s effectiveness as a populist politician and campaigner. American “Iran experts” missed how Ahmadinejad was perceived by most Iranians as having won the nationally televised debates with his three opponents – especially his debate with Mousavi.

Before the debates, both Mousavi and Ahmadinejad campaign aides indicated privately that they perceived a surge of support for Mousavi; after the debates, the same aides concluded that Ahmadinejad’s provocatively impressive performance and Mousavi’s desultory one had boosted the incumbent’s standing. Ahmadinejad’s charge that Mousavi was supported by Rafsanjani’s sons – widely perceived in Iranian society as corrupt figures – seemed to play well with voters.

Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s criticism that Mousavi’s reformist supporters, including former President Khatami, had been willing to suspend Iran’s uranium enrichment program and had won nothing from the West for doing so tapped into popular support for the program – and had the added advantage of being true.

More fundamentally, American “Iran experts” consistently underestimated Ahmadinejad’s base of support. Polling in Iran is notoriously difficult; most polls there are less than fully professional, and hence produce results of questionable validity. But the one poll conducted before Friday’s election by a Western organization that was transparent about its methodology – a telephone poll carried out by the Washington-based Terror-Free Tomorrow (TFT) during May 11-20 – found Ahmadinejad running 20 points ahead of Mousavi. This poll was conducted before the televised debates in which, as noted above, Ahmadinejad was perceived to have done well while Mousavi did poorly.

American “Iran experts” assumed that “disastrous” economic conditions in Iran would undermine Ahmadinejad’s reelection prospects. But the IMF projects that Iran’s economy will actually grow modestly this year (when the economies of most Gulf Arab states are in recession). A significant number of Iranians – including the religiously pious, lower income groups, civil servants, and pensioners – appear to believe that Ahmadinejad’s policies have benefited them.

And, while many Iranians complain about inflation, the TFT poll found that most Iranian voters do not hold Ahmadinejad responsible. The “Iran experts” further argue that the high turnout on June 12 – 82 percent of the electorate – had to favor Mousavi. But this line of analysis reflects nothing more than assumptions.

Some “Iran experts” argue that Mousavi’s Azeri background and “Azeri accent” mean that he was guaranteed to win Iran’s Azeri-majority provinces; since Ahmadinejad did better than Mousavi in these areas, fraud is the only possible explanation.

But Ahmadinejad himself speaks Azeri quite fluently as a consequence of his eight years serving as a popular and successful official in two Azeri-majority provinces; during the campaign, he artfully quoted Azeri and Turkish poetry – in the original – in messages designed to appeal to Iran’s Azeri community. (And, we should not forget that the Supreme Leader is Azeri.) The notion that Mousavi was somehow assured of victory in Azeri-majority provinces is simply not grounded in reality.

With regard to electoral irregularities, the specific criticisms made by Mousavi – such as running out of ballot paper in some precincts and not keeping polls open long enough (even though polls stayed open for at least three hours after the announced closing time) – could not, in themselves, have tipped the outcome so clearly in Ahmadinejad’s favor.

Moreover, these irregularities do not, in themselves, amount to electoral fraud even by American legal standards. And, compared to the U.S. presidential election in Florida in 2000, the flaws in Iran’s electoral process seem less significant.

In the wake of Friday’s election, some “Iran experts” – perhaps feeling burned by their misreading of contemporary political dynamics in the Islamic Republic – argue that we are witnessing a “conservative coup d’état”, aimed at a complete take over of the Iranian state.

But one could more plausibly suggest that, if a “coup” is being attempted, it has been mounted by the losers in Friday’s election. It was Mousavi, after all, who declared victory on Friday even before Iran’s polls closed. And, three days before the election, Mousavi supporter Rafsanjani published a letter criticizing the Leader’s failure to rein in Ahmadinejad’s resort to “such ugly and sin-infected phenomena as insults, lies, and false allegations”. Many Iranians took this letter as an indication that the Mousavi camp was concerned their candidate had fallen behind in the campaign’s closing days.

In light of these developments, many politicians and “Iran experts” argue that the Obama Administration cannot now engage the “illegitimate” Ahmadinejad regime. Certainly, the Administration should not appear to be trying to “play” in the current controversy in Iran about the election. In this regard, President Obama’s comments on Friday, a few hours before the polls closed in Iran, that “just as has been true in Lebanon, what can be true in Iran as well is that you’re seeing people looking at new possibilities” was extremely maladroit.

Among other things, from Tehran’s perspective this observation undercut the credibility of Obama’s acknowledgement, in his Cairo speech earlier this month, of U.S. complicity in overthrowing a democratically elected Iranian government and restoring the Shah in 1953.

The Obama Administration should vigorously rebut any argument against engaging Tehran following Friday’s vote. More broadly, Ahmadinejad’s victory may force President Obama and his senior advisers to come to terms with the deficiencies and internal contradictions in their approach to Iran. Before the Iranian election, the Obama Administration had fallen for the same illusion as many of its predecessors – the illusion that Iranian politics is primarily about personalities and finding the right personality to deal with. That is not how Iranian politics works.

The Islamic Republic is a system with multiple power centers; within that system, there is a strong and enduring consensus about core issues of national security and foreign policy, including Iran’s nuclear program and relations with the United States. Any of the four candidates in Friday’s election would have continued the nuclear program as Iran’s president; none would agree to its suspension.

Any of the four candidates would be interested in a diplomatic opening with the United States, but that opening would need to be comprehensive, respectful of Iran’s legitimate national security interests and regional importance, accepting of Iran’s right to develop and benefit from the full range of civil nuclear technology – including pursuit of the nuclear fuel cycle – and aimed at genuine rapprochement.

Such an approach would also, in our judgment, be manifestly in the interests of the United States and its allies throughout the Middle East. It is time for the Obama Administration to get serious about pursuing this approach – with an Iranian administration headed by the reelected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Copyright 2009, Politico

Source caveat: New America Foundation looks like a vehicle for elite consensus building on "moderate" status quo "reform," i.e., preserving the system as-is with more happy garnishing. There's quite the spooky element among its foundation-heavy funders.

Nevertheless, the above sounds both informed and reasonable, and loses no credibility for coming from an outfit one would expect to be pushing for "democratic" color revolutions.

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