What the Hell is going on in Iran? My Take Part I

As I'm sure most of you know, The Islamic Republic of Iran is currently in the midst of a major popular movement protesting the results of this month's Presidential election and against the establishment's suppression of said movement.

I will not bore you with the basic details of the election or the Iranian system of government. I assume that if you're reading this from me you already have a decent understanding of what's going on over there and who the major players are. What follows then is the first part of my assessment of just what is going on behind closed doors in Iran and where all this may be heading. I know assessments like this, many from people with far more impressive credentials than I, have flooded the blogosphere in recent days, but bear with me, this is my first real post and I need to get into the feel of it.

To start with, I am DEFINITELY in the camp that believes the election in Iran was a fraud. More than that, I'm not sure a real election, the physical placement of ballots aside, actually occurred. Based on the speed with which the results were announced, the unexplained departure from established Iranian electoral practice in the administration of election day, the statistical quirks of the election data (expertly dissected by folks with better statistics skills than me, first among them Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight), and other such factors, I believe the decision that Ahmadinejad would win by such a huge margin was decided ahead of time, end-vote totals made up by electoral officials (or dictated from above) and that in the days following the election officials worked to produce the necessary province and then precinct level data to validate their original numbers.

I am NOT a believer in the so called "real results" of which I have seen several versions now, purporting to either show Mousavi with a large lead over Ahmadinejad or in one incarnation showing Ahmadinejad coming in third. I have no idea what real election results would have looked like, and Ahmadinejad may have won a plurality (though I'm relatively certain he couldnt have won on the first round) if those actual votes had been counted.

So, why was the election stolen? Mousavi is, as many including the President have pointed out, far from the Golden Boy some westerners would like to believe he is. As Prime Minister of Iran in the 1980s (the post no longer exists, its functions now absorbed into the presidency) he okayed the rampant popular supression, religious fanactism and generally islamicy revolutionness of his fellows. Whatever his campaign rhetoric, Mousavi's career does not hold a lot of optimism. Except for the following: many leading figures from the revolutionary era have become disenchanted with the form of the Republic over the years, some have become reformists and others have at least become pragmatic, Mousavi may well be one of these, but it is far from certain. So if Mousavi is not really some great liberal reformist, why is he such a threat to the establishment? Some have stressed that the Supreme Leader harbors a grudge against Mousavi from the 1980s. Others have argued that the electoral theft does not come from the clerical establishment, but from Ahmadinejad himself and institutions directly within his control, and that is was thus more about him keeping his job than anything else.

I on the other hand, think the matter lies in symbolism. Those of us who have watched the news coming out of Iran know that the protest movement is not a cult of personality. These people are not out fighting for the right of Mousavi to be President. They are fighting for their rights as citizens. Mousavi is their tool, little more. So in that sense the massive rallys in his favor in the dying days of the campaign, and his campaign in general, were a frightening alarm to the hardliners within the clerical establishment and within the various other parts of the government, that the popular reformist movement that rose to power under Khatami in 1997 was still very much alive. So it is that movement, rather than Mousavi as a person, that the hardliners want to keep out of power.

By the same token, Ahmadinejad is a symbol. I do not buy allegations that he is mastermind of the whole electoral theft, though he probably was involved deeply in it, fundamentally I think that if he had taken his own iniative on the matter the Supreme Leader would have been so pissed off at being sidelined (The Supreme Leader's ego, i shall discuss in my next post) that he would have thrown Ahmadinejad to the wolves. Ahmadinejad's value is in his status as a standard bearer and symbol of conservative populism. He is the hardliners answer to the reformist movement. An attempt to craft a mass popularity political movement within the system that is resolutely (and actively) conservative and anti-western. In other words, he is the hardliner's attempt to spread their dominance into the "republican" half of Iran's institutions. This constituency DOES exist, though it is not as large as Ahmadinejad works so hard to make it seem. But by and large after 4 years of his governance, of abrasive foreign policy rhetoric, wasteful oil spending, poor economic conditions and just general jackassery, Ahmadinejad has failed to be what his masters wanted of him. Much of the motivation for the electoral fraud I believe lies in the desperation of an establishment that, having failed to win even at a game in which it holds most cards, has now abandoned all pretence of democracy in favor of a bold power grab to protect their interests.