- In the midst of mainly US, Israeli and their mainstream
media moaning about Iran's election outcome, it has become increasingly
clear that both countries were engaged in covert efforts to change the
regime in Tehran. And they lost, but they are not graceful losers. The
sheer diversity of those efforts-costing in some reports hundreds of millions
of dollars-obviously was known to Iran clerical leadership and to Ahmadinejad's
lieutenants and counselors. Therefore, the decision to proceed with a national
election, knowing that major efforts were underway by outsiders to influence
if not subvert it, was pretty bold. However, the mood of the country, as
measured in an independent survey three weeks before the polls opened,
suggested that proceeding with the balloting was low risk for the party
in power.
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- The Ayatollah Khamenei, the Guardian Council and Ahmadinejad
apparently had not counted on such a tumultuous election followup. Indications
are that the "green" revolutionary heir expectant, Mir Hossein
Mousavi, did well among university students, the English-speaking elites,
exporter/importer businesses, and political devotees in his home Azeri
district. However, there are far more ordinary Iranian folk than the academic,
intellectual and business elites, and judging simply from the voting numbers
(a reported 82% of the electorate), far more ordinary people voted in this
election than the elites could muster. It appears that the bulk of Iranians,
the people of the countryside and poor urban districts, including Azeris,
went heavily for Ahmadinejad. Good reasons for that are he was born poor
and he has not lost his link to the poor, while as a politician he has
helped them in many ways. That includes Azeris, whose language he speaks
after several years service in that region of Iran.
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- The principal claim cited by Iran's external critics
that the election was rigged is the fact that Mousavi resoundingly lost.
While outside observers, to the extent that they actually observed part
of the election, were pretty much in and around the capital, no ballot
box tampering cases or voter intimidation cases have been cited by critics.
Some have cited the rapid release of results as evidence of tampering,
but the argument can be made that rapid reporting from polling places is
one of the ways to avoid or reduce rigging, or charges thereof. The longer
ballots hang around a polling place without being counted and placed under
lock and key, the easier it is to tinker with outcomes. Thus, polling places
were probably instructed to work quickly and report promptly. The quick
count is not per se evidence of anything but a quick count. On that point,
Mousavi jumped the gun himself and declared victory well before the polls
closed.
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- Was the election rigged? We may never know for sure,
just as we are unlikely to know exactly how the US presidential election
of 2000 should have turned out. However, the sweep of outsider opinion
is extreme. Professor Juan Cole is cited on Salon.com (see "The arguments
against (and for) trusting Iran's election results" by Gabriel Winant)
as having made the "most influential case" that the election
was stolen, but Cole himself has said that his judgment was based on "speculation
and informed guesses". In a world of political turmoil, including
cheating at times virtually everywhere elections are held, one cannot dismiss
such judgments, but they are not useable as evidence in a court of law.
They specifically do not provide a basis for challenging the reported outcome
of the Iranian elections.
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- On the other side, Professor James Petras notes (see
"Iranian Elections: The 'Stolen Elections' Hoax" at globalresearch.ca)
"that not a single shred of evidence in either written or observational
form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count"
to show that the elections were interfered with or rigged. Petras points
out that there were competing demonstrations during the runup to the elections
and pro-Ahmadinejad crowds were as large as (perhaps larger than) pro-Mousavi
crowds were, but outsiders were interested in watching and reporting on
only the opposition demonstrations. Petras credits the large recorded Azeri
vote for Ahmadinejad to the amount of help he has given to the Azeri working
class, and he sees Ahmadinejad's identification with the poor and working
people as a key factor in the countrywide outcome. This fits a model in
which the vote was divided essentially along class lines, and in that sort
of contest the relatively small Iranian elites would have lost.
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- It appears that the amount of fuss, both international
and internal opposition, requires that Khamenei and the Guardian Council
conduct a review to determine whether actual tampering occurred. However,
not just a little tampering would have to be shown to justify overturning
the results. An official Iranian source reportedly has said that 11 million
of the recorded votes would have to be shown to be fraudulent to switch
the outcome toward Mousavi. Judging from Mousavi's own political history,
the risks are substantial that tampering, if it occurred, also happened
on the part of his supporters. But two facts stand out in this turbulent
landscape: First, a two to one majority vote was predicted by reputable
outside pollsters for Ahmadinejad three weeks before the elections (see
"The Iranian People Speak" by polltakers Ken Ballen and Patrick
Doherty in the Washington Post, 15 June), and second, no charges of tampering
were made until after the results had been announced. As Petras points
out, no evidence has been presented to date. That puts the situation more
in the realm of sour grapes than electoral misfeasance.
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- The US and supporting outsider roles in this situation
are awkward but explicable. For years, US and Israeli groups, notably the
Zionists and their neocons supporters, have taken the position that the
way to deal with Iran is to promote an Iranian leadership that accepts
US and Israeli ambitions for the region, whether or not those ambitions
are consistent with Iranian interests. This notion plays to a basic flaw
in American diplomacy that grew substantially during the Bush years, although
it was not invented by Bush: If you are having trouble with another government,
the best way to deal with the situation is to arrange the change of that
government. The Bush front for this ploy was "we do not talk to our
enemies."
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- There is a low regard for diplomacy at work here. The
highest diplomatic art often has been proven to involve conduct of relations
with known enemies. Normal diplomatic relations typically mean that the
parties will endeavor to work out areas of conflict or concern by dealing
with them in their own frames of reference. That is sometimes hard work,
and as once seen with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, your opposite
number can be a shoe banger. However, the diplomatic necessity was not
to change the Soviet Union but to work with it while it either changed
itself or simply backed away from its sometimes confrontational style.
Since the stakes were potentially earth shaking, patience and sensitivity
were the orders of the day. However, after we had spent more than 40 years
searching for ways to get beyond the Soviet Union, it managed to disassemble
itself. Given its working out in the era of nuclear weapons, that may have
been the most important world power stand-down in history.
-
- In those terms, the Iran case is a crude example of diplomacy
at work. For more than 30 years the US and Iran have been at odds, with
neither actively seeking a diplomatic approachment. However, the US has
drifted toward more and more warlike approaches. Israel has pursued similarly
obtuse courses. Seeking to secure its regional nuclear monopoly, Israel
has sought to prevent any regional power from succeeding in weapons development.
At the same time, Israel has sought to break the link between Iran and
two regional insurgencies, Hamas (Israel's own creation) in Palestine and
Hezbollah (a backlash to Israel's invasion) in Lebanon. With US aid and
abettance, Israel has sought to break the Iran connection without doing
anything to reduce Israeli repression of the Palestinian people, the principal
reason why such groups exist and why Iran supports them.
-
- Both the US and Israel have been playing their own games
in Iranian politics. The Israelis have carried out trans-border raids into
Iran from Kurdish territory in northern Iraq; the US has conducted covert
operations along the frontier with Iraq and has aided Iranian dissidents
such as MEK, a group on the US State Department list of international terrorists.
Those efforts are directed at promoting regime change or a soft coup that
does not seem likely. Backing Mousavi on the theory that he would be more
amenable to US and Israeli activities in the area is only part of the program
to bring about regime change. Referring to him as a "reformist"
or "moderate" is the sweet language of color revolutions that
sometimes succeed elsewhere, but the term "reformist" has little
or nothing to do with Mousavi's political history.
-
- The fact is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a tough-minded
defender of Iranian interests. He is actively and, unfortunately, sensibly
arming Iran against the prospect of a US/Israeli attack. While both US
and Israeli interests appear served by an Iranian decision in 2003, as
reported by the CIA, to stop work on a bomb, US and Israeli threats could
well have the effect of restoring nuclear weapons to Iran's center stage,
where they seem to have been before the Shah was overthrown. However, the
actual scope and character of Iran's nuclear program is controlled by the
Ayatollah Khamenei and the Guardian Council of clerics, not by Ahmadinejad.
If, by whatever means, Mousavi might become President, Iran's nuclear program
would be unlikely to change, because the clerical leadership of the country-along
with most Iranians-would insist on continuing it.
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- Both the enduring Iranian realities and the results of
the June 12 elections suggest it is time for more traditional diplomacy.
If the US, Israel and the West want Iran to stay out of the weapons business,
the first step is to stop threatening the country. The second is to stop
meddling in Iranian selection of its leadership. The third step is to then
sit down with whoever is in charge in Tehran and work out an accommodation
that recognizes Iran's (a) intrinsic importance as a nation of 80 million
people, (b) role as one of the world's principal energy producers, (c)
legitimate interest (under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) in harnessing
nuclear power as a long term domestic energy source, and (d) its spiritual
role in the life of the Shia Islamic community of which Iran is the largest
and most influential member.
-
- All of that requires western acceptance of the fact that
Islam does not recognize any requirement to separate church and state,
even though various countries move slowly toward secular governance. In
the end, as Iranian clerics appear to understand all too well, the basic
processes of governance require pragmatic decision making, and the rest
of the world would do well to encourage those processes toward the peaceful
end of the spectrum. Interfering in Iranian elections or attempting to
arrange soft coups are not the ways to get there. The most critical move
is for outsiders to leave the Iranian people alone.
-
- **********
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- The writer is the author of the recently published work,
A World Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a regular columnist
on rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US
Department of State whose overseas service included tours in Egypt, India,
Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Brazil. His immediate pre-retirement positions
were as Chairman of the Department of International Studies of the National
War College and as Deputy Director of the State Office of Counter Terrorism
and Emergency Planning. He will welcome comment at
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- wecanstopit@charter.net
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