Center for a New American Security

My instinct is to agree,

My instinct is to agree, because it seems kinda whacky, but i saw a few tweets saying stuff like "they're cursing us in arabic" or "they're lebanese imports". probably just what u said though-- adds legitimacy to one side.

Not just tweets --

Not just tweets -- opposition leaders in UK saying their sources are telling them the same thing: that Arabic-speaking men in uniform are part of the crackdown on protestors.

Stratfor has a take on the

Stratfor has a take on the election - that basically we in the West are kidding ourselves about who the Iranians are because we are talking to English speaking urbanites who are not the majority of the country. In summary the majority of Iranians don't want modernization, Ahmadinejad did win the vote, and the clerical regime has wide support outside the urban intellectual crowd. Also they take pains to point out jeans and an IPOD do not a liberal make.

Myth of Iranian Liberalism

CNAS webmaster, posts keep

CNAS webmaster, posts keep disappearing. Nothing objectionable either (unless you object to Starbucks jokes)...

Spiegel online seems not be

Spiegel online seems not be able to make up its mind, though:

Version of June 15:
"Mit hassverzerrten Gesichtern kommen sie Ketten schwingend auf uns zu, drohen, uns mit ihren Crossbikes zu rammen. Rechts und links werden Flüchtende niedergeknüppelt. "Macht, dass Ihr wegkommt", schreien die Männer auf Arabisch: Nach Berichten des Senders "Voice of America" sollen bis zu 5000 libanesische Kämpfer der Hisbollah-Miliz Teheran beim Showdown zur Hand gehen."

Translation: "They are coming at us, faces contorted by hatred, flinging chains, threatening us with their crossbikes. All over the place, people get beaten up. The [agressors] are shouting in Arabic: "F*ck off". According to reports by Voice of America, up to 5000 Lebanese fighters of the Hezbollah militia are said to be helping out in Teheran."

Version of June 16:
"Mit hassverzerrten Gesichtern kommen sie kettenschwingend auf uns zu, drohen, uns mit ihren Crossbikes zu rammen. Rechts und links werden Flüchtende niedergeknüppelt. "Macht, dass Ihr wegkommt", schreien die Männer.
Nach Berichten des Senders "Voice of America" sollen bis zu 5000 libanesische Kämpfer der Hisbollah-Miliz dem Regime beim Showdown zur Hand gehen. "

Now, June 17, we are back to the "Arabic" version again ...

Stratfor has a take on the

Stratfor has a take on the election - that basically we in the West are kidding ourselves about who the Iranians are because we are talking to English speaking urbanites who are not the majority of the country. In summary the majority of Iranians don't want modernization, Ahmadinejad did win the vote, and the clerical regime has wide support outside the urban intellectual crowd. Also they take pains to point out jeans and an IPOD do not a liberal make.

Friedman is a joke.

For one thing, "English speaking urbanites" are not the majority of the country in the U.S., and they still managed to elect Barack Obama. So let's take it easy on these idiotic culturalist stereotypes about the inability of poor, ignorant country folk to make good political decisions.

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin.

Really, it is?

Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people,

Like all the people who currently work for the government? How in the world could you compel government employees to facilitate a fraud that perpetuated the regime they answer to?? I've never heard of such a thing!

and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct.

Which is, uh, precisely what happened. How do you explain the crazy voting irregularities in places like Lorestan and Azerbaijan, to begin with?

Friedman's not the first guy to have made this argument, and it's been mostly debunked.

"Stratfor has a take on the

"Stratfor has a take on the election - that basically we in the West are kidding ourselves about who the Iranians are because we are talking to English speaking urbanites who are not the majority of the country."
Nope. See http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/class-v-culture-wars-in-iranian.html

For (unofficial) results by province in English:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/iranian-election-results-by-provi...
Highlight:
- "The one province that my little birdie alerted me to is Luristan (or Lorestan; these Arabic Farsi transliterations are imprecise), where conservative candidates received only about 20 percent of the vote in 2005 but where Ahmadinejad supposedly got 71 percent on Friday. "
- Look at one of the third party candidates, Karoubi. He is from Lorestan. in 2005, in the first round he took 55% of the vote in Lorestan. In these results, he takes only 5%.

I read somewhere else that these 5% for Karoubi equal the number of the official members of his party/campaign ... Now, I could imagine such a result if people had feared AM getting >50% in the first round. But everybody was sure there would be a second round in these elections ...

Yup. During the Revolution

Yup. During the Revolution (1978/1979), everyone was claiming that the Shah had imported Israeli thugs to beat up people. Plus ca change etc....

Much easier for people to believe that imported thugs are doing the dirty work than to actually have to reckon with ideological differences and differing interests that result in civil violence.

I absolutely agree, AM.

I absolutely agree, AM. We've seen these sorts of rumours before...

* In 1989 many Romanians swore that PLO forces had been deployed to defend Ceausescu . It wasn't true, of course (and some Palestinian medical students were beaten up as a consequence).

*In 2006, there were claims (sadly, given credence in a ludicrous UN report and even reported in the NYT) that some 700 Somali Islamist militia had deployed to Lebanon to assist Hizbullah. Equally silly.

*In 2002, when a particularly effective sniper killed seven IDF soldiers and three settlers north of Ramallah, there were rumours throughout Israel and the blogosphere that he was actually an IRA mercenary (since, obviously, no Palestinian could shoot that well). In fact he was a Fateh activist, using an old rifle.

Regarding Iran, neither Hizbullah nor Hamas have any reason to particularly favour one candidate over the other, and every interest in hedging their bets and keeping good relations with all parties. Mousavi has an especially good record of past support for Hizbullah in the 1980s.

Second, there are few Hizbullah (and very, very few) Hamas cadres in Iran training at any one time. Their contribution (even if they were somehow become involved) would be infinitesimal compared to the Iranian police, 125,000 members of the IRGC, hundreds of thousands of Basij, and 825,000 in the regular forces.

Third, there are around 2 million Arabic-speaking Iranians.

False rumours--especially those attributing to one side nefarious external allies--always circulate. They circulate especially well in the Twitter age, where any idiot can retwitter nonsense (the signal-to-noise ratio in Twitter feeds from/on Iran tilt heavily towards the latter, despite the media's current fascination with it).

elf -- do you know the man

elf -- do you know the man or his work (I don't). You did notice it's not Thomas but George, right?

Yes, I know Friedman's work, and yes, I know that it's George and not Thomas.

I don't know the truth, I am raising a point. What if it isn't fraud?

What if?

Wasn't there a WAPO story a couple of days ago that pointed out the same thing, that Ahm. was polling ahead? What if even with fraud he essentially won?

The Post story has been widely criticized by both polling experts and people with broad knowledge of Iranian politics. The methodology was bad, and they were arguing against a straw man. Who was saying that it was impossible for Ahmadinjad to win? No one. It's entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that he got a plurality of the vote. It just seems unlikely, from both thematic and circumstantial evidence, that he won 2/3rds of the vote.

For Chrissakes the Shah was fairly liberal, compared to the mullahs. Remember the term "Massachusteritti"? For the MIT folks that were going to modernize Iran, and the people would have none of it?

I don't understand your point (though it's nuts to call the Shah "liberal" in any sense).

I don't know, but I do wonder if we aren't indeed kidding ourselves. I am looking at your data though, and I suppose the case can be made either way. But are we quite sure they mullahs (the real power, this election is about the economy and education - the Iranian Presidents real powers, foreign policy, security, defense, the nukes are controlled by the Mullahs) are we quite sure they don't really have solid support?

Maybe we are looking and want to see ourselves (liberal, secular, modern, democratic) and are missing who they are.

No, we're not quite sure of that. But people with serious, deep knowledge of that country and its politics suggest that liberals, reformists, and modernists are increasingly popular, particularly among the younger generation. I'm not willing to write that off based on the ignorant culturalism of a few people who believe that God or nature mandates that certain states and populations must be ignorant, irredeemable, or "evil."

It's also not correct to say that the election is only about domestic issues; whether or not he sits at the controls of foreign policy, nuclear policy, etc., the president of the republic is a very real symbol of the direction of the country and its orientation toward the world. The Iranian people recognize that, which is a big reason that a great many of them aren't interested in being represented by an ignorant fantasist like Ahmadinejad.

Of course we should be realistic about all of this, and I think the administration has been: whether Mousavi somehow emerges as the victor or not, we shouldn't expect Iranian policy toward the U.S. to change. Perhaps this is why the neocons are so enraged by the President's relative silence -- they're the ones whose worldview is suggestive of the idea that a more liberal leader necessarily will result in more liberal policies. Those of us who recognize that governments generally base their actions on what they perceive to be their legitimate national interests aren't expecting anything so dramatic or unlikely.

These sort of stories are

These sort of stories are nothing new and Abu M and others are on the money. There is no up-side for Hezbollah to send 5000 operatives to Tehran, no way they'd need to given the resources available to the Iranian state, and no way it would only be Der Spiegel who would have heard about it if it was the case.

I suppose one could say it also throws further doubt on the credibility of the Der Spiegel story on Hezbollah's direct complicity in the Hariri assassination - ie they hardly seem worried about the accuracy of their "Party of God" stories if they're going to publish this.

RB - an interesting historic twist on your sniper story was that there were regular stories in the UK press during the troubles of IRA sniper attacks being carried out by ex-US marines or German mercenaries etc on accounts of the Micks being too stupid to organise anything effectively. It was all bullshit of course, in fact it was a couple of farmers (more or less).

By the way, re the Ramallah dude - are there any reasons why you think the guys was a Fatah operative? Not particularly doubting you, just they had never repeated such an operation to my knowledge.

Chris Mewett on June 17,

Chris Mewett on June 17, 2009 - 9:50am "Like I said on the other thread about this, if the Basiji were supplemented by a bunch of thugs yelling in Arabic, Iranian people would be losing their shit. You'd hear about it from more than a German reporter and an ABC affiliate."

I second that. I've been watching the prolific tweets of a Tehran resident who speaks English ( http://twitter.com/PD90 )and he's said nothing of the sort: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/34364331.rss

thaks RB

thaks RB