Iran Feature: Re-visiting the 2009 Election (Keshavarz)

Writing in CounterPunch, Fatemeh Keshavarz re-examines what may have happened in the 2009 Presidential election, bringing in analysis of a recently-leaked audio in which a Revolutionary Guard commander describes interference by the Iranian military before, during, and after the vote.



Keshavarz applies her analysis to the tension in Iran today, 15 months after the election: "The leak of the tape, whether by the IRGC [Islamic Revolution Guards Corps] intelligence [bureau] or unhappy elements among them, makes another point clear. The battle of Ahmadinejad’s government for establishing its legitimacy is not over --- not even among the members of the Guard. The intelligence chiefs therefore deem it necessary to convince their own members that they are in control of the situation --- better still, they themselves have masterminded the current situation in the first place.

More than a year has passed since millions of Iranians marched on the streets calling the 2009 election a military coup carried out by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRG), their militia the Basij, and their armed plainclothes hired hands "lebaseshakhsis". The goals of the coup: keeping Ahmadinejad in power and completing the military and economic control of the IRG in the country. After beating up, arresting, and sometimes killing the protesters, the government put a record number of Iranian journalists behind bars (most now serving long sentences) and banned the foreign press from entering the country except to report on officially-orchestrated occasions.

Subsequently, Mir Housein Mousavi, the main opponent of Ahmadinejad and many members of the reformist opposition --- known as the Green Movement --- were put effectively under house arrest curbing their ability to reach the public in Iran. Moving the scenes of its brutality from the streets to jails and interrogation rooms, the regime dropped out of headlines thereby reducing the pressure on the Iranian authorities to answer for their brutal treatment of the opposition.

In the meantime, using its full control over the media, the Iranian government began to promote an alternative account of the 2009 election, an account which has not been without impact on the western left. It goes like this: the Iranian upper and upper middle classes, fooled by the western supporters of the reformists, had assumed that they had the majority while, in fact, in small towns and villages widespread support for Ahmadinejad gave him his 63% victory in the elections. Frustrated with their own miscalculations, the defeated reformists resorted to street violence, and therefore the government had no choice but to use harsher measures to calm things down.

This scenario has many big holes including the fact that, even if Ahmadinejad had the support of the rural areas, the Iranian population is about 65% urban and in fact the large cities are more than able to give any candidate a victory. Furthermore, hundreds of video clips document the peacefulness of the early protest marches in large cities as well as small towns. They also document the unprovoked violence of the security forces against the marchers.

All of this has become relevant again. Less than a month ago, an audio file of a speech by a chief intelligence officer and interrogator from the top ranks of the Revolutionary Guards came to light describing the behind-the-scenes [manoeuvres] of Ahmadinejad’s 2009 victory. The speech was leaked to the opposition websites, and spread fast despite the heavy censorship imposed in Iran. Besides the fascinating details revealed in it, there are other things that make the document important including the fact that no one (not even the government) has disputed its authenticity.

It is, in fact, very likely that the speech was leaked intentionally by the government itself. These facts lead to important questions. Who is the speaker? What does the tape reveal? What is the reformist opposition doing about it? And, why would the Iranian government leak a document that confirms its complicity in a fraudulent election, if indeed the leak has been intentional?

First a quick update on the current conditions in Iran. The country still has the highest number of jailed reporters in the world and only the official news and views are reported on the national media. Expressing political opposition in a blog can lead to five years in jail where the prisoners go on frequent hunger strikes to protest torture, unsanitary living conditions, and insult. Female prisoners will receive reduced sentences if they confess to illicit sexual relations with prominent members of the reform movement. Families of the prisoners who resist making confessions are threatened with more arrests.

And, despite Mr. Ahmadinejad’s claim quoted in The New Yorker’s recent piece “After the Crackdown”, his critics are not free to speak their minds. A standard charge for jailed journalists is “insulting (read criticizing) the president.” To get a sense of the problem, imagine you are an Iranian blogger citing Mr. Ahmadinejad’s claim in his New Yorker interview in your blog and asking, “If it is ok to criticize our president, why are some journalists in jail for 'insulting' him?” You will likely receive a brief phone call from a security agent within days. He will tell you to introduce yourself to one of the intelligence headquarters (or even directly to the main office of Evin Prison). If you are smart, you will do so immediately and quietly.

Side by side with these “security” measures, the National Iranian Radio and Television works to uphold its conspiratorial master narrative: the discovery of a “foreign” plot to end the supremacy of Islam in Iran. Those who would criticize the government are agents of this foreign “enemy.” One does not even need a blog to be considered a foreign agent. It is enough to mention an anti-government protest to a friend in an e-mail, or, worse still, attach a picture of the protest to the e-mail. Last week, in anticipation of the official Quds Day celebration, the day the Iranian government reiterates its support for the Palestinians, the e-mail use was reduced to three hours a day.

The universities (particularly the schools of humanities and social sciences) are perceived as infested with sympathy for the foreign enemy. In the past ten months, Ali Khamenei the Supreme Leader, major cleric Mesbah Yazdi, and Sadeq Larijani, the head of the Iranian judiciary, have all spoken about the unsuitability of the humanities for Iranian universities. Mr. Larijani targeted sociology, psychology, and the branch of philosophy that addresses human existential issues as the most unsuitable ones.

Against this sustained discourse of a foreign threat --- versus the dutiful, legitimate, and honest efforts of the government to offset the treat –-- there is now the newly leaked audio-file of a speech in which, a major Revolutionary Guard intelligence officer and interrogator brags about saving the Supreme Leader’s glory via keeping Mr. Ahmadinejad in the presidential office. This has, according to him, been done single-handedly by members of the Revolutionary Guard through sensible planning and timely action: that is identifying the enemy (the reformists), and using all means (obstruction, violence, spying, threats, and arrests) to stop them from winning the election.

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Iraq: Obama and A Meaningless Date of Withdrawal (Packer)

George Packer writes in The New Yorker:

What President Obama called the end of the combat mission in Iraq is a meaningless milestone, constructed almost entirely out of thin air, and his second Oval Office speech marks a rare moment of dishonesty and disingenuousness on the part of a politician who usually resorts to rare candor at important moments. The fifty thousand troops who will remain in Iraq until the end of next year will still be combat troops in everything but name, because they will be aiding one side in an active war zone. The proclaimed end of Operation Iraqi Freedom has little or nothing to do with the military and political situation in Iraq, which is why Iraqis were barely aware when the last U.S. combat brigade crossed into Kuwait a few days ago. And for most of us, too—except, perhaps, those with real skin in the game, the million and a half Iraq war veterans and their families—there’s hardly any reality or substance to the moment.

Iraq: Obama Wants Us to Forget the Lessons (Bacevich)

It’s hard to have an honest emotional response or even know what one feels. After seven years of war, the occasion deserves some weight of feeling, but many Americans stopped paying attention a long time ago. And that’s exactly why the President made his announcement: because Americans want the war to be over, have wanted it for years. Tonight he told us what we wanted to hear. August 31, 2010, will go down in history as the day Americans could start not thinking about the war without feeling guilty.

This is not entirely ignoble, by the way. The war has gone on for a long time—almost as long as the Civil War and America’s part in the Second World War combined—and it has taken a heavy toll on the one half of one per cent of Americans who have fought it, and in a democracy this is an intolerable situation. A checked-out public, a stressed-out military, a war hardly anyone can explain: at some point it had to be declared over, and only the President could do it, and Obama is the President, and he was as good as his word in so declaring it on August 31, 2010, not a day sooner or later. He can claim full credit for sticking to his own date certain regardless of circumstances—for not postponing the artificial event that just happened until some future date certain. And in doing so, he restored a small measure of democratic credibility here at home. This is what it looks like when a wartime President is true to his word and the people are behind him. Strange, that it doesn’t look better than it does.

For almost all purposes, Iraq has no government. Almost six months after national elections, the country’s politicians remain unable to compromise and cut a deal, showing the persistent lack of maturity and vision that has earned the political class the justifiable contempt of the Iraqi public. Meanwhile, Iraq’s neighbors are playing their proxies against one another and jostling for a piece of the action. In the vacuum, Sunni extremists are showing just how much—and how little—Iraqi security forces are going to be capable of in the post-American-combat-mission era. It’s not a very encouraging picture. Even if a return to civil war or a military coup, or both, doesn’t happen in the near future, Iraq remains fragile and extremely violent. Daily life—electricity, water, security, the same things Iraqis have been complaining about since 2003—is pretty hellish for most Iraqis. Read the comments from Iraqis in these New York Times interviews. They show the same range of views, some of them within a single individual, that one heard throughout the war. There is great disappointment in and resentment of America, but only one expression of pure hatred, and a fair number affirmations that, at least, Iraqis have been allowed to join the world and enjoy a margin of freedom. Almost all of them fear the future and can only imagine a normal life years or decades from now (fifty years is a common marker). Many of them (especially in Sunni areas), as much as they dislike the occupation, dislike more the prospect of a return to the levels of chaos seen in 2006, which could accompany an American withdrawal. It’s a real possibility, and August 31, 2010 was actually not such a good choice for the end of the combat mission. March 31, 2010, right after the elections, would have been better.

And then there are the hundreds of thousands, the millions, of Iraqis who have fled the country and not yet deemed it in their interest to go back. Among them is the core of the country’s educated, secular-minded middle class, including the younger generation—those who had the most to gain by the American invasion. It’s going to be much harder for Iraq to build itself into a stable, modern country without them.

And yet, to hear the President tell it, Iraq is on the right path and in a surprisingly good position to take its destiny in hand. Those passages from the speech remind me of nothing so much as the fatuously optimistic updates one regularly heard from President Bush and others in the earlier years of the war. Whatever Iraqis said, whatever the evidence of one’s senses, things were always getting better (though “challenges” always remained). And, as it turns out, as of August 31, 2010, this is still the case. As a candidate, Obama was in a position to tell the truth about Iraq, and he did. As President, he’s learned the official language of euphemism and vagueness and distortion. Administration officials who, three years ago and not yet in power, were withering in their assessment of the war and Iraqi politicians, have become their unlikely boosters.

The language of Obama’s speech was as flat and forgettable as anything we’ve heard from him. Unlike Bush’s “major combat operations are over” address in 2003 (which came to be known as the “mission accomplished” speech), Obama’s “the combat mission is over” in 2010 failed to carry conviction—evidence of this President’s intelligence, if not his forthrightness. When he talks about Afghanistan, he thinks about what he’s saying, and as a result he says real things in a way that penetrates, even—or especially-—when he avoids grandiosity, as in his speech last December at West Point. On Iraq, he seemed to be trying not to think too hard about what he was saying, while sprinkling his words with a grandiose coating. Otherwise, he might have had to admit—among other things—that he strongly opposed the surge that his speech praised.

O.K.—why should we expect him to be that much better than any other politician? Presidents never admit they were wrong. (Bush turned the refusal into a badge of honor.) We know how much credit honesty would have gained him among his opponents. John Boehner’s speech on Iraq (which, though it preceded Obama’s by a few hours, was a kind of Republican response) proved that the opposition has no interest in Iraq, except as yet another weapon to use against Obama. So Boehner wants Obama to declare victory, and he suggested that it’s unpatriotic not to do so—Boehner, who couldn’t pronounce General Ray Odierno’s name.

There is no American victory in Iraq, and there is not going to be any American victory in Iraq, and Obama was right not to talk about V-I. There isn’t even a clear truce, with a D.M.Z. and a southern half that, under American protection, might evolve into an economic powerhouse and a liberal democracy. In the Times Tuesday, Paul Wolfowitz proposed South Korea as a model for Iraq. The analogy is closer than Vietnam or the Second World War, but it still fails the test of commensurateness—among other reasons, because there will not be tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq sixty years from now, or even two years from now. We are leaving, undefeated and unvictorious—we are leaving it to the Iraqis....

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