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What Are Mousavi’s Plans?
This is bad:
TEHRAN, Iran – Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi issued a direct challenge Wednesday to the country's supreme leader and cleric-led system, calling for a mass rally to protest disputed election results and violence against his followers.
No government and especially not one that concentrates in on position like the supreme leader can allow such defiance to its authority.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has told Mousavi to pursue his demands through the electoral system and called for Iranians to unite behind their Islamic government, an extraordinary appeal in response to tensions over the presidential vote. But Mousavi appears unwilling to back down, issuing on his Web site a call for a mass demonstration Thursday.
The rally, if held, will inevitably see some violence. There are elements on both sides that want to and are able to escalate this. One stone thrown may end up in open shooting.
What does Mousavi want?
"We want a peaceful rally to protest the unhealthy trend of the election and realize our goal of annulling the results," Mousavi said.
But why exactly should the election results be annulled? I am still missing concrete evidence or witnesses coming forward with evidence of real election fraud.
Mousavi could demand recounts with some of his supporters taking part and verifying them. Allowing that would already be a further compromise for Khamenei but likely achievable. If serious miscounts could be found then a call for annulment might be justified. But without factual basis Khamenei has no reason to agree to that. Doing so would further damage his authority.
Open defiance against what the regime holds as the rule of law will only end in more trouble. Why does Mousavi and the power-people behind him want that? What is their planned endgame?
Disclaimer: This is a somewhat kooky speculation on my part–it’s bit too conspiratorial and I don’t think I can believe it myself. I don’t know enough facts on the ground–so it’s total speculation and I don’t claim this has any grain of truthiness in it. Still, it seems to make a peculiar sense the more I think about it. I’m posting it here just to provoke some thoughts and responses. Thanks.
One assumption everyone seems to be making regarding Iran is that there are just two sides in this game–Ahmedinejad’s camp and Mousavi’s camp. In an ordinary election, that would be true, but knowing what we know about Iran, is that sufficient? The more I think about it, it seems to me that the clerical leadership under Khamenei actually rigged the election against both Ahmedinejad and Mousavi. Let me lay out why I started thinking this:
1. The numbers obviously make no sense. We know that Ahmedinejad is a shrewd politician who has a wide support base. But we also know he is a deeply polarizing figure in Iraninan politics. It’s at least highly improbable and, in practice, next to impossible for him to have pulled off 60% of the votes.
2. If Ahmedinejad was indeed rigging the election, knowing his position in the Iranian electorate, would he have come up with such unbelievable numbers? We know something about run-off elections. It is common that nobody wins a majority in the first round. So, it would have been more plausible for him to have himself winning a pluarality–or even concede a plurality to Mousavi–and have himself win a majority in the second round. After all, that was what past elections were like in Iran itself.
3. What does Ahmedinejad have to gain by “winning” an election while destroying his own credibility like this? Not much, if you ask me.
But, from the perspective of Khamenei, things are different. While Ahmedinejad has often been described as a political ally of the clerical establishment, that is hardly accurate–at best, he has been a very difficult ally who did his own thing, often at the expense of the ayatollahs. Ahmedinejad is an outsider, a non-cleric, and a rabble rouser. Indeed, he often used rabble-rousing to enhance the prominence of the presidency at the expense of the religious establishments. I’ve heard that his version of folksy piety has often irked the more “formal” religious authorities. On the other hand, despite the common characterization of Mousavi as an anti-establishment figure, the truth is that he has a good deal more insider credentials as Ahmedinejad has. He has close contacts within the clerical establishment, and while one might mention how his clerics are opposed to Khamenei, one has to think Mousavi is potentially as amenable to the unelected elders of Iran as Ahmedinejad, if anything, as a “devil they know.”
If I were Khamenei, then, what would I do? I’d offer Ahmedinejad a poisoned gift–a clearly tainted electoral victory. If Ahmedinejad survives, he would be in a gravely weakened position and far more dependent on Khamenei–who, after all, would have saved his political life. If Ahmedinejad does not, Khamenei will have “graciously” adjudicated the dispute and handed the victory to Mousavi–and he too would be indebted to the religious leadership. Either way, the clerics win–provided that the entire country doesn’t fall apart in process. Clearly, a high-stakes gamble–assuming, to repeat, there is anything other than my imagination in this. But while I cannot convince myself that the election results are not utterly phoney, I cannot find any good reason for Ahmedinejad to have rigged the election himself–especially given the form in which the “rigging” took place, which is too “clumsy,” especially given previous electoral experiences in Iran. Given the elephant in the room who is not directly involved–Khamenei–and that he is no particular friend of either side, even if he is slightly closer to one than the other, this actually doesn’t seem totally ridiculous to me…but perhaps it does to you, in which case I’m hoping to learn why it might be.
Posted by: kao-hsien-chih | Jun 17 2009 19:41 utc | 41
b:
I would like this to be posted as Dragonfly’s position on the Iranian elections, not just a missive at the bottom of comments. I would like your response at the same place so we can have a clear debate.
b says: There is a full effort of the “western” media and some expatriate Iranian organizations to de-legitimize the Iranian election despite the absence of any real evidence of voting fraud. These events show all characteristics of an engineered “color evolution”.
The validity of a message must be determined regardless of the messenger. You should not care if AP, the Reuters, CNN or even Fox News reports something or the IRIB. You should find reasons for whether the report is true or not regardless of who says it is or it is not. The credibility of the source or the medium is relevant if and only if you cannot determine the validity of the claim on its own merits. Even then the leap from CNN or any other news channel has an agenda to CNN or any other news organization is helping engineer a color revolution is more than a leap of faith. Do you have any hard evidence for this claim? An email from a news executive to his underlings to foment a color revolution, perhaps? I am asking you this question because you subject those who disagree with you to a stricter standard of evidence than you yourself are willing to undergo. So show us evidence, hard evidence, not conjectures, not hypotheses, not conspiratorial connect-the-dot exercises. Evidence and logic please.
Ahmadinejad and the Poor
b says: As said before I find the reelection of Ahmadinejad quite plausible. He has done a lot for the poor.
What is your evidence for Ahmadinejad having done a lot for the poor? What I would like you to do is to list five things Ahmadinejad has done for the poor that are genuinely good for them. You can also tell me five things that Ahmadinejad has done that are bad for the poor but for some reason they fail to see them as bad and think they are good for them.
Misreading the Professor
You have misread or patently misunderstood Professor Salehi-Esfahani’s post about class in the Iranian society. He is an economist and understands class as income classes, not as a social concept. Regardless, his point is that according to the calculations he has done the size of the Iranian middle class has almost doubled from 1997-2007. Assuming that the percentage of voters does not vary much across classes this means that the middle class candidate, in this case Mr. Mousavi, had a better chance of winning the election. One could say that the percentage of poor or other classes who participate in the elections was more than that of the middle class. There is no data for this claim while we know from the previous elections that when the turnout is high in general, reformists tend to win. Assuming that your conjecture is right, Rezaee and Karroubi had a better chance of breaking the vote of the poor than Mousavi, that is, Ahmadinejad was more likely to compete for the votes of the poor with Karroubi and Rezaee. So even if proportionally more poor voters voted than the middle class we should have seen a surge in Rezaee’s vote or Karroubi’s vote or both. In other words, the higher participation rate of the poor is very little threat to the reformist candidate if we agree on your assumptions, since the number of the middle class has almost doubled.
The Fisk Affair
Do you consider Robert Fisk’s interview with one man conclusive evidence? Has Fisk corroborated the man’s claims about what Ahmadinejad has done? How has he done so? Have you corroborated those claims? For example have you contacted Tabriz University, the largest state university in the northwestern Iran, to ask if they do indeed offer the program the man claims Ahmadinejad instituted? But for the sake of argument, suppose some obscure university in the Azeri speaking provinces of Iran offers this program. Do you have any idea how long it takes to have a program of study approved by the Iranian Ministry of Science and Technology? Wouldn’t knowing that it takes several years to have the program established at any state university in Iran give you pause to realize that maybe his predecessors were the ones pushing for the program and he simply confiscated what was already an almost-finished project in his own name as he has often done in other instances?
Ahmadinejad the Leftist
b says: In interior politics and economics, dominant in elections everywhere, his position is more to the left of the typical “western” right-left scale.
Here is where you go far off track. If this statement is indicative of your knowledge of Ahmadinejad’s economic policies, you are in need of serious second thoughts. I assume you are not an economist. That may explain your misunderstanding and misrepresentation of economic analysis. Let’s start with your assertion that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s position is more to the Left. Let’s see how Mr. Ahmadinejad fares against “typical” Left in three areas of economic policy. I can count every area of macroeconomics conceivable and show that contrary to your misguided beliefs Mr. Ahmadinejad has indeed followed the maxims of a brutal form of predatory capitalism far more sinister than the usual libertarian utopia envisioned among the laissez-faire crowd, but for now, let’s just concentrate on three points:
1. Housing Two simple facts about housing: It has the biggest share of household expense and rents are based on property value. Two ways Iranian poor were punished by Ahmadinejad: They cannot afford houses because of skyrocketing property values. Now the demand for house purchases by the people who really want to live in them has decreased because they cannot afford them anymore, so the demand for rentals has gone up. So the poor get punished twice it becomes harder for them to both buy and rent while the real estate speculators among whom one can find prominent backers of President Ahmadinejad are enriched. Question: Ahmadinejad ran a very expensive campaign. Did you see or hear the poor donating money to it? Even Ahmadinejad himself did not claim that he received money from the poor. There was no footage of it; no anecdotes flooding Ahmadinejad friendly blogosphere, no IRIB teaser. Where did the campaign money come from? Why don’t you place Ahmadinejad under the same scrutiny as the others? This willful omission speaks volumes about how “I like him, because the Western media demonize him” plays in much of the ideological blogosphere.
2. Employment Mr. Ahmadinejad, through Mr. Jahromi his longtime friend appointed Minister of Labor, has tried hard to change Iranian labor laws to make firing workers far easier than what it is now. Iranian labor laws are generally labor friendly. Mr. Ahmadinejad opposes labor laws citing inefficiencies and rigidities of the law, a codeword used by Right government to get rid of legal labor protections. Mr. Ahmadinejad has adamantly and at times brutally stifled efforts by workers to unionize or create syndicates. He has not even tolerated the government affiliated Labor House that is supposed to represent the labor force in policy debates, since its leaders have consistently and members have consistently voted Left, that is, reformist. Why do you think Tehran bus drivers staged demonstrations a few years back? They were simply not being paid or had wages far below the poverty line. Of course you can find a color revolution in every protest against Mr. Ahmadinejad; the only color I see here is the color of food at someone’s table whatever that may be.
3. Open Economy Mr. Ahmadinejad’s tenure has seen the rise of consumer imports to unprecedented heights. Remember the very same people who are supposed to be poor therefore voting for Mr. Ahmadinejad were actually being crushed under the onslaught of cheap imports that would have them laid off or work without pay. I suppose you call this economic policy by the Left. I am not citing numbers here so you actually do some search for numbers and face the grim reality rather than a reflexive opposition to whoever is against Mr. Ahmadinejad just because some Western media happen to somehow say it as it is.
Misrepresenting the Professor Again You have misrepresented the good professor’s analysis once more. He uses some numbers from the 2006 census to give a picture of the Iranian labor market in 2009. Using three-year old data to analyze a dynamic labor market is his fault, misrepresenting the results are yours. Assuming his numbers are right, some basic statistics tells us that if you were living in Iran and you were younger than 30 years old in 2006 you had about 22% chance of being unemployed, almost twice as much as the national average of 12.4%. You can download the data from the Statistical Centre of Iran and if you are interested I will show you how these numbers are estimated. At any rate, these numbers simply show the state of the labor market in 2006 not 2009. Would you do the same analysis for the U.S.? Use the 2006 unemployment data to say something about what is going on now? These numbers show the situation of the Iranian labor market some time after Khatami left office. These are the numbers that Ahmadinejad capitalized on to say Khatami did nothing for the economy. Funny they should be looked at as exonerating Mr. Ahmadinejad’s economic performance now. Here is my question: suppose these numbers carry over to 2009, meaning unemployment hovers around 10% and only 5 out of 100 young persons in Iran are unemployed. Also assume that Iranian imports have increased by 75% since the Khatami administration according to official CBI figures and data released by the Iranian Customs Administration and corroborated by the WTO. We also know that the bulk of this surge in imports has gone to consumer stuff not capital goods like industrial machinery. If Iran is not importing capital goods that are used to create jobs how have jobs being created in the economy so as to keep the unemployment rate almost constant or dropping? If I am a businessman expanding my business, do I need bananas and sugar or machinery? I have the economist’s answer to this, but I would like you think about this miracle.
A post on why the election results are not to be believed is next.
Posted by: Dragonfly | Jun 17 2009 21:13 utc | 65
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