You may have heard Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is under a little pressure right now. But for those without the time to monitor endless twitter feeds this should get you up to date;
The gist of it is that the current president of Iran, Ahmadinejad declared himself winner of the recent elections by a staggering margin which raised a few queries considering recent opinion polls and prevailing popular opinion. The main challenger Moussavi raised a few points.
Both the main opposing candidates lost in their own home region and ethnic groups when they should have won.
The results that were coming out on an timely basis had a solid linear pattern raising the possibility of fraud although fivethirtyeight have disputed this.
Moussavi seems to be under house arrest. No-one knows where he is.
Text’s, Facebook, Twitter, newspapers, etc have been closed down before and after the election.
There have been plenty rumours of people being excluded from where vote counting was supposed to take place.
Previously the Iranian Government used to release election results by area but now they attempted to just show the overall result. I think somehow these have leaked out now.
Whether you think the accusations are true or inflated (some supposed real results had Ahmadinejad coming in third) there’s no doubt something big is going down in Tehran. You know those moral police guys, the one’s that looked the girls in a burning building because they weren’t properly attired? Yeah there HQ has been burnt down after a riot that left one person dead and several others wounded after one of the morality guys opened fire.
I think this will have massive consequences for Iran as they were possibly the most free elections in decades and the candidates were hand picked by the supreme ruler! which resulted in this. Moussavi isn’t even that reformist, although he has advocated better rights for women and more diplomacy abroad (fun fact many of the uniformed “police” you see beating people are in fact Hezbollah members, the Iranian government is using its proxies to oppress its own people)
Either the crack down will be so severe that the democracies chance will be crushed in the near future or the protesters will prevail. I’m not sure what’s going to happen but the word is that there will be a recount and there is a general strike planned. Anyone know the state of unions in Iran?
So what do you guys see in Iran’s future, do you think this will succeed or have any affect- even if it’s just removing Ahmadinejad?
Also no referring to George Bush or US politics in this thread, go here for that stuff.
I can’t offer too much, but oddly the immediate thing I was struck with is why in the world would
police uniforms and shields say “POLICE” in big English letters in a country that speaks mainly Persian? Even the graffiti is in Persian (or at least certainly not English). The Hezbollah notion is dead on, I would bet.
One thing that I think was made clear in the collapse of the Soviet bloc was that a truly authoritarian regime cannot survive the loss of fear among its people. A security apparatus can only control small numbers of disorganized people, not a mass movement. Imprisoning or even executing Moussavi may be too late by now.
This is reason for optimism, in the long run. It’s mainly a matter of how many deaths will occur meanwhile.
I don’t know, I am not sure Moussavi is going to be executed. It’s possible that he’s being protected from hardline conservatives as much as the establishment is being protected from what he might say in public.
I have very little optimism for real change in Iran. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Ahmedeijad actually did win the election, and they just rigged it so it looked like he got more votes than he did-- for whatever reason, one being to avoid a runoff election.
Anyway, the clerics still run the country and without violent revolution, I don’t see that changing. Violent revolution would be a losing proposition for the pro-reform side. I don’t think enough of the country is behind it. Don’t be too fooled by the tweets and blogs-- only a minority of the more wealthy folks in Iran have access to that that technology and it’s easy to get a skewed impression of how widespread the protest is. Big, yes, but not big enough.
Well, China seemed to be able to crackdown pretty well after Tiannemen Square., but that was pretty isolated when one considers the size and scope of China, I suppose.
I would. Actual results were leaked from the Ministry of Elections, and Ahmadinejad came in third. Now, these might not be real, of course, but I find them a lot more convincing.
I disagree. The protests yesterday and today in Tehran were enormous, and do note that several members of the Revolutionary Guard were arrested for trying to get people in the army to join the people.
The thing is, even if Moussavi does replace Ahmadinejad, you’re not going to see much of a change. Moussavi is more diplomatic than Ahmadinejad, and more into open government, but they don’t radically disagree. Besides, the President of Iran doesn’t really have that much power anyway.
That’s probably for the best. Cementing the democratic process, giving a place at the table to the voices of liberalization, and having a more diplomatic face for us to deal with is in everyone’s best interests in the long run. Anything more than that would probably be incredibly disruptive.
The point is that it may not even matter what happens to him. The demonstrations seem to be about democracy, not a personality. If there’s a good-sized cadre of leadership talent that can obtain their followership, someone else will likely emerge from it.
Gangster, the organization and size of the protests matter, as I said. The Tiananmen movement never had much cohesiveness or leadership, and that made it relatively easy to suppress. The same was true of the Iranian democrats after we killed Mossadegh and put the Shah and his secret police into power.
Captain Carrot, when revolutions get started, they rarely stop with being “just a little better”. They keep building momentum, as more and more frustrations rise to the surface.
True, but the Supreme Leader gave his blessing to the “official” results immediately after they were first released a few hours after polls closed (even though he’s supposed to wait a few days first), and then blessed them a second time later. Thus, he painted himself into a corner if election fraud is proven (or even as long as its not disproven). His fate and Ahmadinejad’s are intertwined. If Ahmadi gets kicked out, there’s a chance the Supreme Leader goes down with him, or at least is severely weakened in terms of popular support.
What’s interesting to me is the fact that both candidates were picked by the supreme counsel…hand picked really. So, regardless of who was ‘elected’, really it’s the same ole same ole. And yet…it seems that perhaps the Iranian people are nearer the breaking point than I thought they were (I actually have friends in Iran, my Uncle and his family lived there for years before the Shah went down).
I was prepared to come into this thread and basically say that this is much ado about nothing, as my general feeling was similar to what John Mace said up thread…not enough of the population really feels strongly enough about this (or can over come their fear enough) to do anything meaningful. However, reading through the cites in the OP, I have to admit I haven’t been following this as closely as I thought, and perhaps I’ve been under rating what’s going on. Despite the fact that the candidates were hand picked, it seems that this BS election and the results were (perhaps) the spark that sets off the explosion. I know, from my friends in Iran, that people there have been simmering for a long time. It’s very much like I expect the Soviet citizens felt towards the end of the old USSR. Though, as someone pointed out up thread, my friends are not exactly a representative sampling of the population…they are technically savvy, well off financially, from more upper caste families (don’t wince guys…you are and you know you are) with higher level educations…so, my assumption has been that this was similar to the minority of discontent in Iraq in decade or so before the US invasion.
Maybe my assumptions were wrong though. It’s hard to say from blogs and such just how wide spread this all is.
