Nothing good. The protests will be put down with whatever brutality is needed. I also don’t believe the majority of the country cares enough to fight it. This China in 1989 not a Green Revolution.
I also think that although the results were falsified the nutter would have won anyway after the second round. The independent poll showed that and he did win the last election by a similar score after the second round. It’s not like he’s deeply unpopular outside the relatively secular, reasonably affluent urban youth.
Your comment regarding that “the nutter” (easier to spell anyway!) would’ve won anyway in a runoff reminds me some of this Economist article from last week. Why did they cheat when they didn’t really have to and why so badly?
Between those two choices damaging the democratic pillar may be the preferred option to Khamenei and company. And those may be the only two that Khamenei has … but the Assembly of Experts and the rest of the Religious Council has a third path: Khamenei goes, the election is annulled, and Moussavi preserves the system mostly intact continuing to defer to the council and whoever the new Supreme leader is (I doubt Rafsenjani) as he would have if he had won in the first place. Where they will want Iran to go is still the great unknown.
I don’t see why they have to do anything. As Robert Fisk said recently - they ‘hanged tens of thousands like thrushes’ in 1988(?) to no detrimental effect on the regime. They will do the same again if they have to. I think we sometimes underestimate how strong and long-living a regime can be when they have no constraints. Even more so when they have Allah on their side.
Add in both the religious nutterism and the fact that a huge swathe of the population share in the nutterism and I can’t see anything changing. The extreme nutter wing has the guns and the street thugs to wield them.
It might all implode a long way down the line but not this year or the next, next, next, next, next or next.
Besides all we really have here is Tweedledum fighting with Tweedle-dee. Neither are anything but lunatic religious nut-cases. Even if the election was rerun and the Not-Quite-As-Openly-Batshit-Crazy party won we and the people in the street would notice little change.
I sincerely hope i’m wrong though. Nothing would give me greater political pleasure than a genuinely democratic Iran although like Der Trihs I very much doubt they’d be anything but implacable foes of the West.
Even doing nothing is doing something, that is, it is making a choice. So far the choice is option one: Let the pretense of having a democratic pillar be damned. And perhaps there would indeed be no consequence to that choice, despite my minimally informed belief that there would be.
Why do you think “the deep state” cheated the election given that nutter would likely have won a second round anyway and Moussavi would not likely have been anything other than compliant to the Council anyway if he had won?
BTW, let me be clear, none of the possible paths that I am suggesting include a completely democratic Iran. My best case is a preservation of the less powerful democratic pillar and an ascendency of a less nutty wing in the Religious Council that sees engagement and moderation as a better path forward.
I seriously doubt that; things have already gone too far. People have been hurt and killed, there’s been open dissension among the leadership, and the facade of democracy has been broken. This isn’t going to be forgotten anytime soon.
Reza Aslan, a guest on last night’s Rachel Maddow show (transcript here, about 3/4 of the way down) made a couple of points which I considered interesting. The first was that there is now an obvious split among the people who were once united against the Shah and the Great Satan; and the other was that the revolution against the Shah simmered for more than a year before it broke out in full force.
Disclaimers: I haven’t done any particular research that would corroborate or contradict either of the above points. In addition, Mr Aslan has a book that he’s flogging, which in my mind makes anything he says just a tad more likely to be self-serving. Nevertheless, this reinforces my tendency to agree with Der Trihs on this one: we’re a long way from seeing the endgame.
Two answers. First - they are rank amateurs at rigging ballot boxes.
Second - for the sake of presenting to their enemies a united front they did not want it either to go to a second round or have it appear in the vote tallies that there is any serious opposition among the voters to Lunatic Nutterism.
I do so hope I’m wrong but I see the same bargain being struck (and to a great extent this bargain has been tacitly in place for some time) as in China and Russia.
You don’t take democracy seriously and we won’t interfere too much with the well off and/or educated being a little western and consumerist.
I saw an interesting documentary looking at China and Russia and the supposed natural agents of capitalism = democracy were absolutely explicit that they knew this was the deal.
More freedom in private so long as you left politics to the right sort of politician.
This is what will happen in Iran. After the crackdown and the bloodshed draws a line in the sand that relatively progressive forces understand the consequence of crossing the status quo will resume.
Worked in eastern europe for decades.
Worked in China.
Worked in Iran after the Islamic Terror of the end of the eighties and it sure as hell worked in Iraq for a long time under Saddam.
It’s still working across all the assorted Beserkistan’s in Asia with dictators we kow-tow to for strategic reasons.
But like I said - I’d be delighted to be proved wrong.
It works everywhere where the rulers are both strong and utterly ruthless.
Umm, having a book to sell does nothing to hurt one’s credibility, particularly since the dude really knows what he’s talking about. The book is great, I read it last month and it’s not about Iran specifically.
I saw him on the Daily Show the other day and he said something very poignant that Iran has two paths, North Korea or China. I have for a very long time hoped they’d go the China route.
Yes I can. Same country, same rulers governing through the Communist Party structures and same problems. Just richer. And no democracy.
It’s the prime example how education, access to information etc etc does not necessitate democracy. Tieneman Square drew a bloody line in the sand that has remained uncrossed for two decades.
So. You tell me. In what way is China a totally different country when nothing politically has changed. We are (or were until the bankers destroyed it all) richer. We’re ruled by the same political structures etc etc. Do we get to be completely different countries too?
And besides - China being richer etc had absolutely nothing to do with the aborted democratic uprising.
Now - Iran before and after the Shah. There you have ‘two different countries’.
Here we have two extreme, illiberal religious nutters squabbling over whether the Violent Religious Nutters Party or the Extremely Violent Religious Nutters Party won the election. It wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference if they re-run the election and the Slightly Less Crazy Mullah won.
I have created a thread to discuss the very interesting question of how much China has changed over the past 20 years. Please join it here.
In this thread I’ll merely point out that the circumstance in China was very different. It was a limited student movement and the bulk of the population was uninvolved and really probably uniinterested. You also had Asian culture which has a much longer tradition of valuing not making trouble and that the individual should be subsumed for the good of the group. The discontent in Iran is much more pervasive and growing as even some of those who did not vote for Moussavi are upset that the democratic pillar is such a sham.
If Rafsanjani is working something behind the scenes there is so far nothing to show for it, at least that is visible to those of us on the outside. OTOH his silence, his not being by Khamenei’s side or explicitly expressing his support means something as well. If nothing else he has been, according to that article, “the ultimate barometer of the political mood in Iran”. He knows how the pressures change and can predict with some accuracy how the winds will blow. If this was going to clearly fizzle he’d be public in support of Khamenei. And he is not.
And now back to the news channels all Michael Jackson all the time.
I was watching CNN this morning. Apparently, the Mexican ambassador from Iran is claiming that the girl who was shot (can’t remember her name, but she is famous now because of it) was shot by the CIA. He states that the CIA and terrorists use this particular type of bullet, but that Iran does not. No explanation of what caliber the bullet was, but the Iranians do produce a version of the AK47 (assuming this is the terrorist weapon referred to).
Here is a related article on CNN. He wasn’t as forthcoming as he was on the Wolf Blitzer show that I saw.
The thing that bugged me was Blitzer’s commentary by calling these ‘Serious Allegations’. Serious allegations are ones that have some aspect of truth to them. I never understood why a reporter in this situation doesn’t ask something like, “What would Allah think of you lying like this?”, or “Who do you expect to believe such crap?”.
Yeah, that’s some serious bullshit. The CIA killed her…riiiight. Why would the CIA waste a bullet when there are plenty of people being killed as it is?