Iran - No Chance Of New Election

By Steve Hynd

Iran's Guardian Council has nixxed any chance of their being a fresh election, despite their being plenty of evidence to say that the vote count was fundamentally flawed. The liberal UK think tank Chattam House published a study yesterday (PDF here) exploring just how flawed in some detail and two of the authors, Ali Ansari and Thomas Rintoul took to the Guardian's comment pages today to explain their findings:

Ahmadinejad claims to have gathered 13m votes more than all three conservative candidates combined managed in 2005. If true, this would be the biggest increase in a vote since the birth of the Islamic Republic, and conveniently bigger than that achieved by the reformist winner in 1997, Mohammad Khatami. This is odd. The major reformist organisations boycotted the 2005 poll, which Ahmadinejad won, and so the re-entry of these voters might be expected to boost the reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi. Not so, apparently.

By contrast, the conservative camp in 2005 organised a secret campaign to mobilise their core vote for Ahmadinejad. While they may have organised even more effectively this time, with four years to prepare and greater resources at their disposal, to have increased their vote by 113% would be quite spectacular.

...it seems Ahmadinejad recorded many of his greatest victories in rural, often ethnic minority, provinces that formerly supported the reformist cleric Mehdi Karrubi. Rural and ethnic minority provinces (contrary to much popular opinion in the west) have traditionally voted against conservatives. Most notable of these was Karrubi's home province, Lorestan, where his 2005 tally of 55.5% was cut to just 4.6%, with an overall increase of 296% in the conservative vote. In a province with a long history of supporting ethnic Lors like Karrubi, this is even more surprising. Ilam, Khuzestan and the crucial province of Fars all saw huge swings from the cleric to Ahmadinejad.

The breakdown of the votes is not a smoking gun, it does after all come from the same ministry of interior run by Ahmadinejad's former campaign manager, which conducted the count. However, it shows that even the official ?ersion of events makes some claims that are difficult to swallow.

So the vote was stolen, at least in part. The most likely explanation is, as Steve Clemons writes, that:

the real divide now is not between the reformers and revolutionaries but between the old guard clergy and Ahmadinejad's new guard including major security services (but also backed by some hardline clergy like Ayatollah Yazdi), while the twittering classes are a much smaller faction and pawn in the bigger battle of elites.

Unless an old dog has learned new tricks, those imagining defeated candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi to be a paragon of democracy and freedom are very much mistaken. All the signs are that the old puppetmaster, Rafsanjani, is still trying to pull strings in a fight with Ahmadinejad and Khamenei in which the prize is not just political power but the ability to line their own pockets with oil money. However, with his daughter arrested and his attempt to get a consensus in the Council of Experts for replacing Khamenei apparently dead in the water, "the Shark" as he is known to Iranians looks to have been decisively defeated at this stage.

Mousavi and others appear to be determioned to take their protests further, if they can, perhaps realizing they've already burnt their bridges. And the street protest movement may well yet take on a life of its own, fuelled by martyrs like Neda Agha-Soltan and Kaveh Alipour. Yet those protests have dropped of to the tiniest fraction of what they were, under intense and brutal pressure from security forces loyal to Ahmadinejad, while Iranian authorities are now promising that the courts will teach any remaining protestors the error of their ways. And the authorities are trotting out arrested protestors to further their narrative that the protests are caused by Western meddling:

Iranian state television, in a broadcasts clearly intended to discredit opponents defying a ban on protests, paraded people it said had been arrested during weekend violence.

"I think we were provoked by networks like the BBC and the VOA (Voice of America) to take such immoral actions," one young man said. His face was shown but his name not given.

A woman whose face was pixilated said she had carried a "war grenade" in her hand-bag. "I was influenced by VOA Persian and the BBC because they were saying that security forces were behind most of the clashes.

"I saw that it was us protesting ... who were making riots. We set on fire public property, we threw stones ... we attacked people's cars and we broke windows of people's houses."

That VOA and the BBC could inspire grenade throwing and arson is a massive stretch, but Western meddling in Iran with a view to regime change is well documented, involving agencies like America's National Endowment for Democracy and covert ops to aid groups like the terrorist Mujahedeen e-Kalq. Given that, the Iranian regime's propaganda will have some legs.

Overall, the likelihood is that Iran 2009 will be more like the repressed damp squib of Tiananmen 1989 than the revolutionary tsunami of Tehran 1979. The hardliners, led by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad will retrench and will succeed in removing any semblance of the original conception of the Islamic Republic, replacing it with an entirely more autocratic regime - one much like Western conservative hawks have always accused Iran of being.