Accidental Blogger

Much discussion is on in the media and blogosphere over the violent clashes in the aftermath of the Iranian elections. Was the election rigged or not?
A collection of interesting links and stories:
In which Juan Cole thinks that it's highly likely that the elections were stolen: A list of possible indicators that the results were fraudulent, followed by a disclaimer of sort.
"So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two.

What I've said is full of speculation and informed guesses. I'd be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be."

In which Nate Silver thinks that a statistical analysis doing the rounds does not prove fraud, though he believes that fraud occurred and might not be evident from the statistics.

""Still, though, would it really be all that hard to rig an election in a way that would be hard for statistical analysis to detect? Suppose that you're Ahmadinejad, and that you become convinced based on the actual vote totals that you're on track to lose by several points. Could you not simply take every tenth vote, or every fifth vote, that came in for Moussavi, and count it for yourself? This would preserve an element of randomness and would make the province-by-province results look reasonably correct relative to one another.

My point, I suppose, is this. Out of all the things you'd need to do to rig an election, coming up with a set of results that managed to avoid easy statistical detection would probably be one of the easier ones. So I'm skeptical that statistical analysis alone is going to turn up evidence of fraud. But I'll be keeping an eye out for other approaches, particularly from those who have a deeper understanding of the Iranian state than I do."

NYT's Bill Keller:
"On the street, the speculation focused more on how the election was manipulated, as many voters insisted it must have been for Mr. Ahmadinejad to score such a preposterous margin of victory.

One version (from somebody’s brother who supposedly knew someone inside) had it that vote counters simply were ordered to doctor the numbers: Make that 1,000 for Ahmadinejad a 3,000.

Others pointed out that the ballots seemed designed to lead opposition voters astray. Voters were obliged to choose a candidate and fill in a code. Though Mr. Moussavi was candidate No. 4, the code No. 44 signified Mr. Ahmadinejad.

One employee of the Interior Ministry, which carried out the vote count, said the government had been preparing its fraud for weeks, purging anyone of doubtful loyalty and importing pliable staff members from around the country.

They didn’t rig the vote, claimed the man, who showed his ministry identification card but pleaded not to be named. They didn’t even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it."

A Leftist view of Moussavi's earlier stint in the government:

"As prime minister from 1981 to 1989, Mousavi oversaw social austerity measures imposed to finance the Iran-Iraq war. At the time, he was a proponent of normalizing relations with the US and recognizing Arab regimes. In the lead-up to the American Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s, as the US and Israel sold weapons to Iran, Mousavi organized arms purchases from Israel and oversaw the repression of opposition to the negotiations with US officials on weapons—including the execution of prominent Iranian politician Mehdi Hashemi, who had led a Tehran demonstration against these covert arms deals."

The article contends that Khatami might have been a more radical rival to Ahmadinejad had he not pulled out of the election, but that he did so in hopes that Moussavi would be able to collect a larger proportion of the centrist as well as progressive vote.

A skeptical voice (Abbas Barzegar) who mistrusts the story pushed by the Western media:
"As far as international media coverage is concerned, it seems that wishful thinking got the better of credible reporting. It is true that Mousavi supporters jammed Tehran traffic for hours every night over the last week, though it was rarely mentioned that they did so only in the northern well-to-do neighborhoods of the capital.
Women did relax their head covers and young men did dance in the street.

On Monday night at least 100,000 of the former prime minister's supporters set up a human chain across Tehran. But, hours before I had attended a mass rally for the incumbent president that got little to no coverage in the western press because, on account of the crowds, he never made it inside the hall to give his speech. Minimal estimates from that gathering have been placed at 600,000 (enthusiasts say a million). From the roof I watched as the veiled women and bearded men of all ages poured like lava.
…
In the last week Ahmedinejad turned the election into a referendum on the very project of Iran's Islamic revolution. Their street chants yelled "Death to all those against the Supreme Leader" followed by traditional Shia rituals and elegies. It was no match for the high-spirited fun-loving youth of northern Tehran who sang "Ahmedi-bye-bye, Ahmedi-bye-bye" or "ye hafte-do hafte, Mahmud hamum na-rafte" (One week, two weeks, Mahmoud hasn't taken a shower).

Perhaps from the start Mousavi was destined to fail as he hoped to combine the articulate energies of the liberal upper class with the business interests of the bazaar merchants. The Facebook campaigns and text-messaging were perfectly irrelevant for the rural and working classes who struggle to make a day's ends meet, much less have the time to review the week's blogs in an internet cafe. Although Mousavi tried to appeal to such classes by addressing the problems of inflation and poverty, they voted otherwise."

BBC's latest: a solid and succinct analysis.

AP: not too bad, either.

Not tired of links yet? Check The Lede for practically hourly updates.

Though, the comments are more entertaining and possibly illuminating, as is Reza's smart zinger:
"Comment:
Reza
Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:13:19 GMT
Are you people high or just uneducated, brainwashed people? A.) The ballots are done by hand in Iran, not electronic and somehow they have counted the majority of the votes this fast?! B.) Iran is not a real democratic country, the president has no real power. This is a joke and so are the majority of the delusional people that are commenting."

So we have the puppet master manipulating the strings behind, hewing closely to Stalin's dictum that"He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything."

In the US, we've had the Supreme Court in their black robes 'pick' winners of our elections before. Iran has Supreme Leaders in black robes who still 'pick' winners of their elections, the will of the people be damned.

I think that the Obama administration will monitor but not interfere in what is happening with Iran, unless the CIA has a mind of its own and continues with shenanigans a la Mossadegh coup.What must be will be, and has to be organic and coming spontaneously from the people. If they have the numbers and support, maybe it will be the new Green Revolution in Iran.