Tehran Burning

We do not know if the Iranian election was rigged. Sorry. Notwith­stand­ing Ahmadinejad’s two middle names, el diablo and Dictator, we still don’t know if the election was rigged. Historian Juan Cole demurs, citing six pieces of evidence that sup­pos­edly point to fraud. None of them are remotely close to defin­i­tive. Most of them take ethnicity to be an utterly deter­min­ing factor in elections. More impor­tantly, they don’t deal with the numbers.

Nate Silver, the number-cruncher and poll-analyst du jour, debunks a widely-circulating sta­tis­ti­cal analysis deployed by Cole. More recently, Cole has been blub­ber­ing about a poll that he claims supports the fraud thesis. Unfor­tu­nately, it does no such thing. Cole is hardly alone. Stalinist blogger Al Giordano writes, “it is certainly plausible that Ahmadinejad’s supposed victory is merely an invention based on cooked numbers,” his twaddling fingers betraying his inten­tions (Al, when you write “supposed,” you’re making a value judgment, even while the rest of your sentence tries to avoid doing so).

So what’s the real story here? As Richard Seymour reports,

I think it’s a consensus on the liberal-left in the US and UK that the Iranian elections were fixed. If they are right, we are watching a bloodless coup turn into a bloody one, as pro­test­ers have been beaten and are now being shot at and killed by cops. One of Mousavi’s sup­port­ers alleges he was told that a coup was coming. If they are not right, we are still faced with a state busily beating and killing the oppo­si­tion. The Iranian state is still detaining ‘reformist’ MPs, censoring news­pa­pers, shutting down access to social net­work­ing sites (although people are still finding ways to Twitter), and behaving as if for all the world it had every reason to act guiltily. It is not inher­ently implau­si­ble that Ahmadine­jad got 63% of the vote, and it has to be shown that there was a fix. The fact that Ahmadine­jad used state oil revenues to fund pro­grammes for the poor can be approved or derided, but it arguably gave large numbers of people an interest in voting for Ahmadine­jad against his more explic­itly neolib­eral rival. It gave him a base among some of the working class and bazaaris. Still, it is hardly implau­si­ble either that some vote-rigging went on, if only to make the win decisive enough to avoid a run-off.

Anyone seriously inter­ested in following the vote could do worse than head over to his site.

But there’s another point: hundreds of thousands–perhaps millions–of Iranian Mousavi sup­port­ers are out in the street, agitating for reform. They are politi­cized. They think their votes weren’t counted. They know that they are banned from demon­strat­ing. And they know that the Islamic Republic has autho­rized the use of live ammu­ni­tion (there have already been civilian deaths, which may lead to further strength­en­ing of the movement).

An energized populace in Iran, willing to defy ille­git­i­mate state edicts, can only lead to good, fraud or no fraud.

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Tech­no­rati Tags: Ahmadine­jad, Iran, lib­er­al­ism, repres­sion, resis­tance, vote fraud

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