Bogusssssssssss!!!
Ahmadinejad and company can’t even steal an election in a convincing fashion, and the ayatollahs have just let the US off the hook for the 1953 coup that put the Shah in power.
The BBC is reporting from Iran, Numerian at the Agonist isn’t buying it, nor is Gary Sick.
Update via Badtux in comments: Juan Cole has his reasons for not buying it.
OK, here’s why I don’t believe it without even getting to the details:
– this was the largest turn-out that they had had in years
– they had to extend voting hours and round up extra ballots
– they use hand-marked paper ballots that are folded and then stuffed in a box
– the results were reported in record time, and the winning percentage never changed
That does not happen in hand-counted elections that are even close to honest.
They said they had a 70-75% turn-out, but Khamenei said 85% when he congratulated Ahmadinejad before the dust even settled. They are saying there was 90% turn out in the rural areas where Ahmadinejad was expected to win, but a turn out like that should have slowed the system down.
The problem with the clerics who engineered this coup is that they didn’t know or care enough about democracy to even bother to make it look plausible. A 51% win based on fiddling the numbers in the rural areas and inner cities would have probably been accepted, but this is an obvious fraud.
The government is blocking most forms of communication, but there are demonstrations in the cities. People are angry. The clerics have seriously damaged their credibility with the people.
9 comments
Juan Cole doesn’t buy it either. He notes that the candidates didn’t get their usual hometown bounce in their hometowns, and a seriously unpopular candidate everywhere got more votes than a Kurdish candidate who should have gotten a significant number of the votes in the northwest. It’s as if the Ayatollahs panicked and just picked numbers out of their ass. And the BBC coverage looks scary as hell too, if there are not hundreds dead by tomorrow I will be quite surprised…
Question is, now what? We sure as hell can’t do anything here in America, we lost any claim to moral authority when we invaded Iraq under false pretenses then committed the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and the US saying *anything* about the election would turn the population around under the rhubric of “the ayatollahs are evil, but they’re *our* evil.” And I frankly haven’t seen that the Revolutionary Guards has gotten as lax and corrupt as SAVIK got during the end, they show no signs of going easy on anybody who protests that that ayatollahs stole the election. So now what? Nothing good for the Iranian people, or for the region, or for the world for that matter, I suspect :-(.
– Badtux the Pessimistic Penguin
Hopefully we will stay out of it and let the Iranians deal with their own internal problems their own way. Trying to “help” will have the same effect as the “Cuban policy”, i.e. give the clerics a foreign excuse.
I don’t see how we can talk to the Iranian government now, it has lost its validity with this charade.
Numerian noted that in a lot places Ahmadinejad won by exactly and even 1000 or 5000 votes. They produced vote totals faster than a House rollcall with electronic voting. I’ve been at some vote counts and have a good idea of the effort and time required for dealing with paper ballots, and you just can’t do it as quickly as happened in Iran.
Much as I loathe him personally Ahmadinejad still has a lot of suport in Iran, especially in rural areas and the urban poor… Over the last six months he has been buttering up his consitunets with the sort of help that will get them behind him. A modest victory was very possible and perhaps probable.
I agree with you Bryan, what Khamenei and the ruling clique have done is rig the eltion in an inept manner. They could have rigged the result for a smaller victory (say 52/44/2/2 or something like that) and that would have been credible if unpopular. I’m not sure what is going to happen and my friends in Iran are not sure either but things could well get very ugly.
.-= ´s last blog ..Papers indicates Shell’s complicity in Niger Delta protest crackdown =-.
I have a question, Mr. Duff. You may not want to answer because it might reveal too much information to your “enemies”, and I can understand that.
What is the color of the sky on your planet?
Frankly, Jams, I was expecting a run off because Ahmadinejad only won because the urban dwellers stayed home in the last election. He has about 35-40% of the voters behind him, and I expected Mousavi to be in the same range because Karoubi has pulled 15% in the last couple of elections, and Rezaie could have pulled up to 5%.
I would have been suspicious if Mousavi had gotten to the 70% range that Katami enjoyed in his two wins because Mousavi doesn’t have the personal following that Katami enjoyed.
A low fifties win might have been possible, but not 63% in the current economic situation in Iran. It was just fraud, it wasn’t even a clever fraud. Most people can appreciate a clever criminal, someone with a bit of flash, but the clerics of Iran will never be in Sinbad’s league.
What a moron. The sadly ironic part of the above garbage is that the truly dangerous nasty men are the ignorant morons who write ignorant, uninformed, and amazingly stupid garbage such as the one above.
Anyway, Brian… Thankfully I’ll be busy moving to a sane part of the World over the next couple of days and won’t be online for a while (and in all honesty, thankfully!) So I get to deal with the real World for awhile. You can deal with the ignorant moron. 😉 Good luck! 🙂
Cheers m8! tty asap.
Oh, I neglected the word ‘cowardly’ in my second sentence above. Apologies Bryan. I’m sure you’ll know where it should be positioned. 🙂
Mr. Duff, this thread is about the election in Iran. The majority of Iranians aren’t Sunni Muslims, they are Shi’ia, and they aren’t Arabs. I fail to see the relevance of the actions of Saudi Arabian religious fundamentalists against the US to what is going on, other than the fact that al Qaeda is a sworn enemy of both Iran and the US. Iran has been fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda a lot longer than the US and they offered the US assistance but the arrogant ass we had as a President decided to insult them instead.
Do try to keep up.
Take care with moving, Kryten. Unfortunately a few days or weeks won’t be enough to alter the ebb and flow in the current mess the world has created for itself.
The tropics look calm enough, so I should be here when you get back.