By Paul Craig Roberts
(If you think my Iran election posts are a left-wing rant, read this piece. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honour by French President Francois Mitterrand.)
A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernised youth of Tehran. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.
The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed.
This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the pre-emptive declaration of victory and the announcement of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick.
As for the grand ayatollah Montazeri’s charge that the election was stolen, he was the initial choice to succeed Khomeini, but lost out to the current Supreme Leader. He sees in the protests an opportunity to settle the score with Khamenei.
Montazeri has the incentive to challenge the election whether or not he is being manipulated by the CIA, which has a successful history of manipulating disgruntled politicians.
There is a power struggle among the ayatollahs. Many are aligned against Ahmadinejad because he accuses them of corruption, thus playing to the Iranian countryside where Iranians believe the ayatollahs' lifestyles indicate an excess of power and money.
In my opinion, Ahmadinejad's attack on the ayatollahs is opportunistic. However, it does make it odd for his American detractors to say he is a conservative reactionary lined up with the ayatollahs.
Commentators are “explaining” the Iran elections based on their own illusions, delusions, emotions, and vested interests. Whether or not the poll results predicting Ahmadinejad's win are sound, there is, so far, no evidence beyond surmise that the election was stolen. However, there are credible reports that the CIA has been working for two years to destabilize the Iranian government.
On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”
On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”
A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”
On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to $400 million, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”
The protests in Tehran no doubt have many sincere participants. The protests also have the hallmarks of the CIA orchestrated protests in Georgia and Ukraine.
It requires total blindness not to see this.
Daniel McAdams has made some telling points. For example, neo-conservative Kenneth Timmerman wrote the day before the election that “there’s talk of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran.”
How would Timmerman know that unless it was an orchestrated plan? Why would there be a ‘green revolution’ prepared prior to the vote, especially if Mousavi and his supporters were as confident of victory as they claim? This looks like definite evidence that the US is involved in the election protests.
Timmerman goes on to write that “the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars promoting ‘colour’ revolutions . . . Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”
Timmerman’s own neocon Foundation for Democracy is “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”
Showing posts with label Elections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elections. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
The End Of Objective Journalism: The Iran Election And The Corporate Media
In my last post I had pointed out how the Western corporate media has abandoned any pretence of journalistic objectivity in its coverage of the Iran presidential election. And as the days pass and more protest marches are reported from Tehran, we can see how major news outlets have stooped to brazen propaganda aimed at discrediting the election result.
It is not uncommon for election results to end in charges of fraud by the losing party that trigger mass demonstrations and even armed clashes. Just last April, elections in Moldova ended in violent protests, with the losing party claiming fraud and the winning one saying it was the victim of an attempted coup.
In November of last year in Nicaragua, nationwide local elections in which the opposition claimed irregularities led to confrontations involving thousands of people armed with bats, rocks, machetes and guns.
Last July, charges of election fraud led to mass rioting in the capital of Mongolia. There is no record of the corporate media becoming particularly exercised about any of these events.
But the corporate media uses a different yardstick while reporting Iran. Relying mainly on 'tweets' from 'citizen journalists' who are partisan at best, leading newspapers and channels – many of who do not even have a reporter on the scene - have not even bothered to report, much less analyse, the vote totals, which are readily available by both city and province and refute the claims made that the ballots were rigged to give Ahmadinejad a 60 per cent margin across the board.
Besides, they have simply ignored commentary from prominent analysts of the region who have suggested that the claims of a rigged election are not supported by the evidence. Mind you, these are men whose motto is “USA First” and they would willingly give an arm and leg to see the Ayatollahs out.
These men include chief military strategy and Middle East analyst for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies Anthony Cordesman, former chief Iran analyst on George W Bush’s National Security Council Hillary Mann Leverett, the and her husband Flynt Leverett, a long time CIA analyst and National Security Council (NSC) staffer, who together wrote a column entitled 'Ahmadinejad won. Get over it', and George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor private intelligence service.
All of them said Ahmadinejad retained substantial popular support in Iran, particularly among the rural poor and more oppressed social layers, and warned against 'Iran experts' who based their analyses on wishful thinking and contact with a more affluent, English-speaking minority in Iran.
Of course, the US has intense interests in Iran, with the country fighting wars on its eastern and western borders. There is, moreover, the long history of hostility between the two countries, stemming from Washington’s previous domination of Iran and its oil wealth through its dictatorial client regime under the Shah, and the revolution that brought that regime to an end.
But given these interests and this history, conscientious coverage of Iranian politics calls for not only objectivity, but also sensitivity to Washington’s intervention in Iran’s affairs and attempts to influence its politics.
The coverage, however, exhibits no such objectivity whatsoever. Instead, it typifies a presentation of Ahmadinejad's victory over Mousavi as a “fraud” without providing a scintilla of proof to back it up. Instead, the corporate media is uncritically repeating the insistence of the Mousavi camp that it is so.
It is sought to be portrayed that Mousavi won, in some cases, by a 2-1 margin precisely in the areas - the wealthier suburbs of Tehran, Shiraz and elsewhere - that are now the centre of the election protests.
Indeed, the New York Times has actually demanded a new election, portraying Iran's Guardian Council’s call for recounting ballots a “cynical gesture.” The newspaper is not interested in correcting vote fraud, but rather in bringing pressure to bear within the Iranian state to effect a political coup.
In this context it is particularly instructive to remember the corporate media's attitude toward the disputed 2006 presidential election in Mexico, when the conservative candidate Felipe Calderon - with just 36 per cent of the vote and amid substantiated charges of gross electoral fraud - claimed victory over his left-nationalist opponent Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
There was no call for a new election then, and the corporate media was largely indifferent to the evidence that the election had been rigged. While the massive crowds that took to the streets of Mexico City were comparable to those seen in Tehran, there was only disdain for the protesters.
On July 7, just five days after the contested vote totals were announced, the New York Times haughtily editorialised: “Mr Lopez Obrador has occasionally furthered his political career by inviting supporters to take to the streets... but he should resist inciting mass protests, which would harm Mexico’s stability and add to his image as a less-than-committed democrat.”
In Mexico, the victim of vote fraud was told to stand down in the interests of “stability,” while mass protests by his supporters were portrayed as a threat to democracy - the exact inverse of the newspaper’s approach to the Iranian events.
Why the difference? In Mexico, the candidate favoured by Washington won, and in Iran, the White House seeks not stability, but destabilisation.
And therein lies a tale.
(Based on a WSWS report by BV Auken)
It is not uncommon for election results to end in charges of fraud by the losing party that trigger mass demonstrations and even armed clashes. Just last April, elections in Moldova ended in violent protests, with the losing party claiming fraud and the winning one saying it was the victim of an attempted coup.
In November of last year in Nicaragua, nationwide local elections in which the opposition claimed irregularities led to confrontations involving thousands of people armed with bats, rocks, machetes and guns.
Last July, charges of election fraud led to mass rioting in the capital of Mongolia. There is no record of the corporate media becoming particularly exercised about any of these events.
But the corporate media uses a different yardstick while reporting Iran. Relying mainly on 'tweets' from 'citizen journalists' who are partisan at best, leading newspapers and channels – many of who do not even have a reporter on the scene - have not even bothered to report, much less analyse, the vote totals, which are readily available by both city and province and refute the claims made that the ballots were rigged to give Ahmadinejad a 60 per cent margin across the board.
Besides, they have simply ignored commentary from prominent analysts of the region who have suggested that the claims of a rigged election are not supported by the evidence. Mind you, these are men whose motto is “USA First” and they would willingly give an arm and leg to see the Ayatollahs out.
These men include chief military strategy and Middle East analyst for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies Anthony Cordesman, former chief Iran analyst on George W Bush’s National Security Council Hillary Mann Leverett, the and her husband Flynt Leverett, a long time CIA analyst and National Security Council (NSC) staffer, who together wrote a column entitled 'Ahmadinejad won. Get over it', and George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor private intelligence service.
All of them said Ahmadinejad retained substantial popular support in Iran, particularly among the rural poor and more oppressed social layers, and warned against 'Iran experts' who based their analyses on wishful thinking and contact with a more affluent, English-speaking minority in Iran.
Of course, the US has intense interests in Iran, with the country fighting wars on its eastern and western borders. There is, moreover, the long history of hostility between the two countries, stemming from Washington’s previous domination of Iran and its oil wealth through its dictatorial client regime under the Shah, and the revolution that brought that regime to an end.
But given these interests and this history, conscientious coverage of Iranian politics calls for not only objectivity, but also sensitivity to Washington’s intervention in Iran’s affairs and attempts to influence its politics.
The coverage, however, exhibits no such objectivity whatsoever. Instead, it typifies a presentation of Ahmadinejad's victory over Mousavi as a “fraud” without providing a scintilla of proof to back it up. Instead, the corporate media is uncritically repeating the insistence of the Mousavi camp that it is so.
It is sought to be portrayed that Mousavi won, in some cases, by a 2-1 margin precisely in the areas - the wealthier suburbs of Tehran, Shiraz and elsewhere - that are now the centre of the election protests.
Indeed, the New York Times has actually demanded a new election, portraying Iran's Guardian Council’s call for recounting ballots a “cynical gesture.” The newspaper is not interested in correcting vote fraud, but rather in bringing pressure to bear within the Iranian state to effect a political coup.
In this context it is particularly instructive to remember the corporate media's attitude toward the disputed 2006 presidential election in Mexico, when the conservative candidate Felipe Calderon - with just 36 per cent of the vote and amid substantiated charges of gross electoral fraud - claimed victory over his left-nationalist opponent Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
There was no call for a new election then, and the corporate media was largely indifferent to the evidence that the election had been rigged. While the massive crowds that took to the streets of Mexico City were comparable to those seen in Tehran, there was only disdain for the protesters.
On July 7, just five days after the contested vote totals were announced, the New York Times haughtily editorialised: “Mr Lopez Obrador has occasionally furthered his political career by inviting supporters to take to the streets... but he should resist inciting mass protests, which would harm Mexico’s stability and add to his image as a less-than-committed democrat.”
In Mexico, the victim of vote fraud was told to stand down in the interests of “stability,” while mass protests by his supporters were portrayed as a threat to democracy - the exact inverse of the newspaper’s approach to the Iranian events.
Why the difference? In Mexico, the candidate favoured by Washington won, and in Iran, the White House seeks not stability, but destabilisation.
And therein lies a tale.
(Based on a WSWS report by BV Auken)
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Lies, Fantasy And Twitter In Iran Elections
By Roger Alexander
Twittering "truth” out of Tehran these days has become an industry in own right. Amazingly, by basing its stories and analysis on 140-character "tweets" emanating from Iran, virtually the entire Western media is unanimous that the Iranian presidential election last week was “stolen” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the blessings of the “clerical regime.” It is claimed that the fraud was committed to keep out of office the “moderate, secular, and pro-US” former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi.
The coverage by the Western corporate media typifies a presentation of Ahmadinejad's victory over Mousavi, that abandons any pretence of journalistic objectivity. It is sheer propaganda aimed at discrediting the election result.
A typical example: The Christian Science Monitor quoted Farideh Farhi, an 'expert' of Iranian elections at the University of Hawaii, saying, “I am convinced they just pulled it out of their hats.” Indeed, it is easy to be “convinced” when you're half way across the world on the beautiful Waikiki Beach.
I hold no brief for Ahmadinejad. But the manner in which the Western corporate media continues to demonise a sovereign nation and its president borders on the obscene. And they are steadfast in their belief that they, and not the people of Iran, are the agents of social change in that country.
The Western media has conveniently forgotten that Ahmadinejad has strong support among urban workers and the rural poor—the vast majority of the population. That Ahmadinejad (who was previously mayor of Tehran and commands a substantial base among the urban poor and in the rural areas) has retained this constituency is a fact grudgingly acknowledged by various Western commentators.
Besides, it is not mentioned that Mousavi campaigned as no less an ardent defender of Islamic clerical rule than Ahmadinejad. On domestic policy, he vaguely called for more openness, while opposing Ahmadinejad’s “populist” subsidies to the urban poor and the peasantry.
The media has also not sought to explain why the mass of the Iranian people should be expected to support an advocate of the same free market policies that have produced a social disaster throughout the world.
Still, directly reflecting the outlook of the Obama administration, the corporate media promoted the candidacy of Mousavi and depicted a rising tide of “popular support” that was certain to either sweep the “reformer” into office or obtain a close enough result to force a run-off contest with Ahmadinejad.
In their function as conduits for the state and US imperialist policy, the corporate media is seeking to promote the notion that a victory for Mousavi would have represented a “triumph of democracy” and opened up a new chapter in US-Iranian relations. The only possible explanation for Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory, they immediately concluded, was “fraud”. But is there a fraud involved?
There is no reason for anyone to believe Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who said yesterday (June 19) that the election was fair. So the next best thing is to look at the analysis undertaken by independent American scholars and reported in the media.
Writing in the online journal Slate, University of Wisconsin mathematician Jordan Ellenberg applied some statistical analysis to what critics identified very early as a suspicious consistency in Ahmadinejad's results.
Hours after polls closed on June 12, the blog Tehran Bureau pointed out that in the six waves of tallied votes, Ahmadinejad's total ranged from 62 to 70 per cent. Ellenberg wrote that consistency might look odd to American voters “who may be more used to seeing wide swings in the vote totals” because “our fine-grained media start reporting results when just a few per cent of the votes are in.”
But he found nothing statistically inexplicable about the results. The batches of the votes were sufficiently large, he said, that they naturally absorbed the extremes of popularity that one would expect in a diverse electorate and delivered averages that were more or less uniform but not identically so. “The official numbers may or may not be authentic,” he wrote, “but they're messy enough to be true,” Ellenberg concluded.
Indeed, opinion polls done before the election indicated that Ahmadinejad - as unpopular as he is said to have become for his handling of the economy - would nevertheless win by more than a 2-1 ratio - the same margin (63:34) as the final result.
An opinion poll sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund conducted on May 11 and 20 across Iran by 'Terror Free Tomorrow: The Centre for Public Opinion' and the New America Foundation, showed Ahmadinejad with 34 per cent of the vote and Mousavi with 14 per cent. While releasing the results, the TFT's press statement said, “About seven in ten Iranians think the elections will be free and fair, while only one in ten thinks they will not be free and fair.”
The Western corporate media is shouting from the rooftops that a “fraud on a massive scale” was committed, citing the “head-scratching” results in Mousavi's home province of East Azerbaijan where Ahmadinejad took 57 per cent of the vote, an astonishing improvement over his 2005 total of 10 per cent.
But the TFT pre-election opinion poll reported: “Inside Iran, considerable attention has been given to Mr Mousavi's Azeri background, emphasizing the appeal his Azeri identity may have for Azeri voters. (However), the results of our survey indicate that only 16 per cent of Azeri Iranians indicate they will vote for Mr Mousavi. By contrast, 31 per cent of the Azeris claim they will vote for Mr Ahmadinejad.” In other words, Ahmadinejad was 2-1 ahead even before actual votes were cast.
True to form, the Western corporate media is plumbing new depths reporting Iran. Earlier it was Iran's “nuclear ambitions,” now it is all about “eye-witness accounts” of sham elections, the takeover of party offices, a massacre on a university campus, an imminent coup d'etat, the possible overthrow of the whole 30-year-old Islamic Republic, and the isolation of an entire country as its communications are systematically shut down. Lies are being palmed off as gospel.
Secret memos and “smoking gun” documents are playing their role in fuelling outrage. Before the election, Newsweek quoted “secret Iranian government polls” that showed Mousavi would win 16-18 million votes and the incumbent a third of that.
After the results were out, a widely circulated letter, “written by the minister of the interior to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei”, sought to prove the results were fixed at Khamenei's orders. The letter also provides “real” vote totals that more or less tally with the secret polls Newsweek reported - 19 million for Mousavi and just under 6 million for Ahmadinejad.
But the (London) Independent's Robert Fisk, one of the few Western journalists reporting from Tehran, wondered aloud whether the letter was a fake. “However incredible Mr Ahmadinejad's 63 per cent of the vote may have been, could he really - as a man who has immense support among the poor of Iran - have picked up only 5½ million votes?”
Fisk is not an admirer of either Ahmadinejad or the theocratic regime in Iran. But he is an objective, old-school journalist and has wonderful stories to tell from the past week. “A day earlier, an Iranian woman muttered to me in an office lift (in Tehran) that the first fatality of the street violence was a young student. Was she sure, I asked? Yes, she said. I have seen the photograph of his body. It is terrible. I never saw her again. Nor the photograph. Nor had anyone seen the body. It was a fantasy.
“Earnest reporters check this out – in fact, I have been spending at least a third of my working days in Tehran this past week not reporting what might prove to be true but disproving what is clearly untrue.”
Here’s another beauty: “We had the famous instruction to journalists in Tehran from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance that they could no longer report opposition street demonstrations. I heard nothing of this. Indeed, the first clue came when I refused to be interviewed by CNN (because their coverage of the Middle East is so biased) and the woman calling me asked: Why? Are you worried about your safety? Fisk continued to spend 12 hours a day on the streets. I discovered there was a ban only when I read about it in The Independent. Maybe the Guidance lads and lassies couldn’t get through on my mobile. But then, who had cut the phone lines?”
Fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows, but once they are combined and spread with high-speed inaccuracy around the world, they make politically titillating headlines, as Fisk discovered to his dismay.
“Take the call I had five hours before the early-hour phone call, from a radio station in California. Could I describe the street fighting I was witnessing at that moment? Now, it happened that I was standing on the roof of the al-Jazeera office in north Tehran, (the most affluent section of the city) speaking in a late-night live interview with the Qatar television station. I could indeed describe the scene to California. What I could see were teenagers on motorcycles, whooping with delight as they set light to the contents of a litter bin on the corner of the highway.
“Two policemen ran up to them with night-sticks and they raced away on their bikes with shouts of derision. Then the Tehran fire brigade turned up to put out – as one of the firemen later told me with infinite exhaustion – their 79th litter-bin fire of the night. I knew how he felt.
“A report that Basiji militia had taken over one of Mir-Hossein Mousavi's main election campaign office was a classic. Yes, there were uniformed men in the building – belonging to Mousavi's own hired security company.
“Now for the very latest on the fantasy circuit. The cruel 'Iranian' cops aren't Iranian at all. They are members of Lebanon's Hizbollah militia. I've had this one from two reporters, three phone callers (one from Lebanon) and a British politician. I've tried to talk to the cops. They cannot understand Arabic. They don't even look like Arabs, let alone Lebanese.
“The reality is that many of these street thugs have been brought in from Baluch areas and Zobal province, close to the Afghan border. Even more are Iranian Azeris (from Mousavi's home province). Their accents sound as strange to Tehranis as would a Belfast accent to a Cornishman hearing it for the first time.”
Fisk concludes, “I am reminded of Eisenhower's comment to Foster Dulles when he sent him to London to close down Anthony Eden's crazed war in Suez. The secretary of state's job, Eisenhower instructed Dulles, was to say 'Whoah, boy!' Good advice for those who believe in the Twitterers.”
Roger And Out
Twittering "truth” out of Tehran these days has become an industry in own right. Amazingly, by basing its stories and analysis on 140-character "tweets" emanating from Iran, virtually the entire Western media is unanimous that the Iranian presidential election last week was “stolen” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the blessings of the “clerical regime.” It is claimed that the fraud was committed to keep out of office the “moderate, secular, and pro-US” former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi.
The coverage by the Western corporate media typifies a presentation of Ahmadinejad's victory over Mousavi, that abandons any pretence of journalistic objectivity. It is sheer propaganda aimed at discrediting the election result.
A typical example: The Christian Science Monitor quoted Farideh Farhi, an 'expert' of Iranian elections at the University of Hawaii, saying, “I am convinced they just pulled it out of their hats.” Indeed, it is easy to be “convinced” when you're half way across the world on the beautiful Waikiki Beach.
I hold no brief for Ahmadinejad. But the manner in which the Western corporate media continues to demonise a sovereign nation and its president borders on the obscene. And they are steadfast in their belief that they, and not the people of Iran, are the agents of social change in that country.
The Western media has conveniently forgotten that Ahmadinejad has strong support among urban workers and the rural poor—the vast majority of the population. That Ahmadinejad (who was previously mayor of Tehran and commands a substantial base among the urban poor and in the rural areas) has retained this constituency is a fact grudgingly acknowledged by various Western commentators.
Besides, it is not mentioned that Mousavi campaigned as no less an ardent defender of Islamic clerical rule than Ahmadinejad. On domestic policy, he vaguely called for more openness, while opposing Ahmadinejad’s “populist” subsidies to the urban poor and the peasantry.
The media has also not sought to explain why the mass of the Iranian people should be expected to support an advocate of the same free market policies that have produced a social disaster throughout the world.
Still, directly reflecting the outlook of the Obama administration, the corporate media promoted the candidacy of Mousavi and depicted a rising tide of “popular support” that was certain to either sweep the “reformer” into office or obtain a close enough result to force a run-off contest with Ahmadinejad.
In their function as conduits for the state and US imperialist policy, the corporate media is seeking to promote the notion that a victory for Mousavi would have represented a “triumph of democracy” and opened up a new chapter in US-Iranian relations. The only possible explanation for Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory, they immediately concluded, was “fraud”. But is there a fraud involved?
There is no reason for anyone to believe Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who said yesterday (June 19) that the election was fair. So the next best thing is to look at the analysis undertaken by independent American scholars and reported in the media.
Writing in the online journal Slate, University of Wisconsin mathematician Jordan Ellenberg applied some statistical analysis to what critics identified very early as a suspicious consistency in Ahmadinejad's results.
Hours after polls closed on June 12, the blog Tehran Bureau pointed out that in the six waves of tallied votes, Ahmadinejad's total ranged from 62 to 70 per cent. Ellenberg wrote that consistency might look odd to American voters “who may be more used to seeing wide swings in the vote totals” because “our fine-grained media start reporting results when just a few per cent of the votes are in.”
But he found nothing statistically inexplicable about the results. The batches of the votes were sufficiently large, he said, that they naturally absorbed the extremes of popularity that one would expect in a diverse electorate and delivered averages that were more or less uniform but not identically so. “The official numbers may or may not be authentic,” he wrote, “but they're messy enough to be true,” Ellenberg concluded.
Indeed, opinion polls done before the election indicated that Ahmadinejad - as unpopular as he is said to have become for his handling of the economy - would nevertheless win by more than a 2-1 ratio - the same margin (63:34) as the final result.
An opinion poll sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund conducted on May 11 and 20 across Iran by 'Terror Free Tomorrow: The Centre for Public Opinion' and the New America Foundation, showed Ahmadinejad with 34 per cent of the vote and Mousavi with 14 per cent. While releasing the results, the TFT's press statement said, “About seven in ten Iranians think the elections will be free and fair, while only one in ten thinks they will not be free and fair.”
The Western corporate media is shouting from the rooftops that a “fraud on a massive scale” was committed, citing the “head-scratching” results in Mousavi's home province of East Azerbaijan where Ahmadinejad took 57 per cent of the vote, an astonishing improvement over his 2005 total of 10 per cent.
But the TFT pre-election opinion poll reported: “Inside Iran, considerable attention has been given to Mr Mousavi's Azeri background, emphasizing the appeal his Azeri identity may have for Azeri voters. (However), the results of our survey indicate that only 16 per cent of Azeri Iranians indicate they will vote for Mr Mousavi. By contrast, 31 per cent of the Azeris claim they will vote for Mr Ahmadinejad.” In other words, Ahmadinejad was 2-1 ahead even before actual votes were cast.
True to form, the Western corporate media is plumbing new depths reporting Iran. Earlier it was Iran's “nuclear ambitions,” now it is all about “eye-witness accounts” of sham elections, the takeover of party offices, a massacre on a university campus, an imminent coup d'etat, the possible overthrow of the whole 30-year-old Islamic Republic, and the isolation of an entire country as its communications are systematically shut down. Lies are being palmed off as gospel.
Secret memos and “smoking gun” documents are playing their role in fuelling outrage. Before the election, Newsweek quoted “secret Iranian government polls” that showed Mousavi would win 16-18 million votes and the incumbent a third of that.
After the results were out, a widely circulated letter, “written by the minister of the interior to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei”, sought to prove the results were fixed at Khamenei's orders. The letter also provides “real” vote totals that more or less tally with the secret polls Newsweek reported - 19 million for Mousavi and just under 6 million for Ahmadinejad.
But the (London) Independent's Robert Fisk, one of the few Western journalists reporting from Tehran, wondered aloud whether the letter was a fake. “However incredible Mr Ahmadinejad's 63 per cent of the vote may have been, could he really - as a man who has immense support among the poor of Iran - have picked up only 5½ million votes?”
Fisk is not an admirer of either Ahmadinejad or the theocratic regime in Iran. But he is an objective, old-school journalist and has wonderful stories to tell from the past week. “A day earlier, an Iranian woman muttered to me in an office lift (in Tehran) that the first fatality of the street violence was a young student. Was she sure, I asked? Yes, she said. I have seen the photograph of his body. It is terrible. I never saw her again. Nor the photograph. Nor had anyone seen the body. It was a fantasy.
“Earnest reporters check this out – in fact, I have been spending at least a third of my working days in Tehran this past week not reporting what might prove to be true but disproving what is clearly untrue.”
Here’s another beauty: “We had the famous instruction to journalists in Tehran from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance that they could no longer report opposition street demonstrations. I heard nothing of this. Indeed, the first clue came when I refused to be interviewed by CNN (because their coverage of the Middle East is so biased) and the woman calling me asked: Why? Are you worried about your safety? Fisk continued to spend 12 hours a day on the streets. I discovered there was a ban only when I read about it in The Independent. Maybe the Guidance lads and lassies couldn’t get through on my mobile. But then, who had cut the phone lines?”
Fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows, but once they are combined and spread with high-speed inaccuracy around the world, they make politically titillating headlines, as Fisk discovered to his dismay.
“Take the call I had five hours before the early-hour phone call, from a radio station in California. Could I describe the street fighting I was witnessing at that moment? Now, it happened that I was standing on the roof of the al-Jazeera office in north Tehran, (the most affluent section of the city) speaking in a late-night live interview with the Qatar television station. I could indeed describe the scene to California. What I could see were teenagers on motorcycles, whooping with delight as they set light to the contents of a litter bin on the corner of the highway.
“Two policemen ran up to them with night-sticks and they raced away on their bikes with shouts of derision. Then the Tehran fire brigade turned up to put out – as one of the firemen later told me with infinite exhaustion – their 79th litter-bin fire of the night. I knew how he felt.
“A report that Basiji militia had taken over one of Mir-Hossein Mousavi's main election campaign office was a classic. Yes, there were uniformed men in the building – belonging to Mousavi's own hired security company.
“Now for the very latest on the fantasy circuit. The cruel 'Iranian' cops aren't Iranian at all. They are members of Lebanon's Hizbollah militia. I've had this one from two reporters, three phone callers (one from Lebanon) and a British politician. I've tried to talk to the cops. They cannot understand Arabic. They don't even look like Arabs, let alone Lebanese.
“The reality is that many of these street thugs have been brought in from Baluch areas and Zobal province, close to the Afghan border. Even more are Iranian Azeris (from Mousavi's home province). Their accents sound as strange to Tehranis as would a Belfast accent to a Cornishman hearing it for the first time.”
Fisk concludes, “I am reminded of Eisenhower's comment to Foster Dulles when he sent him to London to close down Anthony Eden's crazed war in Suez. The secretary of state's job, Eisenhower instructed Dulles, was to say 'Whoah, boy!' Good advice for those who believe in the Twitterers.”
Roger And Out
Monday, June 15, 2009
Iran's Poor Reject Neo-Liberal Mousavi
For anyone with a serious knowledge of Iranian society and politics, the decisive victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran's presidential could not have come as a surprise. Widely promoted in the international press as riding a wave of popular opposition, former prime minister Mirhossein Mousavi received just 34 per cent against 63 per cent for Ahmadinejad.
It's a kind of result we're familiar with here in India: Lok Sabha 2004, UP Assembly 2007, Tamil Nadu LS poll 2009, Andhra LS LS & Assembly 2009... the list is long and no one's complaining. Many a time the eventual victor has been underreported. The same thing seems to have happened in Iran.
Even Western newspapers that denounced the election have admitted that the incumbent had strong support among urban workers and the rural poor—the vast majority of the population. Ahmadinejad has retained this constituency, despite the repressive and corrupt character of the regime, because of the absence of a socialist alternative.
Disappointed supporters, mostly young people, took to the streets, burning vehicles, torching shop fronts and clashing with riot police to vent their anger over the result. But US and Western media have generally inflated the extent of the protests and the police crackdown.
In an on-the-spot report, BBC's John Simpson breathlessly speculated on whether he was witnessing the beginning of a revolution against the regime—from a crowd that he estimated at 3,000. The Los Angeles Times reported that “huge swathes of the capital erupted in fiery riots” but went on to describe clashes involving “hundreds” of demonstrators.
On what mass base could Mousavi depend for a successful bid to unseat Ahmadinejad? His actual electoral base did not extend beyond better-off-sections of the urban middle class, university students and businessmen.
And as the candidate of the Iranian liberal establishment, he campaigned as no less an ardent defender of Islamist clerical rule than Ahmadinejad. On domestic policy, he vaguely called for more openness, while opposing Ahmadinejad’s “populist” subsidies to the urban poor and the peasantry.
The media has not sought to explain why the mass of the Iranian people should be expected to support an advocate of the same free market policies that have produced a social disaster throughout the world.
Mousavi’s most prominent backer, moreover, was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a leading figure in the state apparatus and one of the country’s wealthiest men. Rafsanjani, notorious for his corruption, is despised by Iranian workers and the poor.
The outcome is not the “surprise” and “shock” presented in the international media. All of the candidates—the conservatives Ahmadinejad and Mohsen Rezai, and the reformers Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi—were vetted by the unelected Guardian Council and are part of the political establishment.
In the final weeks, the campaign was highly polarised around Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, who represent different factions of the ruling elite. As a result, the very low votes for two other candidates - Rezai and Karroubi - are hardly surprising.
Mousavi speaks for sections of the regime who are seeking to ease tensions with the US as a means of ending international sanctions and opening up the deteriorating Iranian economy to foreign capital. For all the fanfare of its highly-orchestrated “colour revolution”—in this case, green—Mousavi’s campaign was directed at a relatively narrow social base—the urban middle classes, particularly students and youth.
Moreover, his criticisms of Ahmadinejad’s populist policies—particularly in rural areas—would only have alienated broad layers of the working class and rural poor, who, while discontented over rising unemployment and soaring inflation, would hardly welcome the tougher austerity measures advocated by the “reformers”.
Those suspicions would have been reinforced by the support for Mousavi from two former presidents—Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Ahmadinejad won an upset victory the 2005 presidential elections by capitalising on the widespread anger among working people over the impact of Khatami’s free market agenda from 1997 and 2005.
He soundly defeated Rafsanjani in the second round in 2005 by promising to put the country’s oil revenues on people’s tables and inveighing against corruption. Rafsanjani, one of the country’s wealthiest men, is widely regarded as a crooked politician.
In the course of this campaign, Ahmadinejad again seized on Rafsanjani’s alleged corruption to posture as a defender of the poor against the wealthy, corrupt elite and to deflect attention from his own economic record.
While boosting Mousavi’s campaign, various Western commentators acknowledged that Ahmadinejad, who was previously mayor of Tehran, had a substantial base among the urban poor and in the rural areas.
A class divide was evident in the reaction in the capital to the election outcome. Young protesters took to the streets in the more affluent northern and north-eastern suburbs. But as the New York Times noted, “the working-class areas of southern Tehran where Mr Ahmadinejad is popular were largely quiet, despite rumours of wild victory celebrations.”
The reaction suggests that significant sections of working people, in rural and urban areas, voted for Ahmadinejad. Their distrust will only have been confirmed by the barely concealed class contempt of Mousavi and his backers for the “ignorance” and “backwardness” of Ahmadinejad’s poorer supporters.
It's a kind of result we're familiar with here in India: Lok Sabha 2004, UP Assembly 2007, Tamil Nadu LS poll 2009, Andhra LS LS & Assembly 2009... the list is long and no one's complaining. Many a time the eventual victor has been underreported. The same thing seems to have happened in Iran.
Even Western newspapers that denounced the election have admitted that the incumbent had strong support among urban workers and the rural poor—the vast majority of the population. Ahmadinejad has retained this constituency, despite the repressive and corrupt character of the regime, because of the absence of a socialist alternative.
Disappointed supporters, mostly young people, took to the streets, burning vehicles, torching shop fronts and clashing with riot police to vent their anger over the result. But US and Western media have generally inflated the extent of the protests and the police crackdown.
In an on-the-spot report, BBC's John Simpson breathlessly speculated on whether he was witnessing the beginning of a revolution against the regime—from a crowd that he estimated at 3,000. The Los Angeles Times reported that “huge swathes of the capital erupted in fiery riots” but went on to describe clashes involving “hundreds” of demonstrators.
On what mass base could Mousavi depend for a successful bid to unseat Ahmadinejad? His actual electoral base did not extend beyond better-off-sections of the urban middle class, university students and businessmen.
And as the candidate of the Iranian liberal establishment, he campaigned as no less an ardent defender of Islamist clerical rule than Ahmadinejad. On domestic policy, he vaguely called for more openness, while opposing Ahmadinejad’s “populist” subsidies to the urban poor and the peasantry.
The media has not sought to explain why the mass of the Iranian people should be expected to support an advocate of the same free market policies that have produced a social disaster throughout the world.
Mousavi’s most prominent backer, moreover, was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a leading figure in the state apparatus and one of the country’s wealthiest men. Rafsanjani, notorious for his corruption, is despised by Iranian workers and the poor.
The outcome is not the “surprise” and “shock” presented in the international media. All of the candidates—the conservatives Ahmadinejad and Mohsen Rezai, and the reformers Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi—were vetted by the unelected Guardian Council and are part of the political establishment.
In the final weeks, the campaign was highly polarised around Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, who represent different factions of the ruling elite. As a result, the very low votes for two other candidates - Rezai and Karroubi - are hardly surprising.
Mousavi speaks for sections of the regime who are seeking to ease tensions with the US as a means of ending international sanctions and opening up the deteriorating Iranian economy to foreign capital. For all the fanfare of its highly-orchestrated “colour revolution”—in this case, green—Mousavi’s campaign was directed at a relatively narrow social base—the urban middle classes, particularly students and youth.
Moreover, his criticisms of Ahmadinejad’s populist policies—particularly in rural areas—would only have alienated broad layers of the working class and rural poor, who, while discontented over rising unemployment and soaring inflation, would hardly welcome the tougher austerity measures advocated by the “reformers”.
Those suspicions would have been reinforced by the support for Mousavi from two former presidents—Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Ahmadinejad won an upset victory the 2005 presidential elections by capitalising on the widespread anger among working people over the impact of Khatami’s free market agenda from 1997 and 2005.
He soundly defeated Rafsanjani in the second round in 2005 by promising to put the country’s oil revenues on people’s tables and inveighing against corruption. Rafsanjani, one of the country’s wealthiest men, is widely regarded as a crooked politician.
In the course of this campaign, Ahmadinejad again seized on Rafsanjani’s alleged corruption to posture as a defender of the poor against the wealthy, corrupt elite and to deflect attention from his own economic record.
While boosting Mousavi’s campaign, various Western commentators acknowledged that Ahmadinejad, who was previously mayor of Tehran, had a substantial base among the urban poor and in the rural areas.
A class divide was evident in the reaction in the capital to the election outcome. Young protesters took to the streets in the more affluent northern and north-eastern suburbs. But as the New York Times noted, “the working-class areas of southern Tehran where Mr Ahmadinejad is popular were largely quiet, despite rumours of wild victory celebrations.”
The reaction suggests that significant sections of working people, in rural and urban areas, voted for Ahmadinejad. Their distrust will only have been confirmed by the barely concealed class contempt of Mousavi and his backers for the “ignorance” and “backwardness” of Ahmadinejad’s poorer supporters.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Between A Rock And A Hard Place
The election season is finally upon us. With the Election Commission announcing the poll schedule for Chhattisgarh (Nov 10 & 14), Madhya Pradesh (Nov 25), Delhi (Nov 25), Mizoram, and Rajasthan (Dec 4) , the ball has been set rolling for the grand finale – the Lok Sabha elections in March or April next year.
This is a critical round for the two chief claimants to that seat, the Congress and the BJP. Although these are state elections, both parties see them as a “semi-final” for the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. The results would assume a larger-than-life importance because they will be an indicator of the shape of things to come.
All four states have been with the Congress and the BJP locked in a straight contest ever since the Swatantra Party went into oblivion. However, this time, there is a wild card entry, the BSP, which hopes to upset the applecart of the two national parties by emerging with the support of smaller outfits as the dreaded third force.
The BJP will be defending its government in MP, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan while the Congress will be trying for a third consecutive term in
So which way is the political wind blowing? Received wisdom has it that usually incumbent governments face the voters’ wrath that results in the main opposition party making major gains. By this yardstick, the BJP that is leading the governments of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh has a lot to worry about. Similarly, the Congress is on shaky ground in
Alas, things do not usually work this way. This writer, for one, takes the so-called anti-incumbency factor with a generous pinch of salt. The mantra is supposed to work this way: the incumbent government makes such a hash of things that voters automatically plump for the opposition. However, the wily Indian voter is known for delivering nasty surprises and the 2004 verdict is still fresh in the public mind. And they keep their cards so close to the chest that even the governments’ intelligence gathering units fail to gauge the public mood. Independent pollsters are even more clueless.
If elections were to be held tomorrow, in Madhya Pradesh (230 seats), Rajasthan (200 seats) and Chhattisgarh (90 seats), the BJP retains an advantage in Madhya Pradesh, and has a fighting chance in Rajasthan given the disarray in the Pradesh Congress. On the other hand, Congressmen claim they have an in Chhattisgarh, but with Ajit Jogi incapacitated and the Shuklas over the hill, it remains to be seen if this is bravado or hard fact. The electoral race in these states is very finely poised and minor swings can change the nature of the outcome.
True, corruption was emerging as a major electoral issue in the BJP-ruled states where corrupt administrations, ministers and legislators have made it into a salient issue but since the BJP-led state governments have generally delivered on other fronts and there aren’t many other big-picture themes for the opposition to try and exploit during the electoral campaign.
For example, in a move to prop up its prospects in the forthcoming assembly polls, the Vasundhara Raje government on Sept 11 played its trump card: it obliged over 7.3 lakh state employees by announcing a pay hike of 30 to 50 per cent, which is even higher than what the Centre announced for its staff. The hike will have retrospective effect from September 1, 2006. Besides state employees, three lakh pensioners in the state will receive the new pay package from the same period.
It must be remembered that disgruntled state government employees played a large role in the unexpected and decisive defeat of Ashok Gehlot-led Congress in 2003.
The BSP factor is another headache for the Congress. The BSP has virtually no history in this region, except in parts of Madhya Pradesh. But after the party surprised all including Mayawati by winning 17 municipal seats in Delhi last year, Mayawati has developed ambitions of spreading her wings outside UP.
That victory was put down to sheer fluke at that time but since then, Mayawati has spent considerable time cultivating political space for her party in these states, all of which share borders with UP. It's a moot point how many seats the BSP will succeed in winning. But it could influence results in enough constituencies to tip the balance. And with Mayawati pinning her prime ministerial ambitions hinge on her ability to snatch the Congress party's vote bank of Dalits and Muslims, she will certainly go for the Congress’ jugular. Ironically, a resurgent Mayawati, rather than being a threat to the BJP, could in fact indirectly help its prospects.
In 2003 assembly polls, the BSP won two seats each in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and polled 4 per cent of the popular vote in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and 7 per cent in Madhya Pradesh. If the BSP were to, say, secure 10 per cent of the popular vote (comprising mostly the traditional Congress vote, which appears likely), the BJP would return to power in these states delivering devastating defeats to the Congress. In other words, the BJP’s hopes of returning to power in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, may well depend on the BSP’s ability to cut into the Congress’ Dalit vote bank.
Moreover, two acts of the UPA government could also emerge as new poll issues in these highly polarised states and could hurt the Congress’ prospects. One is the union government’s controversial submission to the Supreme Court that Ram Sethu cannot be worshipped because Lord Ram himself had destroyed it hence was not an integral part of Hindu religion requiring protection under Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution (dealing with right to freedom of religion). Government counsel argued before the bench hearing the case that religious texts showed that though the bridge had been built, it had been broken by Lord Ram himself and that anything broken could not be worshipped.
The other issue that the BJP is already using to whip up religious passions is the J&K government’s decision to withdraw transfer of land to the Amarnath board owing to pressure from Muslim groups. This issue is likely to find many takers in north
The outcome of these state elections will set the tone for general elections in 2009. If the Congress fails to win at least two of the three BJP-ruled states, the game could be over for the Congress at the Centre. If the BJP fails to retain two of the three states, the party’s hopes of coming to power in
Ends
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