Al Giodarno wrote a very interesting piece about the issue of election fraud, legitimacy, and how the numbers get muddy in the hurry. http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/iran-question-illegitimacy-bigger-electoral-fraud

What I find interesting about the western outrage over this stolen election is that it’s not as if Mousavi or the other candidates are in any way challenging the clerical, theocratic rule in Iran which essentially makes all elections, legitimate or not, rather secondary matters of little import. It’s the clergy which sets all the policy, and the President just carries it out. True, Mousavi wanted to reform the system, make it a little more democratic, and that’s why Kamenei agreed to rig this election. But even if Mousavi had been allowed to win, Iran would still be just a slightly more liberal theocracy, not a democracy.

Expectations-wise, you’re also a little off, in that earlier polls had shown Ahmadinejad with a lead, bt Mousavi coming on strong at the end. The actual results, hard as they are to discern, seem to show Mousavi with a solid win, which was clearly not the expected result.

I think one of the reasons people like Sullivan have been so quick to jump on the Mousavi bandwagon is that we’ve been conditioned by the media and hawks to equate Ahmadinejad and the Iranian establishment with evil. It will probably never occur to most of us to consider whether or not the replacement might be worse.

That these things are often hyped by our press is unquestionable, and the “revolutionary” euphoria of the color parades is as likely to give way to the rule of new rascals, such as Saakasvili in Georgia.

It does seem, though, that there was chicanery in Iran (in addition to the filtering of the candidates beforehand). Our President, on the surface, is maintaining a posture of “We’d like you all to be nice to each other, and we don’t have a dog in your fight” posture, which seems balanced and wise, on the whole, along with a commitment to dialogue whoever emerges the victor.

Great post, Daniel. Great series of posts, actually. There’s so much sentimentalism wrapped up in this – Sullivan is actually using green type. This sentimentalism is a fatal barrier to thinking clearly about an issue – as was the case with Iraq, as you noted.

“The election led to the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline mayor of Tehran, with 19.48% of the votes in the first round and 61.69% in the second. Ahmadinejad is believed to have won the second round because of his populist views, especially those regarding the poor and their economic status[citation needed]. Officials reported a turnout of about 48% of Iran’s 47 million eligible voters, a decline from the 63% turnout reported in the first round of balloting a week before.”

Since then, Ahmadinejad has presided over a huge economic collapse; the election last week saw turnout of around 85%. It would be unprecedented to see a massive increase in turnout to re-elect an incumbent who oversaw such conditions, especially considering that the vast majority of the new voters were probably in the younger set. This doesn’t consider as well the more specific pieces of evidence raised for fraud by folks who, unlike me, have some expertise in the study of Iran, elections, or both, as well as first-hand reports from Iran.

You should note that 90% of what you say here remains valid whether the election was fraudulent or not. Your main thrust is about how Westerners are trying to interpret the events there, which is epistimologically independent of the facts on the ground. Certainly the coup hasn’t been proven, but the balance of evidence suggests at the least that the election was troubled, if not simply rigged.

Equally true for most of us is that little since our birth has much of the exceptional, either.

Jake