I think this is perhaps the most difficult foreign policy position Obama has been put in since being elected. Obviously, the US would like to see the election of Mousavi, who is a reformer and will be much more amenable to a dialogue with Obama on building a real foreign relationship with the West. On the other hand, the US cannot legitimately do much to influence the outcome, because if it were not for CIA-interference, Iran probably would have been a stable democracy for most of the past century, see (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat). The US (and the west writ large) has absolutely no business trying to sort out Iran's politics.
On the other hand, this election is most certainly an enormous fraud, lead by the Khamenei and the clerics. Mousavi has protested the results of the election and Khamenei (the supreme religious leader of Iran) wants to shuffle the protest off to the inner workings of the Guardian Council, a Supreme Court like religious body which he holds power over and will undoubtedly reaffirm Ahmadinejad's re-election. Ahmadinejad is merely a puppet for Khamenei and the clerics, and I base this on the fact that he makes extremely unintelligent off the cuff comments in public statements and when pressed on certain issues. He's really unfit to be a president, and is a basically a pretty face with strong religious/military political and financial backing.
If the election was legitimate, the government would not be blocking the internet, jamming cell phone signals, censoring news coverage, preventing foreign news services from covering the event, arresting and shooting protesters, and doing everything in its power to force the people to suck this one down their collective gullets. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have taken to the streets in protest, in rallys ten times the size of the celebration rally which declared Ahmadinejad the victor.
Juan Cole, who is a professor at University of Michigan that I took a middle eastern history seminar with, and is absolute class when it comes to knowledge about the region, had this to say about the elections on his blog (
http://www.juancole.com):
Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen
1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.
2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)
3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.
4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.
5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.
6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.
I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.
But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime.
As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory.
The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose.
They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts.
This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran.
The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election.
This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players.
Prof. Cole doesn't bullshit around. What he has written is pretty much all the evidence I need, to objectively find this election result completely implausible.
At this point though, it is all in the hands of the people of Iran. The country is bottled up and cut off by government control. It is up to them to throw this motherfucker out by force if ballots do not suffice, and so far it looks as though they are doing their damnedest to try. You can't arrest/kill 200,000 people on the streets of your nation's capitol. Even after the government shot 7 people on Monday by firing into crowds of protesters, more people showed up today to protest more. Hopefully they get whatever support they can from outside sources.
Iran