I wish I could harbor even a smidgen of the confidence the vice president
has that Dr. Ahmadinejad's sweep was really a fraud. In the
Times on-line, Roger Cohen also harbors the belief that the
balloting results were a fraud. And he came away with what for him
must have been a desolating wish:
Majir Mirpour grabbed me. A purple bruise disfigured his arm. He raised his shirt to show a red wound across his back.
'They beat me like a pig,' he said, breathless. They beat me as I tried to help a woman in tears. I don't care about the physical pain. It's the pain in my heart that hurts.
He looked at me and the rage in his eyes made me want to toss away my notebook.
Well, yes, Roger, you and your little notebook have been misleading
people on Iran for a long time. You can actually stop doing that
without throwing away your notebook. The journalism
profession does need one more unemployed.
My impression is that the incumbent's margin of victory was too big to
have been fraudulent and the loser's numbers also too big. Tyrannies don't play around with the numbers like this. A dictator
usually wants 99% of the voters to have been for him. But in Iran we were
seeing the remnants of a true civil society, the last expressions of
which were during the time of the Shah. It would be a blessing if
this were to be the beginnings of a renaissance.
Maybe the regime fiddled around a bit with the numbers at the polls and
after the polling. Still, the outcome had a sense of
authenticity. A vast majority in the country is poor, and
there is where the backing for Ahmadinejad and his ayatollah patrons is
deepest. Mir Hussein Moussavi's support was most solid, among the
economic and intellectual elites in northern Tehran and in other big
cities and among students of which there are millions, many of them
discontented and pro-western, at least in style-of-life and aspirations
to openness to the world. Moussavi, however, is an old hack who
drew closer to his backers once they seemed to have become a critical
mass. And it was there, in these precincts, that the delusion of a
coming victory was born.
It is a critical mass that terrifies regimes like the one in power. That is why the real brutality came after the elections and after the
protests. And the brutality will continue. Robert F. Worth
and Nazila Fathi report in the Times that more than 100 opposition
members of parliament have been detained today, Sunday. Yes, there
are many brave Persians in the country. But they should not be
demonstrating against A'jad. This election was structurally already
half a fraud. They should be demonstrating against the Supreme
Leader, Ali Khameinei, who really sets the laws in the country. (You might want to read his hilarious disquisition on masturbation,
doubtless only in the male expression.)
None of this deflected the Omaba administration, through the voice of Joe
Biden, from reassuring whoever is reassured by such
sentiments that American engagement with the criminal and war-making
class in power will continue. But why in fact did the vice
president rush on the very morrow of the election to hearten those he
thought stole the process? Was he actually trying to demoralize the
opposition? Maybe it is true that Biden talks before he
thinks.
The fact is that, if Sa'ad Hariri's partial victory in Lebanon was also a
partial victory for Barack Obama's tenets at Cairo, the triumph of the
mullahs in Persia is an utter rejection of the president's words, his
tone and his very message to the Muslim world. I suppose that's too
bad. But it does clarify something, doesn't it? And please
don't tell me that there was no relationship between the balloting and
the speech. Had Moussavi won the tally the press would have
credited the Cairo inspirational with the results.
Pace the vice president's eagerness to assuage Tehran, there will
presumably still be an internal struggle in the administration over U.S.
positions vis-a-vis Iran. One of the tout va bien crowd,
Reza Aslan (a friend of my son's and someone I like), has just been
appointed to Dennis Ross' Iran staff. Do not be put off by the fact
that he is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of
California, Riverside and has held the Truman Capote Fellowship in
Fiction. His latest gig is as a writer for the Puffington Host. Still, Aslan may yet be able to recognize a
fact. Now is a good time to see.