The Second Iranian Revolution?

The big story that broke over the weekend is the Iranian "election" and massive popular outrage at its rigged results. The leftist British newspaper The Guardian—proving that the left is still occasionally good for something—has been providing good coverage of this story and reported on Saturday:

Tonight riot police in Tehran confronted thousands of demonstrators shouting "death to dictatorship" amid shock and confusion after the official result backed Ahmadinejad's claim to have won, made barely an hour after polls closed last night.

The election was seemingly a false choice between establishment candidates, all of whom had to be cleared by Iran's theocratic "Guardian Council." But one of those candidates ended up broadening the election issue. Check out a London Times report on the campaign of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's leading opponent.

The symbol of the demand for reform is not so much Mir Hossein Mousavi, the 67-year-old main opposition candidate, who complained of election fraud yesterday, as his wife.

Mousavi, an architect and artist who was prime minister during the 1980s, is an uncharismatic figure. His wife, Zahra Rahnavard, is his secret weapon. Tiny and highly articulate, she was the first political wife to appear on the campaign trail with her husband, giving speeches and publicly holding hands….

"The government should not meddle in the issue of the hijab," she said….

"The hijab should not be forced on anybody. That is a private decision. They should leave young women alone. Our women are mature enough to decide for themselves."

[A]s a writer and academic, she said, "Most important to me is the freedom of expression, the freedom of the pen. We have lost four years of freedom of speech [under Ahmadinejad]."

She was prepared to take on Tehran's most feared force. "We will put an end to these moral police," she said. "We believe we should trust our youth."…

"Let's not forget that Iranians embraced the revolution because of its promises of freedom, welfare, and escaping the rule of the security forces," she said. "We say we want to rebuild Iran on those values, and the youth have flocked to us. Nobody expected this to happen."

In effect, Mousavi was a stealth candidate for opposition to the Iranian theocracy.

Add to that the blatant rigging of the election. Iran analyst Ali Alfoneh, by way of RealClearWorld, offers this overview of the vote count.

Elections in the Islamic Republic are neither fair nor free, but unlike Iraq under Saddam Hussein the Iranian leadership usually manages to manipulate the elections in a very sophisticated and elegant way in an attempt to portray itself as an Islamic democracy. The 2009 presidential election however was not an exercise in sophistication and elegance. The final election result—85 percent voter turnout and Ahmadinejad victory with 62.63 percent of the total vote and a modest 33.75 percent of the vote to the closest contender Mir-Hossein Mousavi—not to mention ridiculously low number of votes of Rezai and Karrubi—shows that the Iranian leadership couldn't be bothered to produce an elegant fraud. Unlike earlier elections there is still no detailed data on breakup of the vote in the provinces, but allegations of lack of voting forms in constituencies supporting Ahmadinejad's rivals, prohibitions against the presence of representatives of the rivals at many voting stations, and election results from native villages and towns of Mousavi, Karrubi, and Rezai [the opposition candidates] most surprisingly showing more than a 90 percent vote for Ahmadinejad, demonstrate rather clumsy rigging tactics.

The question is why all the clumsiness? Why the demonstrative fraud insulting the intelligence of the electorate? Why beat up elderly women and young students in Tehran demanding to know what has become of their vote? And why the brutal repression of dissent in front of the entire foreign press corps? The Islamic Republic may consider this sickening theater a demonstration of power, and the drama may reveal the new rules of the game in a regime changing very fast. Ahmadinejad is indeed a candidate of change and during his presidency the trend towards the militarization of Iran has grown faster. Once ruled by the clergy and guarded by the Revolutionary Guards, the Islamic Republic under Ahmadinejad is developing into a military regime, ruled and guarded by the Revolutionary Guards.

Another analyst echoes this analysis, describing the vote-rigging as a "military coup led by the office of supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."

The latest report cites a leaked interior ministry document supposedly giving the real vote counts—and showing that Ahmadinejad came in third, with Mousavi getting 19.1 million votes and another "reformist" getting 13.4 million, while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got only 5.7 million votes. It's impossible to say whether those figures are true or not, but that's the point: no one can know the genuine results of a rigged election in a rigged political system—and thus the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime cannot make a legitimate claim to power. They have to seize it by force.

Pajamas media has a running summary of reports on the crackdown in Iran. I'll just quote one item, which gives you a flavor for the revolutionary atmosphere of the whole thing.

Students from the Sharif Polytechnic University have organized a large protest on the university campus. As they tried to move the protest into the street, in order to march down the streets of Tehran, their exits and gates were blocked by the regime's security guards and they were blocked from leaving the university grounds; at this juncture the students began to chant loudly and when the sound of their chanting was heard by passersby on the street, they began to gather by the thousands at the other side of the university gates. As reported by the human rights and democracy activists in Iran, the entire area was surrounded by the regime's guards, who have begun to attack and beat the students and supporting demonstrators. Javan'eh Farda (Tomorrow's Youth) website reported that, in a statement, 125 members of the Sharif Polytechnic University faculty have condemned the attacks on the students and have jointly announced their resignations, stating that until the time the people's rights are given, they will neither appear in classes nor for any exams.

Michael Ledeen summarizes the state of the crackdown.

• Mousavi and Karrubi, the two "reformist" candidates in Friday's "elections" are under house arrest, along with dozens of their followers;
• "Reformist" journalists and activists have been rounded up and jailed;
• Cell phones (including, after a day's delay, international cell phones) have been blocked, access to internet has been filtered, Facebook is unreachable, and you can't tweet (can the silencing of Western reporters be far behind?);
• In Tehran, student dormitories are surrounded by security forces.
Ledeen then adds:

But even [the] Soviet Union eventually succumbed to the dissidents, and while the regime has most all of the guns, the chains, the clubs, the tear gas canisters, and the torture chambers, there are tens of millions of Iranians who hate the regime. The question is whether they are prepared to face down the Basij, the police, and the Revolutionary Guards. It is usually a matter of numbers in these cases: if a million people gather in front of the Supreme Leader's palace and demand freedom, while half that number make the same demand in front of the government buildings in Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz, and Mashad, they might win.

Michael Rubin gives what is, unfortunately, a more realistic prediction of what it would take for a new Iranian revolution to succeed: "If and when change comes in the Islamic Republic, it will come as it did in Ceausescu's Romania, when the security forces revolt." In other words, some of the guys with guns have to flip over to the side of the protesters.

For now, it looks like Iran's young advocates of liberty are "losing the brawl," as Jack Wakeland put it to me. We'll see what happens in the coming week.

In the analysis of this story—and of the vote against Hezbollah the week before in Beirut—only the New York Times's Tom Friedman has so far had the honesty to give some credit to President Bush and the war in Iraq.

There are a million things to hate about President Bush's costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the UN to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. "Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed, even if he was disingenuous," said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. "It was bolstered by the presence of a US Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense that change was possible, that things did not always have to be as they were."

When I reported from Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, I covered coups and wars. I never once stayed up late waiting for an election result….

[T]he Bush team opened a hole in the wall of Arab autocracy but did a poor job following through. In the vacuum, the parties most organized to seize power were the Islamists—Hezbollah in Lebanon; pro-Al Qaeda forces among Iraqi Sunnis, and the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Mahdi Army among Iraqi Shiites; the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan; Hamas in Gaza.

Fortunately, each one of these Islamist groups overplayed their hand by imposing religious lifestyles or by dragging their societies into confrontations the people didn't want. This alienated and frightened more secular, mainstream Arabs and Muslims and has triggered an "awakening" backlash among moderates from Lebanon to Pakistan to Iran. The [New York] Times's Robert Mackey reported that in Tehran "chants of 'Death to America'" at rallies for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week were answered by chants of "Death to the Taliban—in Kabul and Tehran" at a rally for his opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi.

Even if the pro-liberty faction in Iran is once again suppressed, we should take some comfort in the fact that this election result further weakens an already weak regime. Iranian exile Amir Taheri, for example, focuses his analysis on the conflict that it reveals between different wings of the Iranian establishment.

Ahmadinejad has won a massive victory over his rivals in the Establishment. But the Khomeinist regime remains deeply unpopular, especially among young Iranians, who account for two-thirds of the population. Yesterday Tehran and other cities witnessed anti-regime demonstrations, mostly young people shouting, "Shame on you Ahmadinejad! Quit the government!" Although small and isolated, these protests could in time grow into a mass movement. Iran is also heading for economic meltdown, with a daily loss of 1,000 jobs and inflation of more than 20%. Ahmadinejad's election slogan is "Ma mitavanim" (We can), like Obama's "Yes we can". Iran's leader has been true to his slogan by showing he can fix the election results to the last detail. But can he cope with a restive population, a divided establishment, and an economy heading for deep recession?

Max Boot puts it this way:

If the mullahs were really canny, they would have let Mousavi win. He would have presented a more reasonable face to the world without changing the grim underlying realities of Iran's regime–the oppression, the support for terrorism, the nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. He is the kind of "moderate" with whom the Obama administration could happily engage in endless negotiations which probably would not accomplish anything except to buy time for Iran to weaponize its fissile material….

With crazy Mahmoud in office–and his patron, Ayatollah Khamenei, looming in the background–it will be harder for Iranian apologists to deny the reality of this terrorist regime.

Ruling with the consent of the governed isn't just the right thing to do. It is also the practical thing to do. A government that cannot claim this source of moral legitimacy—or worse, a government that puts itself into power by openly spurning the consent of the governed—is inherently weak and will suffer through a period of chaos and confusion.

At minimum, the Iranian regime's punishment for political oppression is that it does not just have to live in fear of the United States or the West. It has to live in fear of its own citizens.