A Guide to Understanding the Iranian Unrest

Tom Ordeman, Jr.

Two weeks ago, I sumitted an article entitled A Brief Synopsis of Friday's Iranian Election, in which I concluded with the following statement:
Whatever the result, the next four years of Iranian-Western relations promise to be interesting – but which shade of "interesting" is anyone's guess.. Wow. I had no idea how right I'd be. Unfortunately, even now that the election is ostensibly over, the world still has no indication of just which shade of "interesting" it may be in for from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Two weeks ago, there were two options: a dismal, radioactive future under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or calmer baby steps away from the brink of war and chaos under Mir Hossein Mousavi. Now, there are two completely different options: either the Islamic Revolution meets its inevitable collapse earlier than anyone anticipated, or the marriage of convenience between Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad transitions into a de facto pseudo-theocratic military dictatorship with no discernible trace of reason or restraint.

First things first: let's recap the event that the Iranian officials are still calling an election.

One item that no one seems to be discussing is the event that happened nearly a week prior to the opening of the polls – in Lebanon, not Iran. Leading up to the June 7th polls, Lebanese citizens and international observers were bracing for a Hezbollah victory. Following the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War and the 2008 internal Lebanese conflict, Hezbollah lost some degree of credibility with the Lebanese people while simultaneously showing itself to be able to go toe-to-toe with the Lebanese army and survive against the Israeli Defense Force. Despite this perceived strength, and despite a less than cordial public relations effort running up to the election, the Hezbollah-led March 8 Coalition was decisively defeated by the Western-aligned March 14 Coalition. Hezbollah frontman Hassan Nasrallah even issued a concession statement. Being Iran's proxy in Lebanon, and Syria's agent as well, a defeat for Hezbollah's bloc under present conditions was not only a political hit for the organization as a whole, but also a sort of ad hoc indicator of the election's legitimacy.

With Lebanon's election concluded, all eyes turned to Iran. How much of an impact the Lebanese elections had on the minds of the Iranian electorate is open for vigorous debate, but one can only imagine that an obviously legitimate election in a country dominated by Iran's Hezbollah proxy could only have encouraged hope for a legitimate election in Iran itself. The incumbent, the perpetually controversial Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, had been favored to win early on, but as the poll approached, Mir Hossein Mousavi appeared to have overtaken him. As various news agencies were making claims about the poll being a "big test for Iranian democracy", voters were treated to an unprecedented series of televised debates between the four candidates. According to an anonymous Iranian commentator:
Let’s also forget the polls, carried out in May by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, that have been making the rounds this past week, with numbers that showed Mr. Ahmadinejad well ahead in the election, even in Mr. Mousavi’s hometown, Tabriz. Maybe last month Mr. Ahmadinejad was indeed on his way to victory. But then came the debates.

Starting on June 1, the country was treated to an experience without precedent in the 30 years of the Islamic Republic of Iran: six back-to-back live and unscripted debates among the four presidential candidates. Iranians everywhere were riveted, and the poll numbers began to move.

By the Wednesday before the election, Mr. Mousavi was backed by about 44 percent of respondents, while Mr. Ahmadinejad was favored by around 38 percent. So let’s not cloud the results with numbers that were, like bagels, stale a week later.

Before the election, and despite those early poll numbers, popular wisdom had it that Ahmadinejad was likely to lose if the election wasn't rigged. In addition, analysts also believed that a high voter turnout would favor Mousavi. Also, in a little-cited story several days before the election, a Basij militia commander warned candidate Mehdi Karroubi not to accuse security forces of election fraud, citing Karroubi's claims that he had lost his 2005 campaign against Ahmedinejad due to fraud by the Basij (Iran's volunteer militia) and the Pasdaran (better known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps).

On election day, more than 80 percent of the Iranian electorate turned out to the polls – enough so that voting had to be extended. This was a strong indication that the new front-runner, Mir Hossein Mousavi, would triumph if there was no malfeasance. However, there were widespread reports of ballot shortages in Mousavi's expected voting strongholds. Soon after voting was suspended, Ahmadinejad’s victory was announced.

As alluded to in the above quote, there have been claims by some Western journalists (based largely on the aforementioned obsolete polling and a poor understanding of Iranian demographics) that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have actually won the election. While this may be theoretically true, most indicators suggest that Ahmadinejad lost. Furthermore, essentially all indicators suggest that the votes were never counted in the first place. Here are just a few of the most blatant signs.

- Ahmadinejad’s victory was announced before all of the sealed ballot boxes had even been opened.
- In a four-way race, officials claimed that Ahmadinejad won 62.63 percent of the vote – a remarkably precise tally so soon after polling ended, particularly from a hand-counting of millions of paper ballots without the benefit of computerized voting equipment.
- Persian Ahmadinejad allegedly won against Mousavi, a minority Azeri, among Azeris and Kurds; he also allegedly won in the home towns of all three of his opponents.
- Ahmadinejad allegedly lost only two provinces, one of them being Sistan and Balochistan Province, where he lost by less than 18,000 votes. Balochistan happens to be the location of an ethnic and religious insurgency in which a mosque was bombed and one of Ahmadinejad’s campaign offices was shot up in the weeks preceding the election.

As a friend who spent time in Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution (and who continues to keep close tabs on the country) said to me during the course of an e-mail conversation:
They're not big on subtlety, are they? If you're going to steal an election, why be so obvious?

So, whether Ahmadinejad somehow won a plurality of the vote among three competitors, or even a slim majority, it seems rather obvious that his legitimate seizure of more than 60 percent of the Iranian electorate on June 12, 2009 would have constituted outright defiance of the laws of physics. In deference to the supposed rule of law in Iran, citizens took to the streets almost immediately upon the announcement of Ahmedinejad's victory. According to Kevin Sullivan of RealClearWorld as quoted by Michael Totten:
Iran hawks prefer to label the Iranian police state as simply “The Mullahs,” but the legitimate clerics in this dispute are the ones standing with Mir-Hossein Mousavi against ONE Mullah and his secular police apparatus. If the election has been rigged in such a fashion, then what you are in fact seeing is the dropping of religious pretense in the “Islamic” Republic of Iran. This is a secular police state in action.

In spite of the protests, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the "Supreme Guide of the Islamic Revolution," released statements praising the free and fair elections, and congratulating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his victory. As world leaders publicly questioned the legitimacy of the election results, Ahmadinejad was congratulated by a cadre of rogue leaders: Bashar al Assad of Syria, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, and Kim Jong Il of North Korea, just to name a few. This only emboldened demonstrators. For the last week and a half, protesters from a wide cross section of Iranian society have taken to the streets daily, shouted anti-government, anti-Khamenei, and anti-Ahmedinejad slogans from the rooftops at night, and rallied around Mir Hossein Mousavi (and to a lesser degree Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezaee).

Meanwhile, global analysts have found more and more reason to question the legitimacy of the polls. Analysts have pored over and commented on a variety of indicators, from various ambiguities (CNN, Times) to the inevitable security crackdowns, to the eventual claim by Iranian government officials that the demonstrators were in league with the American enemy. Indeed, analysts have essentially factored and interpreted nearly every breath taken by Ayatollah Khamenei, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammed Khatami, and a variety of other Iranian officials since the results were announced.

While legitimate commentators will be slow to give too much credit to social networking utilities like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and other items, these utilities have indeed been utilized by some demonstrators and activists for organizational and information-sharing purposes, though their predominate use has been by foreign journalists and intelligence agencies, who have examined the output in a continuous attempt to better understand what is taking place. This scrutiny, combined with the official press reports out of Iran, paints a picture of a house divided. In addition to the reformist bloc and the demonstrators, two prominent and senior clerics, Grand Ayatollahs Hossein Ali Montazeri and Yousef Sanei, have both discounted the legitimacy of the results – a telling demonstration of bravado and disunity among the religious establishment.

Meanwhile, Hashemi Rafsanjani, leader of two of the highest-ranking clerical bodies in the Iranian government, has reportedly gone to the Iranian holy city of Qom to call a meeting of the Guardian Council. The Guardian Council is composed of six clerics who are directly appointed by the Supreme Leader, and another six who are appointed by officials who are appointed by the Supreme Leader. Some are speculating that by meeting with the Guardian Council, Rafsanjani may be attempting to remove Ayatollah Khamenei from office – the Guardian Council is the only body with the constitutional authority to appoint the Supreme Leader or remove him from office. A removal of the Supreme Leader has never been attempted, so one could only speculate as to what the fallout from even attempting to remove Ali Khamenei would be.

While foreign observers have some knowledge of conditions on the ground in Tehran and elsewhere based upon the media submissions of key activists, traditional media have been a fascinating indication of the situation in the Iranian government. The semi-official Fars News, which has close ties to the Iranian government, has been unavailable since shortly after the protests flared up. The state-run Press TV news services initially omitted any mention of the civil unrest in the country, and while it now acknowledges the protests, it maintains that Ahmadinejad won the election. As the Iranian government has tried to block social networking websites, Iranian dissidents have responded with distributed denial-of-service attacks on Iranian state websites – with a little help from rogue online groups Anonymous and Pirate Bay.

On shortwave radio, the Voice of Justice program has made a point during the course of the last week and a half to repeat the phrase "President Doctor Mahmoud Ahmedinejad" as frequently as possible, as well as making copious mention of those congratulatory statements from abroad - to include one made by President Obama prior to the actual election. The programming has also been changed to focus less on stories maligning the United States, and more on stories about "President Doctor Mahmoud Ahmedinejad", Ali Khamenei, and any line they can think of to afford the two of them some degree of political legitimacy. The most interesting moment from a recent broadcast of the Voice of Justice program, though, came the day after the poll. The commentators on the program seemed to stutter and stumble over their words more than usual, betraying nerves and apprehension amongst the personnel of the government's propaganda wing. On the topic of radio, Iran appears to be jamming foreign radio broadcasts, including the BBC Persian service. Most foreign journalists have also been placed under house arrest, reportedly the most aggressive press control that the Iranians have enacted since 1979.

That leaves the situation on the streets of Tehran, which remains fluid. The protest leaders have issued a set of demands.
1. Dismissal of Khamenei for not being a fair leader;
2. Dismissal of Ahmadinejad for his illegal acts;
3. Temporary appointment of Ayatollah Montazeri as the Supreme Leader;
4. Recognition of Mousavi as the President;
5. Forming the Cabinet by Mousavi to prepare for revising the Constitution;
6. Unconditional and immediate release of all political prisoners;
7. Dissolution of all organs of repression, public or secret.

If the demonstrators are able to stand their ground and endure attacks by the Iranian security groups, the Islamic Revolution as we know it could meet its inevitable end sooner, rather than later. The protest leaders have also made a concerted effort to keep the demonstrations peaceful, in some cases silent. The dividend of this strategy is that any demonstrators who are killed become instant martyrs, and those arrested become instant political prisoners. Last Thursday's demonstrations were billed as a mourning rally for those whom the security forces had already killed, injured, or arrested. According to Reza Aslan on the Rachel Maddow show, as quoted by Michael Totten:
What’s really fascinating about what’s happening right now in 2009 is that it looks a lot like what was happening in 1979. And there’s a very simple reason for that. The same people are in charge — I mean, Mousavi, Rafsanjani, Khatami, Medhi Karroubi, the other reformist candidate — these were all the original revolutionaries who brought down the Shah to begin with, so they know how to do this right.

And so what you’re going to see tomorrow is something that was pulled exactly out of the playbook of 1979, which is that you have these massive mourning rallies, where you mourn the deaths of those who were martyred in the cause of freedom. And these things tend to get a little bit out of control, they often result in even more violence by the security forces and even more deaths, which then requires another mourning rally which is even larger, which then requires more violence from the government, and this just becomes an ongoing snowball that can’t be stopped.

That’s how the Shah was removed from power, was these mourning ceremonies. And so Mousavi very smartly calling for an official – not a rally – but an official day of mourning tomorrow. I think we’re going to see crowds that we haven’t even begun to see yet, and then follow that, on Friday, which is sort of the Muslim sabbath, the day of prayer, which is a traditionally a day of gathering anyway. This is just beginning, Rachel, this is just the beginning.

The security forces themselves present another problem for the regime. In 1979, security forces loyal to the Shah eventually began to defy their orders to suppress the revolts, and there are indications that this is already happening among contemporary forces. In some cases, attacking riot police have actually been beaten back by unarmed demonstrators. In other cases, demonstrators have gone out of their way to safely extract members of the security forces who had gotten in over their heads. Additional rumors are even more telling: according to some sources, some of the security personnel either speak Persian with a pronounced Arab accent, or speak no Persian at all – an indicator that the regime may distrust its indigenous personnel under these circumstances to the point that it felt the need to import goons from Hezbollah or other sources. (Rumor had it that Hugo Chavez may have even dispatched teams of Venezuelan riot police to assist the Iranian government.) The Iranian government has allegedly imported security personnel in the past, but the current demonstrations appear to have grown beyond anything that Iran has seen since 1979.

Of all of the commentaries from Western writers on the situation in Iran, a piece by Daniel Finkelstein in the Times of London seems to stand out. The money quote?
The protests for Mr Mousavi do not just expose the lie of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory. They expose the lie that there is something Western in wanting democracy and human rights.

The situation remains highly unpredictable. As this piece is being completed, security forces have begun to use live rounds and tear gas in an effort to disperse the protests, the official protest death count stands at nineteen, and several members of Rafsanjani's family have reportedly been arrested (to include his daughter). As tempting as it may be to speculate regarding what global changes could occur in the event of a collapse of the Iranian regime, the momentum and passion of the Iranian people appears far too fragile to warrant anything but rapt attention and earnest prayers from the outside world. If the regime actually crumbles, as it seems so agonizingly close to doing, the face of international politics will be fundamentally changed overnight – the realignment and disturbed political and cultural equilibrium of the Middle East alone would be inconceivable. For now, though, observers can do little more than watch, and hope that Western governments will not repeat the mistakes of 1979.

One final note. I've been keeping close tabs on what's been going on in Iran, and this synopsis reflects my own diligence, at least in part. However, better sources than I have done far better work than I, from which I have drawn heavily. Anyone who wants a more comprehensive recap should visit Michael Totten's June 2009 archive, and his several days of posts for Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog. Totten is one of the two best independent journalists working today, and his coverage of the situation in Iran as it has unfolded has been phenomenal. Also of note are the Info War and Rogue States categories at the Wired.com Danger Room blog, the authors of which have done excellent work keeping track of the confluence of demonstrations and modern technology. Anyone who cares about American or Western foreign policy, the Middle East, human rights in Iran, or Iran in general, would do well to read through the posts from both of these sources.

I'll reiterate what I said two weeks ago: no matter what happens, the final result of this situation in Iran will be some shade of interesting for Iran, and for the rest of the world. At the moment, all most of us can do is sit back and wait, simultaneously terrified and inspired by what could happen next.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Tom Ordeman, Jr. is a technical writer for a major defense contractor in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org..