The Sore Loser of Iran (updated)

(6/15/09)Mousavi supporters protest in Tehran

"It's also possible that the regime has allowed things to spill out, the better to counterattack by brandishing the specter of a revolution. Now that it's in the process of losing its American enemy since Obama's accession to office - given his search to calm things down - the regime may want to create a "domestic enemy."
--du Nouvel Observateur

Those of us still smarting over the fraud of Bush/Gore 2000 find much to cynically amuse us about our news media's response to the recent elections in Iran. CNN questions the legitimacy of the result and highlights commentators who bewail that Iran does not provide sufficient monitors to guarantee that they "count every vote". Somewhere the 90,000 Hispanic and African American voters illegally purged from the 2000 Florida election are probably thinking "oh, so now CNN cares about democracy ..."

Like it not, Ahmadinejad won this election. Knowing the ruling Iranians, which means barely knowing them or their motives at all, I am tempted to think that the entire Mousavi phenomenon was carefully scripted. Like our own elections, for so many countries these 21st century political contests pit economic vs, cultural passions. Here the cause that stirs the culture warriors are abortion and gay rights. In Iran its the marginalized poor vs those concerned with the depressing status of women.

As Robert Fisk reports: "a true and faithful friend of the Islamic Republic, a man I have known for many years who has risked his life and been imprisoned for Iran and who has never lied to me... said. "The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad."

Mousavi, a conservative at heart, did not represent the kind of change real Iranian reformers could believe in. He has, however, by being lionized here in the West, then losing ugly, consigned that country's true democrats to another term of political purgatory.