Analysis casts doubts on Ahmadinejad's victory

An analysis by a British think tank highlights profound differences between voting patterns in Iran's recent election and hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's first victory in 2005, casting doubt on whether they could have occurred without manipulation.

The analysis by the London-based Chatham House could provide ammunition for supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the pro-reform candidate who claims he was the true winner in the June 12 election.

The dispute has sparked more than a week of unrest in Iran that has killed at least 17 people and presented the regime with its greatest challenge since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Iran's highest electoral authority acknowledged irregularities in the election for the first time Monday but insisted they did not affect the outcome.

The official results showed that Ahmadinejad received 13 million more votes than he and other conservatives got in the 2005 election, according to the Chatham House report, which was released Sunday.

The results would have required him to receive support in a third of the provinces from all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters, all new voters and almost half of all former reformist voters — an unlikely scenario, said the study.

Discontent with Ahmadinejad was running high among reformists and even some conservatives unhappy with his handling of the economy and his antagonistic stance toward the international community.

The final tally was 62.6 percent of the vote for Ahmadinejad and 33.75 percent for Mousavi — a landslide victory in a race that was perceived to be much closer.

Such a huge margin went against the expectation that a high turnout — a record 85 percent of Iran's 46.2 million eligible voters — would boost Mousavi, whose campaign energized young people to vote. About a third of the eligible voters were under 30.

Recommended reading:

The Iranian Election and the Revolution Test
June 22, 2009
by George Friedman
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090622_iranian_election_and_revolution_test

Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime’s orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989.

Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces — who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators — and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.

A Question of Support

This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators — who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents — failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution.

Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops — definitely not drawn from what we might call the “Twittering classes,” would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons. The troops had about as much sympathy for the demonstrators as a small-town boy from Alabama might have for a Harvard postdoc. Failing to understand the social tensions in Iran, the reporters deluded themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising. But this was not St. Petersburg in 1917 or Bucharest in 1989 — it was Tiananmen Square.

In the global discussion last week outside Iran, there was a great deal of confusion about basic facts. For example, it is said that the urban-rural distinction in Iran is not critical any longer because according to the United Nations, 68 percent of Iranians are urbanized. This is an important point because it implies Iran is homogeneous and the demonstrators representative of the country. The problem is the Iranian definition of urban — and this is quite common around the world — includes very small communities (some with only a few thousand people) as “urban.” But the social difference between someone living in a town with 10,000 people and someone living in Tehran is the difference between someone living in Bastrop, Texas and someone living in New York. We can assure you that that difference is not only vast, but that most of the good people of Bastrop and the fine people of New York would probably not see the world the same way. The failure to understand the dramatic diversity of Iranian society led observers to assume that students at Iran’s elite university somehow spoke for the rest of the country.

[more at the link - including discussion of the plausibility of the election outcome]

“I think this bit of rhetorical clap-trap is so far off the mark as to border on the ridiculous. In fact the revolt DID spread - to many other cities, large ones in particular, all across Iran. But, more important, thousands traveled to the capital city to join with those in Teheran.”

I think you missed the point. WHO were the “thousands” traveling to the capital city? See the following response to the same recommended reading on another Iran-related thread:

Basij to March on British Embassy Tuesday; Threaten Repeat of American Embassy Takeover
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2277305/posts

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 7:28:02 AM · 51 of 68
PapaBear3625 to Blue_Ridge_Mtn_Geek
From another thread: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2276905/posts

The money quote:

As argued here last year, the state of Iran’s economy has been dire regardless of international sanctions and the global downturn. Basic parameters like growth, money supply, price stability and financial diversity all indicated that the Islamic Republic was not only stagnating economically, it was doing so by design. The mullahs rose to power partly by pitting the undereducated rural masses against the middle class that had constituted the previous regime’s backbone. Read the earlier column on Iran.

Once in power, the ayatollahs set out to pamper the poorer population, giving a low-income person a vested interest in preserving the regime. Meanwhile, the regime contained the urban, educated and upwardly mobile population, lest it threaten its grip on power.

To understand the plight of the Iran’s middle-class young, visualize an America where the underclass is recruited into a massive part-time “Civilian National Security Force” (corresponding to Iran’s Basij), given preferential access to jobs, and made to understand that their prosperity depended upon keeping the old middle class in line and keeping the wheels turning in the economy.

The rebellion is essentially Iran’s middle class being tired of laboring to support the regime and the underclasses. If you want to understand the Basij, think of ACORN with guns, and how they would respond to our Tea Parties if we were disarmed.

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