A word about elections, sour grapes, and conclusion-jumping

Robert Fisk knows rather more about Iran than I do, he's actually there and reporting at the moment, and has written about it extensively over the last few days, so instead of going on about it more than I'm already going to I'll link him and use a quote he quotes in one of his articles:

"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. You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad's supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad."

Arlopop wrote a point-by-point description of why we should question the Iranian results, and while I think he can find most of his answers in the Fisk or the Cockburn in the same paper, I'd like to go over them briefly here. Let's start with majority-Kurd provinces. How could they have swung so Ahmadinejady? Maybe because the comparison of the Kurdish areas to San Francisco-going-McCain is almost offensive. I've never been to either but I'm sure the Kurdish areas of Iran aren't San Fran-fucking-cisco, they're places where people are still operating at the subsistence level and a bad winter kills you, and one of the regions where billions of dollars of massively inflated oil revenues were, according to any proper economist, thrown around like some particularly irresponsible candy since the 2005 elections.

And 'curious election results on the day'? A bit of Voter's-News-Service-2000? I'm aware saying the same thing happened in the States in 2000 isn't likely to persuade 49 to 51% of Americans that the latest Iranian one wasn't a steal; I am saying that this isn't a particularly uncommon thing to have happen. In a similar vein, Arlopop listed other objections that aren't strictly anecdotal or likely to be the actions of a large, impassioned minority of people deeply unhappy about the way the wind was blowing. The thing is, "apart from the fact that the Ahmadi was declared the winner before the votes were counted. apart from the fact that by law Khameni is not to receive the certification from the election commission until the third day following the election and only then can he approve and announce the winner, yet he did so within 24 hrs, apart from the remarkable election result graph that shows a preposterously straight line rise in the votes counted for Ahmadi" - these aren't really bizarre things to have happen if the man was actually leading by around 30%.

If I seemed to 'concede' in a recent post that that Ahmadinejad was less popular in urban areas than rural ones, I didn't mean to. My understanding is that he's unpopular with middle-class urbanites, and Tehran isn't peopled exclusively with middle-class urbanites. Once more, we're not talking about San Fran-fucking-cisco. Ahmadinejad got his big start being the mayor of Tehran, and he's spent the last five years subsidizing people who were being priced out of the Tehranese real estate market (in part because of his own economic policies, but there you are, if most Iranians aren't capable of appreciating economic cause and effect, they can join a club that includes everybody else in the fucking world).

As for generational shifts, he's also spent the last five years subsidizing the young. Why would we assume - especially now, during an international economic crisis that most of the world believes was caused by excessive economic liberalism - why would we assume the generational shift would be away from his managed-economy, high-subsidy side of the spectrum? Especially while there's a 40% unemployment rate?

And if their pre-occupation was peace, why assume Ahmadinejad would be a repellent candidate? Sigh. I'm already trying to avoid offending my own feminist sensibilities by appearing to defend Ahmadinejad, who I think is a cunt; I don't want to start appearing to defend nuclear weapons in the same day. Nonetheless, here're eight little words the young Iranians I went to school with in Paris five or six years ago quoted at me when I asked why the idea of getting nuclear weapons was so popular with them: Iraq, North Korea, 2003, invasion and lack thereof. And then two more: Israeli arsenal. I don't know, but I expect the road to peace looks different when you're a defensive country that actually has a reason to be defensive.

And anybody who would imagine that Iranians would be feeling any less defensive now than they were in 2005, now that someone who made Sharon look like Bambi has his finger on the button, needs to look at a fucking map (not to mention to stop thinking about Obama as a bouquet of roses they can hand the world to apologize for decades of fuck-ups, and to start thinking about him as their own president - but more on that below.) The US is important, sure. It's not where the Iranians I knew were expecting the planes to come from and it's not a geographically small and militarily enormous enemy Iranian strategists would hope to be able to neutralize with the threat of four or five well-shot missiles. Not my cup of strategic tea, but again - if Iranian strategists aren't capable of appreciating the conflict between nuclear armaments and an honest desire for peace, they can join a club that includes just about all the other strategists in the fucking world.

Now, I don't think we're looking at anything in Iran in the protests that could be called sour grapes or sore losing. I think people who want Ahmadinejad gone have the right ideology. I don't like him. I like their right to protest. But look at these two pictures:

Half a million people turn out to protest America's involvement in Indochina, 1971. Then, in 1972, incumbent Nixon beats pacifist McGovern by an embarassing margin, even with the start of the Watergate scandal.

May and June 1968 - a huge chunk of France goes apeshit left, making American peacenik demonstrators look like the spineless bourgeois potheads they turned out to be. Later in June, in the French legislatives President De Gaulle calls to calm everybody down, the rightwing parties clean up nearly 58% of the vote.

Hundreds of thousands of people hitting the streets is evidence something is wrong. But mass demonstrations are not in themselves a sign that the majority isn't being represented.

But look - it's always questionable, right? Arlopop could just as easily ask, why shouldn't we question the Iranian results? They are questionable, even beyond questions of fixing after the fact. The tactics leading up to the election persuading people which way to vote were lousy, Ahmadinejad is a populist to an irresponsible degree, and it's a shame he won - legitimately or not - because if he hadn't won it would have been much simpler to deal with for the rest of the world. Questionable, on all sorts of levels. No less questionable for the questions being common to most democratic systems. And most questionable of all because it's impossible for us to know. We're not Iranian, we weren't there, we didn't count the votes, we didn't see what happened in the counting stations, we didn't have observers there.

Questioning is fine. But there's a difference between questioning and a wholesale leap to the conclusion that the demonstrators represent the Iranian majority and that Ahmadinejad's election was a steal. And let's not leap the other way - for the moment, let's forget similar massive demonstrations in 1953 and the CIA and Iranian government paranoia about how this is the first internet age Yankee-sponsored right-wing coup. Let's think about what we do know - ourselves, us Anglos, now.

Let's look at the fact that international Anglo opinion-leading media outlets like the Economist are already making absolutely unprovable, unqualified statements like "most Iranians believe electoral fraud has occurred on a massive scale", that Republicans are frothing at the mouth for some sort of intervention in favour of Moussavi, that in mainstream American media Moussavi supporters are demonstrating for a wholesale structural change from the Ayatollahs on down - and ask ourselves how this Anglo certainty, this transformation of we don't know into almost definitely, is going to do to the tightrope being trod in the region as Obama seeks to transform the US's fucking lamentable role there. The Financial Times actually has a rather smashing article about it.

Questioning is fine. Questioning is always fine. Anglos and westerners conclusion-jumping en masse in a way that is so illegitimizing is not. Unfortunately it's already been done, and done before we know shit about shit except that a few hundred thousand Iranians are monumentally pissed off and that they're being governed by the sort of murderous thugs governing most of the human population of the world, functioning democracies or not. And now Barack Obama is going to have an exponentially harder time engaging diplomatically with an Iranian regime who millions of his own electorate are being convinced is illegitimate. That's just fucking dandy, and I really have to ask: who is going to be happy about that?