Pepe Escobar: Poetic justice of a green revolution
The fight will be very hard. Employees of the Iranian Interior Ministry - which supervises the election - have warned that ultra-reactionary Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, aka "the Crocodile", Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic spiritual mentor, has issued a fatwa to ... turn the vote upside down. And the regime can always use the young - and very well-armed - Basij militias, the new generation of the revolution, to intimidate voters before the second round of voting. The plot thickens. Ahmadinejad may have lost the support of the Iranian Republican Guards Corps - according to insistent rumors in Tehran. Should that be the case, even if he won he would be absolutely toothless. And a secret state poll suggesting Mousavi will win the first round by a landslide may - or may not - be true. Many in Tehran do not forget the regime's back-door deals that led to Ahmadinejad's victory in 2005. Ahmadinejad has been soundly blasted by his utter incompetence in economic matters, his appalling foreign policy and the lack of civil liberties in Iran. But he was never more dangerous then when he was lying about inflation and unemployment in the Iranian TV debates, always with a straight face - a face the poor and disenfranchised in Iran identify as "one of us". But millions of young, urban, educated - and unemployed - Iranians would rather dream of "poetic justice". The promise would be fulfilled if Ahmadinejad in the end were defeated by an electronic intifada. Fight the power - with green power.
posted by temporal at 6/12/2009
1 Comments:
From Stratfor, By George Friedman, June 15, 2009
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090615_western_misconceptions_meet_iranian_reality
"Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.
Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this."
Post a Comment
<< Home