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AHMADINEJAD WON INDEED AND THE REAL SOURCE OF INTERFERENCE IN IRAN’S ELECTION IS LIKELY THE UNITED STATES

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 27 June 2009
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International Elections-Elected Governments USA

June 27, 2009

AHMADINEJAD WON INDEED AND THE REAL SOURCE OF INTERFERENCE IN IRAN’S ELECTION IS LIKELY THE UNITED STATES

John Chuckman

A recent article called “Ahmadinejad Won, Get Over It” by Flynt and Hillary Leverett is not the only source with serious credentials offering reasonable, non-sensational explanations for events around Iran’s presidential election.

Kaveh Afrasiabi, a scholar who once taught at Tehran University and is the author of several books, says many of the same things.

Close analysis of the election results gives absolutely no objective basis for making charges of a rigged election. Mousavi’s expected win – expected, that is, by the Western press and by Mousavi himself - never had any basis in fact.

Afrasiabi also tells us that Ahmadinejad is extremely popular with the poor in Iran, a very large constituency, and he tells us further that Ahmadinejad spent a great deal of time traveling through the country during his first term listening to them. Ahmadinejad is himself a man of fairly humble origins with a good deal of genuine sympathy for the poor.

Of course, the public in the West has been treated to a barrage of propaganda about Ahmadinejad, conditioned by countless disingenuous stories and editorials to regard him as the essence of evil, ready to stir up trouble at a moment’s notice. These perceptions, too, have no basis in fact.

Ahmadinejad is a highly educated man, ready and willing to communicate with leaders in the West, although given to poking fun at some of the shibboleths we hold to. His office as president is not a powerful one in an Iran where power is divided amongst several groups, just as it is in the United States. He has no war-making power.

Even his infamous statement about Israel – mistranslated consistently to make it sound terrible – was nothing more than the same kind of statement made by the CIA in its secret study predicting the peaceful end of today’s Israel in twenty years or the statement by Libya’s leader, Gaddafi, saying Israel would be drowned in a sea of Arabs. Unpleasant undoubtedly for some, the statement was neither criminal nor threatening when properly understood.

The post-election troubles in Iran definitely reflect the interference of security services from at least the United States and Britain. We have several serious pieces of evidence.

First, Iran discovered and arrested just recently a group with sophisticated bomb equipment from Britain. They were caught red-handed, although our press has chosen to be pretty much silent on the matter. Of course, we all recall the arrest of a group of fifteen British sailors a couple of years ago, an event treated in our press as the snatching of innocents on the high seas when in fact they were on a secret mission in disputed waters claimed by Iran.

Robert Fisk recently wrote an excellent piece about photocopies of what purported to be a confidential official government report to the head of state, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, regarding the election results. It attributed a ridiculously small share of the vote to Ahmadinejad and was somehow being waved by Mousavi’s followers all over the streets.

It seems clearly invented as a provocation, much in the fashion of the famous “yellow cake” document before America’s invasion of Iraq.
We know that Bush committed several hundred million dollars towards a program creating instability in Iran and that Obama has never renounced the operation.

Iran, surrounded by threatening enemies and the daily recipient of dire threats from Israel and the United States, has absolutely no history of aggression: it has started no conflicts in its entire modern era, but naturally enough it becomes concerned about its security when threatened by nuclear-armed states.

Such threats from the United States are not regarded idly by anyone, coming as they do, from a nation occupying two nations of Western and Central Asia, a nation whose invasions have caused upwards of a million deaths and sent at least two million into exile as refugees.

It is a nation moreover that definitely threatened, behind the scenes, to use nuclear weapons against Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, helping end that threat being one of the main reasons for Britain’s joining the pointless invasion in the first place.

In assessing the genuine threats in the world, please remember what we all too often forget: the United States is the only nation ever actually to use nuclear weapons, twice, on civilians. It also came close to using them again in the early 1950s hysteria over communism – twice, once against China and once in a pre-emptive strike at the Soviet Union - and again later considered using them in Vietnam.

As for the other regular source of threats against, Israel, it is a nation which has attacked every neighbor that it has at one time or another. In the last two years alone, it has killed more people in Lebanon and Gaza than the number who perished in 9/11. It is also a secret nuclear power, having broken every rule and international law to obtain and assist in proliferating nuclear weapons.

Of course, there are many middle class people in Iran who would like a change of government. Such yearnings are no secret and exist everywhere in the world where liberal government is missing, including millions of Americans under years of George Bush and his motivating demon, Dick Cheney.

But saying that is not the same thing as saying that a majority of Iran’s people want a change in government or that the election was a fraud.

And remember, too, Iran had a democratic government more than half a century ago, that of Mohammed Mosaddeq, but it was overthrown in 1953 and the bloody Shah installed in its place by the very same governments now meddling in Iran, the United States and Britain.

Forum posts

  • Unfortunately it seems that the writer is not aware of legal procedure of ballot casting in Iran. What shocked everybody inside the country was that the Supreme Leader announced the results of presidential election in favor of Mr Ahmadinejad just one day after completion of ballot casting! While the Guardian Council is responsible body to announce the winner after receiving claims of all rivals and investigating the election thoroughly within 10 days!

    Everybody please read Iranian Constitution first. It is true that the U.S. is our enemy but the election is an internal affair which must be based on Iranian Constitution.

    http://mellat.majlis.ir/CONSTITUTION/english.HTM

    Your brother from Iran

    :)

  • All of which conveniently begs the question of the images of millions of peaceful Iranians gathered in protest being intimidated, tear gassed, beaten with clubs, herded with motor bikes, arrested, and murdered by Iranian Government thugs acting at the behest of Ahmadinejad and Khameni, the same powers obviously behind any election fraud that may have occurred.

    It also begs the question of why the same Government locked up foreign journalists, shut down local papers and non-managed television sources, and did its best to keep Iran in a total communications blackout. If Ahmadinejad and Khameni had their way, the only thing the world would know about the Iranian election is that they are still in charge. NO CREDIBLE SOURCE SUGGESTS THAT OPEN REPORTING OF THE ELECTION OR ITS AFTERMATH WOULD HAVE PAINTED A LESS DAMNING PORTRAIT. Government suppression of inquiry most sensible people might think evidence of something to hide.

    But, to a leftist in ENVY wanting to take a shot at America, jumping on the insane Ahmadinejad story line that "AMERICA (and Great Britain) DID IT", is irresistable. That, of course, is the thinly disguised point of this piece after all.

    Perhaps your readers are gullible enough to buy into its necessary premise --- the handful of deep-cover CIA agents and their assets plausibly in Iran are supermen (or superwomen). But super they indeed must be, complete with preternatural powers, to have so influenced and manipulated millions from positions in hiding in a closely watched society! The ultimate pomposity of your piece lies in its arrogant assumption that the reader is too stupid to understand the meaning of what he has seen with his or her own eyes. Your assertion requires the superhero capabilities of a children’s cartoon.

    Now, if your point was that AMERICA (and Great Britain) DID IT by popularizing the many values and virtues of secular Democracy including individual freedoms as well as freedom of the press and the resulting societal openness including equality of the sexes, then I gladly claim both guilt and my share of credit for being guilty.

    But that is not your point - which is a generic attack upon America.

    Yes we did indeed use the atomic bomb, twice (though this fact has noting to do with the present piece). America did indeed invent it and did not fully appreciate the horror of its use beforehand. Horror and all, under the same circumstances, I would advocate using it again. Most sensible people would.

    We also have worked diligently ever since to avoid using nuclear weapons again. A correct headline would be America has NOT used atomic weapons in anger for more consecutive years than any other country in the world which has had them available for use.

    Yes, about 60 years ago, the American CIA did bring the Shah back to Iran from a "health related" vacation (He thought it was healthy to be out of Iran). He was after all still the Iranian head of state. And we did "assist" him in a plan to toss out his unruly, but elected and quite popular, Parliamentary leader Mossedh - an act that was arguably within the Shah’s Constitutional powers at the time.

    Communists don’t much like this because the Tudeh (Iranian Communist) party was at least temporarily behind Mossedh in a coalition of leftist parties. Hidden behind and not fully revealed until the fall of the Soviet Union, the Tudeh was also executing a Stalin-supported KGB plot to paint Iran red, first with Mossedh apparently in charge to oust western nations (the US and Great Britain), and then replacing him as might be necessary in a putsch to get a more Soviet compliant head of state. Do not forget that Iran was a key route to the Persian Gulf for war material sent to Russia by the allies during WWII and the control of Iran was viewed by the Soviets as key to control of all of Asia and the middle east.

    Maybe Mossedh was not ultimately a Communist and would have out-maneuvered the KGB/Tudeh plot. But Tudeh cells under KGB direction had been secretly placing members to rise in the Iranian Officer Corps begining in 1941/42 and outside of the military were being well armed by smuggled Soviet weapons as Mossedh was elected. An attempt to take control of Iran was looming. There was no other visible leadership than the Shah that was clearly anti-Soviet. Certainly I am among the many who, aware of Communism’s consistent failures, history of oppression, and multiple millions executed in just Stalin overseen atrocity, think putting the Shah back in charge as a blocking move was all in all a good idea for the WORLD at the time. Obviously, Iranian sensibility has been offended and this is unfortunate. But from the outside, it is not at all clear that Iran’s revolution has led to a better path. Green seems to say a lot of Iranians would agree.

    Iranian communists in particular (and international Communists as well) hate the Shah because his forces (ulimately "SAVAK) rooted out the Tudeh Cells and their "sleeper" members in the Iranian Officer Corp. And sure, oil interests were involved. What sort of moron would think otherwise?

    To the degree the Shah was "bloody", it is mostly with the blood of Soviet directed communist revolutionaries attempting to gain control of Iran. Ironically, Iranian Communists were major players in the Iranian Revolution but were anticipated and outsmarted by the Mullah’s. In the months after the evolution, more Iranian Communists were probably executed by kangaroo "Revolutionary Courts" than over 35 prior years by the Shah. Leftists always seem to remember the dead it is convenient to remember and forget the dead it is convenient to forget.

    Whether or not the Iranian Election fraud was in fact great enough to steal the outcome is conjectural. But if it was, the thieves are sure behaving like they are thieves. And clearly millions of Iranians think that it was. That is what counts.

    • "Peaceful " ?when it was peaceful the government did not react even though the demonstrators had **no permit ** . How many days would any government in the world allow a peaceful demonstraition with no permit to go on in their capital city ?And have you not seen all the broken street payvment ? burning police cars and civilian cars , burning buildings, broken ATM machines and store windows ? You call that peaceful ?
      Plus , Mussavi either accept the laws of a country and run to be a president there fore instead of asking his supporters to go to street he should have just filed a complaint . Or if he does not accept the laws of the country then why did he run ? One can not have it both ways and only accept part of the laws that is to one’s liking .

    • Mousavi was quite active repressing people during his term as PM ...wonder what the "reformist" tag represents...open to corruption?
      We really ought to stay out of Iran’s evolutionary process and stop encouraging revolution as though we know better than them when the moment’s ripe. Revolutions have often been exploted for the porposes of colonization. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/KillingHope_page.html for some examples and scrolldown to Iran for a detail on the subject. And here’s a word from an ex CIA operative who knows things are never as they seem http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2009/06/24/stay-out-of-irans-evolutionary-process/

    • Kind of ironic how you instantly dismiss any regime tampering attempt by the U.S. and then spend paragraphs telling us how communists have interfered. Are you sure that you are not a state department employee moving the U.S. governments attempts to destabilize Iran even further?

      Truth be told due to Iran’s refusal to sell oil in dollars is the biggest reason to attempt an Iranian regime change, after all look at what happened to Iraq when they decided to sell oil in Euros. Any attempt to destabilize the fiat currency of America has been dealt with harshly.