Iran - some perspective, please!

OK, has it really been three months since I last blogged this place? Goddamn. I think I must rescind my original premise that posting in-depth newspaper-length articles on subjects was a realistic and much-needed addition to the blogosphere. For this commentator it's not feasible for now, so I shall continue with more humble aims perhaps. And I shall rely on others to carry more of the detail where needed.

Anyway, are we all tired of the ni(t-witted) commentary on the Iranian elections yet? In saying that, I should commence by saying that I don't have a huge amount of time for Ahmedinejad - he is on some fundamental level quite unhinged, and certain of his belief systems are truly potty, but let's be quite clear about a few things;
• Mousavi is not some kind of liberal reformist pro-western democrat. We should not be backing that particular horse with any expectation it would bolt in the direction we'd like to see the country run in. And irrespective, the position of President in Iran is just one of the many seats of power, and not even the most important amongst those.

• The likelihood is almost complete that Ahmedinejad legitimately won the election, albeit with a handful of irregularities. This from Robert Fisk's very earliest report on the election aftermath...
"An interval here for lunch with 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. We dined in an all-Iranian-food restaurant, along with his wife. He has often criticised the regime. A man unafraid. But I must repeat what he 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."

My guest and I drank dookh, the cool Iranian drinking yoghurt so popular here. The streets of Tehran were a thousand miles away. "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."

And for more cogent recent analysis I heartily recommend the following articles...
Ahmedinejad Won. Get Over It (Flint and Hillary Leverrett at Politico.com)
US Likely Source of Interference in Iran's Election

So, of course it is morally repugnant to see peaceful protest being so brutally and bloodily repressed. But it's perhaps worth reflecting for a moment on the moral culpability of Mousavi himself - a man who claimed victory in the election before the polls had even closed, and who has actively encouraged is supporters into the streets in a bid to foment what would by any rational analysis be a completely anti-democratic coup. In simple terms, he has asked people to go out and seek to install him as President in the face of a powerful and brutal state apparatus that knows who the real winner was, one that is backed by a barely regulated and highly lethal militia. Mousavi is basically asking people to go out and die, to spill blood for him in order to have himself undemocratically installed in the second most powerful post in the land. This is not the action of a great democrat, a great humanitarian, but of yet another great spoiled child - one who has somehow convinced himself of his own self-worth, of his patent entitlement to the post he seeks - or even worse, a man who knows he lost but thought he may have found an alternative means to snatch his entitlement at the inconsequential cost of the lives of his supporters.

None of this of course excuses any of the state or militia-sourced brutality, but God knows there's been enough of that type of statement written lately - and once again we have Fisk to thank for the best of the reportage. The stupidity of authoritarian regimes in the face of popular protest remains one of their most profound hallmarks. They never seem to learn that resort to batons, bullets and imprisonment is fuel to the flames of revolution. But the stupidity of those Western leaders like Sarkozy and Merkel pontificating on the situation as if they have some right to act as arbiters is as breathtaking in its arrogance, and they've dealt themselves out of any sort of constructive arrangement with Iran for the entirety of Ahmedinejad's next term, whilst simultaneously giving the regime the perfect pretext to decry internal protesters as acting as mere puppets of the West.

Obama on the other hand has been perfectly upstanding in not taking sides, maintaining the perfectly valid principle that no country has any right to interfere in another's electoral process (although that's of course laughable from an American President, if not this one in particular) whilst deploring the violence, etc. The difficulty for Obama will now come where those on the right and even worse the "Bomb Iran" hawks (and hasn't John McCain gone a long way towards showing us why it's a blessed thing he didn't get his hokey arse installed in the White House - he'd already be fueling the B-52s by now) will now use this whole thing as evidence for any sort of detente with Iran being misguided and amoral.

But that's tomorrow's story. You won't read about this on Twitter though, as it takes more than 144 characters to look at any situation with more nuance than pathetic sloganism.

Tweet on.