The Race for Iran

Earlier this week, ForeignPolicy.com published a remarkable story, “Neda Lives”, by its associate editor, Cameron Abadi.  While, from the title, it seems evident what the article is about, in fact, it is about an extraordinary case of mistaken identity.  Abadi’s article is apparently not the first time this story has been reported.  Some journalists picked it up last summer—but it is still a remarkable (and cautionary) tale.  We append a few excerpts from Abadi’s article below: 

“Neda Soltani is the ordinary Iranian woman whose image spread last summer in an instant around the world.  She’s a symbol of the brutality of the Iranian regime and the resilience of Iran’s movement for democracy.

She’s also still alive.

A woman named Neda did indeed die last summer on the streets of Tehran, gunned down by members of an Iranian militia.  Her full name was Neda Agha-Soltan.  But mixed in with the tragic footage of that Neda’s death, broadcast around the world in a viral video that galvanized world opinion against the Iranian regime, was a compelling Facebook snapshot of a smiling young beauty in a flowered headscarf.

Her name was Neda, too—Neda Soltani…

Until last year, Neda Soltani was a teaching assistant for English literature at Tehran’s Islamic Azad University, where she was doing graduate work on feminine symbolism in the work of Joseph Conrad.  She wasn’t a supporter of the regime, but she also didn’t belong to any sort of active opposition group, even in the heady days after the disputed election.  She was focused on her academic career above all else; while Iranians were marching in the streets, she was correcting her thesis.  She led the prosaic life of Tehran’s silent apolitical majority.  “I worked for 10 long years to get my position at the university,” she told Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung in February.  “I was earning my own money, I had friends, I would go out and I had fun.”

All that changed on June 20 of last year, when a choppy video appeared on YouTube depicting the gruesome and chaotic death of a young Iranian woman…The process began innocuously enough, resting on a foundation of journalism’s most basic building block: competition for a scoop.  Working only with the first name heard on the YouTube video, international news organizations raced one another to unearth more information on the young women who died on camera.  Forgoing fact checks, editors in New York and London allowed small details to get lost in translation as they communicated with their reporters on the ground:  “Agha-Soltan” lost its hyphen, “Agha” was dropped entirely, or “Soltan” picked up an “i”… 

That’s where Facebook comes in.  On June 21, eager Green Movement supporters decided to dedicate a page on the social networking site to the “Angel of Iran.”  Serendipitously, the martyr herself had a personal Facebook from which they could borrow her portrait.  Framed as a standard passport shot, the photo showed an attractive young woman with a relaxed and innocent smile who wore a head scarf that revealed several inches of dark brown hair.  It was a perfectly adequate resource for activists looking to inspire sympathy—except for the fact that the likeness, like the Facebook page from which it was taken, belonged to Neda Soltani, the quiet, unbloodied scholar of English literature.

Having relied on the major networks and newspapers for a lead, the Facebook activists themselves then served as a source for the mainstream media.  The CNN and BBC started illustrating their stories with the “Angel of Iran” photo; news agencies and newspapers were not far behind.  Of course, blogs and other social networking sites were also off to the races in spreading the mistaken photo.  And it wasn’t long before the photo made its way back into Iran and went viral among the Green Movement.

But before the T-shirts and the posters and the ad hoc candlelit street altars, Neda Soltani awoke on June 21 of last year to discover an inbox full of countless requests to befriend her on Facebook.  Then came the phone calls. A professor burst into tears when he heard her voice.

Neda didn’t begrudge the initial error.  There was some resemblance between her and the slain protester, after all.  Neda thought the mistake was liable to correct itself eventually, but decided to speed the process along by reaching out to Voice of America, the U.S.-backed satellite network that was among the most strident in using her photo to agitate the Iranian public.  In an email, she explained that there had been a mix-up; they had been using a false photo, and she included other photos of herself as evidence.

What followed was a disheartening education in applied media ethics.  Instead of issuing a correction, VOA promoted the very photos Neda had used to absolve herself as “exclusive” images of the slain protester.  The momentum of the story overwhelmed attempted interventions of the truth.  Neda tried repeatedly to sway different networks and news agencies, but for all intents and purposes, she had lost control over her face.  On Internet forums, her requests that her photo be removed were met with the accusation that she was a stooge for the regime.  “You won’t take our angel away from us, you bastard,” one Internet commenter writes in reply to her plea.  On June 23, 2009, the parents of Neda Agha-Soltan released for public use a photo of their daughter—the one who, in fact, had been killed—but it had trouble competing with the existing, if false, image of Neda for primacy as the face of Iran’s freedom movement…”

According to Abadi’s article, Neda Soltani now lives outside Iran, in Germany, where she is struggling to put her life back together.  We are not in a position to vouch for all of the things reported in Abadi’s story.  But, if the article is accurate, it provides further confirmation for several important truths that we have sought to explore on www.TheRaceForIran.com:    

First, while VOA’s behavior, as depicted in the article, is beneath contempt, there is a bigger point here—the Obama Administration, like the George W. Bush Administration before it, has decided to use media and broadcasting into Iran as a foundational pillar for a “soft” regime change strategy.  In this regard, see the following passage from Doyle McManus’ well-reported column published in the Los Angeles Times over the past weekend about the “messier, more improvisational approach” that increasingly characterizes the Obama Administration’s Iran policy:

“One new track is long term:  democracy-building.  After initial hesitation, the administration has quietly increased its indirect support for Iran’s democracy movement—very quietly, because the U.S. wants to avoid tainting the dissidents with charges of foreign sponsorship.  Most of the help has come in the form of increased hours of Persian-language radio and television broadcasting into Iran, and in export permits for U.S.-made software to help Iranians evade their government’s efforts to block or punish Internet use.” 

The British government, of course, is also relying on media and broadcasting as part of a “soft” regime change strategy.  This strategy rests on an assumption that, if the Iranian people could only hear the right “message”, they would hold different views about a wide range of domestic and international issues and choose “better” leaders for themselves. 

Based on our personal experiences in Iran, talking with a wide range of official and unofficial Iranians, reading Iranian websites, and seeing comments posted on www.TheRaceForIran.com by readers in Iran, we do not believe that Iranians are lacking in knowledge about their own country or the outside world.  Many Iranians, however, do seem to come to different conclusions about various issues than those preferred in the White House, Foggy Bottom, and Whitehall.  But the U.S. and British governments should focus on figuring out how to deal constructively with Iranians (and others) who do not accept preferred Western narratives about the Middle East and the international order—not basing policy on the delusional proposition that the activities of VOA and the BBC’s Persian Service will somehow change Iranians’ minds about these issues, much less prompt them to change their country’s whole political order.       

Second, it seems increasingly clear that important mainstream media outlets—including CNN and BBC, as reported by Abadi, but also august newspapers like The New York Times (see our related piece here)—are frequently willing to put aside basic practices of responsible journalism when reporting on Iran.  This willingness is partially captured in Abadi’s references to editors in New York and London “forgoing fact checks” and allowing “small details” (a person’s actual identity is a “small detail”??) to “get lost” in the quest for a sexy story.  But the problem goes beyond professional lapses by individual journalists and editors.  (For what it’s worth, one of the comments to Abadi’s article on ForeignPolicy.com claims that the BBC eventually issued a public acknowledgement of its error regarding Neda Soltani’s identity.) 

We should be asking why those lapses are so frequent—indeed, chronic—in reporting and analysis on Iran.  In some cases, the personal political agendas of individual reporters and editors seem to be a critical factor.  But, more broadly, doing serious, reality-based reporting on Iranian politics (including rigorous sourcing and actual fact-checking) could end up regularly putting mainstream media outlets at odds with the narrative about Iranian politics and foreign policy preferred—and paid for—by the U.S. and British governments.  (See our point above on the use of media in the ongoing U.S.-UK “soft” regime change strategy.)  As Michael Massing and others have chronicled (see here), mainstream media outlets—including The New York Times and the Washington Post—were strategically unwilling to do that in the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  Unfortunately, they seem equally unwilling to do it today with regard to Iran. 

The “regime change in Iran” campaign is gaining momentum in the United States.  Two Republican senators—John Cornyn of Texas and Sam Brownback of Kansas—have introduced a bill which, if enacted into law, would make regime change the formal and explicit goal of America’s Iran policy and, among other things, authorize the President “to provide assistance for broadcasting and other communications directly to Iranian democratic opposition organizations”, see here.  In connection with the anniversary of Iran’s June 12, 2009 presidential election, Senator (and former Republican presidential candidate) John McCain also made a public call for the United States to make regime change in Tehran the declared goal of its Iran policy, and to marshal America’s allies to make their own contributions toward that goal, see here.

If President Obama is not already aware of the relevant history, he should take note that it was not President George W. Bush who defined regime change in Baghdad as the goal of America’s Iraq policy—it was President Bill Clinton, who, in 1998, signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act.  History may not repeat itself exactly, but—as an aphorism frequently attributed to Mark Twain notes—it does often rhyme.  Washington needs less poetry about contemporary Iranian politics—and more non-rhyming analysis grounded in actual, on-the-ground reality.           

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Last week, we underscored

“the significance of the Joint Declaration that Brazil and Turkey brokered with the Islamic Republic last month—its significance in terms of both the diplomacy surrounding the Iranian nuclear issue and the changing structure of international relations.” 

We wrote,

“Make no mistake—Brazil, along with Turkey, did something important here, both in brokering their nuclear deal with Iran and in voting against the new sanctions resolution.” 

Last month, shortly after the Joint Declaration was announced, we noted more specifically that

“two rising economic powers from what we used to call the ‘Third World’ have now asserted decisive political influence on a high-profile international security issue.  And, in doing so, they have signaled that Washington can no longer unilaterally define terms for managing such issues.”   

Yesterday, Brazil’s Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim, published an Op Ed in the International Herald Tribune offering his own explanation, for a global, English-speaking audience, of the significance of the Iran-Turkey-Brazil nuclear deal for the future of international relations.  We think that the Op Ed, entitled “Let’s Hear From the New Kids On the Block”, is an insightful statement from one of the world’s most important currently serving foreign ministers.  We are pleased to append the text below; we have highlighted some passages that we think are especially relevant to understanding the political and strategic significance of the Iran-Turkey-Brazil nuclear deal. 

“An editorial in a renowned French newspaper recently predicted that May 17, the date of the “Declaration of Tehran” on Iran’s nuclear program—negotiated by Brazil and Turkey with Iran—will make history books.  A commentator of a respected British daily suggested that the efforts put together by the two emerging countries challenged the primacy of United Nations Security Council’s permanent members over issues of international peace and security—and that this was not received without discomfort.

Indeed, until recently all global decisions were made by a handful of traditional powers.  The permanent members of the Security Council—Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, who are incidentally the five nuclear powers recognized as such by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—had (and still have) the privilege of dealing the cards on matters of international peace and security.  The G-8 was in charge of important decisions affecting the global economy.  In questions related to international trade, the “Quad”—the U.S., the European Union, Japan and Canada—dominated the scene.

Countries like Brazil, China, India, South Africa and a few others are the “new kids on the block” among global players that shape international relations.  They legitimately aspire to greater participation in international institutions, which still suffer from a “democratic deficit.”  Global decisions can no longer be made without listening to their voices.

At the ministerial meeting of the Doha Round in Cancún in 2003, Brazil, India, Argentina and other developing countries chose not to endorse a decision taken by the traditional stakeholders—especially the United States and the European Union—which disregarded their interests, mainly as far as agriculture was concerned. The creation of the World Trade Organization Group of 20 transformed the pattern of multilateral trade negotiations for good.

The financial crisis highlighted even more the coming of age of new actors.  The Financial G-20, which is composed of both rich and developing countries, replaced the G-8 as the prime forum for discussions and decisions concerning the world economy.

On climate change, emerging nations have always been important players.  But at the 15th Conference of Parties of Copenhagen, the “Accord,” however insufficient, was reached in a room where the president of the United States negotiated with the leaders of BASIC — Brazil, South Africa, India and China.

On April 15, Brasilia was host to two consecutive meetings at the highest political level:  the second BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) summit and the fourth IBSA Dialogue Forum (India, Brazil and South Africa).  Such groups, different as they are, show a willingness and a commitment from emerging powers to redefine world governance.  Many commentators singled out these twin meetings as more relevant than recent G-7 or G-8 gatherings.

Discussions on trade, finance, climate change and even global governance have begun to welcome developing countries.  It is understood that without the presence of countries like China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico, no practical results could be obtained. 

Paradoxically, issues related to international peace and security—some might say the “hard core” of global politics—remain the exclusive territory of a small group of countries.   

The fact that Brazil and Turkey ventured into a subject that would be typically handled by the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany)—and, more importantly, were successful in doing so—disturbed the status quo.

The insistence on sanctions against Iran—effectively ignoring the Declaration of Tehran, and without even giving Iran time to respond to the comments of the “Vienna Group” (the U.S., France and Russia)—confirmed the opinions of many analysts who claimed that the traditional centers of power will not share gladly their privileged status.

Indeed, the negotiations conducted by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey followed precisely the script that had been on the table for some months and whose validity had been recently reaffirmed at the highest level.

Much of the world has its eyes fixed now on the World Cup tournament in South Africa.  In football, the most universal of all sports, developing nations such as Brazil and Argentina have always been major players.  It is time that in grave matters of war and peace, emerging nations such as Turkey and Brazil—and other, such as India, South Africa, Egypt and Indonesia—have their voices heard.  This will not only do justice to their credentials and abilities; it will also be better for the world.”

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Last week, ForeignPolicy.com published a set of seven (that’s right, seven) articles by prominent, pro-Green Iranian-Americans (e.g., Reza Aslan, Haleh Esfandiari, Nazila Fathi, Abbas Milani, Azadeh Moaveni, etc.) on the anniversary of the Islamic Republic’s June 12, 2009 presidential election.  The series was entitled “Misreading Tehran”, and was presented as a retrospective and self-critical look at what the American/Western media and commentariat got wrong in their assessments of Iranian politics over the last year. 

This is ironic, to say the least, as several of the authors go to great lengths to point out that they and their pro-Green media colleagues did not really get anything wrong.  Furthermore, it remains unclear why Foreign Policy thought that only pro-Green (and, in some cases, explicitly anti-Islamic Republic) Iranian-Americans should be included in this project.  However, Foreign Policy allowed us to publish today a rebuttal to some of the major themes, claims, and arguments in the seven-part series.  In this rebuttal, we address what we believe are some of the most important (and, unfortunately, sill chronic) flaws in Western coverage of Iranian politics.  We also highlight the risk that willful misreadings of Iranian politics can once again take the United States down a path culminating in an unnecessary military confrontation–just as manufactured “intelligence” and incompetent analysis paved the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. 

Those who are interested can read our rebuttal on Foreign Policy.com, entitled “Who’s Really Misreading Tehran?”, by clicking here.  There is also a comment section there at the end of the article.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

The New America Foundation/Iran Initiative is hosting an event today featuring Stephen Kinzer, who will speak about his new book, Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future.

Race for Iran Publisher Flynt Leverett will moderate the event, which will stream live here from 12:15pm – 1:45pm EST.

– Ben Katcher

(The cartoon above depicts one of many myths apparently ‘informing’  U.S. policy)

Since manufactured claims about Iraqi WMD led the United States to invade Iraq in 2003, no analytic line about developments in the Middle East has had a bigger impact on American foreign policy than the assertion that the outcome of Iran’s June 12, 2009 presidential election—held one year ago tomorrow—was a fraud.  Since shortly after the election, we have been subjected to a great deal of criticism (a disappointingly high percentage of it personal in nature) for arguing that no hard evidence of electoral fraud has been produced, and that Ahmadinejad’s re-election was, in fact, quite plausible as an outcome.  Of course, these are arguments that went against the conventional wisdom that took root among most Western Iran “experts” literally on the morning after the election.   

We stand by these judgments today.  We are certainly not in a position to vouch personally for the physical handling of ballots, the counting process, etc.—in other words, we are not in a position to conclude definitively that there was no fraud in Iran’s 2009 presidential election.  However, we continue to hold that no evidence of fraud has been produced, and that Ahmadinejad’s re-election, without fraud, was eminently plausible. 

We also believe that it should be incumbent on those who continue to assert that there was decisive fraud in the election to come up with hard evidence to support their claim—and not rely solely on “must have been” conjecture.  In 2003, the United States invaded another Middle Eastern country on the basis of “must have been” conjecture and fabricated tales by Iraqi “defectors” and expatriates.  That misadventure has cost well over 100,000 innocent Iraqis their lives, spent vast amounts of American blood and treasure, and severely damaged America’s strategic position. 

Today, the “social fact” that the 2009 Iranian presidential election must surely have been fraudulent is intensifying political pressure in the United States to adopt “regime change” as the explicit goal of America’s Iran policy.  Just read these words, from President Barack Obama, in his statement following the United Nations Security Council’s adoption of Resolution 1929 earlier this week—a resolution ostensibly about Iran’s nuclear program: 

“Saturday will mark one year from the day that an election captivated the attention of the world—an event that should have been remembered for how the Iranian people participated with remarkable enthusiasm, but will instead be remembered for how the Iranian government brutally suppressed dissent and murdered the innocent, including a young woman left to die in the street.

Actions do have consequences, and today the Iranian government will face some of those consequences.  Because whether it is threatening the nuclear non-proliferation regime, or the human rights of its own citizens, or the stability of its own neighbors by supporting terrorism, the Iranian government continues to demonstrate that its own unjust actions are a threat to justice everywhere.”

Before the United States moves too far down the path of supporting coercive regime change in Iran—and, make no mistake, adopting regime change as the goal of America’s Iran policy will ultimately lead to a U.S.-initiated war against the Islamic Republic—it is incumbent on every American who cares about his or her country to ask the question that should have been asked before the Iraq invasion:  what, exactly, is the case for going to war, and what is the evidentiary base supporting that case. 

In that spirit, we want to highlight two pieces of analysis on the Islamic Republic’s presidential election that have informed our own thinking about this critically important event.  (Both pieces have been referenced in comments to various posts on www.TheRaceForIran.com, but we think these analyses warrant a much higher level of attention that they have received so far.) 

The first of these pieces is by Reza Esfandiari and Yousef Bozorgmehr, entitled “A Rejoinder to the Chatham House Report on Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election Offering a New Analysis on the Results”, see here.  The second is by Eric Brill, entitled “Did Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Steal the 2009 Iran Election?”, see here.    

The Esfandiari-Bozorgmehr piece is a sharp and, we believe, persuasive critique of a monograph, see here, published by Ali Ansari, Iranian studies professor at the University of St. Andrews, and two collaborators through the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London.  Ansari’s monograph, entitled “A Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election” and published on June 21, 2009 (literally nine days after the Iranian election), epitomizes, for us, a highly conjectural, “had to have been fraud” approach to studying the election results.  (Ansari has not yet produced a “final” version of his analysis.)    

In their paper, Reza Esfandiari and Yousef Bozorgmerhr systematically go through all of the various points adduced by Ansari and his collaborators—e.g., alleged irregularities and anomalies in the voter turnout, the sourcing of Ahmadinejad’s votes, the alleged underperformance of Mousavi (an ethnic Azeri) in Azeri-majority provinces and of Mehdi Karroubi in his home province, perceptions of statistical anomalies in the official results—and offer devastatingly persuasive rejoinders on every point.  Here are just some of the highlights from their paper: 

–On page 8, there is a graphic depiction of the “swings”, for and against Ahmadinejad, in 25 major Iranian cities, comparing the official results from 2009 with the results from the second-round runoff in 2005, when Ahmadinejad won a landslide victory over former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.  One of the biggest flaws in Ansari’s analysis is his insistence on comparing the results from 2009 with results from first round balloting in 2005—when there was no incumbent president on the ballot and a number of the candidates on the ballot were considered plausible as potential victors.  In 2009, Ahmadinejad was running as an incumbent president seeking re-election (no incumbent president in the Islamic Republic’s history has failed to win re-election) and Mousavi was widely seen as his main challenger; neither Mehdi Karroubi nor Mohsen Rezae was seen by most Iranians as having a serious chance to win.  This means that it is far more appropriate to compare the 2009 results to the second-round results from 2005 (as Esafandiari and Bozorgmehr do), not the first-round results from 2005 (as Ansari does).   

–On page 14, there is a detailed breakdown of official results in the 46 districts won by Mousavi, with the margin of victory and the ethnic classification of the people in these areas.  These data decisively reveal the gross inaccuracy of Western media reports claiming that the official results show (incredibly) Ahmadinejad winning everywhere in Iran, including among ethnic minorities. 

–On page 22, there is an enlightening analysis of the “overseas” vote—that is, votes cast outside of Iran by expatriates or citizens normally resident in the Islamic Republic who were traveling abroad on election day.  Among Iranians living in the West, the official results show that support for Mousavi was overwhelming.  However, among those Iranians who cast their ballots in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia—where many Iranians normally resident in the Islamic Republic routinely visit for religious, business, or family reasons—the level of support for Ahmadinejad was the same as that among those who voted inside Iran.         

The paper deserves careful reading, in its entirety.  On the basis of their analysis, Reza and Yousef draw the following conclusion, which should be pondered by American policymakers dealing with Iranian issues and any Western pundit who comments on the Islamic Republic’s internal affairs: 

“The Chatham House report, although a “preliminary one”, clearly set out to cast doubt on the Iranian election without offering anything other than a superficial analysis…The distribution of votes across the provinces and districts does conform to general trends and comports to a natural outcome.  Statistical studies have proved inexact and inconclusive as far as detecting any real evidence of fraudulent manipulation.  If cheating did occur, it must have been localized and generally restricted to remote parts of the country where the population levels would not have been significant enough to sway the overall result.  We thus conclude that the 10th Iranian presidential election is a genuine reflection of the will of the Iranian people and that Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the duly elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  It is hoped that policy makers acknowledge this fact.”      

It is, indeed, imperative that policymakers in the United States and other Western countries approach the Iranian challenge on the basis of facts.  In this regard, Eric Brill’s piece identifies the potential dangers of getting analysis of Iran’s 2009 presidential election wrong, in terms we wholeheartedly endorse: 

“Ever since the disputed 2009 Iran election and the protests that followed, loud voices have insisted that the pieces are once again in place—an illegitimate jackboot regime, courageous cries for help, a whiff of WMD.  Though it seems unlikely now, the United States could be back in the saddle some day, galloping off to liberate yet another nation of Muslims from Muslim oppression, rescuing a myopic and predictably ungrateful world from yet another existential threat.  Just as those who questioned WMD claims before the 2003 Iraq invasion were shouted down as unpatriotic, those who question the “stolen election” claim today are dismissed as democracy-hating boosters of a thuggish theocracy.”  [Note from Flynt and Hillary:  That has certainly been our experience.] 

Eric clearly specifies the focus of his analysis:  “The question considered here…is not whether the government mistreated those who protested the election result, nor whether Iran’s government ought to be run by different people with different policies.  Nor is the question whether more candidates ought to have been declared eligible to run—a complaint not made by Mousavi until after the election.  Obviously he made the list, and the exclusion of other candidates probably improved his chances.  The question here is simply whether Ahmadinejad won the election, fair and square.” 

Eric then proceeds to review, with impressive meticulousness, the various complaints about the electoral process and the official results that were lodged by Mousavi with the Islamic Republic’s Guardian Council, Ansari’s “preliminary analysis” of the results, and claims of irregularities and fraud advanced by other analysts. 

Like Esfandiari and Bozorgmehr, Eric makes a powerful argument that what many critics of the 2009 Iranian election have described as “excess voting” merely reflects Iran’s long-standing rule that an eligible voter may vote at any polling station anywhere in the world. But he goes on to assess the other allegations of irregularities in the conduct of the election put forward by Mousavi and his supporters—registered observers turned away or later ordered to leave, Mousavi votes thrown away, ballot boxes stuffed with Ahmadinejad votes, pens with disappearing ink, and vote counts either misreported from the field or altered once they reached the Interior Ministry in Tehran.  Eric points out that, to this day, neither Mousavi nor anyone else has identified a single polling station where any of this occurred:

“At polling stations all across Iran, observers for Mousavi monitored the voting all day long and closely watched the vote counting after the polls closed. Not one of Mousavi’s 40,676 registered observers claimed on election day that he had been turned away or prevented from observing. Not one disputed the vote count at his polling station, or later claimed that he had been deceived or had lacked an adequate basis for approving.  Not one alleged that the Interior Ministry reported a different vote count for his polling station…

Shortly after the election, Mousavi claimed in his newspaper (Kaleme) that 10 million people had voted without showing proper identification, but his complaint to the Guardian Council mentioned only 31 such voters. Widespread ballot-box stuffing was alleged, but not a single stuffed ballot box has been identified. Wholesale buying and selling of votes was alleged, but Mousavi has identified only four instances, in each case without any evidence. Thousands or millions of Mousavi votes were said to have been thrown away, replaced by thousands or millions of Ahmadinejad votes, but no one has identified any of the perpetrators, nor mentioned exactly where or how this was accomplished. Vote counts from the field, approved by tens of thousands of Mousavi’s observers, were said to have been altered by the Interior Ministry in Tehran, but no one has identified a single ballot box ­where this occurred—even though the data have long been available to compare the counts for all 45,692 ballot boxes. The silence of Mousavi’s polling station observers is especially deafening. Most or all of them may believe that electoral fraud occurred all over Iran, but apparently each is equally adamant that it did not occur where he spent election day.” 

Eric’s work should make it clear to those who have not examined the 2009 election closely—and even some who have—that all of this can be established without any difficulty.  The facts that he marshals seem very persuasive and should be impossible to ignore—although any number of purported Iran “experts” have managed to do so over the last year.  It is also striking that Mousavi has chosen not to focus on these facts, but insisted instead that the election simply be tossed out and done over. Eric concludes his analysis with a number of trenchant observations:     

“No credible evidence published so far indicates that Ahmadinejad stole Iran’s 2009 presidential election—or, for that matter, that any fraud at all occurred.  The second point is important because many commentators have grudgingly accepted Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy only because his margin was large enough that they believe he would have won even without cheating.  Nearly as telling, there appears to have been no serious effort by Mousavi or his supporters to find such evidence…Nor have independent critics maintained their initial enthusiasm.  The Chatham House Preliminary Analysis never advanced beyond its self-described “preliminary” stage, despite the author’s own suggestion that his brief analysis “be followed up should the fully disaggregated ‘by polling station’ data be released during the ongoing dispute.”  Precisely that data was released just days later, but no “follow up” has appeared.  The response of nearly all pro-Mousavi analysts to the published ballot-box data has been largely the same:  silence.  Statisticians such as Roukema, Beber and Scacco appear to have ignored it entirely.  Even the few who have examined ballot-box-level data—Professor Mebane, for example—have overlooked or ignored its real significance.  For the first time ever in an Iranian presidential election, it was a simple matter to find evidence of vote-count fraud:  just compare the Interior Ministry count with the field count approved by a Mousavi observer, for any ballot box or for all of them.  It is fair to ask why no one has done this, or why they have not published their findings if they have. 

Despite the absence of evidence—or perhaps because of it—Mousavi’s demand has never changed:  Don’t investigate the election; just toss it out and do it over.  One wonders how Americans would have reacted if Al Gore had demanded this in 2000.  Mousavi has never explained what would happen if a second election were held and it yielded the same result.  Would he demand another do-over, and then another, until Iran’s voters get it right?  Even his most ardent supporters eventually would insist on evidence.  If eventually, why not now?  It is not fair to the 24 million Iranians who appear to have voted for Ahmadinejad—nor is it democratic—for a government to “compromise” with a defeated candidate by nullifying an election without a sound basis for doing so.  The loser has a right to complain about an unfair election, but the winner, and those who voted for him, have an equal right to insist that a valid election be respected.  One side will always be disappointed with an election result—but that is democracy, not fraud.  Fraud requires evidence, not merely surprise, disappointment and suspicion. 

All of this matters outside Iran as well.  One suspects that Western leaders acknowledge Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy when they talk privately with their foreign counterparts, but many of them posture in public.  Even those officials who have been comparatively restrained in their public statements on the election…welcome support from election-doubters for confrontational stances they take toward Iran on other grounds.  Most Western media outlets routinely refer to the election as tainted, and many writers insist that policy toward Iran must reflect this.  Those who disagree are often described as regime apologists, or naïve at best.  But they are merely accepting the election results.  It is time others did too.”  

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett