what makes gary sick or juan cole so sure it isn't 1953 all over again?

[click image of Mohammed Mosaddeq]

We know for sure that the U.S. and Israel have had all manner of operatives, including JSOC assassination teams, swarming all over Iran for at least the last three years, virtuoso agents provocateurs not excluded. I don't understand why everyone is this quick to describe this as a paranoid blunder of power-mad dictators. Now that we have Mr. Charming Democratic Pants, who I seem to be thinking of more as President Go Fuck Yourself, do we suddenly want Halliburton et al. to get their hands on the prize, or whut?

Something is definitely not cricket. And Mousavi may really have been the big favorite who got robbed, or he might not, but are the men who have so courageously resisted giving their country away to vampire capitalist kelptocrats all this time really as stupid and horrible as people seem so quick to paint them?

And where did they get the "computer voting" equipment I heard on al Jazeera would be checked for accuracy? Pfeh. Does anyone out there yet have a grasp of how ANYBODY can hack those? With all the monstrous perfidies floating around out there, and so many of them aimed at Iran, can we just sit back and take these pot shots without considering the real world implications of all this stuff?

How ridiculously EASY is it to prey on the urges for Western-style sophistication in Iranian youth? Or in any Muslim women who want out of uniform and into their full human potential? Or the poor who think they can get a better life with Westerners sucking all the profits out of their veins? I'm not sticking up for the oppression of Iranians. They have every right to expect to be free and happy and prosperous, but, really: THINK!

DO THEY HAVE TO PAY FOR IT WITH ALL THEIR COUNTRY'S WEALTH?

That COULD be what's in progress at this very moment... or what the leadership just bloodily calamitously, but none the less rightly, believed themselves to be preventing. There are way too many unconsidered angles. Yes there are....

Quoth Robert Fisk: ...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...."

So, now, really, I feel I must repeat, Yes. There. Are.

First posted: 13 June 2009, 10pm Pacific

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Update, next day: I stayed up stupidly late again last night, taking in the hourly al Jazeera reports, which incrementally give me shots of insight. All the griping about Ahmadinejad's handling of the economy, for instance, stems from the fact that he gives about a quarter of the state's money to the poor. I'm unclear how this creates inflation unless it is merely merchants raising prices to fleece the poor of their sudden windfalls, but, dudes, I'm no economist. Anyway, despite input that even the poor are griping about this because he gives them this money like alms for the poor, as though they are beggars, this is astoundingly decent of him. He has been making sure that destitute people get fed and get educated and get a chance for lives of prosperity. So, if you've been doubting the rest of the country could drown out Tehran to this extent, I am sorry, but, sheesh, this cannot possibly have counted against him at the polls. It amazes me he didn't win by an even bigger margin.

This really seems to be shaking out as a disconnect between the more sophisticated faction of metropolitan society and the general public at large. And it seems that the intellects and liberal-hearted there are about as unable to hang with the imperatives of the poor as we are here. I do exclude myself from this, not because I'm so damn poor and know how they must feel, because I am wealthy in comparison, and because I have spent decades training myself out of these deadly little unwitting hypocrisies of the self beclouding true sense. Someone doing that, even if he is an embarrassment of fundamentalism and a severe lack of diplomatic grace, is going to win elections with record turnouts. Far more believable the record turnout was due completely to the threat of Mousavi's popularity to the struggling masses.

And don't forget the ocean of lies about the so-called Russian invasion of Georgia last summer, in which we were all almost drowned. The truth was almost nowhere to be found in our press. How much the worse do you know it has to be on something like this?

I'm going to start tacking on links here, semi-willy-nilly it my effort to flesh this out some.

Craig Murray makes a supremely diplomatic accounting, which is notable mostly for its inclusion of uncomfortable facts that shouldn't be ignored. The intellectual and creative and liberal Iranians are sick to death of living under the thumbs of dictators and their whims. Who could fault them for that?

Abbas Barzegar, who was there....

Xymphora not subtly reminding us who wishes Iran harm... and I got her link through an email linking me to Notsylvia Night who is making some good points on the matter from Iceland.

Atheo makes it abundantly clear how much pressure there is to discredit these elections....

The reported blockages in internet services which cast so much doubt on the regime may have been merely an overloaded system....

Lenin's Tomb knocks it out of the park again....

I don't know how many more links I will be adding, so you should look back now and again to see, if you are interested. It seems as though Andrew Sullivan may have yanked everyone's chain last night about Iranian election officials declaring the result invalid and calling a do-over, but the page has either been taken down or is so flooded with traffic I can't get to it. It is a day old now and NO news outlet is reporting any such a thing, so it's pretty safe to say it was a hoax, no? There are also scattered reports of a huge Mousavi propaganda campaign on Twitter, but, pfeh, go tweet yourself, I would almost rather suffer the tortures of the damned than to go suffer the tortures of the damned to suss that one out for myself. I can believe it, prima facie, because it is an ideal tool for that action. Have at it if you are into that sort of thing.

So, Amadinejad won. Fair and square.

I am dirt certain the violence against the protesters would not have been so preëmptively harsh unless something had frightened the ayatollahs very badly. That would NOT have been Mousavi, and it wouldn't have been the students, though I'm sure they wouldn't have put up with much guff from them if it started getting out of hand. It looks to me as though they were made to believe something quite existentially threatening was in place... and it might have been, or be. Nothing else accounts for such harshness from them, to my way of thinking. Look at the polls cited by Lenin. Neither the president, nor the ayatollahs, had any reason to fear Mousavi to the point of arresting him and/or members of his staff, and bashing heads as Fisk so vividly described, unless there had been some indication something way more threatening than his popularity in Tehran and abroad. They had nothing to worry about, and they KNEW they had nothing to worry about... even if he'd won. Something else has to account for it. It may LOOK like paranoia, but, well, no matter how much I revile the strictures they put on their people, and the executions, they have demonstrated their kindly intent toward the population, and their willingness to endure moderates in opposition, and I don't believe paranoia is a factor here at all.

Seriously. DO NOT discount the intense pressure of Mossad, CIA, DIA, JSOC, U.S.-and-Israel-backed terrorist groups, the flood of agents provocateurs the Iranian leadership has been battling in silence for YEARS. There is outright no reason to begin to dream these malign forces would leave the election go completely unmolested.

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I think I need to reiterate some of the links found through the Lenin's Tomb post, for emphasis.

Complete Terror Free Tomorrow survey data [pdf]....

New America Foundation support for the integrity and methodology of the Terror Free Tomorrow poll

Support for the efficacy of Ahmadinejad's policies, and the notion the election went along class lines....

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Old Uncle Dave sends along this link about the rumor Mousavi had been told he'd won when he announced so precipitously his victory. This was something that jumped out at me while listening to the news reports about it late Friday night. What in the world would cause him to declare victory so early? Everyone was focussed on the ministry declaring for Ahmadinejad so early, but even earlier Mousavi was declaring it for himself. You have to admit that the challenger coming out so early with such a statement is pretty weird, and might have caused authorities to come right out in response with more authoritative information. Weirder still is an Iranian filmmaker in Paris being asked to make the announcement this way? Whut? Was Mousavi set up?

[And I do NOT mean by Ahmadinejad or the ayatollahs.]

Wouldn't that explain so very much of this mess?

After all, the skunks with the puppet strings are not exactly unfamiliar with Mir-Hossein Mousavi:

Quoth Yassamine Mather: After all, irrespective of the illusions of their supporters, Moussavi and the other reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, are no radical opponents of the regime. For eight years, Moussavi served as prime minister of the Islamic republic - during some of the darkest days of this regime. He was deeply involved in the arms-for-hostages deals with the Reagan administration in the1980s, what came to be known as ‘Irangate’. He also played a prominent role in the brutal wave of repression in the 1980s that killed a generation of Iranian leftists. During this period, thousands of socialists and communists were jailed, with many of them executed while in prison.

This is in tune with the smirking on al Jazeera about him as Iran's Obama. So. Again. How did the support for him get stoked to this much of a frenzy? And why did he make such a jackass mistake as to declare overwhelming victory at a ridiculously precipitous point in the counting? What possibly can this pre-approved-by-the-ruling-clerics candidate have done to send the ayatollahs over the cliff of such a harsh crackdown where they had abstained from such brutality for so long?

And what kind of crazy was "Ahmadinejad the Bad" to be promising the faithful to name the corrupt, when even an imbecile would know to be more gracious at such a time?

Even though I can't go so far as to think Mousavi was involved in some sort of coup attempt, or destabilization scheme, at least not wittingly, I can very seriously believe he was used to create chaos. Was he set up?

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I never thought I'd be linking to Newsweek, but there you have it... I only went there on the advice of Glenn Greenwald. I wouldn't have gone on my own.

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I think these Iranians who are fed up with the embarrassing bumpkin are playing directly into the hands of the international forces -- lovingly known as NEOCONS -- whom they revile for their rapacious and inhumane aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon and Palestine. They have been whipped up into a frenzy of hope for release into a more cosmopolitan and less restrictive government by a bunch of EVIL war criminals.

There is one rabidly anti-theocracy Iranian blogger who seems to think Ahmadinejad has gotten control of the Revolutionary Guard from the ayatollahs and there has been a coup. Others, according to shamelessly pro-Israel groupthink, are begging Obama not to recognize this government.

I BELIEVE THESE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN BRUTALLY DECEIVED, THEIR HOPES STOKED, THEIR FEARS SET ABLAZE, AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS AVID TO SPLATTER THIS ALL OVER THE INSIDES OF OUR POOR CONDITIONED MENTALITIES UNTIL EVERYTHING THAT IS IRAN'S IS ONCE AGAIN OURS.

I cannot stress hard enough how dangerous this is.

I'm begging you, now. THINK!

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AND REMEMBER!

[Short interview from 2008 with Sy Hersh about agents in Iran.]