The Aftermath of Iran 2009 Elections

The actual results of the 2009 presidential elections in Iran may never be known factually. But the actual tallies of the votes cast may have never had anything to do with anything in the first place.

This does not mean that, in the aftermath of the announcement of the election results, the outrage displayed on the streets by the supporters of the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, America's favorite horse in the race, does not indicate real hurt. Those Americans who, to this day, are still bitter about the non-election of Al Gore in the 2000 debacle, can get an idea of the Iranians' sense of betrayal if they take their outrage at the clearly stolen outcome in 2000 and intensify it by a factor of ... oh, about a million.

At least in the American version in 2000, they took their merry time to go through a totally legalistic looking, convoluted process to deny Al Gore his victory at the polls.

In the Iranian version, in contrast, they didn't bother with realistic looking anything: not realistic final numbers nor a realistic looking process; opposition candidates' campaigners had limited or no access to major transit points in the ballot boxes' moves and in the ballot-counting process, and quite honestly, the first-round 'landslide' looks particularly unrealistic. They must be in some kind of hurry for something, since a run-off second round would have finalized everything by the last week of June, regardless. But, no; they just took it clean, and took it in the least amount of time possible.

Observers sympathetic with Ahmadinejad will definitely object that surely he had a very solid support base, especially in the rural areas (about 32% of the population) and among the poor and the lower working classes, particularly in smaller cities and towns, and had a respectable enough following even in the big cities; clearly the more numerous classes were on his side. Ahmadinejad's support base, further, is much more politically active and more positively inspired by Ahmadinejad's politics, whereas Mousavi supporters were not so much inspired positively by their candidate's charisma or oratory skills (both thoroughly lacking) or concrete programs (totally missing), as they were motivated by their dislike for Ahmadinejad.

Stolen or not, these 'elections' produced (what I would characterize as) what the officialdom of Iran has decided to present to the world as their spokesperson and part director of the system.

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