Hot Air has a roundup of reports and reaction to the apparently rigged election in Iran. Allahpundit wonders why the regime didn't try to make the result appear somewhat convincing....
Everyone expected the margin to be close after such a nasty campaign; a close Ahmadinejad win, with Mousavi victorious in the urban areas he was supposed to carry, would have been credible. I guess they figured that a narrow defeat would be treated as even more suspect by Mousavi’s supporters, so they went in the opposite direction and made it a landslide — to an implausible degree, as it turned out. Two: With the regime more illegitimate than ever, where does this leave The One vis-a-vis nuke negotiations? He’s been careful in the past to distinguish Khamenei from the more toxic Ahmadinejad, but Khamenei blessed the results today as a “divine assessment.” His credibility’s shot now, too. If Obama meets with him anyway, it’ll put the U.S. on the side of a sham government against the Iranian people more starkly than ever before.
Michael Ledeen had warned of the illegitimacy of this exercise well before the event, and has a follow-up report in the aftermath.
Ever since the proclamation of Ahmadinezhad’s “triumph,” the streets of the cities have been boiling with anti-regime demonstrations, with the predictable violent crackdown from the security forces. There is hardly a city anywhere in the country where demonstrations are not taking place, and you can gauge the seriousness of the situation by the regime’s response:- Mousavi and Karrubi, the two “reformist” candidates in Friday’s “elections” are under house arrest, along with dozens of their followers;
- “Reformist” journalists and activists have been rounded up and jailed;
- Cell phones (including, after a day’s delay, international cell phones) have been blocked, access to internet has been filtered, facebook is unreachable, and you can’t tweet (can the silencing of Western reporters be far behind?);
- In Tehran, student dormitories are surrounded by security forces.
Stalin would be proud. But even his Soviet Union eventually succumbed to the dissidents, and while the regime has most all of the guns, the chains, the clubs, the tear gas cannisters, and the torture chambers, there are tens of millions of Iranians who hate the regime. The question is whether they are prepared to face down the Basij, the police, and the Revolutionary Guards.
When the candidates must be pre-approved by the dictators, whatever the result may be, it is not democracy. It's unfortunate that this sham was lauded in advance by the Obama people as a legitimate expression of the will of the Iranian people. Now would be a wonderful time for Obama to make a strong public statement of support for the Iranian people's right to select their own leadership. Or at least something beyond Saturday's statement that..."We continue to monitor the entire situation closely, including reports of irregularities." Stephen Hayes says now would be a good time for some of that "smart power" we've been hearing about.
Don't miss Michael Totten....lots of video and links.
UPDATE 6/15:
“I don’t think the middle class is ever going to go out and vote again”
Taranto is noting the good news in the Iranian election story....that erstwhile apologists for the Iranian regime like Roger Cohen and Juan Cole are now chastened by reports of fraud and post-election brutality and oppression. Then there's the bad news...albeit with a silver lining...
The bad news that Iran is still ruled by a vicious, lunatic regime that not only abuses its own people but threatens Israel with annihilation and the entire region with a nuclear arms race. This is very bad, though it's news only to regime apologists like Cohen--and, as we noted Friday, it would have been true even had challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi prevailed in the vote. A Mousavi victory, however, would have made the nature of the regime easier to deny. Clarity is the one unquestionable benefit of the outcome.Posted by dan at June 13, 2009 10:07 PM | TrackBack