Max Forte's List: Iran Election, U.S. Intervention, and the "Left"

• Who are and who promoted these leftist intellectuals who question the social uprising of the people in Iran
• Over the decades I have learned not to expect much from what passes for "the left" in North America and/or Western Europe when it comes to the politics of what their colonial ancestry has called "the Middle East"
• I do expect much more when it comes to our own progressive intellectuals -- Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, Africans and Latin Americans. This is not a racial bifurcation, but a regional typology along the colonial divide.
• Whereas Bishara's piece (with aspects of which I have had reason to disagree) is predicated on a detailed awareness of the Iranian scene, accumulated over the last 30 years of the Islamic Republic and even before, Zizek's (the conclusion of which I completely disagree with) is entirely spontaneous and impressionistic, predicated on as much knowledge about Iran as I have about the mineral composition of the planet Jupiter.
• The examples can be multiplied by many, when we add to what Azmi Bishara has written pieces by Mustafa El-Labbad and Galal Nassar, for example, and compare them to the confounded blindness of Paul Craig Roberts, Anthony DiMaggio, Michael Veiluva, James Petras, Jeremy Hammond, Eric Margolis, and many others.
• those farthest from it write with an almost unanimous exposure of their constitutional ignorance
• not having the foggiest idea what has happened in that country over the last 30 years
• to take more than 70 million human beings as stooges of the CIA and puppets of the Saudis
• Let me begin by stating categorically that in principle I share the fundamental political premise of the left, its weariness of US imperial machination, of major North American and Western European media (but by no means all of them) by and large missing the point on what is happening around the globe, or even worse seeing things from the vantage point of their governmental cues, which they scarcely question.
• With all his promises and pomp and ceremonies, President Obama is yet to show in any significant and tangible way his change of course in the region from that of the previous administration.
• The US Congress, prompted by AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee), pro-war vigilantes lurking in the halls of power in Washington DC, and Israeli warlords and their propaganda machinery in the US, are all excited about the events in Iran and are doing their damnedest to turn them to their advantage. The left, indeed, has reason to worry.
• being blind and deaf to a massive social movement is something entirely different
• having principled positions on geopolitics is one thing
• My concern here is not with that retrograde strand in the North American or Western European left that is siding with Ahmadinejad
• hey are a lost cause, and frankly no one could care less what they think of the world.
• What does concern me is when an Arab intellectual like Asad AbuKhalil opts to go public with his assessment of this movement -- and what he says so vertiginously smacks of recalcitrant fanaticism, steadfastly insisting on a belligerent ignorance
• that he dare not take a stand
• since the US media is not covering the Honduras development as closely as it does (or so AbuKhalil fancies) the Iranian event
• But at what point does a legitimate criticism of media representations degenerate into an illegitimate disregard for reality itself; or has a sophomoric reading of postmodernity so completely corrupted our moral standards that there is no reality any more, just representation?
• If AbuKhalil has this bizarre obsession with the American or Saudi media that he loves to hate, does that psychological fixation ipso facto deprive an entire nation of their defiance against tyranny, their agency in changing their own destiny?
• But he has such a deeply colonised mind that he thinks nothing of us, of our will to fight imperial intervention, colonial occupation of our homelands, and domestic tyranny at one and the same time.
• For people like Zizek, social upheavals in what they call the Third World are a matter of theoretical entertainment. It is an old tradition that goes back all the way to Sartre on Algeria and Cuba in the 1950s, down to Foucault on Iran in the 1970s. That does not bother me a bit. In fact, I find it quite entertaining -- watching grown up people make complete fools of themselves talking about something about which they have no blasted clue.
• A colonised mind is a colonised mind whether it is occupied by the European right or by the cliché-ridden left

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• Hamid Dabashi is criticizing me here. He seems focused (but very selectively and unrepresentative) on what I have been writing on my website on Iran, and manages to misunderstand what I say, or manages to distort what I say.
• It seems to me that you can't from exile pretend to be one with the Iranian masses under tyranny just as I can't from exile pretend to be one with the Arab masses under tyranny. Let us be aware of our privileges and locations and let us remember that famous dictum by Marx in the German Ideology. Are you trying for purposes of political sympathy to erase class and geographical boundaries?
• to say that the US, Saudi and other reactionary forces were involved in a conspiracy in Iran is in no way to deny the existence of a genuine and sincere movement in Iran against the oppressive regime there
• On the blog in English, of course I am more concerned with Western media representation and yet you even managed to misunderstand those, or seem hurt by my criticisms of the New York Times' and CNN's coverage of Iran, and on that we disagree
• Please diagnose me, o expert on leftist maladies
• I don't pose as Iran expert but I comment on matters of international affairs
• the two don't contradict one another. To say that there is an American plot in Iran is not to say that all the protesters in Iran are tools of a Western plot
• he has appointed himself as the world authority on Leftism, Arab and otherwise
• That was the point I was making: that one should not rely on those silly New York Times articles but should rely on the Iranian peoples themselves. Get it?
• Dabashi then ends his article by a string of cliches, but then again, that is what he does: stringing leftist sounding cliches.
• But here is the problem with Dabashi: he claims to be responding to Arab leftists on Iran but he has only read one piece by Azmi Bisharah (and missed what he had to say in Arabic on the subject), and he cites a few of my blog posts on the subject.

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• If the headlines had spoken of a “Twitter revolution in Canada,” a North American society with very widespread broadband Internet access, and almost complete Internet penetration, and one of the highest rates of personal computer ownership, one would have still needed to be very skeptical: 74% of Canadians surveyed have never even heard of Twitter, and only 1.45% of Canadians actually use Twitter, most of those being young, professionals, or in universities
• according to a study done by the Harvard Business School, only 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of Twitter content
• it is doubt that is most absent from the analyses that have been hastily proffered — and when skepticism is absent from analysis, what are we left with? Hype, promotional propaganda, wishful thinking — a rush to the headline-grabbing punchline
• This is indeed a “revolution”…but it’s for Twitter, this entity whose very existence resembles the classic story of the start up from the last dot com bust of the late 1990s, a “Bubble 2.0″ firm operating in a recession no less, without ever producing a business plan, and yet getting $20 million here and $30 million there in financing
• Twitter may be as irrelevant to Iran as it is good for the promotion of Twitter itself, and for the self-flattery of some ardent Twitter users who believe that their tweets and their green-tinted avatars will change the world, or at least Iran.
• The revolution will not only be tweeted, it will be fast and easy, and it will be led by Americans themselves, “for Iran”.
• What there is instead is a rush to the finish line, a predetermined conclusion to immediately thank and praise Twitter in the context of Iran’s street protests.
• In total, only a third of Iranians even have Internet access (we saw in the Canadian case that Internet access does not translate into Twitter use) and, very interestingly, the youth who are most associated with the protests and with Twitter use, consist of 18-to-24-year-olds who in fact comprise “the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups”
• The Associated Press has produced a similar analysis, noting that in Iran, “Internet usage is mostly still a phenomenon of the affluent, the youth and city-dwellers — meaning Twitter and other networks are used mostly by the young and liberal — and may overemphasize their numbers while ignoring more-conservative political sentiments among the non-connected.”
• So in this Twitter revolution, Twitter is not representative of Internet users, Internet use is not representative of a wider population, the youth are not representative of the youth, and the Iranians may not even be Iranian. Fantastic indeed, this power of “social media”.
• Hanson Hosein, director of digital media at the University of Washington, wrote “I’m having a hard time filtering through #iranelection, beyond the re-tweets and second-hand information passed around by Twitterers outside the country….We can’t take [tweets] at face value. It can be quite dangerous. We should be doing as much fact-checking as possible”
• Michael Crowley also wrote, “One thing that really bothers me about these twitters and first-hand accounts posted on blogs is that there’s no way to verify them; I’ve seen several that either seemed suspect or turned out to be false”
• Not only does Twitter allow Americans to engage in participant voyeurism, it allows them to create the “news” about Iran for Iranians themselves, and apparently making it up as they go along. Indeed, anyone can be an Iranian in Twitter, and in fact all are being encouraged to “become” Iranian
• The problem as we see is that when everybody is in Iran, nobody is in Iran.
• One Twitter user pleaded, “don’t retweet anything until it’s confirmed, spreading rumors will do more harm than good #iranelection” — but then, how is it confirmed? Propaganda journalism often gets unmasked; in Twitter, propaganda gets retweeted and thus remasked.
• many of the tweets themselves link to mainstream media sources
• As for “social media” providing egalitarian access and voice for everyone, what is most immediately apparent from #iranelection in Twitter is the drive to silence some voices: “all users IGNORE all post except from reliable sources,” said one. How do you know a source is “reliable” in Twitter? “I’m really following this closely. Fascinating watching the protests unfold” — but you are not actually watching the protests. You are entertaining an illusion in your mind that is generated by the tweets.
• That the U.S. government has an active interest in the unfolding of the “Twitter revolution” for Iran, is an established fact. The U.S. State Department intervened to ask Twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance break so as to not interrupt tweets about Iran — “Ian Kelly, a state department spokesman, told reporters at a briefing that he had recognized over the weekend the importance of social media ‘as a vital tool for citizens’ empowerment and as a way for people to get their messages out’. He said: ‘It was very clear to me that these kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy – spreading the word about what was going on’”

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• Before proceeding, I should indicate what my own biases are regarding the Iranian election protests. First, I have no love for either of the major contenders, whether Mir Hosein Mousavi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or any Ayatollah. I also have no “hatred” for Ahmadinejad and I appreciate his tough stance against the U.S. and Israel. Second, I suspect that there might have been some electoral fraud, but there is no publicly available evidence yet for anything other than voting irregularities that in themselves do not amount to evidence of fraud. Third — and this pertains to the focus of the article below — I do not believe that the Iranian protests were either “instigated” or “orchestrated” by foreign interests, whether media, NGOs, or government agencies. I do not think that the Iranian people are mindless pawns ready to snap into suicidal anti-government actions because of the desires of a foreign power; if I believed otherwise, it would be granting foreign powers with nearly magical, super human qualities, and Iranians would be credited with the opposite. Likewise, I do not believe that one can defeat imperialism by devouring one’s own people and showing them merciless cruelty, while pronouncing that their own constitutionally protected rights to freedom of speech and assembly are “illegal” — assuming that I have even understood what has actually transpired in Iran these past weeks. Fourth, it is depressing to see a situation where the only options discussed seem to swing between authoritarian Islamic rule, Western ideas of socialism, or Western consumerist individualism — to the extent that these delineate the terrain of debate, and I am not sure that they do, then all sides would appear to be utterly hopeless. It can sometimes look like a clash between Eurocentrism and its inversions, at least from afar.
• To assert that foreign powers could engineer a local upheaval is usually far fetched, even when discussing so-called micro-states with all of their proclaimed external vulnerabilities.
• However, to assert that foreign powers do not try to manipulate the course of events, do not try to spread misinformation, do not seek to curry favour with certain factions, and do not have an exploitative interest in the development and outcome of local political processes, is not only equally far fetched, it is patently false.
• Nobody can argue that the United States, Israel, Britain, and Canada have a merely neutral and dispassionate stance to the unfolding events in Iran.
• Not wanting to credit them with possession of magical bullets that can fell any opponent does not entitle us to dismiss their actual interests and involvements.
• The government of Iran has recently accused foreign powers of “meddling” in Iranian affairs. On this point, I agree. Meddling is not orchestration. Meddling is seeking to influence local affairs in the hope of altering them to suit certain interests.
• One actor at work in allegedly promoting democracy in Iran is Kenneth R. Timmerman (see here and here) a journalist, writer, and founder and current executive director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran
• the FDI received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy
• The NED has shown a consistent interest in “democracy promotion” in Iran
• The NED also serves as the secretariat of the World Movement for Democracy which in 2000 admitted “Iran’s Pro-Democracy Student Movement” to its World Steering Committee
• consistent interest in supporting students in Iran
• Kenneth Timmerman in “State Department Backs ‘Reformists’ in Wild Iranian Election,”

• The National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting “color” revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques.

   

  Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.
• some opposition parties in Iran called for a boycott of the elections, Mousavi did not
• U.S. government’s Voice of America banned those calling for a boycott from its airwaves
• “it’s as if the State Department and Voice of America had become campaign advisers to Mousavi.”
• “Saeed Behbehani, the owner of Mihan TV in suburban Washington, D.C., says he recently spoke with a well-known Iranian-American businessman who boasts of his ties to the State Department and who just returned from a trip to Dubai. The businessman said he met with Mousavi’s campaign manager, Mehdi Khazali.”
• Seymour Hersh’s July 2008 article in the New Yorker, “Preparing the Battlefield: The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves Against Iran,” the U.S. Congress agreed to provide up to $400 million for covert activities in Iran which would involve “support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations”
• U.S. Special Operations Forces have conducted cross-border operations from southern Iraq into Iran since at least 2007

• On 25 February 2007 the Telegraph published “US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran,” whose primary destabilization efforts were to put pressure on Iran to not seek nuclear weapons. However, that assumed goal changed when on 27 May 2007 the Telegraph published another article, “Bush sanctions ‘black ops’ against Iran,” that stated that CIA-directed “black operations” now had a more ambitious aim, that of bringing about “regime change” in Iran:

   

   

  “Mr Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilise, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs”.
• Terrorist attacks within Iran, and directed specifically against Ahmadinejad’s campaign, spiked just prior to the recent elections
• CIA was also allowed “to supply communications equipment which would enable opposition groups in Iran to work together and bypass internet censorship by the clerical regime”
• One actor seeking to send that message, and “winning hearts and minds,” is “Swift boat Veterans for Truth” member Jerome Corsi, whose NGO, the Iran Freedom Foundation (IFF), inaugurated a 12-day “Iran Freedom Walk” from Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell to Washington, DC in 2005
• ne of the very founders of the FDI itself, Joshua Muravchik, is the author of a 19 November 2006 article in the Los Angeles Times titled, “Bomb Iran,” whose lead sentence is: “WE MUST bomb Iran”
• Iran Freedom Support Act, which would eventually provide up to $50 million to NGOs working to support democratic change along the lines of the various coloured revolutions of eastern Europe, a projection of “soft power” that has now become fashionable in Washington
• Section 402 of the Act

• Jared Cohen and,

   

   

  “his role as press contact for the Alliance of Youth Movements. Launched in late 2008 with a Summit in NYC, the AYM gathered together an ensemble of media corporations, Obama consultants, social network entrepreneurs, and youth organizations, under the auspices of the State Department. Representatives came from Media Old (MTV, NBC, CNN) and New (Google and especially Facebook). The AYM produced a Field Manual and a series of How-to videos (How to Create a Grassroots Movement Using Social-Networking Sites, How to Smart Mob, How to Circumvent an Internet Proxy). The goal was to have youth leaders from around the world learn, share and discuss how to build powerful grassroots movements.”

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• This essay is a response to Maximilian Forte’s essay “Causation or Correlation, a Useful Crisis Notwithstanding: U.S. Democracy Promotion in Iran.”
• Maximilian’s chief assertion in the Causation or Correlation essay is that the “U.S. government has (not directly) created Iranian discontent and marshaled Iranian youths to risk their lives protesting during a brutal crackdown” is probably correct
• What he fails to indicate is how foreign agents can have a more powerful, same, or very similar impact utilizing methods that are congruent to outright involvement
• My position is that while the U.S. may not be outright extensively stage-managing the protests, they are never the less utilizing various Iranian political actors, propaganda and other instruments to influence public opinion and a have great impact without outright involvement
• foreign agents (CIA and oil corporations) have and continue to play a monumental role in the orchestration and current meddling in the events of Iran
• I posit that the paradigm of “mass-involvement” i.e. on-site training, marshaling and other assistance of local resistance is not applicable in urban pre-war combat contexts. In countries that have not been outright invaded such as Iran, the paradigm of “specific-involvement” utilizing multi-layer human proxies and trusted cut-outs (intermediaries) better fits. Specific-involvement allows for both orchestration and involvement through human leverage.
• True, the U.S. Government has not created the current discontent, but what does that matter when the U.S. and British governments have significantly influenced the chain of events, albeit some inadvertent since the 1940s that led to the current discontent
• Utilizing specific-events allows foreign agents to blend in and conduct “attacks” and merge with the local population, essentially it is the updated imperialist version of hit-and-run.
• using proxies and cut-outs allows outside agents to disavow all knowledge about the proxy or the cut-out
• In conclusion, the use of multiple and fragmented local proxies and cut-outs to conduct specific-involvement events that strike at socio-cultural and psychological nerves and meta data alteration are the preferred and updated tools of the imperialist guerrilla during urban pre-war involvement.

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• "The funding increase for “Internet freedom, ’’ as it is called on Capitol Hill, is part of a State Department budget line item labeled Near East Regional Democracy, but details are secret. A Senate budget committee supported the increase, but recommended that $30 million of the funds be devoted to the expanded Internet effort
• The move to fund Internet activists is not entirely new
• Obama supports the Internet effort
• Although the Bush administration never funded a special Internet initiative, it spent 25 to 40 percent of its Iran democracy promotion money on Internet-related activities, according to David Denehy, who headed the State Department’s Iran grants from 2005 to 2007
• the State Department gave funds to Freedom House, which translated and disseminated a manual called “Everybody’s Guide to Bypassing Internet Censorship,’’ and another on how to do peaceful protests."

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• the Washington Institute, Hoover Institution, American Enterprise Insitute, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies now speak for the Iranian people
• those people called for sanctions against the Iranian people IN THE NAME of the Iranian people
• The next step is predicatable: those same people will call for bombing Iran IN THE NAME of the Iranian people
• the shift from a Republican to a Democratic administration makes no difference whatsoever when it comes to the Middle East

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• "As an Iranian-American who grew up in Iran, I couldn't disagree more with my fellow Iranian-American's opinion that Sen. John McCain cares about human rights in Iran ("An Iranian-American thanks McCain," Letters, Thursday). I wouldn't be fooled by the senator's advocacy to help ordinary Iranians since he has continuously pushed for sanctions against Iran, which hurt the general population there. If he truly cared about Iranians, he would help lift the embargo on non-military equipment, such as civilian-aircraft spare parts, which are desperately needed in Iran at this time. A number of recent aircraft

  

  crashes resulting in the loss of hundreds of innocent Iranian lives have been attributed to the U.S. embargo of these spare parts. I will never forget when he sang "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" on one of his campaign stops...If Sen. McCain were sincerely concerned about human rights and freedom, he would also criticize other Muslim countries friendly to the U.S. and which Israel does not consider its enemy, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Turkey, in which human-rights abuses are much more widespread."

• The US Congress now cares about the Iranian people. This is as vapid as when the Feminist Majority (which used to sell on its website pieces of Burqah to express solidarity with women in Afghanistan--although it did not sell plastic black eyes to show solidarity with victims of domestic violence here in the US) feigned concern over the women in Afghanistan

• Funding for cyber resistance
• The Obama administration is poised to dramatically increase funding aimed at helping Iranian activists circumvent government controls on the Internet, according to Congressional aides, marking a new wave of US support for Web-based dissent at a time when the Iranian regime has clamped down on street protests
• The funding, which is set to double from $15 million in 2009 to $30 million next year for Iran and other countries that block free speech on the Internet, puts the US government in an unlikely alliance with counterculture computer activists
• Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which received State Department funds in 2007 to study the Internet’s impact on democracy and currently has a grant to look into what kinds of people are trying to get around government Internet filters
• could be a windfall for nonprofit organizations that provide Iranians with ways to view websites blocked by the regime
• some in Congress question whether the effort is consistent with Obama’s stated goals of engaging, rather than antagonizing, the Iranian regime
• Iran, which has repeatedly accused the United States of trying to engineer a revolution inside its borders
• The funding could also become controversial, since the Internet tools developed to protect the identities of democracy organizers in Iran can also be used to hide networks of Internet criminals and terrorists. Another concern is that the US funding will spur repressive regimes to step up their own efforts to censor and spy on the Internet, sparking an arms race of sorts in cyberspace
• President Bush’s controversial effort to directly fund dissidents in Iran
• One of the most popular anonymizers in Iran is a software program known as Tor
• Tor began as a volunteer effort, Lewman said. In recent years it has gotten funding from the Department of Defense and the State Department, channeled through the Broadcasting Board of Governors, aimed at improving access to Voice of America in places where it has been blocked. Last year, about half of the group’s $500,000 budget came from the US government
• Tor continues to have an estimated 8,000 users at any given time in Iran
• “We do not want people to think we are an arm of the Great Satan,’’ said Eric Raymond, a self-described anarchist, who began helping Iranian activists in June, when one wrote his blog asking for help in the wake of the postelection crackdown.
• Although the Bush administration never funded a special Internet initiative, it spent 25 to 40 percent of its Iran democracy promotion money on Internet-related activities, according to David Denehy, who headed the State Department’s Iran grants from 2005 to 2007
• Under Denehy’s tenure, the State Department gave funds to Freedom House, which translated and disseminated a manual called “Everybody’s Guide to Bypassing Internet Censorship,’’ and another on how to do peaceful protests.

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• The New York Times correspondent in Beirut continued to cover the Iran story from...Beirut. But there is a new twist to the NYT coverage: notice that a correspondent from London was added to the mix: "Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London, Nazila Fathi from Toronto, and independent observers from Tehran." Wow.
• why do people who appear as guests on mainstream US media feel obliged to defend the coverage of those media no matter how lousy they are in their coverage?

• Since the June 12 Iranian presidential elections, Iran "experts” have mushroomed like bacteria in a Petri dish. So here is a quiz for all those instant experts. Which major country has elected more presidents than any in the world since 1980? Further, which nation is the only one that held ten presidential elections within thirty years of its revolution?

   

  The answer to both questions, of course, is Iran. Since 1980, it has elected six presidents, while the U.S. is a close second with five, and France at three. In addition, the U.S. held four presidential elections within three decades of its revolution to Iran’s ten.
• Even the blogosphere has joined this battle with near uniformity, on the side of Iran’s opposition, which is quite rare in cyberspace.
• Much of the allegations of election fraud have been just that: unsubstantiated accusations. No one has yet been able to provide a solid shred of evidence of wide scale fraud that would have garnered eleven million votes for one candidate over his opponent.
• More than thirty pre-election polls were conducted in Iran since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main opponent, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, announced their candidacies in early March 2009.
• some of the organizations sponsoring these polls, such as Iranian Labor News Agency and Tabnak, admit openly that they have been allies of Mousavi, the opposition, or the so-called reform movement
• there was only one poll carried out by a western news organization. It was jointly commissioned by the BBC and ABC News, and conducted by an independent entity called the Center for Public Opinion (CPO) of the New America Foundation
• predicted an 89 percent turnout rate. Further, it showed that Ahmadinejad had a nationwide advantage of two to one over Mousavi
• How did this survey compare to the actual results?
• a turn out rate of 85 percent
• President Ahmadinejad received 24.5 million votes to Mousavi’s 13.2 million votes, or 62.6 per cent to 33.8 per cent of the total votes, respectively
• this result mirrored the 2005 elections when Ahmadinejad received 61.7 per cent to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s 35.9 per cent in the runoff elections
• Mousavi’s supporters and Western political pundits cried foul and accused the government of election fraud. The accusations centered around four themes
• First, although voting had been extended several hours due to the heavy turnout, it was alleged that the elections were called too quickly from the time the polls were closed, with more than 39 million ballots to count
• Second, these critics insinuated that election monitors were biased or that, in some instances, the opposition did not have its own monitors present during the count
• Third, they pointed out that it was absurd to think that Mousavi, who descended from the Azerbaijan region in northwest Iran, was defeated handily in his own hometown
• Fourth, the Mousavi camp charged that in some polling stations, ballots ran out and people were turned away without voting

• By the following morning, a copy of a letter by a low-level employee in the Interior Ministry sent to Supreme Guide Ali Khamanei, was widely circulating around the world. (Western politicians and media outlets like to call him “Supreme Leader” but no such title exists in Iran.)

   

  The letter stated that Mousavi had won the elections, and that Ahmadinejad had actually come in third. It also promised that the elections were being fixed in favor of Ahmadinejad per Khamanei’s orders. It is safe to assume that the letter was a forgery since an unidentified low-level employee would not be the one addressing Ayatollah Khamanaei. Robert Fisk of The Independent reached the same conclusion by casting grave doubts that Ahmadinejad would score third – garnering less than 6 million votes in such an important election- as alleged in the forged letter.
• There were a total of 45,713 ballot boxes that were set up in cities, towns and villages across Iran. With 39.2 million ballots cast, there were less than 860 ballots per box
• ranian voters had only one choice to consider: their presidential candidate. Why would it take more than an hour or two to count 860 ballots per poll? 
• results were then reported electronically to the Ministry of the Interior in Tehran
• Despite all these challenges, the Islamic Republic of Iran has never missed an election during its three decades. It has conducted over thirty elections nationwide. Indeed, a tradition of election orderliness has been established
• There has not been a tradition of election fraud in Iran
• In fact, former President Mohammad Khatami, considered one of the leading reformists in Iran, was elected president by the people, when the interior ministry was run by archconservatives. He won with over 70 percent of the vote, not once, but twice.
• It is highly unlikely that there was a huge conspiracy involving tens of thousands of teachers, professionals and civil servants that somehow remained totally hidden and unexposed.
• Mousavi is an independent candidate who emerged on the political scene just three months ago, after a 20-year hiatus.
• Ahmadinejad had a nationwide campaign operation. He made over sixty campaign trips throughout Iran in less than twelve weeks, while his opponent campaigned only in the major cities, and lacked a sophisticated campaign apparatus.
• It is true that Mousavi has an Azeri background. But the CPO poll mentioned above, and published before the elections, noted that “its survey indicated that only 16 per cent of Azeri Iranians will vote for Mr. Mousavi. By contrast, 31 per cent of the Azeris claim they will vote for Mr. Ahmadinejad.”
• Richard Nixon trounced George McGovern in his native state of South Dakota in the 1972 elections
• Had Al Gore won his home state of Tennessee in 2000, no one would have cared about a Florida recount
• If Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards had won the states he was born and raised in (South and North Carolina), President John Kerry would now be serving his second term
• But somehow, in Western newsrooms Middle Eastern people choose their candidates not on merit, but on the basis of their “tribe.”
• The fact that minor candidates such as Karroubi would garner fewer votes than expected, even in their home regions as critics charge, is not out of the ordinary. Many voters reach the conclusion that they do not want to waste their votes when the contest is perceived to be between two major candidates.
• Likewise, Ross Perot lost his home state of Texas to Bob Dole of Kansas in 1996
• As for the charge that ballots ran out and some people were turned away, it is worth mentioning that voting hours were extended four times in order to allow as many people as possible the opportunity to vote.
• even if all the people who did not vote, had actually voted for Mousavi (a virtual impossibility), that would be 6.93 million additional votes, much less than the 11 million vote difference between the top two candidates
• But to characterize the struggle in Iran as a battle between democratic forces and a “dictator,” is to exhibit total ignorance of Iran’s internal dynamics, or to deliberately distort them

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• We Americans love to shoot our mouths off over matters we know next to nothing about.  It's something that we are hardwired to do.  We have utmost faith in the power of words.  "Speaking truth to power" is one of our favorite phrases, even when some of the "truth" is actually nonsense.
• In recent days a number of US peace organizations have issued sternly-worded statements on the recent events in Iran, including Peace Action and the Campaign for Peace and Democracy.  While these groups laudably encourage continued nuclear negotiations and seemingly eschew interventionism, they are quick to denounce the elections as "massively fraudulent" and generally subscribe to the "mad mullah" stereotype of the current political system in Iran.
• There is a remarkable convergence between the tone of these statements and the American right who are hypocritically beating their chests over Iran's "stolen" election.
• Such "statements" by New York or Washington-based peace groups are profoundly misguided on many levels.  This is not the time or place, and these groups have little standing to hold forth on the internal dynamics of Iranian politics.

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• the earthquake in the Islamic Republic   is shaking the Mideast and deeply confusing everyone, including   the US government
• The arm   of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, remains withered   from a bomb planted by the US-backed Mujahidin-i-Khalq, who   were once on the US terrorist list.
• While the   majority of protests we see in Tehran are genuine and spontaneous,   Western intelligence agencies and media are playing a key role   in sustaining the uprising and providing communications, including   the newest electronic method, via Twitter. These are covert   techniques developed by the US during recent revolutions in   Ukraine and Georgia that brought pro-US governments to power.
• We also   hear lot of hypocrisy from Western capitals. Washington, Ottawa,   London and Paris piously accused Iran of improper electoral   procedures while utterly ignoring the total lack of democracy   in their authoritarian Mideast allies such as Egypt, Morocco,   and Saudi Arabia, that never hold elections and throw political   opponents into prison and torture them. Compared to them, Iran,   for all its faults, is almost a model of democratic governance.
• The US,   France and Saudi Arabia just cooperated to rig Lebanon’s recent   elections, dishing out millions in bribe money to ensure victory   of the pro-US faction.
• France’s President Nicholas Sarkozy had   the chutzpah to rebuke Iran for improper election procedures   after returning from the funeral of Gabon’s dictator, Omar Bongo,   who had ruled for 41 years and supplied France with cheap oil.
• Über-moral   Canada, which backed Pakistan’s military dictatorship under   Gen. Pervez Musharraf, accused Tehran of unfair elections.

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• Iran claimed that the unrest was being fueled by foreign interference, a charge reported but generally dismissed in Western media accounts.
• But there is ample reason to believe that the U.S. likely had a hand in fomenting the chaos that has since plagued the country many commentators have compared to the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah.
• The National Endowment for Democracy
• a quasi-governmental agency with funding from both Congress and private individuals whose purpose is to support foreign organizations sympathetic to U.S. foreign policy goals
• The idea behind NED was to create an organization to do overtly what the CIA had long been doing clandestinely, and the organization has developed its own history of foreign interference. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” acknowledged Allen Weinstein, one of NED’s founders.
• In Nicaragua, for instance, the CIA provoked opposition activities in the hopes that it would prompt an “overreaction” from the Sandinista government. The NED was there, also, providing money to opposition groups
• In the Bulgarian elections of 1990, NED spent over $1.5 million in an effort to defeat the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). When the effort failed and the BSP won, NED backed opposition groups that sowed chaos in the streets for months until the president and prime minister finally resigned.
• The NED was in Albania supporting the opposition to the communist government that was elected in 1991. Once again, turmoil in the streets led to the collapse of the government, forcing a new election in which the U.S.-backed Democratic Party won.
• Between 1990 and 1992, NED financed the Cuban-American National Foundation, an anti-Castro group out of Miami
• NED was present in Mongolia helping to unite opposition parties under the National Democratic Union to defeat the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party that had won elections in 1992.
• During the Clinton administration, NED was in Haiti working with the opposition to ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
• And NED was in Venezuela financing the opposition to President Hugo Chavez, including groups involved in the attempted coup in 2002 that nearly succeeded in his overthrow.
• NED is also active in Iran, granting hundreds of thousands of dollars to Iranian groups. From 2005 to 2007, NED gave $345,000 to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation (ABF)
• Another recipient of NED grants is the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which received $25,000 in 2002, $64,000 in 2005, and $107,000 in 2006. The 2002 grant was to carry out a “media training workshop” to train participants representing various civic groups in public relations. The 2005 money was given in part to “strengthen the capacity of civic organizations in Iran”, including by advising Iranian groups on “foreign donor relations.” The 2006 grant was similarly designed to “foster cooperation between Iranian NGOs and the international civil society community and to strengthen the institutional capacity of NGOs in Iran.”
• The Office of Iranian Affairs
• In February, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requested emergency funding from Congress to the amount of $75 million, on top of a previously allocated $10 million, “to mount the biggest ever propaganda campaign against the Tehran government”, in the words of The Guardian
• The money “would be used to broadcast US radio and television programmes into Iran, help pay for Iranians to study in America and support pro-democracy groups inside the country.” The propaganda effort would include “extending the government-run Voice of America’s Farsi service from a few hours a day to round-the-clock coverage.”
• in 2005, Ritter wrote that the Bush administration had authorized a number of covert operations inside Iran. “The most visible of these”, he wrote, “is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.” The MEK’s CIA-backed operations within Iran included “terror bombings”, Ritter charged
• the State Department created the Office of Iranian Affairs (OIA) under the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which would “reach out to the Iranian people” and bring more Iran experts into the Foreign Service and more Persian-speaking officers into the OIA, the Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR), and other branches of the State Department.
• Charles A. Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and Ray Takeyh, also a senior fellow at the CFR, observed that the objective was “not just to contain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions but also to topple the Iranian government.”
• US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton acknowledged in October 2006 that regime change was the “ultimate objective” of the U.S. sanctions policy, and adding that it “puts pressure on them internally” and “helps democratic forces” within the country and amongst the Iranian diaspora.
• Administration officials told the New York Times that then Vice President Dick Cheney was promoting the “drive to bring Iranian scholars and students to America, blanket the country with radio and television broadcasts and support Iranian political dissidents.” The program was to be “overseen by Elizabeth Cheney, a principal deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, who is also the vice president’s daughter.”
• In May, the Los Angeles Times reported that the OIA was headed by David Denehy, a specialist at the International Republican Institute (IRI).[32] The IRI has been a recipient of NED funds, and was active in Venezuela, including the year of the attempted coup, when the IRI received $299,999 from NED to “train” political parties (including the IRI, over $1 million in grants was given by NED to groups operating in Venezuela in 2002)
• U.S. Covert Operations in Iran
• In July, Seymour Hersh repeated in an interview with NPR that the U.S. was supporting anti-regime terrorist groups including the MEK, Jundallah, and the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK). “The strategic thinking behind this covert operation is to provoke enough trouble and chaos so that the Iranian government makes the mistake of taking aggressive action which will give the impression of a country in acute turmoil”, Hersh said, in order to give the White House a casus belli.
• In a July 29 article, Scott Ritter wrote that “American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities that result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed…. The CIA today provides material support to the actions of the MEK inside Iran. The recent spate of explosions in Iran … appears to be linked to an MEK operation….”
• Hersh wrote another article in the New Yorker in November noting that the Pentagon was increasingly conducting covert operations that had traditionally been the CIA’s domain and giving further details about its activities in Iran. “In the past six months, Israel and the United States have been working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan”
• On February 27, 2007, the London Telegraph reported, “America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear program.
• A ‘Velvet Revolution’
• But the “Twitter Revolution”, as some Western media have dubbed it, may not be all it appears. Blogs in the U.S. exploded with unconfirmed reports based on anonymously submitted tweets, many ostensibly coming from inside Iran. But as the Washington Post observed, “It is hard to say how much twittering is actually going on inside Iran.”
• The New York Times observed that “just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation.”
• When Twitter Inc scheduled maintenance for the website, the U.S. asked the company to postpone the work so the service would not be interrupted as it was being used to rally people into the streets to protest the election. “One of the areas where people are able to get out the word is through Twitter,” a senior State Department official told reporters. “They announced they were going to shut down their system for maintenance and we asked them not to.”

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• When  I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised  to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and  bloggers bending themselves into knots about the current crisis in Iran.  They cite the long history of U.S. interference in Iran and conclude  that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the  Empire.
• Some  of these authors have even cited my book, The Iran Agenda, as  a source to prove U.S. meddling. Whoa there, pardner. Now we're getting  personal.
• The  large majority of American people, particularly leftists and progressives,  are sympathetic to the demonstrators in Iran, oppose Iranian government  repression and also oppose any U.S. military or political interference  in that country. But a small and vocal number of progressives are questioning  that view, including authors writing for Monthly Review online,  Foreign Policy Journal, and prominent academics such as retired  professor James Petras.
• They  mostly argue by analogy.
• past practice is no proof that it's happening in this particular  case
• As  far as I can tell none of these leftist critics have actually visited  Iran, at least not to report on the recent uprisings. Of course, one  can have an opinion about a country without first-hand experience there.  But in the case of recent events in Iran, it helps to have met people.  It helps a lot.
• 1.  Assertion: President Mahmood Ahmadinejad won the election,  or at a minimum, the opposition hasn't proved otherwise.
• Actually,  Iranians themselves were very worried about election fraud prior to  the vote count. When I covered the 2005 elections, Ahmadinejad barely  edged out Mehdi Karoubi in the first round of elections. Karoubi raised  substantive arguments that he was robbed of his place in the runoff  due to vote fraud.
• On  the day of the 2009 election, election officials illegally barred many  opposition observers from the polls. The opposition had planned to use  text messaging to communicate local vote tallies to a central location.  The government shut down SMS messaging! So the vote count was entirely  dependent on a government tally by officials sympathetic to the incumbent.
• For  Ahmadinejad to have sustained his massive victory in one third of Iran's  provinces, he would have had to carry all his supporters, all new voters,  all voters previously voting centrist and about 44% of previous reformist  voters. 
• 2.  Assertion: The U.S. has a long history of meddling in Iran, so  it must be behind the current unrest.
• Could the CIA have  anticipated the vote count, and on two days notice, mobilized its nefarious  networks?
• Does the CIA even have the kind of extensive networks that  would be necessary to control or even influence such a movement?
• Many  Iranians do watch foreign TV channels via satellite. A sat dish costs  only about $100 with no monthly fees, so they are affordable even to  the working class. Iranians watched BBC, VOA and other foreign channels  in Farsi, leading to government assertions of foreign instigation of  the demonstrations. By that logic, Ayatollah Khomeini received support  from Britain in the 1979 revolution because of BBC radio's critical  coverage of the despotic Shah.

• So  if they CIA was manipulating the demonstrators, it was doing a piss  poor job.

   

  Of  course, the CIA would like to have influence in Iran. But that's  a far cry from saying it does have influence. By proclaiming  the omnipotence of U.S. power, the leftist critics ironically join hands  with Ahmadinejad and the reactionary clerics who blame all unrest on  the British and U.S. 
• 3.  Assertion: Ahmadinejad is a nationalist-populist who opposes U.S. imperialism.  Efforts to overthrow him only help the U.S.
• comparing Ahmadinejad with Chavez or Evo Morales is absurd
• Chavez has got it exactly backward. The popular  movement in the streets will make Iran stronger as it rejects outside  interference from the U.S. or anyone else.   
• The  leftist critics must answer the question: Whose side are you on? 

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• Humanitarian Rhetoric and U.S. Imperialism in Iran
• It is worth reflecting on one central question regarding Iran: why does the recent election enjoy so much attention in the U.S.?
• Without American officialdom’s fixation on the Iran “threat,” it is unlikely that the election would receive sustained attention.
• the substantive reason for America’s Iran fixation: U.S. imperial power
• I refer to the fixation with Iran as “faith based,”
• The recent obsession with Iran’s nuclear “threat” and the 2009 election is advantageous for American leaders.  Sustained attention to them allows officials to project their concern with national security and humanitarian issues, rather than discuss their addiction to war and material gain.  The public, however, will not be well served by discussion of Iran until we realize the bait and switch that is taking place.  Humanitarian concerns may motivate many average Americans, but such concerns serve more as a rhetorical weapon of U.S. leaders against the weak and downtrodden of the world.

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• Is This the Culmination of Two Years of Destabilization
• A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernized youth of Terhan. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.
• The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted
• However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed
• This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the release of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote.
• There is a power struggle among the ayatollahs. Many are aligned against Ahmadinejad because he accuses them of corruption
• it does make it odd for his American detractors to say he is a conservative reactionary lined up with the ayatollahs.
• Commentators are "explaining" the Iran elections based on their own illusions, delusions, emotions, and vested interests.
• Whether or not the poll results predicting Ahmadinejad's win are sound, there is, so far, no evidence beyond surmise that the election was stolen.
• However, there are credible reports that the CIA has been working for two years to destabilize the Iranian government.
• On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”
• On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”
• the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”
• On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”
• The protests in Tehran no doubt have many sincere participants. The protests also have the hallmarks of the CIA orchestrated protests in Georgia and Ukraine.

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• There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite.
• the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote
• the leading Western-backed liberal opposition candidate Hossein Mousavi
• an unprecedented overseas vote of 234,812, in which HM won 111,792 to MA’s 78,300
• A victory for Mousavi was described as a victory for the ‘voices of moderation’, at least the White House’s version of that vacuous cliché.
• Prominent liberal academics deduced the vote count was fraudulent because the opposition candidate, Mousavi, lost in his own ethnic enclave among the Azeris.
• What is astonishing about the West’s universal condemnation of the electoral outcome as fraudulent is that not a single shred of evidence in either written or observational form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count.
• The belief in a free and open election was so strong that the Western leaders and mass media believed that their favored candidate would win.
• The Western media relied on its reporters covering the mass demonstrations of opposition supporters, ignoring and downplaying the huge turnout for Ahmadinejad.

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