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A flawed election or a crushed revolution?
This article was first published on the Stratfor website.
The author, George Friedman, is chairman and CEO of Stratfor, the
world’s leading online publisher of geopolitical intelligence.
Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically
located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express
resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually
the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and
by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and
becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As
resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and
security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and
isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop
following the regime’s orders. This is what happened to the Shah of
Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania
in 1989.
Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the
initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially
isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the
demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security
and military forces — who remain loyal to the regime and frequently
personally hostile to the demonstrators — and use force to suppress the
rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen
Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others.
Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to
the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.
A Question of Support
This is also what happened in Iran this week.
The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators —
who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s
opponents — failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations
primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the
breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice
that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other
areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they
failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had
smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a
failing revolution.
Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops — definitely not drawn from what we might call the “Twittering classes,”
would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons.
The troops had about as much sympathy for the demonstrators as a
small-town boy from Alabama might have for a Harvard postdoc. Failing
to understand the social tensions in Iran, the reporters deluded
themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising. But
this was not St. Petersburg in 1917 or Bucharest in 1989 — it was
Tiananmen Square.
In the global discussion last week outside Iran, there was a great
deal of confusion about basic facts. For example, it is said that the
urban-rural distinction in Iran is not critical any longer because
according to the United Nations, 68 percent of Iranians are urbanized.
This is an important point because it implies Iran is homogeneous and
the demonstrators representative of the country. The problem is the
Iranian definition of urban — and this is quite common around the world
— includes very small communities (some with only a few thousand
people) as “urban.” But the social difference between someone living in
a town with 10,000 people and someone living in Tehran is the
difference between someone living in Bastrop, Texas and someone living
in New York. We can assure you that that difference is not only vast,
but that most of the good people of Bastrop and the fine people of New
York would probably not see the world the same way. The failure to
understand the dramatic diversity of Iranian society led observers to
assume that students at Iran’s elite university somehow spoke for the
rest of the country.
Tehran proper has about 8 million inhabitants; its suburbs bring it
to about 13 million people out of Iran’s total population of 70.5
million. Tehran accounts for about 20 percent of Iran, but as we know,
the cab driver and the construction worker are not socially linked to
students at elite universities. There are six cities with populations
between 1 million and 2.4 million people and 11 with populations of
about 500,000. Including Tehran proper, 15.5 million people live in
cities with more than 1 million and 19.7 million in cities greater than
500,000. Iran has 80 cities with more than 100,000. But given that
Waco, Texas, has more than 100,000 people, inferences of social
similarities between cities with 100,000 and 5 million are tenuous. And
with metro Oklahoma City having more than a million people, it becomes
plain that urbanization has many faces.
Winning the Election With or Without Fraud
We continue to believe two things:
that vote fraud occurred, and that Ahmadinejad likely would have won
without it. Very little direct evidence has emerged to establish vote
fraud, but several things seem suspect.
For example, the speed of the vote count has been taken as a sign of fraud,
as it should have been impossible to count votes that fast. The polls
originally were to have closed at 7 p.m. local time, but voting hours
were extended until 10 p.m. because of the number of voters in line. By
11:45 p.m. about 20 percent of the vote had been counted. By 5:20 a.m.
the next day, with almost all votes counted, the election commission
declared Ahmadinejad the winner. The vote count thus took about seven
hours. (Remember there were no senators, congressmen, city council
members or school board members being counted — just the presidential
race.) Intriguingly, this is about the same time in took in 2005,
though reformists that claimed fraud back then did not stress the
counting time in their allegations.
The counting mechanism is simple: Iran has 47,000 voting stations,
plus 14,000 roaming stations that travel from tiny village to tiny
village, staying there for a short time before moving on. That creates
61,000 ballot boxes designed to receive roughly the same number of
votes. That would mean that each station would have been counting about
500 ballots, or about 70 votes per hour. With counting beginning at 10
p.m., concluding seven hours later does not necessarily indicate fraud
or anything else. The Iranian presidential election system is designed
for simplicity: one race to count in one time zone, and all counting
beginning at the same time in all regions, we would expect the numbers
to come in a somewhat linear fashion as rural and urban voting patterns
would balance each other out — explaining why voting percentages didn’t
change much during the night.
It has been pointed out that some of the candidates didn’t even
carry their own provinces or districts. We remember that Al Gore didn’t
carry Tennessee in 2000. We also remember Ralph Nader, who also didn’t
carry his home precinct in part because people didn’t want to spend
their vote on someone unlikely to win — an effect probably felt by the
two smaller candidates in the Iranian election.
That Mousavi didn’t carry his own province is more interesting.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett writing in Politico make some
interesting points on this. As an ethnic Azeri, it was assumed that
Mousavi would carry his Azeri-named and -dominated home province. But
they also point out that Ahmadinejad also speaks Azeri, and made
multiple campaign appearances in the district. They also point out that
Khamenei is Azeri. In sum, winning that district was by no means
certain for Mousavi, so losing it does not automatically signal fraud.
It raised suspicions, but by no means was a smoking gun.
We do not doubt that fraud occurred during Iranian election. For
example, 99.4 percent of potential voters voted in Mazandaran province,
a mostly secular area home to the shah’s family. Ahmadinejad carried
the province by a 2.2 to 1 ratio. That is one heck of a turnout and
level of support for a province that lost everything when the mullahs
took over 30 years ago. But even if you take all of the suspect cases
and added them together, it would not have changed the outcome. The
fact is that Ahmadinejad’s vote in 2009 was extremely close to his
victory percentage in 2005. And while the Western media portrayed
Ahmadinejad’s performance in the presidential debates ahead of the
election as dismal, embarrassing and indicative of an imminent
electoral defeat, many Iranians who viewed those debates — including
some of the most hardcore Mousavi supporters — acknowledge that
Ahmadinejad outperformed his opponents by a landslide.
Mousavi persuasively detailed his fraud claims Sunday, and they have
yet to be rebutted. But if his claims of the extent of fraud were true,
the protests should have spread rapidly by social segment and geography
to the millions of people who even the central government asserts voted
for him. Certainly, Mousavi supporters believed they would win the
election based in part on highly flawed polls, and when they didn’t,
they assumed they were robbed and took to the streets.
But critically, the protesters were not joined by any of the
millions whose votes the protesters alleged were stolen. In a complete
hijacking of the election by some 13 million votes by an extremely
unpopular candidate, we would have expected to see the core of
Mousavi’s supporters joined by others who had been disenfranchised. On
last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, when the demonstrations were at their height, the millions of Mousavi voters should have made their appearance. They didn’t.
We might assume that the security apparatus intimidated some, but
surely more than just the Tehran professional and student classes
posses civic courage. While appearing large, the demonstrations
actually comprised a small fraction of society.
Tensions Among the Political Elite
All of this not to say there are not tremendous tensions within the
Iranian political elite. That no revolution broke out does not mean
there isn’t a crisis in the political elite, particularly among the clerics. But that crisis does not cut the way Western common sense would have it. Many of Iran’s religious leaders see Ahmadinejad as hostile to their interests,
as threatening their financial prerogatives, and as taking
international risks they don’t want to take. Ahmadinejad’s political
popularity in fact rests on his populist hostility to what he sees as
the corruption of the clerics and their families and his strong stand on Iranian national security issues.
The clerics are divided among themselves, but many wanted to see
Ahmadinejad lose to protect their own interests. Khamenei, the supreme
leader, faced a difficult choice last Friday. He could demand a major
recount or even new elections, or he could validate what happened. Khamenei speaks for a sizable chunk of the ruling elite,
but also has had to rule by consensus among both clerical and
non-clerical forces. Many powerful clerics like Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani wanted Khamenei to reverse the election, and we suspect
Khamenei wished he could have found a way to do it. But as the defender
of the regime, he was afraid to. Mousavi supporters’ demonstrations
would have been nothing compared to the firestorm among Ahmadinejad
supporters — both voters and the security forces — had their candidate
been denied. Khamenei wasn’t going to flirt with disaster, so he
endorsed the outcome.
The Western media misunderstood this because they didn’t understand that Ahmadinejad does not speak for the clerics
but against them, that many of the clerics were working for his defeat,
and that Ahmadinejad has enormous pull in the country’s security
apparatus. The reason Western media missed this is because they bought
into the concept of the stolen election, therefore failing to see
Ahmadinejad’s support and the widespread dissatisfaction with the old
clerical elite. The Western media simply didn’t understand that the
most traditional and pious segments of Iranian society support
Ahmadinejad because he opposes the old ruling elite. Instead, they
assumed this was like Prague or Budapest in 1989, with a broad-based
uprising in favor of liberalism against an unpopular regime.
Tehran in 2009, however, was a struggle between two main factions,
both of which supported the Islamic republic as it was. There were the
clerics, who have dominated the regime since 1979 and had grown wealthy
in the process. And there was Ahmadinejad, who felt the ruling clerical
elite had betrayed the revolution with their personal excesses. And
there also was the small faction the BBC and CNN kept focusing on — the
demonstrators in the streets who want to dramatically liberalize the
Islamic republic. This faction never stood a chance of taking power,
whether by election or revolution. The two main factions
used the third smaller faction in various ways, however. Ahmadinejad
used it to make his case that the clerics who supported them, like
Rafsanjani, would risk the revolution and play into the hands of the
Americans and British to protect their own wealth. Meanwhile,
Rafsanjani argued behind the scenes that the unrest was the tip of the
iceberg, and that Ahmadinejad had to be replaced. Khamenei, an astute
politician, examined the data and supported Ahmadinejad.
Now, as we saw after Tiananmen Square, we will see a reshuffling
among the elite. Those who backed Mousavi will be on the defensive. By
contrast, those who supported Ahmadinejad are in a powerful position.
There is a massive crisis in the elite, but this crisis has nothing to
do with liberalization: It has to do with power and prerogatives among the elite.
Having been forced by the election and Khamenei to live with
Ahmadinejad, some will make deals while some will fight — but
Ahmadinejad is well-positioned to win this battle.

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