Anonymous report suggests Ahmadinejad voters may be deserting him

Jim Sleeper reports from one of his prior students, currently reporting out of Iran, that many who voted for the Tienanmen government are now realizing that Ahmadinejad was planning a coup and consolidation of power and is well on his way to getting there. So they are not supporting Ahmadinejad's apparent agenda.

Combine this with the very effective non-violent revolution that is being waged against the Ahmadinejad and it is both the seeds and the desired result. The government does not dare kill a lot of the revolutionaries (because that's what they are) because they are working to delegitimize the government. The bodies of protesters shown in the media will also greatly delegitimize the Ahmadinejad government. It is right out of the playbooks written by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Orange and Green Revolutions in eastern Europe (which Vladimir Putin has roundly denounced as Western-inspired.)

A similar set of protest actions in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago did not work because the Communist government of China was able to shut down communications outside China and then totally repress the story of Tiananmen Square. The 1999 Iranian protests were also shut down by the government, but with the new forms of communication, the Iranian government has been unable to keep the news and pictures from getting out to the rest of the world.

The government's efforts to repress the news of what they are doing to spreading the rest of the world simply aren't working, and apparently the Iranian government has a very sophisticated Internet control operation. What's happening, though is that they cannot keep up with the workarounds that the younger computer uses are developing. The government closes off access to one website, the protesters twitter everyone the URL of another website, and everyone goes there. Twitter, apparently, cannot be shut off. Nor can access to overseas URLs be shut off on a blanket basis.

The result is that the Ahmadinejad government's repression measures are themselves being fed back to the Iranian population to delegitimize the government, and the government can't keep up with the various news sources. So the Ahmadinejad government is being forced to delegitimize itself.

We'll see if it works this time.

One thing to consider - this is not a sudden conflict caused by the election. There are two sides, the government and the protesters, and both have prepared their actions very much in depth. The kind of highly disciplined demonstrations the protesters have been conducting do not happen out of someone's hip pocket. Similarly, the Ahmadinejad government appears to have prepared their coup attempt long before the election. On both sides it it a media war with the government having the monopoly on using force. It's a fascinating conflict.

I wonder if the U.S. has a modern enough Internet system to successfully conduct a similar set of protests? Our broadband system is technologically behind that of most other industrial nations now and as well as that of many developing ones. (That's because of the phone company monopoly and the way Congress is bought and paid for by lobbyists.)

Machiavelli on the current Iranian situation

Merk Kleiman provides some excellent quotes explaining what seems to be happening in Iran this week.

The statement is, however, predicated on the idea that the Ayatollah Khamene'i is in fact in charge and has made the statements declaring that Ahmadinejad did win the election with an unlikely 66% of the vote. That may be in question. Laura Rozen is doing great reporting as this item from her blog War and Piece demonstrates:

One man who worked in the Ministry of Interior, which carried out the vote count, said the government had been preparing its fraud for weeks, purging anyone of doubtful loyalty and importing pliable staff members from around the country.

“They didn’t rig the vote,” claimed this man, who showed his ministry identification card but pleaded not to be named. “They didn’t even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it.”

This suggests that the takeover by Amahdinejad has been long planned and carefully prepared for. It has been suggested that what we are watching is a coup by the military, Intelligence Services and the Revolutionary Guard (from which Ahmadinejad came) and it is aimed a usurping the power of the Ayatollahs.

Since someone on radio said that the Ayatollah did not give his announcement that Ahmadinejad won the election himself (issued two hours after the polls closed - remember that this was voted on paper ballots that had to be hand counted - there is reason to suspect it really is a coup by the military hardliners.

Laura also reports what Gary Sick previously wrote:

In 1997, Iran’s hard line leadership was stunned by the landslide election of Mohammed Khatami, a reformer who promised to bring rule of law and a more human face to the harsh visage of the Iranian revolution. It took the authorities almost a year to recover their composure and to reassert their control through naked force and cynical manipulation of the constitution and legal system. The authorities did not, however, falsify the election results and even permitted a resounding reelection four years later. Instead, they preferred to prevent the president from implementing his reform program.

In 2005, when it appeared that no hard line conservative might survive the first round of the presidential election, there were credible reports of ballot manipulation to insure that Mr Ahmadinejad could run (and win) against former president Rafsanjani in the second round.

Now I may just be a cynical old man, but that sounds a lot like this current situation is another battle in a long-running conflict between the government of Iran, kept in place by the hardliners with military force and the use of religious imagery. The two quotes I presented to begin this place rather strongly suggest that both the government and the reformers have been preparing for this election and both sides are quite well organized. The stuff we are seeing reported (badly by our media, incompetently by American TV "news" when it is not being ignored) is part of a longer deeper battle.

Finally, I believe it was Juan Cole who wrote that the deaths of protesters were going to cause more and greater protests. (Sorry - I can't find the link to his quote.) But what he said that the funeral processions would lead to more protests, as would the 40 days of mourning that followed the funerals. Then, any additional killings by the government troops will lead to a new round of funeral - protest - mourning - protest. So it could stretch out for a long period of time. And my own observation is that the Iranian military and police do not have good enough control on their troops to keep them from killing more protesters in the heat of the moment. That is classic peaceful protest such as was used by Gandhi against the British in India. And twitter is the protester's friend - as are the many other modern methods of communication going back to faxes as the Soviet dissidents used to use.

Overall I would guess that Iran is going to be in for a really long, hot summer.