I’ve been watching the election protests in Iran (see the dramatic video from BBC News below) and like many of you, I’m alarmed at how events have unfolded. The disputed election presents the U.S. with something of a challenge, Obama knows he will have to deal with whoever is eventually declared the winner, so like Vice-President Biden said, the U.S. is waiting and watching without issuing any forceful denunciations of the Iranian government or direct support for the protesters. The only overt move the U.S. made was to encourage the social networking service Twitter to delay a maintenance outage in a nod to how vital the service has become for the protesters. That seems to be a very timid response and I’m sure many Americans would like to see their government be much more forceful in support of democracy in Iran.
Should the U.S. do more to support the protesters? The answer may depend on how legitimate the election turns out to be. As this report in Time Magazine notes, there are good reasons for suspecting that the election was rigged. That said, there are also good reasons for believing that the election outcome reflected the true will of the Iranian people. As this Stratfor analysis notes, the composition of the Iranian electorate suggests that a landslide for Ahmadinejad may not have been outside the realm of possibility. By all accounts the rival candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi draws his support from the wealthy elite and students, while President Ahmadinejad’s base includes the urban working class the the provincial poor. As in any Western democracy, the working class and rural voters greatly outnumber the wealthy elite and students. So, assuming that Mousavi did win almost all of the elite and student vote, he would still have lost in the provinces and among the urban poor, and thus lost the election.
Is there any evidence to support this idea? I would suggest that the fact that protests are not spontaneously breaking out in other cities and towns across Iran indicates that the protest movement is not a popular movement, but one indeed being driving by the elite and students in the capital city of Tehran. The fact that protesters are using Twitter confirms that we are dealing with a small group of technically savvy people who have access to cell phones, computers and the internet and are using social networking as a force multiplier to rally the many thousands in the city who do not have such access. That’s not to say there was no election fraud, as NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel pointed out in his report, the election ballots were handwritten without the aid of election machines, and all of those ballots would have to be counted by hand and given the size of the Iranian electorate, that process could reasonably have been expected to take days or weeks. Instead, the results were announced hours after the polls closed. It’s simply not possible for all of the ballots to have been counted in time.
Given that that there was massive election fraud AND that Ahmadinejad probably did win a majority of votes, the U.S. will have to tread very carefully in expressing support for the protesters knowing that regardless of the outcome of the protests, President Obama will be negotiating with President Ahmadinejad in pursuing his engagement policy. Change has not come to Iran.