|
Written by James Petras
|
|
Sunday, 21 June 2009 10:09 |
 “Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or
mixed recreation... Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war than
religion.”
Financial Times Editorial, June 15 2009
Introduction
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. In the most recent
period, 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 recently concluded, June 12, 2009 elections in Iran are a classic case: The
incumbent nationalist-populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (MA) received 63.3%
of the vote (or 24.5 million votes), while the leading Western-backed liberal
opposition candidate Hossein Mousavi (HM) received 34.2% or (13.2 million
votes).
Iran’s presidential election drew a record turnout of more than 80% of the
electorate, including an unprecedented overseas vote of 234,812, in which HM won
111,792 to MA’s 78,300. The opposition led by HM did not accept their defeat and
organized a series of mass demonstrations that turned violent, resulting in the
burning and destruction of automobiles, banks, public building and armed
confrontations with the police and other authorities. Almost the entire spectrum
of Western opinion makers, including all the major electronic and print media,
the major liberal, radical, libertarian and conservative web-sites, echoed the
opposition’s claim of rampant election fraud. Neo-conservatives, libertarian
conservatives and Trotskyites joined the Zionists in hailing the opposition
protestors as the advance guard of a democratic revolution. Democrats and
Republicans condemned the incumbent regime, refused to recognize the result of
the vote and praised the demonstrators’ efforts to overturn the electoral
outcome. The New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, the Israeli Foreign Office
and the entire leadership of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish
Organizations called for harsher sanctions against Iran and announced Obama’s
proposed dialogue with Iran as ‘dead in the water’.
The Electoral Fraud Hoax
Western leaders rejected the results because they ‘knew’ that their reformist
candidate could not lose…For months they published daily interviews, editorials
and reports from the field ‘detailing’ the failures of Ahmadinejad’s
administration; they cited the support from clerics, former officials, merchants
in the bazaar and above all women and young urbanites fluent in English, to
prove that Mousavi was headed for a landslide victory. 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. Other academics claimed that the ‘youth
vote’ – based on their interviews with upper and middle-class university
students from the neighborhoods of Northern Tehran were overwhelmingly for the
‘reformist’ candidate.
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. During the entire electoral campaign, no credible (or even dubious)
charge of voter tampering was raised. As long as the Western media believed
their own propaganda of an immanent victory for their candidate, the electoral
process was described as highly competitive, with heated public debates and
unprecedented levels of public activity and unhindered by public proselytizing.
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.
Worse still, the Western media ignored the class composition of the competing
demonstrations – the fact that the incumbent candidate was drawing his support
from the far more numerous poor working class, peasant, artisan and public
employee sectors while the bulk of the opposition demonstrators was drawn from
the upper and middle class students, business and professional class.
Moreover, most Western opinion leaders and reporters based in Tehran
extrapolated their projections from their observations in the capital – few
venture into the provinces, small and medium size cities and villages where
Ahmadinejad has his mass base of support. Moreover the opposition’s supporters
were an activist minority of students easily mobilized for street activities,
while Ahmadinejad’s support drew on the majority of working youth and household
women workers who would express their views at the ballot box and had little
time or inclination to engage in street politics.
A number of newspaper pundits, including Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times,
claim as evidence of electoral fraud the fact that Ahmadinejad won 63% of the
vote in an Azeri-speaking province against his opponent, Mousavi, an ethnic
Azeri. The simplistic assumption is that ethnic identity or belonging to a
linguistic group is the only possible explanation of voting behavior rather than
other social or class interests.
A closer look at the voting pattern in the East-Azerbaijan region of Iran
reveals that Mousavi won only in the city of Shabestar among the upper and the
middle classes (and only by a small margin), whereas he was soundly defeated in
the larger rural areas, where the re-distributive policies of the Ahmadinejad
government had helped the ethnic Azeris write off debt, obtain cheap credits and
easy loans for the farmers. Mousavi did win in the West-Azerbaijan region, using
his ethnic ties to win over the urban voters. In the highly populated Tehran
province, Mousavi beat Ahmadinejad in the urban centers of Tehran and Shemiranat
by gaining the vote of the middle and upper class districts, whereas he lost
badly in the adjoining working class suburbs, small towns and rural areas.
The careless and distorted emphasis on ‘ethnic voting’ cited by writers from the
Financial Times and New York Times to justify calling Ahmadinejad ‘s victory a
‘stolen vote’ is matched by the media’s willful and deliberate refusal to
acknowledge a rigorous nationwide public opinion poll conducted by two US
experts just three weeks before the vote, which showed Ahmadinejad leading by a
more than 2 to 1 margin – even larger than his electoral victory on June 12.
This poll revealed that among ethnic Azeris, Ahmadinejad was favored by a 2 to 1
margin over Mousavi, demonstrating how class interests represented by one
candidate can overcome the ethnic identity of the other candidate (Washington
Post June 15, 2009). The poll also demonstrated how class issues, within age
groups, were more influential in shaping political preferences than
‘generational life style’. According to this poll, over two-thirds of Iranian
youth were too poor to have access to a computer and the 18-24 year olds
“comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all groups” (Washington
Porst June 15, 2009).
The only group, which consistently favored Mousavi, was the university students
and graduates, business owners and the upper middle class. The ‘youth vote’,
which the Western media praised as ‘pro-reformist’, was a clear minority of less
than 30% but came from a highly privileged, vocal and largely English speaking
group with a monopoly on the Western media. Their overwhelming presence in the
Western news reports created what has been referred to as the ‘North Tehran
Syndrome’, for the comfortable upper class enclave from which many of these
students come. While they may be articulate, well dressed and fluent in English,
they were soundly out-voted in the secrecy of the ballot box.
In general, Ahmadinejad did very well in the oil and chemical producing
provinces. This may have be a reflection of the oil workers’ opposition to the
‘reformist’ program, which included proposals to ‘privatize’ public enterprises.
Likewise, the incumbent did very well along the border provinces because of his
emphasis on strengthening national security from US and Israeli threats in light
of an escalation of US-sponsored cross-border terrorist attacks from Pakistan
and Israeli-backed incursions from Iraqi Kurdistan, which have killed scores of
Iranian citizens. Sponsorship and massive funding of the groups behind these
attacks is an official policy of the US from the Bush Administration, which has
not been repudiated by President Obama; in fact it has escalated in the lead-up
to the elections.
What Western commentators and their Iranian protégés have ignored is the
powerful impact which the devastating US wars and occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan had on Iranian public opinion: Ahmadinejad’s strong position on
defense matters contrasted with the pro-Western and weak defense posture of many
of the campaign propagandists of the opposition.
The great majority of voters for the incumbent probably felt that national
security interests, the integrity of the country and the social welfare system,
with all of its faults and excesses, could be better defended and improved with
Ahmadinejad than with upper-class technocrats supported by Western-oriented
privileged youth who prize individual life styles over community values and
solidarity.
The demography of voting reveals a real class polarization pitting high income,
free market oriented, capitalist individualists against working class, low
income, community based supporters of a ‘moral economy’ in which usury and
profiteering are limited by religious precepts. The open attacks by opposition
economists of the government welfare spending, easy credit and heavy subsidies
of basic food staples did little to ingratiate them with the majority of
Iranians benefiting from those programs. The state was seen as the protector and
benefactor of the poor workers against the ‘market’, which represented wealth,
power, privilege and corruption. The Opposition’s attack on the regime’s
‘intransigent’ foreign policy and positions ‘alienating’ the West only resonated
with the liberal university students and import-export business groups. To many
Iranians, the regime’s military buildup was seen as having prevented a US or
Israeli attack.
The scale of the opposition’s electoral deficit should tell us is how out of
touch it is with its own people’s vital concerns. It should remind them that by
moving closer to Western opinion, they removed themselves from the everyday
interests of security, housing, jobs and subsidized food prices that make life
tolerable for those living below the middle class and outside the privileged
gates of Tehran University.
Amhadinejad’s electoral success, seen in historical comparative perspective
should not be a surprise. In similar electoral contests between
nationalist-populists against pro-Western liberals, the populists have won. Past
examples include Peron in Argentina and, most recently, Chavez of Venezuela, Evo
Morales in Bolivia and even Lula da Silva in Brazil, all of whom have
demonstrated an ability to secure close to or even greater than 60% of the vote
in free elections. The voting majorities in these countries prefer social
welfare over unrestrained markets, national security over alignments with
military empires.
The consequences of the electoral victory of Ahmadinejad are open to debate. The
US may conclude that continuing to back a vocal, but badly defeated, minority
has few prospects for securing concessions on nuclear enrichment and an
abandonment of Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas. A realistic approach
would be to open a wide-ranging discussion with Iran, and acknowledging, as
Senator Kerry recently pointed out, that enriching uranium is not an existential
threat to anyone. This approach would sharply differ from the approach of
American Zionists, embedded in the Obama regime, who follow Israel’s lead of
pushing for a preemptive war with Iran and use the specious argument that no
negotiations are possible with an ‘illegitimate’ government in Tehran which
‘stole an election’.
Recent events suggest that political leaders in Europe, and even some in
Washington, do not accept the Zionist-mass media line of ‘stolen elections’. The
White House has not suspended its offer of negotiations with the newly
re-elected government but has focused rather on the repression of the opposition
protesters (and not the vote count). Likewise, the 27 nation European Union
expressed ‘serious concern about violence’ and called for the “aspirations of
the Iranian people to be achieved through peaceful means and that freedom of
expression be respected” (Financial Times June 16, 2009 p.4). Except for Sarkozy
of France, no EU leader has questioned the outcome of the voting.
The wild card in the aftermath of the elections is the Israeli response:
Netanyahu has signaled to his American Zionist followers that they should use
the hoax of ‘electoral fraud’ to exert maximum pressure on the Obama regime to
end all plans to meet with the newly re-elected Ahmadinejad regime.
Paradoxically, US commentators (left, right and center) who bought into the
electoral fraud hoax are inadvertently providing Netanyahu and his American
followers with the arguments and fabrications: Where they see religious wars, we
see class wars; where they see electoral fraud, we see imperial destabilization.
Source: Global Research
|
|
|
