Last Straw

I was sur­prised today to find one of my favour­ite tech­no­logy com­ment­at­ors, John Gruber of Dar­ing Fire­ball, declar­ing that no doubt remains as to whether the elec­tion was fraud­u­lent. Really, because a theo­cratic gov­ern­ment is crack­ing down on dissidents?

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my exper­i­ences in the Middle East it is that all is not what it seems when West­ern gov­ern­ments and the Eng­lish news media are telling the story.

It … has been curi­ous to see the U.S. news organ­iz­a­tions sud­denly care about legit­im­ate elec­tions when most of them ignored, ridiculed, or covered-up evid­ence that George W. Bush stole the U.S. pres­id­en­tial elec­tion in 2000 and pos­sibly in 2004 as well.

–Robert Parry, Invest­ig­at­ive Journalist

While I wouldn’t be at all sur­prised if the elec­tion was fraud­u­lent — in the same way that I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the 2000 and 2004 U.S. pres­id­en­tial elec­tions were fraud­u­lent — there’s just not enough evid­ence to be in no doubt. At least in the case of Iran an invest­ig­a­tion has actu­ally been ordered.

The truth is we just don’t know. The only way to remove doubt would be another elec­tion involving neut­ral inter­na­tional observ­ers. Not on the hori­zon it seems.

Here’s another the­ory on Iran’s recent pres­id­en­tial election:

First, a few facts:

• The U.S. and Bri­tain have a his­tory of med­dling in the polit­ics of other coun­tries, includ­ing lead­ing the 1953 Ira­nian coup d’état that deposed the democratically-elected gov­ern­ment of Ira­nian Prime Min­is­ter Mohammed Mosad­deq, to ensure West­ern con­trol of Iran’s pet­ro­leum resources.
• The U.S. is repor­ted to cov­ertly sup­port Ira­nian dissidents.
• Iraq was invaded on the premise of a nuc­lear weapons threat, which never existed.
• Iraq was invaded because it has large stra­tegic energy reserves and Sad­dam Hus­sein wouldn’t do as he was told.
• The Ira­nian gov­ern­ment is in the same boat.
• When no evid­ence of nuc­lear weapons could be pro­duced Saddam’s dic­tat­or­ship was rolled out as the revi­sion­ist jus­ti­fic­a­tion for invasion.
• The U.S. and Israel (both of which have a his­tory of launch­ing wars of aggres­sion) have talked openly of attack­ing Iran on the premise of a nuc­lear weapons threat.
• Iran has never attacked another coun­try in aggression.
• Iran may not have a nuc­lear weapons pro­gramme either.

The the­ory:

• A large minor­ity of dis­sid­ent Ira­ni­ans believed they were going to win the election.
• Ira­nian elec­tion was not fraud­u­lent.¹
• Many West­ern­ers (some of whom helped elect the invaders of Iraq and con­tinue to vote today) are lead to believe the Ira­nian elec­tion was fraudulent.
• Due to this belief the U.S., Israeli and Brit­ish gov­ern­ments get to label the Ira­nian pres­id­ent a dic­tator. Some­thing to keep the West­ern lib­er­als happy while they attempt another coup d’état or invasion.

1. There is evid­ence that it may not have been, such as reports from Robert Fisk and a pub­lic opin­ion poll three weeks before the elec­tion repor­ted to show “Ahmad­ine­jad lead­ing by a more than 2 to 1 mar­gin.” [↩]