Good news

McClatchy Newspapers reports that Iran's most senior cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri had denounced the election results:

"No one in their right mind can believe" the official results from Friday's contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi's charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers "in the worst way possible."

"A government not respecting people's vote has no religious or political legitimacy," he declared in comments on his official Web site. "I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to 'sell their religion,' and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God."

I don't know how much power Ayatollah Montazeri has, but in a virtual Islamic theocracy, being the senior cleric must count for a lot.

Ralph

Obama vs McCain

On the Today show, Sen. John McCain said that President Obama should make a forceful declaration about the election in Iran. "He should speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election. The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights."

President Obama said this:
". . . the easiest way for reactionary forces inside Iran to crush reformers is to say it's the US that is encouraging those reformers. So what I've said is, `Look, it's up to the Iranian people to make a decision. We are not meddling.' And, you know, ultimately the question that the leadership in Iran has to answer is their own credibility in the eyes of the Iranian people."

How short a time it has been since both Hillary Clinton and John McCain were claiming that Barack Obama was too inexperienced to handle complex foreign affairs and to be commander in chief.

So, who looks unpresidential now? Even right-wingers and neo-cons are praising Obama's handling of the Iran crisis. Bot Pat Buchannan and Bill Crystal have said so.

Ralph

Iran again

It's not clear what it will lead to, but the big news coming out of Iran is that the Guardian Council, which I gather is a sort of wise overseer of the government, has agreed to a recount of the votes.

It could, of course, mean that this too will be a sham designed to legitimate the fraud; but I sense that it may be an honest move.

Meanwhile, despite criticism from politically motivated clowns on the right who say he should be declaring outrage, Obama has taken just the right stance: saying that we have no way of knowing whether the election results are valid, since we had no monitors in the country, but that Iranians need to feel their ballots matter, and he urged a recount. He also deplored the violence and the crackdown on peaceful demonstrations. He also said he didn't want to say anything that would inject the U.S. into Iranian internal divisions. It would be a mistake to make it seem that the protests were a U.S. backed uprising.

He also spoke directly to the Iranian youth: "And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected."

Just the right touch of restraint, respect for the people, but holding to the values of self-determination and the right to peaceful protest.

Ralph

Iran investigation?

After appearing to completely accept the (probably) fraudulent re-election of Ahmadenijad, the Supreme Islamic Leader Khamenei met with reform candidate Mousavi and then announced an investigation of his claims of election fraud.

The question is: does this mean anything? Here's Nico Pitney's take on it (HuffingtonPost):

Understanding Khamenei's voter fraud shift. It's still unclear why Khamenei decided to announce a probe of possible election fraud, or what that investigation might look like. (It was strange enough that he came out on Sunday and re-blessed Ahmadinejad's victory.)

Justifiably skeptical readers note that, at the very least, this announcement can buy the Supreme Leader time and relieve some of the urgency felt by pro-Mousavi Iranians.

Another emailer, Reza, is even more pessimistic: "Please put the Supreme Leader's request to probe the election results in perspective for your readers. The body that will be probing election is appointed by the Supreme Leader and all its members are hardliners and backers of Ahmadinejad and his policies. This is nothing but a sham in an attempt to extinguish the fever for change that's taking hold in the country."

This may very well be true. On the other hand, Khamenei is most certainly feeling pressure from various quarters -- popular unrest, the more ideologically-moderate camp of former President Rafsanjani, a host of Ayatollahs, and so on -- to address the election allegations. And it's unclear at this point how Khamenei addresses any of those pressures by having a sham probe give a seal of approval to the results.

So, we wait. Khamenei is in a delicate balance: he wants to retain the power of the clerics, yet if he crushes the reform movement in an obvious way -- as in this clumsily stolen elections and the reaction to the protests up to now -- then his international standing is seriously jeopardized, just when Iran is making a bid for acceptance.

The European Union was too quick to recognize Ahmanedijad's "victory." The Obama administration is taking the better stance of waiting.

Ralph

The amazing Obama

Blogger Tom Engelhardt of TomGram writes about Obama's amazing political skills.

And the president himself, well, if you didn't watch his speech in Cairo, you should have. The guy's impressive. Truly. He can speak to multiple audiences -- Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, as well as a staggering range of Americans -- and somehow just about everyone comes away hearing something they like, feeling he's somehow on their side.

And it doesn't even feel like pandering. It feels like thoughtfulness. It feels like intelligence.

If, in a Star-Trekkian mode . . . you could transport yourself back to early 2003 and tell just about any American what's coming, you might have found yourself institutionalized. If you had said that the new norm would be a black president with Reagan-like popularity, Kennedy-like charisma, and Roosevelt-like skills in the political arena, leading a majority Democratic Congress in search of universal health care, solutions to global warming, energy conservation, and bullet trains, your listener might, at best, have responded with his or her own joke: "A priest, a rabbi, and a penguin walk into a bar..."

But it's true, and he is for real.

Ralph

Senator Whitehouse

Remember the name: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (RI). A lot of us regreted when Senator Lincoln Chafee -- the lone liberal Republican senator -- lost his bid for re-election in 2006.

But no more. The man who defeated him, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehous is proving himself to be a formidable member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who is conducting an investigation into the bush administration's torture policy. In his position, he has read all the classified reports concerning the interrogations, particularly of Zubaydah, who was famously waterboarded. This led Whitehouse to make this astounding statement in a speech on the Senate floor last week:

I want my colleagues and the American public to know that, measured against the information I’ve been able to gain access to, the story-line that we have been led to believe, the story-line about waterboarding that we have been sold, is false in every one of its dimensions, and I ask that my colleagues be patient and be prepared to listen to the evidence when all is said and done before they wrap themselves in that story-line.

This is the clearest refutation yet of dick cheney's claims in his effort to write his version of history into the books before the real evidence is released.

I've watched Whitehouse in committee hearings. He is impressive. More than anyone I know, he impresses me as future presidential material. But could a man with the name of Whitehouse really be elected to live and preside in the White House? I suppose so, but if you were writing a novel, your editor would say "no way; you've got to change his name."

Ralph

Iran blows up

Juan Cole has a good analysis of what probably happened in the Iranian election.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/13/iran/

His conclusion is that the election was a "last-minute and clumsy fraud," by a central government that was caught by surprise but was determined not to let reformist candidate Moussavi win.

It's the pattern of supposed voting that makes no sense. Ahmadinejad reportly won by a 63% majority that was spread rather uniformly across the country, in cities as well as countryside. It makes no sense that Ahmadinejad would have run equally strongly in areas where he was popular as in areas where his challenger had aroused the most enthusiasm.

Urban youth and women were especially strong supporters of Moussavi, and they turned out in huge numbers to vote -- and yet the official results show that their support for the reform candidate was less than their vote for the reform candidate in 1997 and 2001.

Cole points out that a carefully planned theft of the election would at least have conceded his home region of Tabriz to Moussavi. But official results have Ahmadinejad winning Tabriz by 57%.

Will it have much pracical significance? Some say not, since the president does not have much power; the government is run by the theocrat, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

What does seem evident at this point is that the obvious fraud has galvanized the resistance; there is even some talk among correspondents of a possible overthrow of Khamenei -- or at least a loss of power possibly leading to replacing him, if not the government.

What remains to be seen is how far the violent resistance will go. As of this moment it seems to be escalating. This, combined with the crackdown on the international media and the blacking out of all email communciation, suggest a very serious problem and certainly a black eye on the Iranian government's attempt for acceptance on the world stage.

Ralph