Where's their vote?

Tom Watson's concerned that folks here are seeing events in Iran from a too American perspective, with the danger of turning opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi into a folk hero.  Tom doesn't like or trust Moussavi and offers a good reason:

Twenty years ago, the newspaper I worked for was blown up by terrorists for demanding that American bookstores show enough courage to carry The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, had issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers. Khomeini's hand-picked Prime Minister - a man who publicly upheld the death sentence against the brilliant author - was none other than Mir Hussein Moussavi, darling of western bloggers and media types who have somehow confused his faction's struggle for power in the totalitarian theocracy with a grand moral movement for democracy and social change.

Read Tom's post and follow the links to the TIME and Foreign Policy articles on Moussavi.

I see where Tom's coming from.  I'm not sure I see that Moussavi's all that important to the discussions I've followed online or to what's going on in the streets of Tehran.  Juan Cole posted this report from a professor he's in contact with over there.

Today, under slate skies and despite official warnings that the permit to march had been denied, against rumors that orders had been given to shoot to kill, they came. They came by the tens if not hundreds of thousands, marching east to west along the many kilometers of Enqelab Street to Azadi, or Freedom Square. "It would be dishonorable, na mardi, to not go," a young couple explained. "We have to go." Another man asks who is going, what is going on? He is told that the "Mousavi-chiha" are marching starting at 4. He laughs, "Mousavi-chiha nadarim, hame ye Iran hastand!" We don't have Mousavi supporters, it's now all of Iran...

Seems to me that we're making folk heroes out of the folk heroes, the people of all of Iran.

A sobering update from NPR.

Al Giordano on another failure of the MSM on the Iran story.

Comments

[Apostate]

Agree that it's not about Mousavi, per se. It's about election-fraud and the people's will.

I saw on Twitter that Obama made a statement along the lines that there was precious little difference between Mousavi and his predecessor. A Twitterer retorted, of late, there's precious little difference between Obama and his predecessor.

We can't even afford to be holier than thou, with our supposedly liberal president actually to the right of the conservative President Nixon.

If anyone is curious, "na mardi" literally means "unmanly," not dishonorable.

[Ken Houghton]

And here I thought it was "it's not Tuesday, this is not Belgium."

What Apostate Said. No one who has watched Mousavi's history would confuse him with a real reformer. No one the least familiar with the Iranian electoral process would confuse themself that reform is possible under it.

But the right of the people, as Russell Crowe noted once, is to choose the lesser of two weevils.

They may have chosen Mousavi. They may have chosen Mousavi without a majority, but Achmen... may not even have been second. There's a remote but not credible possibility that they chose Achmen... without a majority, in such a manner that it was clear that he would lose a runoff (e.g., 37/33/30).

What does not appear to have happened is that Achmen... was elected to the Largely Ceremonial Office with a majority of the vote, as would have been required to certify his election.

As a conservative sf writer once noted, 95% of governing is making certain that the 10-20% of the people inclined to revolt are not joined by a large portion of the 30-50% who are not happy but not really willing to do anything about it. In that respect, the Iranian election as reported is clearly a failure.

[John]

Is it really that hard to ask that people look up how to spell Ahmadinejad before posting about him? Seriously, Ken Houghton, that's some weak stuff. "Achmen..."?

As to Tom Watson's point, Iran is not a totalitarian state. It has not been a totalitarian state since our boy, the Shah, got kicked out in 1979. It's a state with some deeply problematic aspects, and not nearly as democratic as it ought to be, but it's not totalitarian. To call Iran totalitarian is to deprive the word of all real meaning. I would say, in fact, that it is nearly impossible to be a truly totalitarian state in the modern world - only North Korea really manages it, and that's through basically completely isolating itself from the outside world.

[John]

We can't even afford to be holier than thou, with our supposedly liberal president actually to the right of the conservative President Nixon.

To the right in what way? What bullshit. Nixon was as right wing as he thought he could get away with.

[Apostate]

John, Republicans have moved much farther right in the past 30 years. In case you haven't noticed.

Nixon was a goddamn progressive compared to Obama.