Pick the Continue Reading link for George Friedman’s
above titled essay, from Strategic Forecasting Inc. (via
www.stratfor.com), permission granted to reproduce here.
Mr. Friedman’s essay from last week is also available here.
Update: Kissinger comments.
Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime’s orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989.
Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces — who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators — and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.
A Question of Support
This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators — who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents — failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution.
Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops — definitely not drawn from what we might call the “Twittering classes,” would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons. The troops had about as much sympathy for the demonstrators as a small-town boy from Alabama might have for a Harvard postdoc. Failing to understand the social tensions in Iran, the reporters deluded themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising. But this was not St. Petersburg in 1917 or Bucharest in 1989 — it was Tiananmen Square.
In the global discussion last week outside Iran, there was a great deal of confusion about basic facts. For example, it is said that the urban-rural distinction in Iran is not critical any longer because according to the United Nations, 68 percent of Iranians are urbanized. This is an important point because it implies Iran is homogeneous and the demonstrators representative of the country. The problem is the Iranian definition of urban — and this is quite common around the world — includes very small communities (some with only a few thousand people) as “urban.” But the social difference between someone living in a town with 10,000 people and someone living in Tehran is the difference between someone living in Bastrop, Texas and someone living in New York. We can assure you that that difference is not only vast, but that most of the good people of Bastrop and the fine people of New York would probably not see the world the same way. The failure to understand the dramatic diversity of Iranian society led observers to assume that students at Iran’s elite university somehow spoke for the rest of the country.
Tehran proper has about 8 million inhabitants; its suburbs bring it to about 13 million people out of Iran’s total population of 70.5 million. Tehran accounts for about 20 percent of Iran, but as we know, the cab driver and the construction worker are not socially linked to students at elite universities. There are six cities with populations between 1 million and 2.4 million people and 11 with populations of about 500,000. Including Tehran proper, 15.5 million people live in cities with more than 1 million and 19.7 million in cities greater than 500,000. Iran has 80 cities with more than 100,000. But given that Waco, Texas, has more than 100,000 people, inferences of social similarities between cities with 100,000 and 5 million are tenuous. And with metro Oklahoma City having more than a million people, it becomes plain that urbanization has many faces.
Winning the Election With or Without Fraud
We continue to believe two things: that vote fraud occurred, and that Ahmadinejad likely would have won without it. Very little direct evidence has emerged to establish vote fraud, but several things seem suspect.
For example, the speed of the vote count has been taken as a sign of fraud, as it should have been impossible to count votes that fast. The polls originally were to have closed at 7 p.m. local time, but voting hours were extended until 10 p.m. because of the number of voters in line. By 11:45 p.m. about 20 percent of the vote had been counted. By 5:20 a.m. the next day, with almost all votes counted, the election commission declared Ahmadinejad the winner. The vote count thus took about seven hours. (Remember there were no senators, congressmen, city council members or school board members being counted — just the presidential race.) Intriguingly, this is about the same time in took in 2005, though reformists that claimed fraud back then did not stress the counting time in their allegations.
The counting mechanism is simple: Iran has 47,000 voting stations, plus 14,000 roaming stations that travel from tiny village to tiny village, staying there for a short time before moving on. That creates 61,000 ballot boxes designed to receive roughly the same number of votes. That would mean that each station would have been counting about 500 ballots, or about 70 votes per hour. With counting beginning at 10 p.m., concluding seven hours later does not necessarily indicate fraud or anything else. The Iranian presidential election system is designed for simplicity: one race to count in one time zone, and all counting beginning at the same time in all regions, we would expect the numbers to come in a somewhat linear fashion as rural and urban voting patterns would balance each other out — explaining why voting percentages didn’t change much during the night.
It has been pointed out that some of the candidates didn’t even carry their own provinces or districts. We remember that Al Gore didn’t carry Tennessee in 2000. We also remember Ralph Nader, who also didn’t carry his home precinct in part because people didn’t want to spend their vote on someone unlikely to win — an effect probably felt by the two smaller candidates in the Iranian election.
That Mousavi didn’t carry his own province is more interesting. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett writing in Politico make some interesting points on this. As an ethnic Azeri, it was assumed that Mousavi would carry his Azeri-named and -dominated home province. But they also point out that Ahmadinejad also speaks Azeri, and made multiple campaign appearances in the district. They also point out that Khamenei is Azeri. In sum, winning that district was by no means certain for Mousavi, so losing it does not automatically signal fraud. It raised suspicions, but by no means was a smoking gun.
We do not doubt that fraud occurred during Iranian election. For example, 99.4 percent of potential voters voted in Mazandaran province, a mostly secular area home to the shah’s family. Ahmadinejad carried the province by a 2.2 to 1 ratio. That is one heck of a turnout and level of support for a province that lost everything when the mullahs took over 30 years ago. But even if you take all of
the suspect cases and added them together, it would not have changed the outcome. The fact is that Ahmadinejad’s vote in 2009 was extremely close to his victory percentage in 2005. And while the Western media portrayed Ahmadinejad’s performance in the presidential debates ahead of the election as dismal, embarrassing and indicative of an imminent electoral defeat, many Iranians who viewed those debates — including some of the most hardcore Mousavi supporters — acknowledge that Ahmadinejad outperformed his opponents by a landslide.
Mousavi persuasively detailed his fraud claims Sunday, and they have yet to be rebutted. But if his claims of the extent of fraud were true, the protests should have spread rapidly by social segment and geography to the millions of people who even the central government asserts voted for him. Certainly, Mousavi supporters believed they would win the election based in part on highly flawed polls, and when they didn’t, they assumed they were robbed and took to the streets.
But critically, the protesters were not joined by any of the millions whose votes the protesters alleged were stolen. In a complete hijacking of the election by some 13 million votes by an extremely unpopular candidate, we would have expected to see the core of Mousavi’s supporters joined by others who had been disenfranchised. On last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, when the demonstrations were at their height, the millions of Mousavi voters should have made their appearance. They didn’t. We might assume that the security apparatus intimidated some, but surely more than just the Tehran professional and student classes posses civic courage. While appearing large, the demonstrations actually comprised a small fraction of society.
Tensions Among the Political Elite
All of this not to say there are not tremendous tensions within the Iranian political elite. That no revolution broke out does not mean there isn’t a crisis in the political elite, particularly among the clerics. But that crisis does not cut the way Western common sense would have it. Many of Iran’s religious leaders see Ahmadinejad as hostile to their interests, as threatening their financial prerogatives, and as taking international risks they don’t want to take. Ahmadinejad’s political popularity in fact rests on his populist hostility to what he sees as the corruption of the clerics and their families and his strong stand on Iranian national security issues.
The clerics are divided among themselves, but many wanted to see Ahmadinejad lose to protect their own interests. Khamenei, the supreme leader, faced a difficult choice last Friday. He could demand a major recount or even new elections, or he could validate what happened. Khamenei speaks for a sizable chunk of the ruling elite, but also has had to rule by consensus among both clerical and non-clerical forces. Many powerful clerics like Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani wanted Khamenei to reverse the election, and we suspect Khamenei wished he could have found a way to do it. But as the defender of the regime, he was afraid to. Mousavi supporters’ demonstrations would have been nothing compared to the firestorm among Ahmadinejad supporters — both voters and the security forces — had their candidate been denied. Khamenei wasn’t going to flirt with disaster, so he endorsed the outcome.
The Western media misunderstood this because they didn’t understand that Ahmadinejad does not speak for the clerics but against them, that many of the clerics were working for his defeat, and that Ahmadinejad has enormous pull in the country’s security apparatus. The reason Western media missed this is because they bought into the concept of the stolen election, therefore failing to see Ahmadinejad’s support and the widespread dissatisfaction with the old clerical elite. The Western media simply didn’t understand that the most traditional and pious segments of Iranian society support Ahmadinejad because he opposes the old ruling elite. Instead, they assumed this was like Prague or Budapest in 1989, with a broad-based uprising in favor of liberalism against an unpopular regime.
Tehran in 2009, however, was a struggle between two main factions, both of which supported the Islamic republic as it was. There were the clerics, who have dominated the regime since 1979 and had grown wealthy in the process. And there was Ahmadinejad, who felt the ruling clerical elite had betrayed the revolution with their personal excesses. And there also was the small faction the BBC and CNN kept focusing on — the demonstrators in the streets who want to dramatically liberalize the Islamic republic. This faction never stood a chance of taking power, whether by election or revolution. The two main factions used the third smaller faction in various ways, however. Ahmadinejad used it to make his case that the clerics who supported them, like Rafsanjani, would risk the revolution and play into the hands of the Americans and British to protect their own wealth. Meanwhile, Rafsanjani argued behind the scenes that the unrest was the tip of the iceberg, and that Ahmadinejad had to be replaced. Khamenei, an astute politician, examined the data and supported Ahmadinejad.
Now, as we saw after Tiananmen Square, we will see a reshuffling among the elite. Those who backed Mousavi will be on the defensive. By contrast, those who supported Ahmadinejad are in a powerful position. There is a massive crisis in the elite, but this crisis has nothing to do with liberalization: It has to do with power and prerogatives among the elite. Having been forced by the election and Khamenei to live with Ahmadinejad, some will make deals while some will fight — but Ahmadinejad is well-positioned to win this battle.
That essay is by George Friedman © Strategic Forecasting, 2009
(at www.stratfor.com), permission granted to reproduce here.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/21/will_dialogue_work_with_iran_97099.html
“As Amir Taheri has put it, the opposition candidate who lost the rigged election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is just “a balloon that a section of the Iranian middle class inflated to show its anger not only at Ahmadinejad but also at the entire Khomeinist regime.”
The demands of the people in the streets — and there have been quite literally millions of them, turned out in every significant Iranian town, invisible to western media holed up under house arrest in Tehran, but quite apparent through the Internet — are unambiguous.
They want “regime change.” They do not want an amelioration, but an end, to the morality laws, the thugs who enforce them, the secret prisons, the international brinkmanship, the terror networks, and the rest of the regime’s infrastructure of power.
If the regime does win, it will emerge from the carnage as an even deadlier enemy to the West. The only leverage the West will have is appeasement, and that has never worked, anytime or anywhere in history.
President Obama bet, with his Cairo speech, that it will work this time. He disavowed his predecessor’s bellicose rhetoric, and committed the U.S. to dialogue with Iran’s monstrous rulers.
President Reagan, who extracted more concessions from Soviet tyrants than all previous presidents combined, did not do so by making nice to them.”
…
However, I might add that the breadth of the demonstrations seems to be wider than previous expressions of regime discontent.
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Friedman seems to be scrambling to ensure his original diagnosis was correct — that this was a doomed reaction from the start amongst a small strata of society.
The recent arrest of Gen. Ali Fazli for refusing to attack protesters and the lockdown of Westerners into hotel rooms tell a different tale than Friedman.
This just might be the real thing. Who and what comes out on top is beyond my paygrade, natch.
And yet again, I disagree with Friedman. He’s now covering previous criticisms, with his assertion that the vote COULD be counted quickly, and that Mousavi wasn’t that popular and that the urban population is not that important. And so on. I disagree.
Friedman is ignoring the demonstrations! Does he think that only a small elite segment of the population speak English? And that only these people protested? Hundreds of thousands of them? And not simply in Tehran but in the other major cities? And the enormous Iranian population in cities in the West, eg Los Angeles? What about them?
It wasn’t about a vote count; it wasn’t about, even, an election. That’s the surface. The ‘event’, which included BOTH the election and the protests was about a deep societal change required, and desired, by the young generation of Iran.
Friedman totally ignores this demographic statistic; he ignores the under 30 population. He ignores the global economy and political system that is networked by and for this age set. He refers to them as a ‘small faction’ that talked to the BBC and CNN.
Friedman ignores that the economic system of Iran, as well as its political structure, is two-class and that it totally rejects the input of a middle class. Friedman errs in his reference to a ‘middle class’..who are, instead, the elite upper class in Iran.
Friedman also errs in his assumption that IF and Only IF the majority of the population wanted change, THEN, they would have ALL been out on the streets. No, this is never the case. The voice that speaks out is a voice and not the body. The American Revolution was led by a handful of signers of the Declaration, not the entire population. But, that Revolution was necessary and the population and economy was at the ‘tipping point’.
Iran is at the same ‘far-from-equilibrium’ state; it’s at the tipping point when its massive under 30 population requires the capacity to Be Active in their own nation and in the world. And a somnambulant and decaying economy, a redistributive rather than business and market economy, won’t satisfy this group.
Friedman also ignores, utterly, the effect of the global network. This under 30 population is networked with the world – and – with their Iranian friends in America and elsewhere. They want change.
Friedman ignores the economy, ignores demographics, ignores the age of the population, ignores the effect of Iraq and Afghanistan democracy, and ignores the electronic network.
Certainly, this current phase one wouldn’t work. Not yet. But, there is no going back. The regime will fall sooner rather than later.
What is, however, deeply disturbing, is Obama’s failure to stand up for democracy. As president of the USA, the bastion of democracy, that is his duty. He failed to support democracy. Instead, he behaved as if it, and the demonstrators, didn’t exist. For him, they didn’t exist. As a pathological narcissist, the only realities that exist, are those within his control. If he can’t control them by charm or harm, they don’t exist. Shameful.
Women and the Iranian Unrest
An article from American Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/women_and_the_iranian_unrest.html
Definitely worth reading
“The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States,” Obama said in an interview broadcast Monday on CBS’ “The Early Show.”
“We shouldn’t be playing into that,” he said in the interview, which was recorded Friday.”
He may have a point. If the U.S. is involved in any way, the Ayatollah can rally the people around battling “the great satan”.
“The failure to understand the dramatic diversity of Iranian society led observers to assume that students at Iran’s elite university somehow spoke for the rest of the country.”
A lot of people make the mistake that universities speak for the populace.
Friedman makes some very interesting if pessimistic points. If this is, indeed, another Tiananmen, then the protesters are ruined. If, however, pressure from the West helps, they might be spared some kind of wrath.
One point (and perhaps it is naive): because there are no Internet links other than in Tehran, could there be uprisings elsewhere and we just don’t know about it?
dmorris – are you serious?
Do you really think that the people demonstrating, and dying, in the Iranian protests, are doing it because of pressure from the USA?
Do you really think that the Iranian govt would be believed if it insisted that their protests were not valid, and that their anger at their lack of power in their own country’s political and economic life, was somehow caused by the USA?
Obama is an indifferent, ignorant coward.
For 15+ years now I’ve been hearing from Iranians living here in Canada that a revolution in Iran in inevitable. Maybe we’re there…
ET,
Not sure I would go your distance yet. They are demonstrating for their own reasons, and for their own purpose.
The regime has, in the past, been able to use the US as a foil. For the moment, the best things the US can do is stay out of the way. But that may not be true tomorrow, I think the possibilities are changing rapidly.
I honestly didnt think this was possible 3 weeks ago. I wouldnt have thought that the whole regime would be in question 4 days ago. But these are only possibilities for the moment.
There hasnt been much that Obama could do or shoudl do for the moment. The Iranian community in the US isnt criticizing him as far as I can tell (I could be wrong).
You are correct that the revolution, if it happens, is not about him or the US. Those who mention his Cairo speech drive me crazy, I dont see the connection.
But the cange from Bush, might have created the space where internal Iranian dissent could speak WITHOUT being accussed of acting on behalf of Bush. Look at how the dialogue in Canada has changed now that he is gone. The whole Harper as American stooger argument cant be made, isnt being made. Why wouldnt the same synamics, with higher stakes, apply in Iran?
I will say again, for the moment saying little by the US pres is the right thing, but that is changing. As the regime increases brutality then the time to speak clearly will be there.
Canada, and the Europeans are in different positions so Canada could speak clearer, which it has done.
The Iranian people have to want it, and if they really do the whole Islamic republic structure is going down the drain. Can’t be too soon.
I’ve added to the entry first above:
Update: Kissinger comments.
stephen – the press and public pundits are still defining Harper as ‘Bush’; they are trying to depict him as part of the ‘old Bush regime’ and Ignatieff as ‘Hope and Change’.
What Obama could have said, was only that he supports democracy and the desire for democracy, everywhere in the world. Period.
As for Kissinger’s groveling gravel, it’s meaningless. The Rulers of Iran have always used the US as a convenient foil. Obama could have been utterly silent, simply eaten his ice cream and played golf, without saying a word, and they would still have accused the US of somehow, being responsible by ‘secret infiltration’ and ‘hidden support’.
Therefore, both Kissinger and Obama’s explanation of Obama’s reluctance to support democracy, per se, are empty.
Since both Kissinger and Obama know, or ought to know, that the Iranian leadership would accuse the US of involvement no matter what, then, Obama ought to have spoken up, as leader of the world’s strongest democracy, in support of democracy.
His silence says a lot. About his own support for democracy and the voice of the people…remember, his reaction to the Tea Parties? How he at first, completely ignored them? Said he didn’t know about them? And then, finally, acknowledged them but disparaged them? And left it to his minions to smear and sneer at them.
His two-step reaction to the Iranian demonstrations was identical. His first reaction was essentially to ignore their agenda and focus. His second was a weak ‘hush, hush’ to the administration to ‘don’t be brutal’. He said nothing to the demonstrators. His next statement was that there wasn’t much difference between Ahmandinejad and Mousavi – which denigrates the demonstrators and suggests they are just ignorant rabble (like the Tea Parties).
As I’ve said before, Obama ignores anything and anyone whom/that he can’t control by charm or harm.
My other point is that this demonstration in Iran is the cusp of a major change there – and in the Middle East. The ME has to move into democracy. Its population is too large and too young to be restrained and constrained as a lower class. The ME has to enable a middle class. No choice. This is the cusp of such a movement.
And which countries ought to be alarmed at the moment? Saudi Arabia, for one. It can’t continue to repress its population forever either.
Friedman is good at providing background and internal political/historic context, but what stands out like a sore thumb in his conclusions is the dearth of such hard, verified information on election data as would be required, you think, to justify his take on the legitimacy of the election result.
For example, he says:
“Even if you take all of the suspect cases and added them together, it would not have changed the outcome.”
International observers *weren’t allowed in*, so how can he possibly quantify how many “suspect cases” there are? He can’t know — it’s impossible — so he can’t “add them together” to make a pronouncement about the legitimacy of the outcome.
I’ve seen that sort of analysis elsewhere too, statements to the effect that, “yes, there were (X) cases where the vote totals were more than 100% of eligible voters, but those cases wouldn’t have affected the outcome.” The assumption, of course, is that the malfeasance indicated by such numbers didn’t occur anywhere where the total number of votes was 100 percent or less of eligible voters.
Friedman seems inordinately inclined to take Iranian government pronouncements about the fairness of the election counts and then run with that ball because it supports his own view. He’s good for background, but when it comes to his Father Christmas pronouncements on the real outcome of the vote, he’s groping in the dark — unless he had thousands of western observers there that nobody knows about.
There is something being missed here.
Up ’til the last two or few weeks of the election campaign, nothing was expected. then, surprisingly, an election broke out.
There were public debates where real arguments occured. This whetted the appetite of the people for open discussion and liberty.
This is why there are riots.
Owebama just got his 3AM phone call, and managed to drop the phone, and lose the connection
he’s called for the navy in that part of the world to stand down
what a damn incompitent fool, just like that stupid kissinger
ET,
Ok I think I see the point you are making with your example of what Obama could have said.
I dont want to quibble with it other than to say the Iranian regime couls simply have said they do since they just had an election. It an internal matter.
I dont want to be defending Obama here, but I dont know that he has done much wrong here at this stage. He has spoken out for universal rights of assembly and speech…but once again there isnt much good he can do, even if he parachuted into Iran himself, I wouldnt put it past him.
It isnt about Obama, I think you would agree, and there is little of practical value he can contribute for the moment other than find quiet ways to support and encourage. The mullahs pull their support from the rural and small towns in Iran. You dont need to inflame that, but the demographics do the regime in, given that they havent successfullly brainwashed them.
The time is coming for a more tangible or forceul response, but I would take my cues through the expat community. Once they start to say involvement is required and proscribe its form then Obama can do something. But right now he should swat flies and kibbitz with Gibbs.
There is a very sophicticated PR campaign going on within Iran, so I wouldnt discount US involvement. There is leadership and resources involved here, it may simply be funded by expats.
Interesting post on the relative strengths/weaknesses (the author sees a number of strengths, but has a few caveats) of Strafor’s reports:
http://seekerblog.com/archives/20050313/is-stratfor-credible/
Kissinger is a fool. His own diplomatic efforts, everywhere, were a failure; dispite his mystique.
ET, this uprising is simply one of liberty. People are frustrated in their abillity to walk, or say or do, as they please … and particularly women.
Unfortunately, no leader has come to the fore to crystalize this sentiment. All tghe leading players are regimistes
who cares about Iran when the precious one can rid of us pestulance with a quick snap of his magnificent wrist. and be pleased with himself – outright impressed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ2H1K_0FXw&feature=related
can the Iranians or the North Koreans not grasp the significance of the one’s moves magnificent?
what axis of evil cannot bow before the snap of fingers or clap of hands of the community organizer
Kissinger’s comments miss the entire issue.
Kissinger frames the issue as though it is good that Obama isn’t seen as supporting one of the contenders in the Iranian election.
This is entirely an evasion of the real issue, which is that the election was fixed, gamed, essentially a pose put on by the government to been seen as having popular support from the Iranian people for the status quo.
The real issue is that the status quo in Iran does NOT have popular support from the people and the people are on to the game and refuse to go along any more.
Interesting take on the election. video: Iran Election Questions: Noam Chomsky’s Speculation