It is now the wee hours of the morning in Tehran. Reports on Twitter suggest that the shouts of “Allaho Akbar” were louder tonight than they have been all week (here is a video supposedly from tonight). It seems that tomorrow will almost certainly bring bloodshed and a brutal crackdown should the opposition take to the streets, as they are expected to, in 12 hours or so.
I imagine fateful decisions are being made tonight. The hundreds of thousands of Iranians who took to the streets this week will be deciding if they should go out tomorrow in the face of Khamenei’s speech, and its unmistakable threat. The unit commanders and general staff of the army, the police and the IRGC will be deciding whether they will follow orders tomorrow, whether they can order their men into the streets to beat, maim and kill fellow Iranians. Clergy will decide, as they’ve been deciding all week, whether to stand with Khamenei and endorse his coup.
Khamenei has made his choice. Much rests on decisions made by the rest of Iran over what must be an unimaginably tense night.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Ghosts of Elections Past
Andrew Sullivan, in trying to answer the question, “why did Khamenei fix the election?” points to a blog post by Brian Ulrich. Sullivan concludes from Ulrich’s piece that Khamenei fixed this election because he’d fixed other elections. This is not quite right.
What Ulrich describes, the Guardian Council’s “vetting” of candidates and restricting only those acceptable to the conservative clergy to participate in elections is not at all what happened in Iran on Friday. The Guardian Council’s restricting who may and who may not contest elections is a power it has exercised repeatedly throughout the history of the Islamic Republic. Certainly its barring 3,000 candidates in 2004 was unprecedented, but the practice itself is accepted.
Friday’s apparent fraud is something different altogether, however. As a friend of mine who lives by analyzing Iran put it, “You can’t call it vote rigging if they never counted the votes.” I think his estimation is correct. God knows what happened to the millions of ballots cast on Friday, but they weren’t counted. The results promulgated by the government appear to have been made up out of whole cloth. This sort of election fraud – utter disregard for the even restricted will of the people – is wholly unprecedented in Iran. It is astounding that Khamenei would attempt this. While we in the West have frequently in the past derided Iran as authoritarian, the Iranians themselves jealously guard the Republican aspects of their system. Khamenei’s outlandish gamble offended the sensibilities of the Iranian people – that there would be outcry is wholly unsurprising, that the outcry has been as vociferous and sustained as it has been this week is inspiring.
Today, some of the questions about Iran’s nascent revolution have been resolved: Khamenei was in on the fraud from the outset; Khamenei is siding with Ahmadinejad and the IRGC; the regime will crackdown brutally on any further demonstrations. Questions that remain are: Why didn’t Khamenei crackdown at the outset instead of allowing this to build momentum? Have the Iranians in the street coalesced around a common goal and defined success for themselves? Can the demonstrations be sustained in the face of what will likely be a withering attack from the government?
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Why Mourning Matters
Mousavi’s call for Thursday to be a day of mourning for the protesters already killed demonstrates that he is both savvy and that he knows his history.
During the 1979 Revolution, mourning demonstrations honoring killed demonstrators were a means of unifying the otherwise disparate groups who had taken to the street in opposition to the Shah. That all these groups, with different goals and different beliefs could be brought together, into the street, as one corpus under the aegis of mourning served as a fundamental organizing principle in 1979.
In 1979, mourning also served as a means to build and sustain momentum: every day a demonstrator was killed, the next day there would be a mourning demonstration. And then again, 40 days later, at the end of the traditional mourning period, there would be a further demonstration. Invariably, a demonstrator would be killed during the mourning demonstration which would then give rise to another demonstration the following day. And so on, and so forth.
Mousavi’s choice of this tactic is cunning. It is not, I think, an accident that a man steeled in the first revolution would reach back for a tactic prominently used then. I also do not think the parallels will be lost on the older generation, the members of the government who can still remember 1979.
During the 1979 Revolution, mourning demonstrations honoring killed demonstrators were a means of unifying the otherwise disparate groups who had taken to the street in opposition to the Shah. That all these groups, with different goals and different beliefs could be brought together, into the street, as one corpus under the aegis of mourning served as a fundamental organizing principle in 1979.
In 1979, mourning also served as a means to build and sustain momentum: every day a demonstrator was killed, the next day there would be a mourning demonstration. And then again, 40 days later, at the end of the traditional mourning period, there would be a further demonstration. Invariably, a demonstrator would be killed during the mourning demonstration which would then give rise to another demonstration the following day. And so on, and so forth.
Mousavi’s choice of this tactic is cunning. It is not, I think, an accident that a man steeled in the first revolution would reach back for a tactic prominently used then. I also do not think the parallels will be lost on the older generation, the members of the government who can still remember 1979.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
And what of the Bazaaris?
Andrew Sullivan has been doing a fantastic job aggregating the news and information coming out of Iran, and the analysis that’s been coming out of various sources outside of Iran. I think Andrew lacks enough background knowledge about Iran , however, to properly put a lot of the information in context, or to recognize what analysis is really ideologically driven crap and what reflects a good understanding of Iran. One such question I’d like to see him pose-since he seems to be able to drive some of the conversation throughout the blogosphere and the pundit class-is ‘what of the Bazaaris?’
The Bazaaris, of course, are the merchant class in Iran, particularly Tehran, that are widely viewed as having played a key role in the 1979 Revolution and the pro-Mosadegh demonstrations in the 1950s. Win the bazaaris and you win Iran, or so goes the conventional wisdom.
Answering that question, I think, would go a long way towards resolving the dispute between the Green Sea Optimists (like Lauren Secor) and the Green Sea Pessimists (like Steve Coll). Coll, a fantastic journalist who has done great work, and with whom I generally agree, is maybe too quick to dismiss the budding revolution out of hand. If the Bazaaris are with the people that have taken to the street, then, historically, I say this budding revolution has a fair chance of bringing about something new.
What that something new is, is an open question. It doesn’t seem like the people in the streets at this point have any particular end result in mind and it doesn’t seem like Mousavi himself has any thing in mind, either – indeed, Mousavi seems to have in many respects been caught up in the Green Sea himself and is still grappling for a goal with which to provide it direction.
The Bazaaris, of course, are the merchant class in Iran, particularly Tehran, that are widely viewed as having played a key role in the 1979 Revolution and the pro-Mosadegh demonstrations in the 1950s. Win the bazaaris and you win Iran, or so goes the conventional wisdom.
Answering that question, I think, would go a long way towards resolving the dispute between the Green Sea Optimists (like Lauren Secor) and the Green Sea Pessimists (like Steve Coll). Coll, a fantastic journalist who has done great work, and with whom I generally agree, is maybe too quick to dismiss the budding revolution out of hand. If the Bazaaris are with the people that have taken to the street, then, historically, I say this budding revolution has a fair chance of bringing about something new.
What that something new is, is an open question. It doesn’t seem like the people in the streets at this point have any particular end result in mind and it doesn’t seem like Mousavi himself has any thing in mind, either – indeed, Mousavi seems to have in many respects been caught up in the Green Sea himself and is still grappling for a goal with which to provide it direction.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Pitfalls of American Foreign Policy
Steve Coll’s Comment in the most recent issue of the New Yorker is, as usual, excellent. While discussing US policy towards Afghanistan over the last 30 years, it speaks to a broader truth in American foreign policy. Namely, the United States is miserable-miserable-at policy-follow through. Not only do American policy makers evince an historical unwillingness to consider the long-term or even second order effect of their policies, immediate success or failures frequently result in utter abandonment of the policy, regardless of the effects of abandoning the policy.
Coll’s book Ghost Wars illustrates both of the above points with reference to US policy making during and following the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The first is illustrated by the well warn tale of the US providing arms, training and intelligence to the mujahideen and what would become of some of the mujahideen after the Soviets left. The second is the less well known story of what the US did with regard to Afghanistan after the Soviets left – and more to the point, how different American policies after the Soviet withdrawal may have resulted in a very different Afghanistan (and a very different America, for that matter).
The short version of that story is that America abandoned Afghanistan. After the Soviets left, Afghanistan was essentially a power-vacuum. The disparate resistance groups remained disparate, as they remain today, the country was fractured, and the lawlessness gave rise, rather quickly, to the Taliban.
Again, this is not a critique merely of American policy in Afghanistan; rather, American policy in Afghanistan is emblematic of American foreign policy. Foreign policy is rarely one-dimensional. Frequently, the effects of policy are non-linear and multifaceted. The same is true for the effects of abandoning policy without a replacement. The moral, I think, is that we must become better at thinking policy through and at not acting with caprice or out of pique.
Coll’s book Ghost Wars illustrates both of the above points with reference to US policy making during and following the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The first is illustrated by the well warn tale of the US providing arms, training and intelligence to the mujahideen and what would become of some of the mujahideen after the Soviets left. The second is the less well known story of what the US did with regard to Afghanistan after the Soviets left – and more to the point, how different American policies after the Soviet withdrawal may have resulted in a very different Afghanistan (and a very different America, for that matter).
The short version of that story is that America abandoned Afghanistan. After the Soviets left, Afghanistan was essentially a power-vacuum. The disparate resistance groups remained disparate, as they remain today, the country was fractured, and the lawlessness gave rise, rather quickly, to the Taliban.
Again, this is not a critique merely of American policy in Afghanistan; rather, American policy in Afghanistan is emblematic of American foreign policy. Foreign policy is rarely one-dimensional. Frequently, the effects of policy are non-linear and multifaceted. The same is true for the effects of abandoning policy without a replacement. The moral, I think, is that we must become better at thinking policy through and at not acting with caprice or out of pique.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Richard Holbrooke on Afghan Poppies
Richard Holbrooke, the new US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan described the US and NATO attempts to arrest Afghan poppy production as “wasteful and ineffective.” The BBC reported on Saturday, that Holbrooke reported that despite US expenditures of $800 million/year in poppy eradication efforts the US is getting no return for their investment. Holbrooke recommends that the US should redirect money spent on eradication to assistance to farmers.
About a month ago, I wrote here about the damage US poppy eradication policy was doing on the overall effort to stabilize Afghanistan and defeat the resurgent Taliban. Holbrooke’s comments are a hopeful indicator that US policy will shift over the coming months, away from destroying the livelihood of farmers (which ultimately encourages their support of the Taliban) to providing alternative means of wage earning. As I wrote a month ago, if this means purchasing crops from these farmers t several times the market price, it will be money well spent. Aggressive eradication methods not only do not work to stem the tide of poppy farming but actively undermine the US mission in Afghanistan.
About a month ago, I wrote here about the damage US poppy eradication policy was doing on the overall effort to stabilize Afghanistan and defeat the resurgent Taliban. Holbrooke’s comments are a hopeful indicator that US policy will shift over the coming months, away from destroying the livelihood of farmers (which ultimately encourages their support of the Taliban) to providing alternative means of wage earning. As I wrote a month ago, if this means purchasing crops from these farmers t several times the market price, it will be money well spent. Aggressive eradication methods not only do not work to stem the tide of poppy farming but actively undermine the US mission in Afghanistan.
US Unemployment County-by-County
The New York Times published this map of the United States illustrating the unemployment rate county-by-county. It is instructive to remember that the traditional unemployment measure undercounts the unemployed. Unsurprisingly, the heavily agrarian plain states seem to be doing better (that is, less poorly) than the rest. Oddly enough you’re better off living on the East Coast rather than the West Coast, and if you live in Alaska, well, Federal Subsidies notwithstanding, you should consider moving.
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