Mosharraf Zaidi: A broken election in a broken Iran

Posted: June 25, 2009, 2:00 PM by NP Editor
Mosharraf Zaidi



What is happening in Iran is not a CIA conspiracy to destabilise the Middle East. It is simply more evidence of the incapability of Muslim societies to competently conduct their affairs within the confines of an agreed set of rules. The Great Satan is not in Washington DC, or at the CIA headquarters. The Great Satan is the unfettered and dysfunctional state.

In Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and almost everywhere else where Muslims make up a majority of the population, this Great Satan is feeding monsters that are always a few speeches away from being out of control. It is not unnatural that the United States should applaud some of these monsters (like those in Iran) and not others (like the millions of Pakistanis that, for two years, protested for the restoration of the judiciary). Iran’s democrats are more convenient for U.S. foreign policy than Pakistani democrats. The United States is a rational animal, and the U.S. state, as problematic as it may be, is not the unfettered and dysfunctional beast that mullahs in every corner of the Muslim world pretend it is.

Many contest the use of the term Muslim world, and perhaps there are good reasons to do so. There continue to be enough reasons however not to get rid of the term. At the top of that list is the collective inability of Muslim societies to construct viable and sustainable states that work. At the top of the list of examples of states that don’t work is Iran. And at the top of the list of examples of how it doesn’t work is the June 12 election.

Iran’s post-election riots and instability are the products of public policy dysfunction. The fuel that is being added to the fire may very well be the product of Fox News’ intense desire to see the back of Ahmedinejad, but the fire itself is all-Persian, all-Islamic republic, and all too avoidable.

Since Iran does not allow for the free and unfettered expression of political opinions, public opinion polls from within the country have no credibility. So those that are interested in Iran depend on opinion polling conducted by external actors. This year for example, between May 11 and May 20, The Centre for Public Opinion at Terror Free Tomorrow, the New America Foundation, and KA Europe SPRL conducted a nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians. Thirty-four per cent of all respondents said they would vote for Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, fourteen per cent said they would vote for Mir Hussein Moussavi, two per cent said they would vote for Mehdi Karroubi, and one per cent said they would vote for Mohsin Rezaee. A staggering 27 per cent said they did not know who they would be voting for, but that they would indeed vote. However, of those 27 per cent, more than 60 per cent planned to vote for a reformist candidate (which would mean either Moussavi or Karroubi). The poll therefore suggested that there would be a two-way race that would pit Moussavi and Ahmedinejad in a close race for president — with Ahmedinejad holding a small but significant lead.

The official elections result, when announced, sparked almost immediate protests because it came out to be 63 per cent for Ahmedinejad, 34 per cent for Moussavi, two per cent for Rezaee and one per cent for Karroubi. That two-to-one margin for Ahmedinejad was bad news for Iran, because it ran against the grain of established political wisdom, and did not reflect, in any way, the expected closeness of the race.

On June 17, as the protests began to engulf more and more of the airwaves, the fabrications, counter-fabrications and propaganda began in earnest. Already rocked by a crisis of confidence in the system, the Iranian people began to get bombarded with different kinds of versions of the truth. One of the most popular ones, reported on by Robert Fisk, in The Independent, was an allegedly secret letter, whose copies are being distributed all over Tehran and in the countryside. This secret letter, written by Minister of Interior Sahdeq Mahsuli to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, states that the actual results were nothing like what has been officially declared, and that in fact, Moussavi took 50 per cent of the vote, Karroubi took 35 per cent, Ahmedinejad took only 15 per cent and Rezaee took less than 0.2 per cent.

Fisk and other commentators make cases both for and against the validity of this letter. But the veracity of the letter is a train that left the station a long, long time ago. The real issue here is that if Robert Fisk is reporting on an allegedly secret letter, then it has newsworthiness within the context of the Iranian election. If people believe that Iran has been duped by President Ahmedinejad, then all the nutty speeches in the world, by him or by his best friend, the equally incorrigible Hugo Chavez, won’t do him any good. The viability of the best statesman, or the worst tyrant, is rooted not in the mechanics of elections or public opinion polls but in the quantum of credibility afforded to the processes involved.

The truth of this should be most apparent to Pakistanis, who have now endured almost a full year with President Asif Ali Zardari — a president who is legitimate because the process that produced his victory was credible, even though he, as a political entity, really was not.

That an election result should generate both such wildly different versions of the truth and such dramatic and sustained civil disobedience in Iran is most ironic. Iran has developed a credible elections process, though it does not conform to democratic convention, and does not really represent a free choice of the people (given the vetting of candidates by unelected clerics). The most telling nugget of the electoral system’s credibility in Iran is the voter turnout. Iranian elections regularly produce 50 per cent voter turnout, but in 1997, on the cusp of ushering in the Khatami era, voter turnout peaked to more than 80 per cent. In the 2005 election, when Ahmedinajad ran against Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the turnout was above 60 per cent. This year, according to the official result, turnout was over 85 per cent.

Voter turnout may be the only place where there is any kind of agreement between the TFT opinion poll, the official result and the alleged real result in the secret letter to Khamenei. In all three, voter turnout is said to be in excess of 80 per cent.

Why is voter turnout so important? Because citizens that really believe in the system tend to engage with it. Iranians may not agree with one world view or another, but they have repeatedly expressed, with their votes, an unusual degree of confidence in the expression of their voice as an important one in shaping the leadership of their country.

The contested election result is structurally damaging for the Islamic Republic and for the Khomeini Revolution because it has dramatically eroded confidence in the Iranian system. This confidence was not just demonstrated by Iranian citizens in election after election, but even by its adversaries, who never liked the post-revolution Iran, but rarely questioned the legitimacy of its regimes. This does not mean that the state is about to fall apart, or that Iran won’t continue to operate within the framework of the revolution of 1979. It simply means that the fragility of that framework is dramatically greater than it was before this election.

The susceptibility of the Iranian system to a single contested election is the typical behaviour of a weak and ineffective state. The weakness and ineffectiveness of states is not a commodity that can be bought, even by the mighty CIA. Foreign powers, no matter how resourceful, cannot mine the political and institutional capacity of any country to the extent of immobilising them. Conversely, neither can state effectiveness and strength be bought, even by the mighty USAID. A corollary that may be useful for Iran’s most important and perhaps even more dysfunctional neighbour to the east.

Mosharraf Zaidi is a public policy advisor and columnist who writes for the Egyptian newspaper, and the International News in pakistan. He can be reached through his website www.mosharrafzaidi.com

Photo: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad waves as he tours the Mehr petrochemical facility during the its inauguration ceremony at the Asaluyeh petrochemical plant, 1,200 kms south of Tehran, on Thursday. Ahmadinejad warned his US counterpart Barack Obama to stop meddling in Iran's affairs as the regime clamped down further on the opposition despite growing global concern. ARASH KHAMOUSHI/AFP/Getty Images