Politics and International Diplomacy
columnist: Attila Avschar

Topic: Iran
And here goes the dominos: Iran election, what happened?

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An analysis of what went on prior to the election and subsequent protests and violence. A look at the road ahead.

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by Attila Avschar
(centrist libertarian)
Friday, June 26, 2009

And here goes the dominos:
When it was first reported in the news that President Obama had written a letter to Khamenei 2 months prior to the election, I had no doubt that the letter had played a major role in this massive miscalculation of the regime. In fact Obama, with entirely innocent intentions and unknowingly, started a chain reaction that resulted in a disaster for Iranian regime.

Iranian regime while unpredictable in many senses especially in internal affairs due to significant control of information, it still has a very fixed pattern of behavior when it comes to international politics.

Part of that is because of the nature of negotiating "Iranian Style", prevalent in the culture. This primarily consists of pushing the other party over the point of no return, where any deal other than the one imposed would be immensely costly and if that fails well, they just bought themselves a whole lot of time. You can see this in every single international negotiations conducted by Iran, in this regime or past.

The other major part is due to the fundamental misunderstanding of Iranian regime of "political maneuvering" by the west, which in essence is based on the religious mentality of "going all the way" regardless of the consequences. Anytime the west has extended a hand or eased pressure on Iran, the actions of the west were taken as a sign of weakness by Iranian regime. In their mind, why would "the enemy" try to befriend them unless the enemy is weak. One just needs to look at the latest round of posturing over the nuclear issue to see how Iranian government considers concession a weakness.

Now back to President Obama. Although he might have had some briefing regarding the possibility of a coup by the IRG, no one and I mean no one could have predicted what would happen next.

I always say that Iranian people have a Red Line, it is rather an invisible line and governments never know when they are about to cross it. The only time they realize that they have done so, is when the entire population explodes in their face and it is already too late. So there is no dispute that President Obama could not have intended to affect the elections in this way. Just consider that even if Mousavi was elected, the decision was still with Khamenei and IRG High Command as to how to continue negotiating over the nuclear and other major issues. And one can rule out the manipulation of the vote because of Obama letter, since preparation for such a massive fraud and controlling the consequences would have had to start months or even couple of years before the actual election.

Khamenei wanted to install Ahmadinejad as president, completely eliminate the remaining decent and take over Iran, and then negotiate with the west over the nuclear and other interests such as Iraq and Israel in exchange for a guarantee of survival, open trade and a blind eye to what is going on inside Iran, something perhaps similar to the deal with Saudi Arabia. This is obvious from the fact that Khamenei waited for after the election to respond. That way Ahmadinjads "guaranteed" second term would have started with a glorious victory over the west hence further stabilizing the regime.

But few unforeseeable events set in motion a series of actions and mistakes that no one could predict and as the result turned the whole thing upside down.

This election was rigged and the coup conspiracy started many months ago, so the regime expected resistance and they were prepared for it. I am almost certain that in their mind they were even over prepared. This was evident from confused statements and actions taken by the leaders such as Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. But this was not the whole story. A disaster of this scale is a series of unpredictable events in conjunction with human error. Now let's take a look the sequence of these factors and their effect on the final outcome:

1- Preparation for takeover: Regime starts preparation for the coup. This includes vote rigging and preparation of security forces and so forth. At this stage, Bush is still in the office and there are constant threats going back and forth. It is still far from US elections and for what it seems prospects of a less hostile US administration is not in anyone's mind. Regime knows that so long as there is the threat of foreign intervention they are safe from internal threats. This belief becomes more evident when later during the final stages of the US primaries when Khamenei said in Friday prayers that "there is no way that the corrupt government of US would allow someone like Obama (black) to become US president".

2- The wind of change: To everyone's surprise Obama wins the US election hands down. As every nation finds something in him to like, Africans in him being black, Muslims in the middle name of Hussein and European just for the fact that he is not Bush, Iranian government quickly changed tone and congratulated Obama on his win. What they missed was a massive shift in the world toward hope and peace. Obama election inspired the world and reverberated in many forms across the world including Iran. Iranian government entirely missed this in their calculations. In fact Obama's original position of "Negotiation without Precondition" as impractical as it was, managed to change the minds of Iranian population very significantly. When Obama was elected and announced his official foreign policy, Iranians firstly felt that if a black man can become a US president then anything is possible through the people! Keep in mind that generally this is much bigger of a deal outside of US rather than inside. Inside US this proves that tolerance and progress in American society has come a long way. Outside of the US this proves that US government IS elected by the people and not run by "Zionist Puppets" as most of the anti-American voices claim, loudest which can be heard from Iranian regime. And subsequently by officially congratulating Obama they put the stamp of approval on the fact that they were lying all along about US. Secondly his foreign policy doctrine proved to the people that US is not after an excuse to attack Iran. This silently shifted most of the attention of the Iranian population back to economic problems and social freedoms.

3- They dared to hope: As the election drew near, there was a renewed sense of hope in Iranian population which is very young in average. What the regime was counting on was the pattern in the previous elections that the population for the most part stayed away from, the elections which resulted in Ahmadinejad becoming the president. This is evident from the Ahmadinejad's campaign strategy mostly focused on discrediting the reform candidates and demoralizing their supporters rather than rallying the base. Assuming that the softened tone of the US will be generally taken as victory for Ahmadinjead policies and hope that the population would assume that with better future relations with US economic problems would also be solved. But unknown to the regime the population was thinking that now that there is a softer US administration in White House, it is time to have president that would be able to finally seal the deal. This and other factors such a the true desire of the young for social and political freedom  made for   an unexpected turnout which was another chip fell horrendously away from  where the regime wanted it.

4- How far can you fake? Not far enough: This was when first the problem started to rear its head. With the massive turnout, the regime was presented with a huge problem. The preparation for vote rigging was not enough to cover the turnout and guarantee a win for Ahmadinejad, it could go to second round. So in panic, they manufactured the result without even counting the rigged votes. This is evident from obvious and flawed statistical anomalies in the numbers they produced in heist, not to mention the total miscalculation of the required effort to do a counting. According to the release times they must have had counted 5,000,000 votes in first 2 hours. This and other irregularities signaled a lack of preparation or perhaps a surprise. This literally unbelievable result was finally what pushed the people over that invisible red line.

5- Bite of a million ants is as deadly as a dagger in the heart: With the camel's back broken, people took to streets in numbers that regime did not predict. To the point that in the first few days people very easily overpowered the security forces regularly keeping them at bay. But in the panic of the moment, instead of opening a way out, Khamenei cornered himself and the opposition into a point of no return by throwing all his weight behind Ahmadinjad and essentially exposing his role in the coup and officially losing the symbolic position of impartiality, hoping that this will force the Mousavi and Rafsanjani into concession and so the support would dwindle. But again soon they found out that even Mousavi and Rafsanjani are just in for the ride and this is even beyond their control.

6- Here goes the dominos: Well as they say, the rest is history, but in the making. The regime started using brutality to crush the protests and that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin of their own making. The regime lost the much needed international legitimacy and appearance of the stability. Images and news that streamed out of Iran, in two weeks, undid what regime spent years to build. No democratic country now can effectively deal with Iranian government without being condemned by countless international organizations and even their own population. The outpouring of the support from the people of the world, free and oppressed, effectively rendered the current regime incapable of redeeming the international legitimacy that they needed to move the coup agenda forward. There are talks of further immediate sanctions, possibility of Crimes Against Humanity charges, blockade of fuel shipments and even David Gergen went as far as saying on CNN that "a Security Council mandate for blue helmets may be possible if the killings continue". Economy is the choke point of this government. All the talks on nuclear energy, missile systems, international terrorism, they will all be null and void if the government can't improve the economy and all the posturing of the regime is in the hopes of using these issues as bargaining chips to improve the economy and therefore stabilizing the regime. Now that is all gone, reports of millions of dollars being transferred out of the country, international companies pulling out of contracts, governments pulling diplomats in protest, billions of dollars of assets being frozen and this is just the beginning.

So what did the letter do? It convinced the Khamenei that the deal with US is already sealed, a fatal premature confidence, but unfortunate for him, that was just a maneuver and not a concession!

Now the core objectives of the coup are totally lost beyond redemption. So what happens next? What you are seeing is the swansong of an experiment that first almost didn't make it, but after 30 years, almost made it, but never did. The only way that this regime would be able to sustain itself now is through brute force, so expect to see much more blood, but that even won't save them for long because the economy is the Achilles Heel of this government and there is already an arrow sticking out of it.

By Attila Avschar

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©2009 Attila Avschar, all rights reserved. You must have written permission from the author in order to republish this work.
Published: Friday, June 26, 2009
Last modified: Friday, June 26, 2009

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