Iranians may be ready to vote Ahmadinejad out of power

Nice find, Major. The best hope for the people is a revolt from the street and the hierarchy, within the clerics and the military. I'm surprised that there haven't been strikes as yet. That looks like the next logical step for the opposition.

 

Here is another interesting column by Roger Cohen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/opinion/02iht-edcohen.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

July 2, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Let the Usurpers Writhe

By ROGER COHEN
TEHRAN — Think of normalized relations with the United States as the big prize. Who gets to deliver it? One thing is certain: Iran’s ruthless usurpers are determined to ensure reformists are never in a position to claim the breakthrough.

That at least is the view of Mohsen Mahmoudi, a 34-year-old conservative cleric I ran into at a post-electoral rally for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and got to know over the ensuing week.

Rightist yet drawn to America, a card-carrying Basij militiaman from the University of Qom, a prayer leader at an Islamic cultural center in north Tehran, Mahmoudi backs the regime’s brutal clampdown but concedes there will be a cost.

“This is going to cause a huge gulf between generations,” he told me. “I was talking to a young woman who was a good friend of mine before the vote and she said she doesn’t respect me any more. She’s so angry she’s ready to die.”

Mahmoudi looked surprised. I’m not. Sentiment has shifted radically in Iran as multiple security forces deploy in defense of a lie. For Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, the question of how to win back support will in time arise. Enter America, the target of Great-Satanism but dear to most Iranians.

“Relations with the United States are the big taboo, and whoever breaks the taboo will be a hero,” Mahmoudi said. “The real fight is over whether the right or the left should rebuild ties.”

Referring to the opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and the former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, the cleric explained: “We would never allow Moussavi or Khatami to restore relations, because they would then have heroic status.”

Two weeks after Iran’s ballot-box putsch, mysteries still envelop it. Why have a pre-electoral freedom-fest, bring hundreds of journalists to Tehran to witness it, then put on a horror show, throwing them into jail or out of the country? Everything I saw — the sheer brazen clumsiness of the vote theft and its hysterical, club-wielding aftermath — suggest a last-minute decision.

I think there were two determining factors — one internal and the other external — behind this violent gamble, this historic error.

Nobody predicted the Moussavi surge in the last two weeks of the campaign. Even in mid-May, he was dead in the water. Then his why-spurn-the-world message connected, delivering millions of young Iranians from apathy to activism, and sparking the green wave that had “Velvet Revolution” alarms flashing in every Ahmadinejad acolyte’s zealous little mind.

You can hear the militia and Revolutionary Guard commanders conspiring: “We let this Moussavi guy win, or we go to a run-off, and this thing could get away from us.” For “this thing” read, our revolution and our ideology and our piles of cash (not necessarily in that order.)

The external factor was subtler. President Obama had unsettled the regime with his outreach. Questions from within assailed Khamenei: Is Great Satanism so integral to the revolution that you won’t talk to Barack Hussein Obama — black man of part Muslim heritage — even as the economy nosedives and the Middle East map shifts?

Then the regime sees Moussavi looming and the danger of a rapprochement with the United States over which it loses control: the nightmare scenario.

The guardian of the revolution panics. Operation Jackboot goes into effect on the night of June 12, decreed in the name of a co-opted God, despised and derided by a clear majority of Iranians. As repression (once selective and now general) spreads, so does popular rage.

I asked Mahmoudi, a big and garrulous man who sat in the front row at Khamenei’s ferocious June 19 sermon, about the election hailed as “a miracle” by the leader.

“Moussavi was supported by people who have lost faith,” he said. “We believe legitimacy comes from God. They believe legitimacy comes from the people, from votes. As long as it was a fraternal fight, it was O.K., but when it’s a fight about religious belief, the situation becomes unacceptable.”

The facts don’t support this view. Moussavi has redoubled his expressions of devotion to Islam; Allahu Akbar is the cry of his followers. No, the issue is simpler: Iranians, Moussavi among them, believe votes must be counted in the uneasy hybrid of a country called the Islamic Republic.

Khamenei may be transplanted from heaven, as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was before him, but this transplant embedded in the Constitution has a price: The people don’t get to reverse the transplant but have some marginal, quadrennial say about its nature. At least they believed that until June 12. Now they don’t, which is why the regime may have stuck a dagger in its own heart.

So, I asked Mahmoudi, if legitimacy comes from God, why hold an election? “To get a level of acceptance,” he said. “The legitimacy of the election comes from the supreme leader’s approval, but the level of acceptance comes from votes.”

That Talmudic clarification is helpful. Demonstrations may have disappeared from Tehran’s streets of shame, but Iranian acceptance is at an all-time low. The government is now illegitimate. Power has been usurped. The equation has changed.

I think Mahmoudi’s right. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad may begin to unclench their fist, as isolation and sullen defiance grow, in a bid to deliver what they would not allow the reformists to initiate: détente with America.

Obama must leave them dangling for the foreseeable future. He should refrain indefinitely from talk of engagement.

To do otherwise would be to betray millions of Iranians who have been defrauded and have risked their lives to have their votes count. To do otherwise would be to allow Khamenei to gloat that, in the end, what the United States respects is force. To do otherwise would be to embrace the usurpers.

The slow arc of moral justice is fine but Iran is gripped by the fierce urgency of now. Obama, the realist on whom idealism is projected, is obliged to make a course correction.

I say all this with a heavy heart. Non-communication between America and Iran is bad for both countries and the world. It complicates and undermines every U.S. objective from Gaza to Afghanistan. It’s dangerous and it’s unnecessary.

I’ve argued strongly for engagement with Iran as a game-changer. America renewed relations with the Soviet Union at the time of the Great Terror and China at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Operation Jackboot has not, as yet at least, involved mass killings.

But the Iran of today is not the Iran of three weeks ago; it is in volatile flux from without and within. Its Robespierres are running amok. Obama must do nothing to suggest business as usual. Let Ahmadinejad, he of the bipolar mood swings, fret and sweat. Let him writhe in the turbid puddle of his self-proclaimed “justice” and “ethics.”

Mahmoudi told me that when he went to study in Qom, he had no idea what Iran’s nuclear program was. But there were regular classes on it. Scientists were brought in to enlighten the clerics. They were sensitized. The aim was that “We go back to towns and villages and talk in the mosques about the people’s nuclear rights.”

“It’s because Ahmadinjad stood for this that he became a hero to many,” Mahmoudi said. “He equated it with the nationalization of our oil industry and made it the core symbol of our independence and pride.”

But Ahmadinejad made many enemies along his mystical-militaristic way, not least Ali Larijani, the finger-to-the-wind speaker of the Majlis, or Parliament, and a potential compromise replacement. Larijani is not alone in realizing that the president has become the most divisive politician in the revolution’s 30-year history.

The price of Obama’s engagement may just have become Ahmadinejad’s departure. I think it has. His defenestration is not impossible; it would be forced from within where disaffected clerics and moderates abound; and it would restore an Islamic Republic, recognized by Obama, where both words of that self-description mean something, a land of God and people.

 

Drip drip drip...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/05/iran-uprising-blogging-su_n_225796.html


The most important group of religious leaders in Iran has called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate, an act of defiance against the country's supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country's clerical establishment.


The statement by the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult -- if not impossible.

"This crack in the clerical establishment and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic," said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. "Remember they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei."

 

Just to be accurate, this is not the most important group of religious leaders in Iran.

 

wow!

[rquoter]

"Death to Russia!"

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The official loudspeaker suggesting slogans to people at Friday's Prayer, and people responding with their own slogan!

Official: Death to America
People: Death to Russia!

Official: Death to Israel
People: Death to Russia!

Official: Death to England
People: Death to Russia!

Official: Death to Hypocrites
People: Death to Russia!

[/rquoter]

http://uskowioniran.blogspot.com/2009/07/death-to-russia.html

 

ok why Russia?

 

They support Ahmadinejad and his policies.

 

Apparently, there was a lot of "Death to China" as well. No idea why in either case:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/07/death-to-death-to-america.html

Also, some "death to the dictator":

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/07/why-do-you-kill-your-brother.html

 

I have no political opinion on Iran, but one of my favorite artists put this together. Pretty Chilling.

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No way Khamenei is a dictator.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090724/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_politics

TEHRAN, Iran – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad caved into pressure from hardline clerics and the country's supreme leader Friday and allowed the resignation of his top deputy after a week-long standoff.
For days, the president had resisted pressure from hard-liners, including a direct order from the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to dismiss his choice for the key post of first vice president, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, who last year angered conservatives when he made friendly comments toward Israel.

The final blow, however, appeared to be the public reading on state television of the order issued earlier by Khamenei to dismiss Mashai because he is "contrary to the interest of you and the government."
The issue created a rare rift between Ahmadinejad and the hard-liners that form the bedrock of his support and comes at a particular sensitive time as he is battling opposition reformists who accuse him of winning the June 12 presidential elections through fraud.

"After the announcement of the exalted supreme leader's order, Mashai doesn't consider himself first vice president," IRNA quoted presidential aide Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi as saying late Friday.

The resignation capped a day of renewed pressure that featured conservative student street demonstrations and Friday sermons railing against Mashai's appointment.

Despite all the pressure, Ahmadinejad had pleaded for more time to explain his reasons for choosing a man he had described as a "pious, caring, honest and creative caretaker for Iran." Mashai's son is also married to the president's daughter.

The president even continued to back his man after his greatest supporter and the supreme leader of the country issued a private order Monday telling him that the appointment "causes a rift and disillusionment among your supporters. The aforementioned appointment must be canceled and consider it null and void."

Reading the order publicly Friday dramatically increased the pressure on Ahmadinejad, and further refusal to act would have amounted to a flagrant and public defiance of the supreme leader.

The issue was also the topic of the main Friday prayer sermon in Tehran. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said that "now that he (Khamenei) has expressed his opinion, there is no room for delay anymore."

Khamenei has the final say over all state matters and has rarely faced defiance in the past. That changed following last month's election when supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi challenged Khamenei's ruling that the June 12 vote was fair.

The flap over the vice presidency appears to signal a move by Khamenei to entrench for himself an even more unquestionable status in the face of the reformist threat. By demanding Mashai's removal, Khamenei is effectively appropriating a new power, since normally the supreme leader does not intervene openly to remove a government official, though he is believed to often vet appointments behind the scenes.

The president's brief defiance may have been out of fear of an attempt by hard-liners to dictate the government he is due to form next month.
Mashai angered hard-liners in 2008 when he said Iranians were "friends of all people in the world — even Israelis." He was serving as vice president in charge of tourism and cultural heritage at the time.

Iran has 12 vice presidents, but the first vice president is the most important because he succeeds the president if he dies, is incapacitated, steps down or is removed. The first vice president also leads Cabinet meetings in the absence of the president.

Hard-line students protesting in the streets Friday warned Ahmadinejad that they will withdraw their support unless he dismisses Mashai.
"Obeying the leader's order is the demand of the nation," they chanted.

 

here's a couple of videos from today.


you can see and hear the gun shots at the end

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I'm not sure how Iran ever gets past Neda's death.

 

I would start with getting rid of the current regime.

 

I am Pro-change in Iran. However, making Neda's death seem anymore important and symbolic than the other people who have died irks me.

There are tons of families who have lost people to death and prison. I feel for all of them equally. Unfortunately I see this Neda phenomenon as a PR move more than anything and I don't like it.

I hope we can lend the same amount of importance, respect and media coverage to all sacrifices and losses in this horriffic event.

Maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong. But that's how it seems to have hit me.

 

Sometimes a person is just thrust into that role and there is no stopping it -- like the student in front of the tank during the Tienanmen riots.

 

Please help me report this garbage to get the poster banned.

 

Can you give me a link? I haven't seen the offending post and want some context.