Process and Speech [Iran]

One thing that I, and many other people who are riveted by what's going on in Iran, have been truly heartened by is the extent to which global information sharing means that authoritarian governments and dictatorships can't exercise nearly as much power as they once did. Because of the existence of a [mostly] free press in places like Britain and the United States, and mobile phone technology and the internet, activists and protesters in Iran have been able to get their information out of the country where not only the rest of the world can see it, but other people in Iran can as well. The regime has shut down Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, access to news sites, and more, but they can't shut down everything. People are still sending pictures and video to the BBC, and Twitter, a home-grown American service, has been indispensable for the resistance.

Here's some good reporting on the censorship and supression of information that has taken place, not just of individuals trying to communicate, but of newspapers, foreign journalists, and even the state's own sources ["Even governmental news sources have been targeted in the crackdown. Four interior ministry officials have been arrested for given results that were different from those announced by Ahmadinejad’s allies."]

The regime is trying to combat the flow of information from the protestors with its own flow of information. Unfortunately, they're making some of it up. Here's just one example, an explanation of how the state-run newspaper photoshopped images of a pro-Ahmadinejad rally to make it appear larger.

But the story's not over. I can't claim to know when or how this will die down, but a lot of people seem to think that Ahmadinejad will be president. The question is--how will the regime deal with dissent? So far, it's not looking good. Young people who have tried to access or send information to outside sources have been threatened:

"Anonymous" from Norway emailed to say a friend in Iran had rung BBC Persian, without getting through.

"Now she has received a message on her answering machine from Sepah [Revolutionary Guards] saying they know she has been involved in criminal activity - and now she has to report to the police."

Fahimeh emailed BBC Persian TV from Shiraz, dismissing such warnings as random scare tactics.

The words she described finding on her answerphone: "We know you went to the rally on Monday, if you repeat that again, we will deal with you" match those described in an email by Parinaz.

Here's some reporting from an Australian journalist who's defying the government ban on foreign media. He says "You've got to realise that what's happening at the moment is that the actual authorities are losing control of what's happening on the streets and that's very dangerous and damaging to them." He also has some interesting information about the security forces becoming more sympathetic to Mousavi supporters--read the whole thing, as they say.

The point of all this is that it matters when people have a right to speak, a right to dissent, a right to access information. People have misinterpreted my and other liberals' anger about what is happening as support for Mousavi. I actually don't know much about him or his platform. No one has any illusions that he would suddenly change the course of Iranian foreign policy to make everything all better. The problem is that it may have been the will of the Iranian people that he be elected president. And if that will was defied, if the election results were fabricated, rigged, inflated, or otherwise doctored, that is a miscarriage of justice. Perhaps Ahmadinejad did win. But it's rather likely that if he did win, he won by a much smaller margin, or won without obtaining a majority of the votes, which would have forced a runoff.

The regime didn't want a runoff. They didn't want a win by Ahmadinejad with 52%. Because with a small margin, they'd have deal with accusations of irregularites. Unfortunately, it seems that they seriously miscalculated the reaction they'd get by rigging the entire thing.

Some Links:

Robert Dreyfuss has some great insight about the kinds of people who are against Ahmadinejad:

The anti-Ahmadinejad coalition is deep and broad. It includes conservative, Old Guard founders of the Islamic Republic, who view Ahmadinejad with disdain and who resent the coming to power of his coterie of Revolutionary Guard commanders; the large and growing majority of Iranian clerics and senior ayatollahs, many of whom have long viewed the Leader, Ayatatollah Ali Khamenei, as an upstart and usurper since he was elevated to his position 20 years ago; nearly the entirety of Iran's business class, especially those involved in high-tech, aviation, oil and gas, and heavy industry, who blame Ahmadinejad for his catastrophic mismanagement of the economy and for the crippling economic sanctions; the entire class of Iranian reformists, from more liberal-minded clerics like former President Khatami to more centrist ex-officials such as former Prime Minister Mousavi, the presidential candidate; a large contingent of Iranian women, energized by the role of Zahra Rahnavard, Mousavi's wife, who I met in Tehran, who campaigned vigorously for her husband and for women's rights; and of course, the educated elite of Iran, including students, artists, filmmakers, intellectuals, writers, and musicians.

Today's NYT reporting of events in the last 24 hours, including threats of execution by a government lawyer:

Reuters reported that Mohammadreza Habibi, the senior prosecutor in the central province of Isfahan, had warned demonstrators that they could be executed under Islamic law.

“We warn the few elements controlled by foreigners who try to disrupt domestic security by inciting individuals to destroy and to commit arson that the Islamic penal code for such individuals waging war against God is execution,” Mr. Habibi said, according to the Fars news agency. It was not clear if his warning applied only to Isfahan or the country as a whole, Reuters said.

More Robert Dreyfuss on the the effect of American rhetoric about Iran:

Right-wingers in the United States are already comparing the Iranian unrest to Hungary, 1956, and calling on the United States to give its full support to the Green Wave. Nothing could be stupider. What they miss is that President Obama's outreach to Iran, including his Cairo speech — which got a word-by-word exegesis prepared for Khamenei and was widely viewed by many Iranians — is in part responsible for the sudden upsurge of support for Mousavi. And it happened not because Obama called for military action in Iran, and not because Obama backed Mousavi, but precisely because he didn't.

Here's Dan Rather (I know!) with a surprisingly good piece about the importance of a free press:

It is too soon to know or to say how the situation in Iran will turn out, but there are lessons in this for our own country, for a democratic system more fragile than we at times like to believe. One of these lessons is the centrality of freedom of the press to the entire enterprise of democratic government: You cannot have the latter without the former. And the other is the lesson that citizen journalism is a way for the people to hold on to freedom of the press, even in times of oppression. In a turn of phrase that seems to be cropping up everywhere, the revolution may not be televised…but it very well could be Twittered.

UPDATE: Here's Ken Ballen reiterating that even Ahmadinejad supporters support a free press and free elections:

Put all together, our polling shows that Ahmadinejad, running a competent campaign, may have had enough support three weeks before the vote to possibly win the election under the electoral rules as they stood. With Ahmadinejad's early lead, it is possible that the vote reported did actually reflect the will of the Iranian people, though now, it is impossible to know...

Yet the government's actions since the election may have changed the debate in Iran from being about candidates to being about democracy. While we do not know whether the election results were rigged, the government's handling of the election itself runs counter to principles of democracy, free press and free elections -- goals our polling shows almost all Iranians, whether or not they support Ahmadinejad, strongly support.

UPDATE II: Here's Yglesias with an excellent point about Obama's role in the Iranian election crisis:

Something I think people don’t always get is that the President is not the columnist-in-chief or the National Blogger.