Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran by Leverett Flynt & Leverett Hillary Mann

Author:Leverett, Flynt & Leverett, Hillary Mann [Leverett, Flynt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2013-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

ALTERNATE REALITIES

In the months preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the American policy, intelligence, and media communities failed to exercise critical scrutiny over intellectually shoddy if not downright bogus claims about Saddam Husayn’s weapons of mass destruction programs, Baghdad’s ties to Al-Qa’ida and other terrorist groups, and internal Iraqi politics. Through their failure, they helped sell a manufactured case for war, enabling one of the United States’ biggest strategic blunders since the end of the Cold War. In 2009, the same communities—and in some cases the same individuals—once again disgraced themselves with regard to the Iranian election. Mousavi’s dissent was not a fact-based challenge to abuses that generated a fraudulent outcome. But his inability to back up his allegations did not stop Western pundits and media outlets from endorsing them as facts. In a manner distressingly reminiscent of the runup to the Iraq War, political, policy, and media elites, including the West’s “best” and “most respected” Iran analysts, failed to assess the election rigorously. Rushing to judgment on the basis of exaggerated rumors and, on some points, outright inventions, they created an alternate reality, dismissing facts that got in their way. As mounting poll data undermined their unsubstantiated claims, only a few were even prepared to retreat to “we will probably never know.”58

Some Western experts on Iran went beyond merely accepting unsubstantiated claims about electoral fraud. If Mousavi could not prove it, they tried to do so themselves by arguing that the results were too inconsistent with past voting patterns to be credible. Three flaws in this approach merit specific attention. First, many analysts compared the 2009 election to the first round of the 2005 election, when Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad outpolled other candidates to move into a runoff; seen this way, Ahmadinejad’s 2009 tally seems suspiciously large.59 But the comparison is false—it is tantamount to holding that, because Barack Obama took just 38 percent of the vote in a multicandidate caucus in Iowa in January 2008, he could not possibly have won 54 percent of the state’s vote in the general election against John McCain ten months later. As noted, high-quality polls make it clear that the 2009 election was, from the outset, a two-man race; Ahmadinejad’s share of the vote in the 2005 runoff (61.7 percent) is very close to what he won in 2009 (62.5 percent).

Second, analysts argued that the 2009 results departed implausibly from some ethnic groups’ previous voting behavior, finding it incredible, for example, that Karroubi, an ethnic Lori, did not carry his native Lorestan, as he had in 2005, and that Ahmadinejad, who had won just 7 percent of the province’s vote in the first round in 2005, took 70 percent in 2009.60 But, as also noted, high-quality polls showed Karroubi’s support in the low single digits throughout the 2009 campaign. Nationally, many voters declined to waste their vote on a candidate they did not think could win, and many Lors appear to have made the same choice. The results show that Karroubi did in

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