“Cab drivers in Tehran get 60 litres a month of gas,” he said scornfully this afternoon, wielding an electric trimmer close to my right ear. “People wouldn’t vote for Ahmadinejad under those kinds of conditions.” Sixty litres is about 16 gallons, for those of you who think metric measurements are against the laws of God. Godless or not, those 60 rationed litres mean I’m glad I’m not in Tehran and urgently needing a cab.
Al Jazeera observes today that the ratio of votes for Ahmadinejad versus Mousavi was consistent across the country:
“Ahmadinejad had apparently taken the northwestern city of Tabriz with some ease. Tabriz is the heart of East Azerbaijan, and Azeris are among the tightest ethnic groups in the country, unfailingly voting along ethnic lines.
”In the 2005 presidential election, Mohsen Mehralizadeh was a largely unknown and wholly unsuccessful candidate. He came in seventh and last, and yet he still won the Azeri vote in the Azerbaijani provinces. Mir Hossein Mousavi is an Azeri from Tabriz.
”Elsewhere, Mehdi Karroubi failed to take his home state of Lorestan; in Khuzestan, Mohsen Rezai, a local scion, was expecting at least two million votes. His total for the entire country has failed to breach one million. And with each updated count, Ahmadinejad's lead did not waver from a very stable range of 66-69 per cent, irrespective of which districts were reporting.”
Okay, so it was a fiddle. The question is, though, how much of one? Was it a complete farce, or did the bulk of voters actually stand by their incumbent?
All along, I have suspected Ahmadinejad still enjoyed widespread support outside the big cities. Not his final 62.6 per cent support maybe, but perhaps over 50 per cent support. His opponents traded wild accusations and made ludicrous promises of peace and prosperity (especially the latter), while Ahmadinejad’s side handed out 400,000 tonnes of potatoes from a bumper crop. For desperately poor people – and Iran is very good these days at creating desperately poor people – that works.
The other factor is that even under Obama, the U.S. and its hordes of media commentators still don’t grasp what a negative influence they are. If a Reformist is praised in the West, it’s manna from heaven for hardliners, who can then claim the praised one is a traitor to his country, in league with ‘the Zionists.’. If the U.S. truly wants regime change in Iran, then it must shut up for five years, an impossible assignment.
What now? After this weekend's demonstrations die down, Ahmadinejad will say something provocative to the West, and someone in Israel with lots of qualifications to Know Everything Significant will insist we have to destroy the Natanz nuclear facility now. All of which, wise people will studiously ignore
The real weapon against the Islamic Republic is the global recession. Ahmadinejad’s administration has turned a somewhat viable economy into a disaster zone. Amir Taheri says at http:// www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=2&id=17040/ that Iran is losing a thousand jobs a day – almost one a minute, in a population less than one-quarter that of the U.S.A. that already suffers from upwards of 20 per cent joblessness.
Under such pressure, something is likely to give. I’ve speculated several times on the emergence of a military dictatorship in Iran, given the size of the army and the paramilitary forces, along with the distaste for continuing direct political involvement that most senior Ayatollahs have voiced. Iran being Iran, nothing is ever entirely predictable there, but at the very least, Ahmadinejad may well be wishing, a year from now, that he had not been so ‘lucky’ to obtain his landslide re-election yesterday.