I wanted to do a post this evening entitled “Babes that vote,” but the plan was derailed. Two days ago, every major news outlet had photos of pretty Iranian women students, waving their ink-stained fingers to prove they’d voted. I was going to plunder my favourites from the BBC and Der Spiegel for the blog, but this morning, those galleries had all gone. Instead, the scenes were of demonstrators being chased by bearded young Basiji on motorbikes. The unposted post was to be about how western media coverage is always skewed towards attractive, English-speaking Tehranis saying things that, frankly, are a bit like the speeches contestants in beauty pageants get to make: “I’d like to find a cure for cancer and work towards world peace, if God lets me win.”
It’s no wonder the babes disappeared. But more to the point, such coverage is pernicious, because people outside of Iran have no idea how false an image they present. The privileged few, with their tinted hair, plastic-surgery enhanced lips and noses, and designer duds, hardly represent the majority of voters. Who are the majority, you wonder? The answer is, the people who voted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back into power. Most of them, if memory serves, are poor and a little ragged, and don’t make it onto TV except as occasional objects of derision.
I was suckered into the whole game, wanting to believe that Mousavi, who is hardly a liberal, might win and put a new face on things. But he was, frankly, a clueless political strategist, and Ahmadinejad isn’t.
It was StratFor’s George Friedman who had the best perspective today, I thought:
“It must always be remembered that Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that lasted eight years, cost untold lives and suffering, and effectively ended in its defeat. Iranians, particularly the poor, experienced this war on an intimate level. They fought in the war, and lost husbands and sons in it. As in other countries, memories of a lost war don’t necessarily delegitimize the regime. Rather, they can generate hopes for a resurgent Iran, thus validating the sacrifices made in that war – something Ahmadinejad taps into. By arguing that Iran should not back down but become a major power, he speaks to the veterans and their families, who want something positive to emerge from all their sacrifices in the war.
”Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran – something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Lower East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.”