Why we shouldn't fall for pro-regime clichés about Iran (Laura Secor)

On Sunday I posted a report on the Iranian election by the journalist Laura Secor (Iran's stolen election and what it means, contd.) A new piece by Secor (below) makes two important points.

=> The first point addresses yet another aspect of the sheer implausibility of the official election results. Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who knows Iran well, independently brought it up in an e-mail message this morning:

The piece of this I find the most unbelievable is that 39.2 million paper ballots could have been counted by hand and the data entered into a computer in about 12 hours, half of them in the first four hours, and the first 5 million in an hour and a half after polling stations closed, according to what has been reported by Associated Press.

As that AP report points out, "Previous elections took at least twice as long."

Here's how Laura Secor puts it:

I cannot improve on Juan Cole’s thorough and excellent debunking of the results at juancole.com, but I can certainly explain my own swift gut reaction. I was in Iran for the 2005 presidential election, the 2006 election for the Assembly of Experts and city councils, and the 2008 parliamentary elections. Nowhere did I see any kind of balloting other than old-fashioned paper. This is not the United States, where partial results appear on television screens on a rolling basis. The results were tabulated by hand, and, therefore, never released less than twenty-four hours after the polls closed. In 2005, the second-round results were issued in the wee hours of the second day after the voting. They were delivered by announcement outside the interior ministry, where die-hard political junkies and journalists had gathered since midday Saturday to await news. This time, the regime’s television station called Ahmadenijad the winner at 1:30 A.M. Saturday morning, only ninety minutes after the last polls closed, and the proportions had barely changed when the official announcement came nine-and-half hours later. How, exactly, did the government manage to tabulate the results so quickly?

A few informed observers have suggested to me that it really looks as though the Interior Ministry simply announced some pre-cooked percentages without even bothering to go through the motions of counting the ballots. That's not implausible. (Perhaps they are retrospectively stuffing the ballot boxes now, reversing the usual procedure?)

=> Second, Secor cautions against readily accepting a "pernicious cliché" that "has entered our discussion of Iranian politics"--namely, that only westernized upper-middle-class yuppies and North Tehran metrosexuals dislike Ahmadinejad and the Iranian regime. Yes, it is important to recognize that Ahmadinejad and the forces he represents have some real popular support, and that there are significant political divisions related to class and culture in Iranian society. But the pseudo-sophisticated assumption that the 'real' people uniformly support the fundamentalists and hard-liners is too simplistic:

A sort of pernicious cliché has entered our discussion of Iranian politics, namely that the Western press cannot be trusted because American reporters are too lazy to leave North Tehran and too dazzled by the appearance of a vocal minority of upper-class Iranians who are congenial to our self-image. We believe Iran is overrun with people who think like we do, the argument goes, because these are the people who talk to us. It is true that the movements of American reporters in Iran are controlled and curtailed to the point where Tehran is the main, if not the only, point of access, apart from the hard-line holy city of Qom. I cannot speak for all American journalists who report from Iran, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who is acutely aware of, and frustrated by, the lack of insight into the rural heartland this affords us. The best that we can do is to familiarize ourselves with the full spectrum of urban life, across class and cultural boundaries. Most Iranians, after all, live in cities, of which Tehran is only the most gigantic.

It is from this reporting that I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, that the urban poor had ceased to be a reliable constituency for Ahmadinejad. They were in 2005. But by 2006, it was hard to find a South Tehrani who was pleased with the outcome of that vote or prepared to vote for him again. Why? Because under Ahmadinejad, the country’s economic crisis deepened in ways that hit urban populations—both the poor and the middle class—harder than anyone.

Ahmadinejad’s 2005 mandate was an economic one. Those who wish to argue that Western reporters, in their narcissism, have simply overlooked the widespread enthusiasm for the incumbent, need to explain the outcome of the 2008 parliamentary elections, which were carried by conservatives who were fiercely critical of Ahmadinejad’s economic policies and worked hard to distance themselves from him. These were elections that did not even include any reformist candidates, let alone lure a large North Tehrani vote.

Culture wars and deep polarities tear at Iranian society, but they are not as binary as they are often painted. [....]

Class dynamics in Iran are volatile, complex, and absolutely integral to the country’s politics and history. But the simplistic gloss that all but an élite and trivial minority support the fundamentalist outlook, irresponsible populism, and strong-man politics of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not begin to do them justice, let alone to illuminate the forces currently clashing in the streets of Iranian cities large and small. [....]

The new generation of activists (students, democrats, feminists, journalists) comes largely from the traditional lower middle class—the same demographic that brought us the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and no less authentic a part of the social fabric. To dismiss these Iranians’ aspirations as the vain fancies of the isolated rich is insulting and misguided. Those élite North Tehranis have not been the ones populating rallies and prison cells. That work has been done by those whose lives are difficult and dangerous enough to feel that change is urgent at any price. [....]

Read the whole thing.

--Jeff Weintraub

=========================
New Yorker "News Desk" (On-Line)
June 13, 2009
LAURA SECOR: WHY TEHRAN MATTERS

The Iranian blogosphere, Facebook, and indispensable English-language Web sites like Tehran Bureau and NIAC Insight are streaming with video footage of chaos in the streets of Iranian cities, and with updates from Iranian observers on the scenes of mayhem, the blackout of communications, and the arrests of scores of opposition figures. Meanwhile, here in the United States, the blogosphere is still debating whether or not the election was fraudulent, and, if so, just how fraudulent it was. I made the case on Saturday that, given the demographics, the figures released by the Interior Ministry just do not add up and that no government that has conducted a fair election follows it with communications blackouts and a form of martial law. But that is not the main reason that the announced results resound as not only false, but as egregiously in-your-face false.

I cannot improve on Juan Cole’s thorough and excellent debunking of the results at juancole.com, but I can certainly explain my own swift gut reaction. I was in Iran for the 2005 presidential election, the 2006 election for the Assembly of Experts and city councils, and the 2008 parliamentary elections. Nowhere did I see any kind of balloting other than old-fashioned paper. This is not the United States, where partial results appear on television screens on a rolling basis. The results were tabulated by hand, and, therefore, never released less than twenty-four hours after the polls closed. In 2005, the second-round results were issued in the wee hours of the second day after the voting. They were delivered by announcement outside the interior ministry, where die-hard political junkies and journalists had gathered since midday Saturday to await news. This time, the regime’s television station called Ahmadenijad the winner at 1:30 A.M. Saturday morning, only ninety minutes after the last polls closed, and the proportions had barely changed when the official announcement came nine-and-half hours later. How, exactly, did the government manage to tabulate the results so quickly?

A sort of pernicious cliché has entered our discussion of Iranian politics, namely that the Western press cannot be trusted because American reporters are too lazy to leave North Tehran and too dazzled by the appearance of a vocal minority of upper-class Iranians who are congenial to our self-image. We believe Iran is overrun with people who think like we do, the argument goes, because these are the people who talk to us. It is true that the movements of American reporters in Iran are controlled and curtailed to the point where Tehran is the main, if not the only, point of access, apart from the hard-line holy city of Qom. I cannot speak for all American journalists who report from Iran, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who is acutely aware of, and frustrated by, the lack of insight into the rural heartland this affords us. The best that we can do is to familiarize ourselves with the full spectrum of urban life, across class and cultural boundaries. Most Iranians, after all, live in cities, of which Tehran is only the most gigantic.

It is from this reporting that I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, that the urban poor had ceased to be a reliable constituency for Ahmadinejad. They were in 2005. But by 2006, it was hard to find a South Tehrani who was pleased with the outcome of that vote or prepared to vote for him again. Why? Because under Ahmadinejad, the country’s economic crisis deepened in ways that hit urban populations—both the poor and the middle class—harder than anyone.

Ahmadinejad’s 2005 mandate was an economic one. Those who wish to argue that Western reporters, in their narcissism, have simply overlooked the widespread enthusiasm for the incumbent, need to explain the outcome of the 2008 parliamentary elections, which were carried by conservatives who were fiercely critical of Ahmadinejad’s economic policies and worked hard to distance themselves from him. These were elections that did not even include any reformist candidates, let alone lure a large North Tehrani vote.

Culture wars and deep polarities tear at Iranian society, but they are not as binary as they are often painted. Iran has a traditional and a modern lower class, a traditional and a modern middle class, even a traditional and a modern élite. The new generation of activists (students, democrats, feminists, journalists) comes largely from the traditional lower middle class—the same demographic that brought us the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and no less authentic a part of the social fabric. To dismiss these Iranians’ aspirations as the vain fancies of the isolated rich is insulting and misguided. Those élite North Tehranis have not been the ones populating rallies and prison cells. That work has been done by those whose lives are difficult and dangerous enough to feel that change is urgent at any price. And if there is a hard core of Iranian activists who will remain in Tehran’s mean streets in the days or weeks or months ahead, it will most certainly not be one comprised entirely of the well-heeled few.

Class dynamics in Iran are volatile, complex, and absolutely integral to the country’s politics and history. But the simplistic gloss that all but an élite and trivial minority support the fundamentalist outlook, irresponsible populism, and strong-man politics of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not begin to do them justice, let alone to illuminate the forces currently clashing in the streets of Iranian cities large and small.