Morning Brief: Iran's opposition running out of options

Fri, 06/26/2009 - 8:08am

Top story: The options for Iran's opposition continued to narrow as Iran's Guardian Council declared this month's election "the healthiest since the revolution." The regime also appears to have succeeded in neutralizing some opposition leaders. Presidential candidate and cleric Mehdi Karrubi says he still believes the election results were fraudulent but would continue his protests only through the legal system. 

Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has nonetheless vowed to continue fighting, despite "recent pressures" aimed at making him reverse his position. Several of his top campaign aides have been arrested in recent days. 

At Friday prayers in Tehran, leading cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami (pictured) issued a statement calling for the leaders of protests to be punished "strongly and with cruelty so it will be a lesson for everyone."

Meeting in Trieste, the G8 foreign ministers issued a statement condemning the violence in Iran.

King of Pop: Spontaneous mourning for pop star Michael Jackson broke out across the world yesterday. A number of current and former world leaders including Nelson Mandela and Hugo Chavez made statements. 

Middle East

  • Another bombing killed 15 people in a Baghdad market. Four days until U.S. withdrawal.
  • American-backed Saad al-Hariri appears set to become Lebanon's Prime Minister. 
  • Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal says he welcomes "new language" from U.S. President Barack Obama. 

Europe

Asia

  • Pakistan's terrorist violence has spread to Pakistani Kashmir. 
  • The U.S. and South Korea are  holding defense talks in Seoul aimed at countering North Korea.
  • Foreign trade and business associations are urging China to reconsider requiring all PCs to be sold with censorship software. 

Africa

Americas

  • Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya fired his top general for refusing to support a referendum that could lead to suspending presidential term limits.
  • Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made a thinly veiled threat to shut down opposition TV station Globovision once and for all. 
  • Air Force General Douglas Frasier will take over the U.S. Southern Command, where he will face a number of challenges including Guantanamo, and drug trafficking. 
AFP/Getty Images
Joshua Keating | Permalink | | Comments? Login or register
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FP Weekend editor needed...

by jgarzik on Sun, 06/28/2009 - 3:07pm

...to kill the spam, and post updates like the Honduras coup.

Follow the links

by hass on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 6:28pm

The blogger LINKS to criticisms of the studyby the Leveretts -- does not write the criticism himself. The Catham House study is obviously faulty because it compares apples and oranges:

"Recently, spot analyses by scholars from the University of Michigan and the Royal Institute of International Affairs suggested that this year’s election results are out of line with previous presidential elections. These analyses compare this year’s results with the first round of the 2005 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani outpolled other candidates to move into a runoff. Viewed through that prism, Ahmadinejad’s 2009 tally seems inflated.

But the comparison is structurally flawed. It is tantamount to arguing that, because Barack Obama won 38 percent of the vote in a competitive, multicandidate caucus in Iowa in January 2008, it is implausible that he could have won 54 percent of that state’s vote in the two-person general election in November. A more appropriate comparison for this year’s results in Iran would be the second round of the 2005 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad trounced Rafsanjani." (Leveretts)

No evidence of fraud

by hass on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 10:58am

There's no actual evidence of fraud in the Iran elections. Every claim about vote rigging has a perfectly reasonable and rational counter-claim. See IranAffairs.com for more FACTS about the alleged election fraud in Iran.

Don't believe what you're told. THINK: WHY WOULD THEY RESORT TO FRAUD when the opposition leader, Mousavi, is very much a regime insider and hardly a threat to the system?

well actually

by Lure D. Lou on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 12:12pm

there have been credible reports of ballot stuffing and a report from a British University points out that the numbers don't add up in many of the provinces...the need to commit fraud has to be separated from the actual practice....paranoid regimes like to stack the deck even if they have no real chance of losing which was not the case in Iran....sure Mousavi was an inside player but so many people were willing to put their necks on the line to defend his franchise that we have to take the allegations seriously....

In any case, I find the notion of an Islamic democratic state to be a bit absurd anyway since there is nothing remotely democratic about how Iran treats it's citizens...and Mousavi was not likely to matter very much on the liberalization score....

Religion is not the opium of the masses...it's the crack of the masses....time to wake up people...could it be that the real test of God's judgment will be not how well you followed the tenets of your specific creed, but how well you avoid getting entrapped by them...

God is a clever fellow...do you think he /she is going to be taken in by someone whose idea of devotion is pounding their head on the floor...get real...I think God would appreciate an atheist who still managed to live a moral life...he would appreciate the dedication and authenticity of such a person...not the rumblings of a pack of sexless bigots

my thoughts go out to the poor young men who had their hand and foot cut-off in Somalia yesterday for stealing cell=phones....ah Islam!...so enlightened....(but I guess on balance it's no better than Christians burning people on the cross for alleged witchcraft)....a pox on all of that BS

No evidence of vote rigging in Iran

by hass on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 1:02pm

Had you actually bothered to check the link to IranAffairs.com you'd see that the university studies are faulty, and the rest of the rant about religion and democracy is irrelevant to the point that there's no actual evidence of vote-rigging in Iran.

Lone blogger vs. Chatham House

by Lure D. Lou on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 4:45pm

Personally I'll take Chatham House over whomever your blogger is

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/755/

as far as my rant goes, I know it is irrelevant to the topic but I am so disgusted by the 'righteous' that it just flows out....

does anyone wonder why China developed so quickly into a modern state...could it be they rejected mumbo-jumbo in the public market-place of ideas....Mao was a genius...

Not a "lone blogger" at all

by hass on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 6:29pm

"Recently, spot analyses by scholars from the University of Michigan and the Royal Institute of International Affairs suggested that this year’s election results are out of line with previous presidential elections. These analyses compare this year’s results with the first round of the 2005 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani outpolled other candidates to move into a runoff. Viewed through that prism, Ahmadinejad’s 2009 tally seems inflated.

But the comparison is structurally flawed. It is tantamount to arguing that, because Barack Obama won 38 percent of the vote in a competitive, multicandidate caucus in Iowa in January 2008, it is implausible that he could have won 54 percent of that state’s vote in the two-person general election in November. A more appropriate comparison for this year’s results in Iran would be the second round of the 2005 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad trounced Rafsanjani." (Leveretts)

No evidence of fraud

by hass on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 10:57am

There's no actual evidence of fraud in the Iran elections. Every claim about vote rigging has a perfectly reasonable and rational counter-claim. See IranAffairs.com for more FACTS about the alleged election fraud in Iran.

Don't believe what you're told. THINK: WHY WOULD THEY RESORT TO FRAUD when the opposition leader, Mousavi, is very much a regime insider and hardly a threat to the system?