The president's policies and his sometimes offensive remarks have created hardships and embarrassment for this middle-class voting bloc, which has found it hard to travel abroad and do business in the face of Western sanctions and restrictions.
So, the election outcome could be explained simply by Iran's middle class and intellectuals voting for Mousavi, while larger numbers of poor and conservative Muslims favored Ahmadinejad.
Mousavi seemed to acknowledge this point when he released his supposed proof of the rigged election, accusing Ahmadinejad of buying votes by providing food and higher wages for the poor. At some Mousavi rallies, his supporters reportedly would chant "death to the potatoes!" in a joking reference to Ahmadinejad's food distributions.
Yet, while passing out food and raising pay levels may be a sign of "machine politics," such tactics are not normally associated with election fraud. And if the central principle of democracy holds one person, one vote then the ballot of a poor uneducated Iranian in the countryside should count as much as one cast by a wealthy college-educated Iranian in the capital.
Dangerous Conventional Wisdom
But the major U.S. news media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, are unwilling to accept this analysis or even consider it a plausible explanation. In editorial after editorial, the big newspapers dismiss the Iranian election as "fraudulent," without qualification or substantiation.
The oft-repeated assumption has congealed into Washington conventional wisdom, what all the important pundits just know to be true. Earlier this month, Richard Haass, president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" pronouncing the Iranian election a "fraud" and drawing only nods or silence from others around the table.
Yet, this dubious certitude is not without consequence. It cuts into President Barack Obama's political maneuvering room for engaging Iran in serious negotiations; it justifies covert operations aimed at destabilizing the Tehran regime; ultimately, it could give a moral rationale to a military assault on Iran.
There also are troubling parallels between the way the U.S. news media has reacted to the Iranian election as well as the dispute over Iran's nuclear program and how many of these same news outlets helped stampede the American people into war with Iraq.
For instance, the Washington Post's neoconservative editorialists declared flatly in 2002 and early 2003 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Only later, after the U.S. invasion and the discovery of no caches of WMD did the Post's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt concede that maybe the Post should not have been so categorical.
"If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction," Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. "If that's not true, it would have been better not to say it." [CJR, March/April 2004]
Yet, despite the deaths of more than 4,300 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Hiatt is still directing the Post's editorial page and spoiling for a new confrontation with another Muslim nation, Iran, in part by touting as "flat fact" that Iran's election was "fraudulent."
The New York Times and its senior editors have matched the Post's hysterical coverage of Iran, much as they also contributed to the rush to war in Iraq. Since last June, the Times has run many editorials and news stories that reflect a deep-seated bias against Ahmadinejad and his government.
When the Times executive editor Bill Keller assigned himself to cover Iran's election, he co-authored a front-page news analysis that began with an old joke about Ahmadinejad having lice in his hair.
Since then, the Times has consistently published one-sided articles about both the election and the nuclear dispute. For instance, while decrying Iran's alleged nuclear-bomb ambitions, the Times almost never mentions actual nuclear states in the region, including Israel, Pakistan and India.
Ducking a Recount
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
2
