In Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and now, apparently, also in Egypt, rule is passed from father to son or from brother to brother. A family affair.
Our own elections are clean, more or less, even if after every election people claim that in the Orthodox Jewish quarters the dead also voted. Three and a half million inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian territories also held democratic elections in 2006, which former President Jimmy Carter described as exemplary, but Israel, the US and Europe refused to accept the results, because they did not like them.
So it seems
that democracy is a matter of geography.
WERE THE election results in Iran falsified? Practically no one of us - in Tel Aviv, Washington or London - can know. We have no idea, because none of us - and that includes the chiefs of all intelligence agencies - really knows what is happening in that country. We can only try to apply our common sense, based on the little information we have.
Clearly, hundreds of thousands of voters honestly believe that the results were faked. Otherwise, they would not have taken to the streets. But this is a quite normal among losers. During the intoxication of an election campaign, every party believes that it is about to win. When this does not happen, it is quite sure that the results are forged.
Some time ago, Germany's excellent 3Sat television channel broadcast an arresting report about Tehran. The crew drove through the main street from the North of the city to the South, stopping frequently along the way, entering people's homes, visiting mosques and nightclubs.
I learned that Tehran is largely similar to Tel Aviv at least in one respect: in the North there reside the rich and the well-to-do, in the South the poor and underprivileged. The Northerners imitate the US, go to prestigious universities and dance in the clubs. The women are liberated. The Southerners stick to tradition, revere the ayatollahs or the rabbis, and detest the shameless and corrupt North.
Mousavi is the candidate of the North, Ahmadinejad of the South. The villages and small towns - which we call the "periphery" - identify with the south and are alienated from the north.
In Tel Aviv, the South voted for Likud, Shas and the other right-wing parties. The North voted for Labor and Kadima. In our elections, a few months ago, the Right thus won a resounding victory.
It seems that something very similar happened in Iran. It is reasonable to assume that Ahmadinejad genuinely won.
The sole Western outfit that conducted a serious public opinion poll in Iran prior to the elections came up with figures that proved very close to the official results. It is hard to imagine huge forgeries, concerning many millions of votes, when thousands of polling station personnel are involved. In other words: it is entirely plausible that Ahmadinejad really won. If there were forgeries - and there is no reason to believe that there were not - they probably did not reach proportions that could sway the end result.
There is a simple test for the success of a revolution: has the revolutionary spirit penetrated the army? Since the French Revolution, no revolution has succeeded when the army was steadfast in support of the existing regime. Both the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia succeeded because the army was in a state of dissolution. In 1918, much the same happened in Germany. Mussolini and Hitler took great pains not to challenge the army, and came to power with its support.
In many revolutions, the decisive moment arrives when the crowds in the street confront the soldiers and policemen, and the question arises: will they open fire on their own people? When the soldiers refuse, the revolution wins. When they shoot, that is the end of the matter.
When Boris
Yeltsin climbed on the tank, the solders refused to shoot and he won. The
Berlin wall fell because one East-German police officer refused at the decisive
moment to give the order to open fire. In Iran, Khomeini won when, in the final
test, the soldiers of the Shah refused to shoot. That did not happen this time.
The security forces were ready to shoot. They were not infected by the
revolutionary spirit. The way it looks now, that was the end of the affair. (italics and text color done by editor)
I AM not an admirer of Ahmadinejad. Mousavi appeals to me much more.
I do not like leaders who are in direct contact with God, who make speeches to the masses from a balcony, who use demagogic and provocative language, who ride on the waves of hatred and fear. His denial of the holocaust - an idiotic exercise in itself - only adds to Ahmadinejad's image as a primitive or cynical leader.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
5
4
3
