Iranian-Americans Denied Protest Permit

Exactly. I would think that the Iranian people would get comfort from knowing that people in other countries are supporting them...this will give them strength to carry on.

But at this point there's no proof either way, too early to make cocksure comments on who's going to be the legitimate leader. Footage of Tehran is like showing footage of people in San Francisco protesting and saying that it represents the feelings of the majority of the U.S. Anyway, props to those people getting angry over suspected irregularities. We're much too docile to do that here in the U.S., see 2000 and just about every election for proof of that.

There was never anything substantiated about the 2000 election, merely a bunch of supposition from people who later devoted their attention to 9/11 trutherism. There was a single incidence of a poorly-designed ballot supported by a statistically anomolous result that would have thrown off the outcome in one county in Florida, and yes, that outcome probably would have shifted the result of the election, but I don't think that one incident was qualifies as "serious irregularities" as much as it does dumbass design. Everything else I've ever heard amounted to grandstanding on both sides of the fence, and none of it really has anything to do with Iran.

"Iran = No aid, no real military conflict with anybody that I know of now."

No real military conflict?

Seriously?

Heard of Lebanon, for starters? You know, where Iranian funds and training and weapons and some actual manpower helped tear down that country's elected government, and for years before that helped keep that country in civil war? Iran is still involved here.

Or how about 30 years of funding various militant Muslim groups that, you know, actually kill others? Again, Iran is still doing this.

Again, that's just for starters.

Listen, I know your strong feelings about Israel, but let's not be silly.

"to be honest, I'm not real big on the selfish 'middle class' right now anyway, but that's mostly due to my feelings about them in this country."

I'd recommend you divorce your own relatively tiny personal biases from your thoughts about geopolitics. It's kind of a requirement if you want to have the clearest view possible. Especially if you and I are going to solve all the world's problems on this blog :)

As well, I suspect you are not as lower-class as you pretend to be here.

I think you're confusing Iran with Syria, not to mention with lots of U.S. propaganda, and yes I stand by what I said. Lebanon's saintly compared to Israel.

"I think you're confusing Iran with Syria, ..."

Not to be a smart-ass Navin, but I would urge you to learn more about the work of Syria and Iran, and their proxies, in Lebanon, and the relationship between Syria and Iran, a relationship that is as important to our challenges in the Middle East as the Palenstinian-Israeli conflic. I'm not sure you have the proper understanding to offer intelligent comment if you think I am confusing the two. Trust me, I am not.

"I notice you didn't mention the difference in "aid money" either, I guess you agree with me on that *big difference*."

Well, it's obvious that we give aid to Israel, not Iran. You are just offering a simplistic formula to explain military action, and you seem significantly ill-informed about the peaceful nature of Iran.

"I don't pretend to be anything. The U.S. middle class was largely dumb and selfish, living off of phantom wealth and trying to keep up with the Joneses"

That's a childish generalization, and you apparently use it to shape your views on Iran. Odd. (Actually, it's more technically stereotype rather than generalization, but I notice you seem more comfortable with stereotypes as long as it does not involve poor people or minorities. Again, odd, if not original.)

"I didn't buy a house because I knew actually affording one could be dicey, same goes for new vehicles and giant flat screens. "

I don't have any of those possessions, nor want any of them, yet I am firmly in the middle class but most measures: income, cultural, what have you.

What If Ahmadinejad Really Won?
By Robert Parry
June 15, 2009

It’s fast congealing into conventional wisdom that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole re-election through fraud and that the so-called “green revolution” of Mir-Hossein Mousavi – which was based in the country’s intelligentsia and middle class – got robbed.

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But a strong case can be made that the large turnout, which was estimated at about 85 percent, was the key to a genuine landslide for Ahmadinejad, who is viewed as a friend of more traditional Iranians from the working classes and among the rural peasants.

That is the assessment expressed by Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty in a Washington Post op-ed citing their findings from extensive polling across Iran in mid-May that detected roughly the same 2-to-1 margin in favor of Ahmadinejad that emerged from the final tallies.

Ballen and Doherty also knocked down one of the central arguments cited by analysts who are claiming that Ahmadinejad committed fraud. That argument is that Mousavi, an Azeri, surely would have won Azeri-dominated districts which instead were recorded as going heavily for Ahmadinejad.

However, Ballen and Doherty reported that “our survey indicated … that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.”

Their poll also undercut the widespread media assumption about Internet-savvy youth backing Mousavi. They found that only 1 in 3 Iranians have access to the Internet and the “18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.”

Nevertheless, the rush to the “fraud” judgment among much of the U.S. news media is shaping the political realities that now confront both Washington and Tehran. One of the snap media judgments has been that Ahmadinejad’s “theft” of the election proves that hardliners in Israel and neoconservatives in the United States were right all along about the impossibility of dealing rationally with Iran, that President Barack Obama was the "big loser," and that force is the only option to employ against Iran.

It also has been curious to see U.S. news organizations care suddenly about legitimate elections when most of them ignored, ridiculed or covered-up evidence that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential election in 2000 and possibly in 2004 as well.

In Election 2000, Florida – a state controlled by Bush’s brother Jeb and Jeb’s cronies – was the scene of widespread election irregularities. Then, when a recount was attempted, the Bush campaign sent well-dressed hooligans from Washington to Miami to stage a riot aimed at intimidating vote counters. Finally, Bush got five partisan Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes and award the White House to Bush.

Yet, the U.S. press corps was extraordinarily passive about this well-documented election theft. Even when it became clear that Al Gore won the popular vote and would have carried Florida if all legal ballots had been counted, major U.S. news organizations, including the New York Times and CNN, misrepresented the facts to protect Bush’s “legitimacy.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Gore’s Victory.”]

Similarly, serious irregularities in Election 2004, especially in the key state of Ohio, were never seriously investigated by the mainstream news media, which instead mocked Internet sites (including ours) and citizens groups as “conspiracy theorists” for citing some of the bizarre vote tallies favoring Bush. [For details, see our book, Neck Deep.]

Yet, when an election occurs in another country and an “unpopular” leader appears to win, an opposite set of rules apply. Anyone who doesn’t immediately accept the assumption of voter fraud is naïve; every “conspiracy theory” is cited respectfully while contrary evidence is downplayed or ignored, for instance the assumption about the Azeri vote that Ballen and Doherty debunked with their poll findings.

Another irony is that Iran's religious leaders now have ordered an investigation of the fraud allegations in a country not known for its democratic institutions. That is more than Americans got in 2000 and 2004.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/index.html

Yesterday's Washington Post, emphasis mine:

The Iranian People Speak

By Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty
Monday, June 15, 2009

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The breadth of Ahmadinejad's support was apparent in our preelection survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.

Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply reflected fearful respondents' reluctance to provide honest answers to pollsters. Yet the integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly four in five Iranians -- including most Ahmadinejad supporters -- said they wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect Iran's supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote. Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving the national economy. These were hardly "politically correct" responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.

Indeed, and consistently among all three of our surveys over the past two years, more than 70 percent of Iranians also expressed support for providing full access to weapons inspectors and a guarantee that Iran will not develop or possess nuclear weapons, in return for outside aid and investment. And 77 percent of Iranians favored normal relations and trade with the United States, another result consistent with our previous findings.

Iranians view their support for a more democratic system, with normal relations with the United States, as consonant with their support for Ahmadinejad. They do not want him to continue his hard-line policies. Rather, Iranians apparently see Ahmadinejad as their toughest negotiator, the person best positioned to bring home a favorable deal -- rather like a Persian Nixon going to China.

Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world. Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted.