lostfan Posted June 13, 2009 Share Posted June 13, 2009 Also now that I think of it, we don't need to be telling Iran how to rig elections, I forgot they already caught us with our hand in the cookie jar before. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HuskyCaucasian Posted June 13, 2009 Author Share Posted June 13, 2009 QUOTE (lostfan @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 03:25 PM) I don't like people dying, but f*** yeah, go Iranians There is hope when there is civil unrest. At least they arent laying down and just taking it. Are we on our way to some sort of a civil war? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lostfan Posted June 13, 2009 Share Posted June 13, 2009 I doubt it comes to a civil war, but we were talking about that at work. A co-worker said that if Ahmadinejad "won" she thought there would be a revolution. I don't see it though but then again I don't really study Iran that closely either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HuskyCaucasian Posted June 13, 2009 Author Share Posted June 13, 2009 QUOTE (lostfan @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 03:49 PM) I doubt it comes to a civil war, but we were talking about that at work. A co-worker said that if Ahmadinejad "won" she thought there would be a revolution. I don't see it though but then again I don't really study Iran that closely either. It will be a long, bloody uphill fight. When you have, basically, a dictatorish regime with complete control of all media and armed forces, good luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lostfan Posted June 13, 2009 Share Posted June 13, 2009 QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 04:52 PM) It will be a long, bloody uphill fight. When you have, basically, a dictatorish regime with complete control of all media and armed forces, good luck! It already happened once, 30 years ago... just saying Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HuskyCaucasian Posted June 13, 2009 Author Share Posted June 13, 2009 QUOTE (lostfan @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 03:56 PM) It already happened once, 30 years ago... just saying I'm not really up to snuff on Iranian history. I suppose i should in a hurry now. lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
knightni Posted June 13, 2009 Share Posted June 13, 2009 The dictatorship brought on revolution in the form of radical religious fundamentalism. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lostfan Posted June 13, 2009 Share Posted June 13, 2009 (edited) QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 05:01 PM) I'm not really up to snuff on Iranian history. I suppose i should in a hurry now. lol Cliff's notes: Iran was once a pro-Western democracy that had a lot of British influence, like the rest of the Middle East, along with Pakistan and India. Then their (elected) leader - I believe his name was Mossadeq off the top of my head - made the decision to nationalize Iranian oil so that they could keep the oil revenue for themselves. This pissed the British off because it was private British companies profiting off that oil, and they stood to lose a lot of money. They wanted to overthrow the government to keep the profits, so they tried to play the "Communist" card with Truman (claiming that the Iranian government was vulnerable to a takeover by the Soviets, so we better do it first, of course this was bulls***, they just wated their money). Truman didn't buy it, so the Brits tried it again when President Eisenhower got elected. Eisenhower, really not knowing any better, bought it and authorized Operation Ajax which basically installed a dictator who let the Brits keep their oil. He was pro-US though so we didn't care and didn't bother to think of the consequences. The Iranian people knew the score though and it really pissed them off, because the shah was extremely brutal. Eventually President Carter convinced the shah to loosen his grip on the Iranians some since it looked like his house of cards was about to implode on him, and the shah did, but that led to the collapse of his government (it was imminent) and made him have to flee the country. For a while it looked like some students and intellectual types were about to take over the government, but the last straw was when we allowed the shah to be treated here in the US for cancer. Their response was the embassy takeover and hostage crisis along with the conservative, hard-core anti-US Islamic regime we have now. The whole thing just sucks, because prior to that, Iran idolized the US and wanted to be a secular democracy just like us. And had we not made that series of mistakes, they probably would be. Edited June 13, 2009 by lostfan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lostfan Posted June 13, 2009 Share Posted June 13, 2009 QUOTE (knightni @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 05:06 PM) The dictatorship brought on revolution in the form of radical religious fundamentalism. That's the cliff's notes cliff's notes version. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HuskyCaucasian Posted June 13, 2009 Author Share Posted June 13, 2009 QUOTE (knightni @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 04:06 PM) The dictatorship brought on revolution in the form of radical religious fundamentalism. which seems to have fed back into a weird hybrid of "Democracy" and dictatorship Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HuskyCaucasian Posted June 13, 2009 Author Share Posted June 13, 2009 QUOTE (lostfan @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 04:17 PM) The whole thing just sucks, because prior to that, IRAN idolized the US and wanted to be a secular democracy just like us. And had we not made that series of mistakes, they probably would be. 1) Corrected that for ya 2) Once again, it goes to show my belief that the more we mess with the middle east, the more we make it worse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Disco72 Posted June 13, 2009 Share Posted June 13, 2009 QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 05:35 PM) 1) Corrected that for ya 2) Once again, it goes to show my belief that the more we mess with the middle east, the more we make it worse. It's not necessarily messing with it but messing with it for purely "selfish" national interests and ignoring any possible long term consequences. Having said that, though, I do sometimes wonder if there is any "right" policy for the middle east. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lostfan Posted June 13, 2009 Share Posted June 13, 2009 QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 05:35 PM) 1) Corrected that for ya 2) Once again, it goes to show my belief that the more we mess with the middle east, the more we make it worse. lol. oops Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderBolt Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 Iran streets after election http://www.flickr.com/photos/mousavi1388/s...57619592664479/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 Juan Cole has a couple useful pieces up. Here's his general politics one and here's why he thinks the election was stolen. I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation. But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime. As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory. The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose. They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts. This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran. The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election. This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lostfan Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 No way that Ahmadinejad won Tehran at all, let alone by a landslide. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderBolt Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 Somehow Mousavi lost his home province by a considerable margin. A province that’s been know for it’s loyalty to the man. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
knightni Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 Will this cause Mousavi supporters to attempt an attack on Ahmadinejad? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderBolt Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 QUOTE (knightni @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 10:09 PM) Will this cause Mousavi supporters to attempt an attack on Ahmadinejad? It's possible. The real wildcard is whether their's enough anger amongst the Iranian youth to attempt to overthrow the Ayatollah. He's the man with the real power. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lostfan Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 I really doubt anything happens, this isn't the first time there's been civil unrest in Iran. But if anything this will probably accelerate the end of the Islamic regime there by a few more years - there's a s***-ton of under-30s in Iran, and this generation doesn't remember 1979 or American meddling in Iranian affairs. It's only a matter of time really. But goddamn, what amateurs. They couldn't even be bothered to make the voting across provinces even look real. Could you imagine if Obama won Texas and Oklahoma by large margins, or if McCain had gotten a 65% margin in San Francisco and Chicago? That would send up red flags immediately. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kapkomet Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 QUOTE (lostfan @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 09:20 PM) I really doubt anything happens, this isn't the first time there's been civil unrest in Iran. But if anything this will probably accelerate the end of the Islamic regime there by a few more years - there's a s***-ton of under-30s in Iran, and this generation doesn't remember 1979 or American meddling in Iranian affairs. It's only a matter of time really. But goddamn, what amateurs. They couldn't even be bothered to make the voting across provinces even look real. Could you imagine if Obama won Texas and Oklahoma by large margins, or if McCain had gotten a 65% margin in San Francisco and Chicago? That would send up red flags immediately. Exactly. This is a sign that the Ayatollah panicked. Hard core panicked. (spelling sucks I know). Now the IRG will take care of the cleanup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 This is the best data I've seen since the correlation between global warming and number of pirates. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lostfan Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 10:56 PM) This is the best data I've seen since the correlation between global warming and number of pirates. lol, seriously that is just really f***ing lazy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 QUOTE (lostfan @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 07:58 PM) lol, seriously that is just really f***ing lazy. One possibility is that this is actually deliberate...draw Mousavi's supporters out in to the streets where they're vulnerable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lostfan Posted June 14, 2009 Share Posted June 14, 2009 (edited) QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 11:04 PM) One possibility is that this is actually deliberate...draw Mousavi's supporters out in to the streets where they're vulnerable. Nah, I'd just chalk this up to incompetence and shortsightedness. I really doubt they had a real plan. As an analyst I try not to see things with a pro-Western/US bias (i.e., automatically figuring someone I don't like had to cheat to win) but in this case what happened is pretty obvious. Edited June 14, 2009 by lostfan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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