This conversation about whether the Iranian vote was fixed is nonsense. Of course it was! Yes, polls in Iran are unreliable but Mousavi was leading 54-39 in the one poll before the election. Heavy voter turnout favored him. And instead he loses 63% to 34%. That's an absolute joke. They might as well have gone all the way and called it 97-3%.
According to these "official" results Mousavi lost his own home district (which is inconceivable in Iranian politics) and got far less votes than previous reformist candidates. Look, these things are not even close to believable. No one should give these numbers a shred of credibility. What is only a hundred percent more likely is that the Iranian government decided ahead of time who was going to win and that was that.
You have to understand 63-34 is a gigantic blowout that is much larger than some of the biggest landslides in American history. When Reagan crushed Mondale in 1984 and carried 49 out of the 50 states, he only won 58.8% to 40.6%. To say Ahmedinejad won 63-34 is not only saying we fixed this thing, but we're rubbing it in your face.
And let's be clear this isn't a matter of some missing ballots or voting irregularities. This is simply making up a number and pretending it's the real vote. I doubt they even counted the actual votes. What would be the point? Remember, the Iranian state news agency declared Ahmedinejad the winner before a single vote had been counted. Gee, I wonder who they were pulling for? I've never seen an election so rigged in my life (at least one that was actually pretending to be a real election). Saddam Hussein would be proud of the way this election was conducted.
The internet, texting and other forms of communication also happened to be conveniently down during and after the election. These are the main ways Mousavi supporters were communicating with one another. Gee, I wonder which side the state was on? Who gave the order to jam these lines of communication and whose side were they on? How much more obvious can this be?
Most people think the Iranian government turned these devices off to lower the Mousavi vote. I think they didn't give damn about lowering the vote because they weren't going to count the ballots anyway. They turned off the communication so that a revolt would be harder to conduct while they announced the bogus results.
Before the elections the Iranian Revolutionary Guard announced that if Mousavi's people complained about rigged elections, they would crush them. Whose side do you think they were on? And why do you think they might have been making such preparations?
But the clerics who run Iran and Ayatollah Khamenei better be careful what they wish for. This is how you start revolutions. Iran has a very young population that is yearning for more freedom and those younger voters were overwhelmingly on the side of Mousavi. These young Iranians made the mistake of believing that they had some say in their government and that they did not live under a dictatorship. And now they have found out the truth. My guess is that is not going to sit well with them.
It's one thing to bring in a new slightly moderate leader with only some powers as your next president. It's another thing to tell your people that they don't matter and that you rule their lives with an iron fist and that their government is a fraud. That's the kind of thing revolutions are made of.