The Noble Lie

I have been purposely said very little about the ongoing situation in Iran. To me, it still looks like election theft, but I feel the reservation is warranted because of the not-so-pretty history of American intervention in Iranian democracy. I've read some strongly-worded attacks of the western media spin on events, but the response that I find most interesting comes from Robert Fisk, longtime Middle East media correspondent and ballsy combat-zone journalist who has covered the crises of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, making a great effort to remind us Occidentals that Arabs are human beings too.

I put some weight into what Robert Fisk has to say about the Iran crisis. Excerpt below.

In Tehran, fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows:

We have, in fact, reported all the censorship – of local newspapers as well as communications. The footage of a brutal police force assaulting the political opposition on the streets of the capital has shocked the world. Rightly so, although no one has made comparison with police forces who batter demonstrators on the streets of Western Europe, who beat women with night-sticks, who have kicked over an innocent middle-aged man who immediately suffered a fatal heart attack, who have shot down an innocent passenger on the London Tube... There are special codes of morality to be applied to Middle East countries which definitely must not apply to us.

So let's take a look at those Iranian elections. A fraud, we believe. And I have the darkest doubts about those election figures which gave Mousavi a paltry 33.75 per cent of the vote. Indeed, I and a few Iranian friends calculated that if the government's polling-night statistics were correct, the Iranian election committee would have had to have counted five million votes in just two hours. But our coverage of this poll has been deeply flawed. Most visiting Western journalists stay in hotels in the wealthy, north Tehran suburbs, where tens of thousands of Mousavi supporters live, where it's easy to find educated translators who love Mousavi, where interviewees speak fluent English and readily denounce the spiritual and cultural and social stagnation of Iran's – let us speak frankly – semi-dictatorship.

But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi's support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.

This is also my suspicion: that Ahmadinejad might have scraped in, but not with the huge majority he was awarded. For with their usual, clumsy, autocratic behaviour, the clerics behind the Islamic Republic may have decreed that only a greater majority for the winner could decisively annihilate the reputation of its secular opponents. Perhaps Ahmadinejad got 51 per cent or 52 per cent and this was preposterously increased to 63 per cent. Perhaps Mousavi picked up 44 per cent or 45 per cent. I don't know. The Iranians will never know, even though the Supreme Leader told us yesterday that the incredible 63 per cent was credible. That is Iran's tragedy.

I have also said little about the coup in Honduras, but Democracy Now reports the coup's generals were trained at the infamous School of the Americas.

At the moment, I have only one thing to say about the situation in Iran. What is happening now in the streets of Iran should have happened in the United States in 2000*. The people of Iran are showing more dedication to the democratic process than Americans did, and as an American, I say we have to do much better next time the establishment so flagrantly insults our intelligence.

I like to joke that we're more advanced here in the United States because we have machines to do our vote-rigging for us. Instead of being rubber-stamped by a Supreme Leader, ours was rubber stamped by a Supreme Court.

* - Thanks Heraldo.