After spending most of the day with my family I’ve plugged back into the evolving news out of Iran. And amidst my efforts to sift through the blizzard of information and rumor to get some sense of what is happening, it’s hard to miss the two very different storylines, not based simply on different facts but on very different interpretations that make sense of them. Many of the links I’ve posted over the last couple hours are taking it as basically a given that a massive fraud took place — enough to put Ahmadinejad’s ‘victory’ fundamentally in doubt.
Operating on these assumptions, Gary Sick writes: “If the reports coming out of Tehran about an electoral coup are sustained, then Iran has entered an entirely new phase of its post-revolution history.” Sick argues that while Iran’s revolutionary elite have placed severe constraints on who could run in the republic’s elections and often stymied the reforms of reformers like former President Khatami, they had not until yesterday felt compelled to outright steal an election.
At the same time you have this current lead story in Newsweek by Christopher Dickey. Dickey’s covered the Middle East for Newsweek for many years. His reporting has always struck me as more like the coverage of the Middle East you read in the European press — not ideologically left, but certainly contrary to the dominant tone of reporting on the Middle East you find in the American press.
Dickey starts from the very different assumption that what happened here was simply that the Western press got wildly ahead of itself by assuming the more educated and cosmopolitan voters in Tehran and other big cities represented the whole country. In the event, what we might call Iran’s ‘silent majority’, conservative rural voters and the working classes of the cities, turned out in massive numbers for Ahmadinejad. “It appears that the working classes and the rural poor–the people who do not much look or act or talk like us–voted overwhelmingly for the scruffy, scrappy president who looks and acts and talks more or less like them,” he writes. “And while Mousavi and his supporters are protesting and even scuffling with police, they are just as likely to be overwhelmed in the streets as they were at the polls.”
I do not say this having a clear position on which underlying set of facts is more credible, though, as I noted before, I put a lot of stock in Juan Cole’s analyses of questions like this. And he seems to think the regional breakdowns of the election data are simply not credible.
But going forward I have to imagine that either new facts or simply the momentum of one or other of the narratives will take hold and be the defining one in countries outside Iran. I’m eager to see which one it is.
