Days Of Decision

The McChrystal request for more troops in Afghanistan is reportedly as much as 45,000. It's now on a shelf at the Pentagon as deliberations continue in the White House on reviewing the overall strategy. Obama has no scheduled events today. That could be in observation of Yom Kippur (Emanuel and Axelrod are certainly indisposed today), but what's also likely is a day of internal discussion over the way forward in Afghanistan. The President has reached beyond his circle of advisors and even to Colin Powell in making this decision.

The competing advice and concerns fuel a pivotal struggle to shape the president’s thinking about a war that he inherited but may come to define his tenure. Among the most important outside voices has been that of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired four-star Army general, who visited Mr. Obama in the Oval Office this month and expressed skepticism that more troops would guarantee success. According to people briefed on the discussion, Mr. Powell reminded the president of his longstanding view that military missions should be clearly defined.

Mr. Powell is one of the three people outside the administration, along with Senator John F. Kerry and Senator Jack Reed, considered by White House aides to be most influential in this current debate. All have expressed varying degrees of doubt about the wisdom of sending more forces to Afghanistan.

Mr. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has warned of repeating the mistakes of Vietnam, where he served, and has floated the idea of a more limited counterterrorist mission. Mr. Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and an Army veteran, has not ruled out supporting more troops but said “the burden of proof” was on commanders to justify it.

In the West Wing, beyond Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has advocated an alternative strategy to the troop buildup, other presidential advisers sound dubious about more troops, including Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, according to people who have spoken with them. At the same time, Mr. Obama is also hearing from more hawkish figures, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Even inside the Pentagon, opinions are mixed as to whether more troops will make a difference.

The assumption of the hawks, that allowing Afghanistan to fall to the Taliban will automatically signal a return of Al Qaeda into the country in a safe haven, reminds me of the domino theory - speculative, ignorant of the local dynamic, based on scant evidence. James Jones, the national security advisor, seemed to dismiss it the other day. While Al Qaeda's presence in the border region hasn't been wasy, with drone strikes and other pressures, the severe anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, such that the government is openly hindering government visa requests and de facto protecting Al Qaeda, suggests that they are much more comfortable where they are than moving back into Afghanistan, where the Taliban suffered decapitation the last time they gave them harbor, are not as ideologically aligned with them this time around and would be wary of entering into the same agreement. Notwithstanding the argument that "safe havens" in host countries are unnecessary for a plot to be carried off in, for example, Denver and Queens, or for core leadership to gravitate to North Africa or some other area. An Afghanistan-centered strategy, in this context, seems foolish.

I think the linchpin of all of this is Joe Biden. He was maybe the pre-eminent humanitarian interventionist in the Democratic Party for a long time, until coming up against Afghanistan and recognizing that the nation-building effort had no partner and was doomed to failure. It's the personal meetings between Biden and Hamid Karzai that appear to have soured him on the whole project and shift to a counter-terrorism focus:

Nothing shook his faith quite as much as what you might call the Karzai dinners. The first occurred in February 2008, during a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan that Biden took with fellow senators John Kerry and Chuck Hagel. Dining on platters of rice and lamb at the heavily fortified presidential palace in Kabul, Biden and his colleagues grilled Karzai about reports of corruption and the growing opium trade in the country, which the president disingenuously denied. An increasingly impatient Biden challenged Karzai's assertions until he lost his temper. Biden finally stood up and threw down his napkin, declaring, "This meeting is over," before he marched out of the room with Hagel and Kerry. It was a similar story nearly a year later. As Obama prepared to assume the presidency in January, he dispatched Biden on a regional fact-finding trip. Again Biden dined with Karzai, and, again, the meeting was contentious. Reiterating his prior complaints about corruption, Biden warned Karzai that the Bush administration's kid-glove treatment was over; the new team would demand more of him.

Biden's revised view of Karzai was pivotal. Whereas he had once felt that, with sufficient U.S. support, Afghanistan could be stabilized, now he wasn't so sure. "He's aware that a basic rule of counterinsurgency is that you need a reliable local partner," says one person who has worked with Biden in the past. The trip also left Biden wondering about the clarity of America's mission. At the White House, he told colleagues that "if you asked ten different U.S. officials in that country what their mission was, you'd get ten different answers," according to a senior White House aide. He was also growing increasingly concerned about the fate of Pakistan. Biden has been troubled by the overwhelmingly disproportionate allocation of U.S. resources to Afghanistan in comparison to Pakistan, a ratio one administration official measures as 30:1. Indeed, before leaving the Senate last year, Biden authored legislation that would triple U.S. non-military aid to Islamabad to $1.5 billion per year. (House-Senate bickering has tied up the plan for months, and Biden has recently been working the phones to broker a compromise.)

Actually, that tripling of aid for Pakistan passed the Senate unanimously this past week.

Biden actually lost this fight the first time around to the hawks, but the futility of the fraudulent election has brought things into a different view. And yet the White House and other NATO members feel obliged to actually support Karzai, mainly because of his ethnicity (a Tajik like Abdullah Abdullah would lose the Pashto-dominated country quickly). Just writing a sentence like that leads to the conclusion that building a stable government here is impossible.

Frank Rich looks at the deliberations in the White House through the prism of the Vietnam era and the release of a new book detailing that policymaking:

George Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.

Bundy left his memoir unfinished at his death in 1996. Goldstein’s book, drawn from Bundy’s ruminations and deep new research, is full of fresh information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco. “Lessons in Disaster” caused only a modest stir when published in November, but The Times Book Review cheered it as “an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.” The reviewer was, of all people, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began in Vietnam and who would later be charged with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis by the new Obama administration [...]

As Goldstein said to me last week, it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.

We shall know the outcome of these days of decision within weeks. Obama has a responsibility, not to rubber-stamp the views of Washington hawks and counter-insurgency lovers, but to outline the best possible policy for the future. I don't see how committing 100,000-plus troops to Afghanistan for five years or more, to defend an illegitimate government, to fight an invisible enemy, fits with that mandate.

Feinstein: Afghanistan Cannot Sustain A Democracy

It's one thing for the Bernie Sanderses and Russ Feingolds to openly question the mission in Afghanistan. It's quite another for Dianne Feinstein to do so.

KING: Well Senator Feinstein, you're the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence. To the question of where this ends, it is eight years after 9/11. We've paused and reflected on that just the other day. You see the things that we can't see, the intelligence. Are we winning in Afghanistan? Are we any closer to finding Osama bin Laden, and does the president have a clear strategy, in your view?

FEINSTEIN: Well, I can tell you this. A lot of the leadership has been taken out of al Qaeda. I can say and I think you would agree that Afghanistan and the Pakistani border are still the major safe haven, the major safe haven for terrorists in the world. And these are people who will, if they can, come after us, not necessarily the Taliban, but certainly al Qaeda and other affiliated groups.

So we have to consider that. We have about 60,000 troops there, another 8,000 are moving in with our allies, it about equals the force that is in Iraq. To the best of my knowledge, the president has had no request for additional troops up to this time. My view is that the mission has to be very clear. I don't believe --

KING: Has to be means it is not now?

FEINSTEIN: I believe it is not now. I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan. I believe it will remain a tribal entity.

I do believe that clearing out Al Qaida, clearing out the Taliban is a bona fide part one of the mission. I do agree that training Afghan troops, Afghan -- Afghan police is an important piece of the mission.

I believe the mission should be time limited, that there should be no, well, we'll let you know in a year and a half, depending on how we do. I think the Congress is entitled to know, after Iraq, exactly how long are we going to be in Afghanistan.

Feinstein is actually more charitable about the presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan than the commanding general on the ground, Stanley McChrystal, who said this week that there are no signs of major Al Qaeda anywhere in the country.

But as far as the wariness of the viability of Constitutional democracy in Afghanistan, you need only look to their recent election, into which the opposition leader is now seeking a criminal investigation. He has accused Hamid Karzai of treason and "state-engineered fraud". Despite this, Karzai will probably win election on the first ballot, and a vote that has been horribly compromised will be made official. We saw in Iran how this can lead to violence and chaos, and Afghanistan is not nearly as stable. Without a viable partner in the government, as Feinstein says we cannot expect an endless commitment. Yet because Karzai is Pashtun the US will likely back him in this fight, alienating the other ethnic groups in the region. Kalashnikovs are flying off the shelves in the Tajik areas. Civil war is not an unlikely scenario at this point.

This further limits the mission, away from state-building and toward dealing with the elements in the country willing to deal. Otherwise we set ourselves up for a decade-long slog that will only end with more dead and more treasure squandered, to little effect. And yes, as Sen. Feinstein says, that process should have an end date.

The Battle To Defend The Clearly Fraudulent And Hated Afghan Government

The UN is now officially calling the Afghan elections fraudulent. And then calling for a... recount of the fraudulent data?

Afghanistan's troubled presidential election was thrown into further turmoil Tuesday when a U.N.-backed complaints panel charged widespread fraud and ordered a partial recount, just as election officials announced that President Hamid Karzai appeared to have gained enough votes to win.

The growing political crisis threatens to set off a direct confrontation between Karzai and his Western backers, who have been increasingly alarmed by mounting evidence of ballot-box stuffing and other irregularities, much of it reportedly benefiting Karzai's campaign.

In the days immediately following the Aug. 20 vote, U.S. officials were uniform in praising what President Obama called "a successful election." Obama said he looked forward "to renewing our partnership with the Afghan people as they move ahead under a new government."

But the widening fraud issue now seems likely to further prolong the slow election process, leaving the country without a clear leader for weeks or even months while tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops are battling the Taliban alongside Afghan forces. Obama's strategy also includes major economic development initiatives, improved delivery of services and a crackdown on corruption -- all of which will be difficult to implement without a valid Afghan government.

It puts the military in an unwinnable situation, trying to win hearts and minds over to a government which is clearly corrupt. And if riots break out, would the military come to the aid of the government against protesters against a stolen election?

Meanwhile, the situation is getting more dangerous for Americans over there. New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell barely escaped from the Taliban after a commando raid (his Afghan interpreter was killed in the melee). Insurgents trapped and killed four US soldiers yesterday in a firefight witnessed by McClatchy's Jonathan Landay:

"We will do to you what we did to the Russians," the insurgent's leader boasted over the radio, referring to the failure of Soviet troops to capture Ganjgal during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation.

Dashing from boulder to boulder, diving into trenches and ducking behind stone walls as the insurgents maneuvered to outflank us, we waited more than an hour for U.S. helicopters to arrive, despite earlier assurances that air cover would be five minutes away.

U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and tree lines — despite being told repeatedly that they weren't near the village.

"We are pinned down. We are running low on ammo. We have no air. We've lost today," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, 37, said through his translator to his Afghan counterpart, responding to the latter's repeated demands for helicopters.

Four U.S. Marines were killed Tuesday, the most U.S. service members assigned as trainers to the Afghan National Army to be lost in a single incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Eight Afghan troops and police and the Marine commander's Afghan interpreter also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle that raged from dawn until 2 p.m. around this remote hamlet in eastern Kunar province, close to the Pakistan border.

With the government having lost legitimacy, the Taliban has become emboldened, and its forces tied up with nationalists fighting occupiers. And our mission has become increasingly scrambled. Liberal hawks (like Howard Dean!) need to come to their senses and realize how far we've strayed from the mission in Afghanistan, and how little hope we have of a turnaround.

Over 100%

Keep in mind that this is coming from Iranian state-run PressTV:

Iran's Guardian Council has suggested that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of people eligible to cast ballot in those areas.

The council's Spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, who was speaking on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) Channel 2 on Sunday, made the remarks in response to complaints filed by Mohsen Rezaei -- a defeated candidate in the June 12 Presidential election.

"Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100% of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80-170 cities are not accurate -- the incident has happened in only 50 cities," Kadkhodaei said.

That's a hilarious last sentence. "I abhor the implication that the Royal Navy is a haven for cannibalism. It is well known that we now have the problem relatively under control!"

The ruling regime may be cracking down on foreign press, but their local press isn't doing them many favors, either. The country is now essentially a police state, with violent clashes breaking up any attempts at protest. I don't think that's sustainable, especially when powerful clerics like Hashemi Rafsanjani are seizing the moment:

4:43 AM ET -- Report: 40 senior clerics want election results annulled. The intense infighting among Iran's clerical establishment appeared to play out in new dramatic fashion on Monday. Via reader Art, the news site Peiknet reported that Ayatollah Rafsanjani has a letter signed by 40 members of the powerful 86-member Assembly of Experts calling for the annulment of the recent presidential election results.

Moreover, the letter (the authenticity of which has, again, not been verified) charges that the arrest of Rafsanjani's daughter Faezeh on Sunday was a way to exert pressure on him, and that she was followed and identified by the intelligence services during the rally.

More translation via a reader:

It says Khamenai has lung cancer and wanted to have his son as Supreme Leader (the position that Rafsanjani wants), and that the attempt to alter the election results was done in an attempt by Khamenei to eventually allow his son Mojtaba to replace him. It says that at the core the argument is not just about Mousavi but the overall system of government, as it's becoming a like Monarchy rather than a republic. So far, it says, most of the clerics have not accepted Ahmadinejad presidency, and quotes Ayatollah Javadi Amoly saying of the attack on Tehran University students, 'no Muslim will destroy another's property, they must be foreigners.'

Not over by a long shot.

10,000 Foot View On The Iran Protests

A sampling of cable media last night - and yes, it was cable, but these were generally pretty knowledgeable scholars, like Reza Aslan and Joseph Cirincione and Abbas Milani - suggested pretty much en masse that Iran had reached a tipping point from which they cannot return, and that the regime has been dealt a fatal blow by a week's worth of protesting. I think we have to step back for a minute and process this. As Jim Sleeper, a journalist informed by one of his former students living in Iran right now, notes, this revolution is in no way understandable in an American liberal/conservative sense. Aslan touched on this tonight as well. It's a group largely made up of precisely the people who kicked off the 1979 Iranian Revolution - Mousavi, Rafsanjani, Medhi Karoubi, the top cleric Montasevi who reportedly broke with his colleagues - using similar tactics to take down specific actors in the regime in the name of "redeeming" the revolution. Mousavi himself is a former Prime Minister and classic insider, a protege of the Ayatollah Khomeini who could be motivated simply by animus toward the Supreme Leader Khamenei. Seeing someone so close to Khomeini lauded by conservatives is quite a laugh. That does not mean figures like Mousavi are irreconcilable:

Although he has long had an adversarial relationship with Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his insider status makes him loath to mount a real challenge to the core institutions of the Islamic republic. He was an early supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, and as prime minister in the 1980s he approved Iran’s purchase of centrifuges on the nuclear black market, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Yet like many founding figures of the revolution, he has come to believe that the incendiary radicalism of the revolution’s early days must be tempered in an era of peace and state-building, those who know him say. Some have seen a symbolic meaning in his decision to make Monday’s vast demonstration in Tehran a march from Enghelab (revolution) Square to Azadi (freedom) Square.

“He is a hybrid child of the revolution,” said Shahram Kholdi, a lecturer at the University of Manchester who has written about Mr. Moussavi’s political evolution. “He is committed to Islamic principles but has liberal aspirations.”

Indeed, to see a thoroughly Islamic revolution matched with greater openness and individual freedoms would be a rethinking of Islam itself and highly desirable.

It's also worth understanding how this has completely bypassed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, almost ceasing to be about him at all, and instead has to be viewed through the lens of the desires of the Supreme Leader. The election itself has become almost besides the point, as thirty years of frustration with the shift of the Islamic Revolution, or possibly even just frustration with the personality of Khamenei himself, bubbles to the surface. This is a really good analysis:

However, his support for Ahmadinejad before and after the elections, together with what many believe to be overwhelming election fraud that he has sanctioned, is almost out of character for Khamenei. Such moves are very sudden and extreme, unlike the punctilious way in which he has maneuvered around important issues and decisions in the past. They are also very provocative, not just for supporters of reformists, but because they are clearly efforts to isolate other powerful figures. These leaders include Rafsanjani and Karroubi, both of whom have vast business connections and are politically well-connected.

One possible reason for Khamenei’s recent decision is that he realized that unless he intervened, the reformists would win the elections. What concerned the Supreme Leader even more is the fact that the clergy, both right and left, were turning against the president, and ultimately, against him. Recently, for instance, the Society For Combatant Clergies, a powerful conservative group belonging to the clergy in Qom, decided “not to support any candidate in the presidential elections.” This was a politically correct way of saying that they would not support Ahmadinejad. As someone who has supported Ahmadinejad throughout his career, Khamenei took their decision as a rebuff against his own political ambitions.

A victory by the reformists, in cooperation with the clergy and Rafsanjani, would have created a powerful front against Khamenei. Instead of being loyalist soldiers like Ahmadinejad, they would have challenged his views in important areas, such as dealing with the United States. With Khamenei already viewing Obama’s positive overtures as a threat, any more internal dissent would have boosted Washington’s position against Iran in the negotiations.

It's worth noting that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani heads the Assembly of Experts, the religious body which chooses - and can depose - a Supreme Leader. The clerics have said almost nothing throughout this week of protests, but Rafsanjani has been alleged to be masterminding this whole spectacle. The fact that some protestors are targeting Khamenei personally lends credence to that. Rafsanjani and "moderates" like him have backed down before, but the presumed stolen election is a more powerful lever with which to play out the palace intrigue. Viewed this way, we can see these protests as a high-stakes jockeying for power among different sects from the original Islamic revolution, a far cry from some democratic uprising for freedom. I don't think that's the motivation of everyone in the streets, but what they don't know won't hurt them.

A huge protest is scheduled for tomorrow in mourning of the reportedly 32 protestors who have died in the struggle so far - something pulled right from the playbook of 1979, when the mourning rallies were used to demean the brutal regime of the Shah. But the government has fairly successfully cracked down on communications to the outside world, and the Revolutionary Guard and its militias, for the most part, appear to remain firmly in the camp of the current rulers, although there are some cracks in that armor. When the people with the guns start to don green shirts and fold into the crowds, then things may change. Until then, we're as likely to see a repeat of Tiananmen Square as a revolution of any kind. As Steve Coll says:

All of the opening source evidence since the last round of counter-revolutionary street protests suggests that there has seen no particular strengthening of the urban and merchant forces who constitute the backbone of “reform” in Iran. If anything, the Defenders of the Revolution seem stronger now, since their militias, conservative foundations, and overseas networks have been strengthened by the money flowing from expensive oil. Yes, the economy is in trouble, and yes, the urban reform forces can make a lot of noise in the streets, since they live and thrive in the cities. This, however, a counter-revolution does not make. The Obama Administration has banked on engagement with the “real” Iran. Surely the Administration is right to lay its long-shot bet on the protests—morally, and otherwise. But let’s not kid ourselves about how the roulette wheel is most likely to spin.

(I don't know that Obama has banked on much of anything - they were perfectly willing to engage whoever ran the country before the elections.)

I have been following Nico Pitney's minute-by-minute reports with interest, and I think that this is an interesting moment in the history of Iran. Those using nonviolent resistance techniques should be commended for their bravery. But perspective is highly sought. This isn't so clear-cut.

More from Juan Cole, translating primary sources, here.

Obama's Needle Threading In Iran

Pete Hoekstra's Twitter FAIL is symptomatic of a larger trend of conservatives wanting to use the allegedly stolen election in Iran as a means to reveal their greater glory of an Arab spring. At first they expressed pleasure at Ahmadinejad's survival because extremists need one another to start wars, and now they seek Obama's direct confrontation into an election in a foreign country. They've kind of been all over the map.

[F]ringe actors like al Qaeda and the neocons or Ahmadinejad and Bibi need each other for political survival. The relationship isn’t even antagostic, it’s a symbiotic mutualism. Intractable, crazy antagonists legitimize the position of extremists who oppose them.

Fortunately, we have in the White House someone who understands that his words matter. His White House seeks a focus on human rights and peaceful resolution rather than wading into the election itself, which is clearly the right policy.

A senior Obama administration official who did not want to be identified or quoted explained that the president was deeply conscious of appearing not to favor any side in the election. Officials had ruled out calling for a recount or a revote out of a concern for undermining the Iranian opposition. The official said it was important to have a policy toward Iran that advanced the administration’s desire for liberalization and human rights in Iran, not one that merely vented American outrage at Ahmadinejad.

If and when Obama speaks about the violence in Iran over the coming days, the official predicted, he will emphasize the need for respecting human rights in Iran and for Iranians to reach their own solution. Potential multilateral efforts at calling attention to electoral improprieties and the resulting violence were said to be on the radar of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. No administration official mentioned recognizing the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s proclaimed victory at this point as a policy option under consideration, in keeping with Biden’s call for further “analysis” about the true election result, despite the fact that the European Union’s presidency, currently held by the Czech Republic, recognized Ahmadinejad as the victor despite noting “irregularities” in the vote.

The President himself said it best - we have a history in meddling in the foreign affairs of Iran (as well as many other nations), and overt calls for recounts or revotes at this point would enable Ahmadinejad and the hardliners to marginalize what appears to be real dissent in their country as the work of American puppets. It's the right policy, one of engagement without engaging. As Bush's former ambassador to Iran said, the President is threading the needle correctly:

In an interview today with NPR, (Nicholas) Burns praised Obama’s handling of the crisis, and said that a more aggressive response would actually play into the hands of President Ahmadinejad.

“President Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to see a very aggressive series of statements by the United States that would try to put the U.S. in the center of this,” Burns said. “And I think President Obama is avoiding that quite rightly.”

“This is not a dispute for the U.S. to be the center of,” Burns said at another point. “It’s up to Iranians to decide who Iran’s future leaders will be. He said he respects Iran’s sovereignty. I think it was important to do that.”

Without Americans driving the discussion and seeking the spotlight, the Iranian resistance has advanced the ball. The mullahs had to offer a limited recount but it has failed to stop the protests in all the major cities. A senior ayatollah has now come out against the election, reflective of a real split inside the ruling class. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is being forced to address the issue at Friday prayers this week. Even the Iranian soccer team wore green armbands yesterday during a nationally televised match, in solidarity. The reformers are doing just find without America trying to put their thumb on the scale. Obama should take the lesson and apply it to the rest of the world, too.

Electoral Theft In Iran

I left kind of a flip Twitter message about how, unlike in Iran, here in the US we never have stolen elections and irregularities at polling places, but this disputed election and the subsequent protests in the Islamic Republic is actually a bit more serious than that. You could see this coming a mile away - wildly divergent polls, an expected high turnout, a country known for at least limiting their elections, though they are probably more free than other countries in the region. It set the table for the unrest we see:

Supporters of the main election challenger to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clashed with police and set up barricades of burning tires Saturday as authorities claimed the hard-line president was re-elected in a landslide. The rival candidate said the vote was tainted by widespread fraud and his followers responded with the most serious unrest in the capital in a decade.

By nightfall, cell phone service appeared to have been cut in the capital Tehran. And Ahmadinejad, in a nationally televised victory speech, accused the foreign media of coverage that harms the Iranian people. There was more rioting at night and fires continued to burn on the streets of Tehran.

Several hundred demonstrators — many wearing the trademark green colors of pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign — chanted "the government lied to the people" and gathered near the Interior Ministry as the final count from Friday's presidential election was announced.

The Supreme Leader closed ranks around Ahmadinejad's victory as a "divine assessment." Meanwhile Mousavi denounced a regime based on "lies and dictatorship." I think it's clear we're going to see more protests and, in all likelihood, violent clashes with the Revolutionary Guard, which has vowed to "crush" any popular movement.

Juan Cole lays out the evidence, in compelling fashion, that the hardliners and conservatives stole the election. He doesn't think the protests will eventually have much of an impact:

The public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that generation.

My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers.

So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two.

My only hesitation would be that more attention is being paid to Iran now than in the past, and sustained effort would receive support outside the country. But that's quite a burden on the reformers, even if, as alleged, they represent a majority in Iran. And anyway, the White House is cautiously hedging away from lending support to the reformers, mindful that any words from the West could easily be used by hardliners as proof that the infidels are trying to overthrow the government. This spokesman for the Iranian resistance explains:

Robert Gibbs' White House statement may not fully capture the depth of the crime committed against the Iranian people. "But I think it's wise for the U.S. government to keep its distance," Ghaemi says. The White House can and should "show concern for human life and protesters' safety and promote tolerance and dialogue." But to get any further involved, even rhetorically, would "instigate the cry that the reformers are somehow driven and directed by the U.S., whether under Bush or under Obama, and there's no reason to give that unfounded allegation" any chance to spread.

Ghaemi continues to say that the international community should present a united front that gives "no legitimacy" to the election. In particular, he wants U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to express "serious grievances" about how the election was conducted. "Sanctions and military threats, all these things are counterproductive," Ghaemi says. The initiative has to be expressed and promoted by the Iranians themselves, particularly from Mir Hossein Moussavi and other exponents of popular Iranian outrage. "It very much depends on what leading reformers, including Moussavi, ask them to do, and how much responsibility do they take for exposing them to danger. If they put their tails between their legs and walk away, it will be very sad."

Ultimately, the President of Iran holds less power than assumed. But the Supreme Leader Khamenei's assent of this apparent fraud is a bad sign for future engagement with the Obama Administration. The hardliners are consolidating power.

When In Doubt, Just Call For Victory

You have to admit, Jim Tedisco is the Alpha Dog of the Week:

COLUMBIA COUNTY — 20th Congressional District candidate Republican Jim Tedisco submitted a petition to the Dutchess County Supreme Court Thursday asking the judge to declare him the winner of the extremely close special election race, despite the numbers currently being in favor of his opponent, Democrat Scott Murphy.

According to The Associated Press, Murphy leads Tedisco by 178 votes district wide — 79,452 to 79,274. The only ballots that have not been counted are those challenged by each candidate’s lawyers, and while Tedisco’s office has said the challenges are roughly evenly split between the two camps, Columbia County lawyers for Murphy have only challenged 22 ballots, while Tedisco’s have challenged 258.

Nicely done. I'm going to head to my local courthouse today and ask to be crowned king. The results of that vote, or whether there was one at all, simply inconvenience my desire to rule over the land like a colossus.

Cher from Clueless puts this best:

Cher's Dad (looking at her new-and-improved report card): Cher, what's this all about?
Cher: My report card?
Cher's Dad: The same semester?
Cher: Uh-huh!
Cher's Dad: What did you do? Turn in some extra credit reports?
Cher: No.
Cher's Dad: You take the midterms over?
Cher: Uh-uh.
Cher's Dad: You mean to tell me that you argued your way from a C+ to an A-?
Cher: Totally based on my powers of persuasion. You proud?
Cher's Dad: Honey, I couldn't be happier than if they were based on real grades.

I think this is just the first step in repealing the 17th amendment and going back to selecting lawmakers instead of having the unwashed rabble VOTE for them.

...Scott Murphy's now up by 264 votes, proving once again that the judges have to step in and stop this count before things get out of hand and the Democrat wins.

Elections Are A Minor Inconvenience

Minnesotans want Norm Coleman to concede, by a two-to-one margin, so they can move on with full representation in their government. And the DNC has turned up the pressure by demanding that Coleman concede. But Norm Coleman and his business buddies don't care.

A group of several dozen of the most influential business lobbyists in Washington is vowing to raise and spend whatever it takes to bankroll Norm Coleman’s upcoming appeal fight, in the wake of a three-judge ruling declaring that Al Franken defeated Coleman in the Minnesota Senate race.

The group of lobbyists, which calls itself “Team Coleman,” is made up of some of the biggest players in D.C.’s permanent lobbying establishment, and includes executives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Restaurant Association and others.

“We will raise as much as is necessary,” Dirk Van Dongen, a leading member of Team Coleman and the president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, told me in an interview. “We’ll keep raising money as Norm needs it. We continue to be active in raising resources for Norm to carry out this fight to the end." [...]

But Democrats are likely to point to the lobbyists’ fundraising as proof that they’re merely keeping this battle alive to keep the seat vacant and prevent Dems from getting a leg up in the big upcoming policy battles involving the business lobbies, such as the battle over the Employee Free Choice Act.

Van Dongen (who is the father of WhoRunsGov editor Rachel Van Dongen) rejected that claim.

“That’s a side benefit,” Van Dongen said, when asked if the goal was to keep the seat vacant. “But this is all about us doing everything we can to be sure that Norm has had a fair election and to get him back in his Senate seat. We’d be doing exactly the same thing if the Republicans were in the majority.”

Well, there you have it. The amount of corporate money plowed into a doomed-to-fail project is a small price to pay for the "side benefit" of keeping that 59th Democratic vote out of the Senate. I wonder if Team Coleman funded any of the tea parties, too.

And we're beginning to see this obstruction and delegitimizing of the election system as a pattern. In NY-20, where Scott Murphy has moved into the lead on the strength of absentee votes and is heavily favored for victory if the numbers continue to flow in at this level, the Republican candidate Jim Tedisco and his buddies from the Brooks Brothers Riot Roger Stone and John Sweeney have decided that their best option is to suppress as many votes as possible, and use the language of "voter fraud" to deny legitimate voters the franchise. Despite the fact that actual cases of fraud are almost nonexistent. Not even the junior Senator from New York has been spared.

This just in from Columbia County: when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s absentee ballot came up in the queue, the poll watchers for Jim Tedisco objected to it, saying the senator was in the county on election day and should have voted in person.

Gillibrand's office maintains that she wasn't in the county on Election Day.

And today, a judge said that most of Tedisco's 1,200 objections are invalid. But this statement by a Tedisco ally says it all.

They're not doing it because they believe the votes to be illegitimate, really. What they're doing, in the days and now hours leading up to the court hearings that will decide the outcome of the race between Republican Jim Tedisco and Democrat Scott Murphy, is creating a fact on the ground for the judiciary to overturn, if it dares [...]

"It's always better to be ahead-that's the whole goal of this process," said Nick Spano, a Yonkers Republican and former state senator who came out on the right side of a lengthy recount process in 2004, eventually winning by 18 votes.

This will never end. The Coleman and Tedisco cases can be put on a continuum. Conservatives now see electoral results as simply a starting point. They have adopted the cries of "stolen elections" from 2000 and 2004 and turned them right around. It was all so very predictable. They've had a plan for stealing elections for years and years, and Coleman and Tedisco are just following the playbook.

The latest and most elaborate of these jokes is the urban legend that American elections are rife with voter fraud, particularly in the kinds of poor and minority neighborhoods inhabited by Democrats. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that fraudulent voting would be a major target of the Department of Justice. As the New York Times reported last month, the main result of this massive effort was such coups as the deportation of a legal immigrant who mistakenly filled out a voter-registration card while waiting in line at the department of motor vehicles.

But the administration has remained ferociously committed to suppressing voter fraud -- as soon as it can find some. In April of last year, Karl Rove warned a Republican lawyers' group that "we have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today. We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it's a real problem.

"I appreciate that all that you're doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot -- the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it's important to our democracy."

The goals here are to intimidate and alienate people from the voting process, suppress as many votes as possible, and delegitimize the victory, even if the Democrats manage to run the legal gauntlet and win. Eventually, Al Franken and Scott Murphy will be seated in Congress. But there's no harm for the Republicans to just keep on with the same dirty tactics, with a look to the next election, when they can whisper about how "the Democrats stole the last one."

...Howard Dean on Hardball today: "This could be a national pattern ... this looks like a national attempt by the Republicans to keep people out of office if they have a D after their name."

If You Don't Know, Alaska Where Your Ballot Is

I concur with Nate Silver that something is definitely fishy about the Alaska numbers. Nowhere else in the country did the pre-election polls so wildly differ from the post-election reality. Don Young and Ted Stevens, one unspeakably corrupt and the other a convicted felon, both won their elections, apparently, despite being down by double digits in the pre-election polls. I thought there might be a backlash against the "Washington elite libruls" who punished Stevens with a conviction, but that doesn't explain Young. And it certainly doesn't explain this:

Indeed, it seems possible that the number of "questionable" ballots could be quite high. So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket.

More than unlikely. Now, I know the outcome of the Presidential race was apparent by about 4pm local time there, but you would think having a native son (well, daughter) on the ballot would seek to counteract any depressed turnout.

Shannyn Moore has a great write-up on this. And Digby says what we're all thinking:

If this were coming from anywhere but the state that had legislators who proudly belong to something they called the "Corrupt Bastards Club" (with hats!) I would adopt a wait and see attitude. As it is, I have no problem saying that this stinks to high heaven and is probably exactly what it looks like.

Something's very, very wrong.

Dirty Tricks Watch

Every year the Republican Party sends a flier into minority or poor neighborhoods telling people to vote on the wrong day. This one is even more efficient, because it claims that Virginia modified their laws to have Republicans vote on November 4 and Democrats on November 5. That way, they don't lose one vote! Good work, Virginia GOP! There's a copied logo from the Commonwealth of Virginia on the flier, too, making it look all official-like.

But as far as crude fliers go, this one from Wisconsin, distributed in a heavily white area, wins the prize.



"Change means...BLACK!" Mmm, that's some delicious ratfucking!

And then there's this, a pretty novel case of ballot-stealing.

Three Hialeah voters say they had an unusual visitor at their homes last week: a man who called himself Juan, offering to help them fill out their absentee ballots and deliver them to the elections office.

The voters, all supporters of Democratic congressional candidate Raul Martinez, said they gave their ballots to the man after he told them he worked for Martinez. But the Martinez campaign said he doesn't work for them.

Juan "told me not to worry, that they normally collected all the ballots and waited until they had a stack big enough to hand-deliver to the elections department," said voter Jesus Hernandez, 73. "He said, 'Don't worry. This is not going to pass through the mail to get lost.'"

Hernandez said he worries his ballot was stolen or destroyed. He and two other voters told The Miami Herald that the man was dispatched by a woman caller who also said she worked for Martinez. But the phone number cited by the voters traces back to a consultant working for Martinez's rival, Republican congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart.

Martinez's campaign manager, Jeff Garcia, has asked the Miami-Dade state attorney's office to investigate.

Wow. That's breathtaking criminality.

The Republicans are going to do everything they can to make sure that if you're a Democrat, you don't vote this year. Not all of it will work - the stories of young workers who probably need the money walking off the job at call centers rather than read smear call scripts against Barack Obama are inspiring. And the GOP is consistently losing in the courts. But they clearly have other means, as you can see above, and some will be effective. The best way to stop it is to bring them out into the sunlight.

Looking Good, But Still Some Storm Clouds

With 8 days to go, the news out of the polling world is stable and solid. Obama leads measurably in enough states to win the election, and even the toss-up states are moving his way. The election is being played out on red state turf, and with New Mexico and Iowa looking great, and Colorado and Virginia close to it, there is simply a lot to be excited about if you're the Obama campaign. Though the traditional media wants to inflate their ratings by continuing to call this a close race, they're deluding themselves.

Worried about "the tightening?"

Well, Obama's national lead has been stable at 7% for a month now. The national campaign is not tightening, and we are just seeing statistical noise.

Even if the campaign were tightening, Obama would still have a comfortable national lead. According to polling conducted over the weekend during the tracking poll "tightening," Obama reaches 264 electoral votes in states where he leads by 9.5% or more, passes 277 in Virginia where he leads by 8.0%, and hits 286 in states where he leads by 7.3% or more. So, he is actually doing even better in the Electoral College, where 270 votes are needed to win, than he is doing in national polls where he leads by 7%.

However, don't underestimate the ability of the powers that be, the gatekeepers, to desperately try to keep a hold on power, on a number of fronts, outside the normal electoral process. We have retailers telling their managers that there will be negative consequences to a Democratic victory. They are particularly frightened about the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers at a company to unionize. This is extra-legal, to indoctrinate your own employees politically, and it shows why EFCA is needed, actually, because this type of union-busting happens during a "free" election in the workplace. But it's not going to stop.

Neither are the efforts of committed Republicans to game the system in order to save the election:

"5,000 Coloradans whose voter status is in limbo because of [a] controversial check box...The registration form asks for a driver's license or state ID number. If applicants don't have that, they're supposed to check a box and then put down at least the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. But thousands of people didn't check the box. According to a policy adopted last year by Secretary of State Mike Coffman, these applications are supposed to be listed as incomplete...National and local voting-rights organizations criticize Coffman's policy, saying it violates other federal laws. They say Coffman is unfairly putting up barriers for people who are eligible to vote and want him to change his policy."

The check box is "controversial" because you are asked to check it on the form if you don't "have" a driver's license or ID card [...] So, here's the thing - what's the definition of "have?" I may have one at my house or in my car, but not with me at the very moment I am filling out the registration form. In that case, it would be logical - and, in fact, honest - for me to not check that box, while also putting down the last four digits of my social security number as my selected method of verifying my registration. Alternately, for whatever reason (privacy, etc.), I may simply feel more comfortable listing the last 4 digits of my social security number, rather than my entire driver's license number. So therefore, I might have listed my social security number and not checked the box.

And yet, if you made any of those logical choices - if you gave all the social security information required by law, but simply didn't check the box - Coffman is attempting to use that choice to potentially invalidate your registration and prevent you from voting.

And this kind of suppression is not just happening at the state level, but at the federal level as well, as George Bush has ordered the Justice Department to step into the Ohio voter registration controversy, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that the Secretary of State need not verify hundreds of thousands of registration forms against federal documents and throw out even those which have a typo on either side.

6 million or so people are going to go to the polls on Election Day and be told that they can't vote. There may be legitimate reasons for that, like lack of registration, or completely illegitimate ones, like them being purged from the rolls. But they won't be voting. And that is likely to hurt the Democrats.

I'm still more worried about November 5 than November 4. But you should educate yourself on the potential problems with your vote and be prepared to fight for it. The Election Protection wiki is a good source of information, and there's also 866-OUR-VOTE, a number you can call if you have problems on Election Day.

Always Left To Right

Obama is kicking tail in early voting, clearly because they're making it a priority and they have better ground organizing. This will mean that McCain will have to swamp the polls on Election Day, and every vote you already have before then is a win. The question is whether or not we will have those votes.

Yet again, voting problems in WV. Early voters in West Virginia have reported vote switching on electronic machines. Both counties where problems have occurred have Republicans in charge of voting, along with our GOP secretary of state.

The first was a report from multiple voters in Jackson County, one of the few GOP-leaning counties in WV:

"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney...the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail."

Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.

The second occurred over the weekend, for voters in Putnam County, WV:

"I pushed buttons and they all came up Republican," she said. "I hit Obama and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.

"I asked them for a printout of my votes," Ketchum said. "But they said it was in the machine and I could not get it. I did not feel right when I left the courthouse. My son felt the same way."

Funny how every single one of these stories I've heard results in the votes switching from Democrats to Republicans. Never the other way around.

Yep, just funny how that goes.

The Thugs Are Out

Kudos to Raw Story for an incredible piece of journalism detailing the lengths to which the Administration's goons are trying to shut down any investigations into the perversion of the Justice Department. Jeers to the traditional media for its near-total blackout on these incidents. We're talking about serious business here.

These crimes raise serious questions about possible use of deliberate intimidation tactics not only because of who the victims are and the already wide criticism of the prosecutions to begin with, but also because of the suspicious nature of each incident individually as well as the pattern collectively. Typically burglars do not break-into an office or private residence only to rummage through documents, for example, as is the case with most of the burglaries in these two federal cases.

In Alabama, for instance, the home of former Democratic Governor Don Siegelman was burglarized twice during the period of his first indictment. Nothing of value was taken, however, and according to the Siegelman family, the only items of interest to the burglars were the files in Siegelman's home office.

Siegelman's attorney experienced the same type of break-in at her office.

In neighboring Mississippi, a case brought against a trial lawyer and three judges raises even more disturbing questions. Of the four individuals in the same case, three of the US Attorney’s targets were the victims of crimes during their indictment or trial. This case, like that of Governor Siegelman, has been widely criticized as a politically motivated prosecution by a Bush US Attorney.

It's more than just a bunch of Watergate-style burglaries, too.

The incidents are not limited to burglaries. In Mississippi, former Judge John Whitfield was the victim of arson at his office. In Alabama, the whistleblower in the Don Siegelman case, Dana Jill Simpson, had her home burned down, and shortly thereafter her car was allegedly forced off the road.

While there is no direct evidence linking these crimes to the US Attorneys’ office targeting these individuals, or to the Bush administration, there is a distinct pattern that makes it highly unlikely that these incidents are isolated and unrelated.

All of these crimes remain unsolved.

Read the whole thing. You'd think there was some kind of Nixon's plumbers' reunion tour or something.

For a really good look into the Siegelman story in case you haven't kept up, Thom Hartmann interviewed the former Alabama governor last week. Here's the audio.



I wasn't aware of this part:

[Thom Hartmann]: And, in fact, if I understand this correctly, you were being prosecuted by a woman whose husband was the campaign manager for the Republican who ran against you for governor and in the middle of the night in one county because of a voting machine malfunction after the election had apparently already been called in your favor, suddenly in the middle of the night when there were nobody expect Republicans standing around, they discovered a couple thousand more votes and said 'Oh, yeah, no no, Don Siegelman actually lost'. Do I have that right?

[cross talk]

[Don Siegelman]: You have it right. They electronically shifted votes from my column to my Republican's column.

[Thom Hartmann]: To Bob Riley's column.

[Don Siegelman]: I believe, yes, to Bob Riley's column. And oddly enough, it didn't effect a single down-ballot race. They took five thousand or six thousand votes of mine and shifted it over to Bob Riley and when they counted everybody else's votes, the shift at the top which logically would have made a difference at the bottom...

[Thom Hartmann]: Sure.

[Don Siegelman]: You know, had no impact whatsoever.

[Thom Hartmann]: So the people running for the lesser state offices, the folks who voted Democratic right down the ticket all of a sudden at the very top of the ticket were 'Oh, I'm going to vote for every Democrat except Don Siegelman, I'll put that over to Riley ' and only in this one area in this one county on this one set of machines that was discovered in the middle of the night. by the Republicans.

[Don Siegelman]: Yes, a couple of other interesting things, Thom, since you brought this up, but the two people who either were given credit or who gave themselves credit for stealing the election and swinging the election to my Republican opponent for catching this 'electronic glitch' as they called it, one was Karl Rove's partner, business partner, her name was Kitty McCullough also known as Kelly, oh gosh, I can't remember what her second name was but she had a different married name.

[Thom Hartmann]: But she's the one who discovered the extra votes that caused you to lose and caused Bob Riley to won, OK.

[Don Siegelman]: And the other person was a guy named Dan Gans who right after that went to work for an Abramoff/Tom Delay related company, a group called the Alexander Strategies Group. And he claimed credit on his web site that he was responsible for this, because he had an expertese in electronic ballot security.

That 2002 election, in places like Alabama and Georgia, was as dirty as the day is long.

You've got election theft, destruction of evidence (5 million emails), violation of subpoenas, perversion of the instruments of justice, railroading Democratic officials into jail, and now intimidation of witnesses, arson and burglary. It's all wrapped up with a nice little bow if any Woodwards and Bernsteins want to take a whack at it. Even, you know, Woodward, or Bernstein.