As election fever grips Tehran, and it begins to seem possible that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could lose to his main rival, Mir Hussein Moussavi, in Friday’s presidential election, Iranians who want to stick with the incumbent have been dropping hints that the campaign to vote him out of office might be the culmination of some sort of foreign plot to undermine their country.
After a rally for Mr. Ahmadinejad at Tehran’s largest mosque on Monday, a man explained to Lindsey Hilsum of Britain’s Channel 4 News (about 1 minute into the video report embedded below) that “all these people want Islamic republic — not liberal democracy, not Orange Revolution.” The fact that Mr. Moussavi’s supporters have made a color — in this case green, which has solid Islamic credentials — the symbol of their movement probably just reinforces the fear among some Iranians that what they are witnessing is a local version of the Orange Revolution, which swept an opposition government into power in Ukraine.
Iranians come by their willingness to believe that foreigners are plotting against them honestly, since American and British intelligence agents did, in fact, conspire to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. More recently, Seymour Hersh reported just last year that the Bush administration was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on covert operations designed to destabilize the country’s government. Then last month a senior Democratic Congresswoman, Jane Harman, seemed to suggest that the United States should be encouraging separatist movements inside Iran. While Ms. Harman apologized for her remarks, a spate of recent bombings and attacks in Iran, possibly carried out by separatists, has made Iranians wonder if the Obama administration’s policy towards them might involve bombs as well as barbecues.
But Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence has cultivated these fears as well. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, last year the ministry produced and broadcast an elaborate, and unintentionally funny, public service announcement warning Iranians that Western pro-democracy movements were really covers for anti-government plots hatched in the White House.
In the long-form commercial posted, with subtitles, on MEMRI.org, (registration required) animated versions of John McCain and George Soros are shown meeting inside the White House to plot against Iran. The evil genius they confer with is an animated version of Gene Sharp, the political scientist whose theoretical work on nonviolent protest inspired the color revolutions of Eastern Europe.
While there is no sign that Mr. Moussavi, a former prime minister of Iran in the 1980s, really is some sort of Western puppet, the fact that his campaign has made an issue of how Mr. Ahmadinejad has alienated Iran from the West might make it easier for his opponents to cast him as somehow soft on America.
Mr. Moussavi and his supporters seem unbowed by these sorts of accusations though. Chants of “Death to America” at rallies for Mr. Ahmadinejad this week were answered by chants of “Death to the Taliban — in Kabul and Tehran” at a rally for Mr. Moussavi. The candidate’s articulate and engaged wife has even been compared with America’s first lady (though, when asked this week about her role in her husband’s campaign, she stated simply: “I am not Michelle Obama”). On the streets of Tehran, and on Flickr, the opposition leader’s green-clad supporters have been seen waving posters of him bearing the promise, in English, of “a new greeting to the world.”
That last slogan makes it clear that Mr. Moussavi shares more than just a middle name with the new American president. Mr. Obama’s speech in Cairo last week was called “A New Beginning: Engaging With Muslims Worldwide,” and throughout his own campaign, Mr. Obama argued that his country needed a new leader who could abandon the confrontational foreign policy of the previous administration. Looking at the size and intensity of the demonstrations by his supporters in Tehran this week, it is clear that Mr. Moussavi has convinced some Iranians that their time for change has come, too. On Friday we will find out if a majority of the country’s voters feel the same way.
For a better look at how the campaign is playing out on Tehran’s streets this week, here is Ms. Hilsum’s report for Channel 4 News:
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