Mehdi Khalaji speaks in a roundtable-style special hearing of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the political crisis in Iran, hosted by John Kerry
Watch U.S. Senate video of this event (the hearing begins at 36:30).

Washington Post, June 15, 2009

Large-scale manipulation of Friday’s presidential election in Iran was to be expected, but few could have predicted that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had a military coup in mind. By declaring incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner, Khamenei conveyed a clear message to the West: Iran is digging in on its nuclear program, its support to Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, and its defiant regional policies.
In the streets of Tehran and other major cities, riot police, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militias are battling reformist demonstrators who are protesting the results. The government has cut Internet connections and cellphone service and jammed foreign satellite TV and radio broadcasts. Most foreign journalists in Iran to cover the election were expelled after the voting ended. More than 100 leaders of the reform movement have been detained so far, and others are under what amounts to house arrest.

Even though Khamenei asked the candidates not to dispute the results, a reformist group called the Council of Militant Clerics, led by former president Mohammad Khatami, apologized to the people for not being able to protect their votes and asked the government to overturn this result and hold new elections. In statements Sunday, two of the presidential candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, asked people to continue their “nonviolent demonstration” throughout the country and criticized the government for using violence against demonstrators.

More than 80 percent of Iranian voters turned out primarily because Ahmadinejad’s three challengers succeeded in mobilizing Iran’s silent majority, especially in the two weeks before the election. All three warned explicitly about the risks of Ahmadinejad’s domestic and foreign policies. Although Ahmadinejad enjoys the support of Iran’s powerful supreme leader, in the final two weeks before the election all reputable polls inside and outside of Iran showed that Ahmadinejad’s popularity had decreased significantly — particularly following televised campaign debates — even in rural areas and among the urban working class.

Ahmadinejad took office four years ago through an engineered election. This time Khamenei announced — before the official Interior Ministry count had been issued — that Ahmadinejad had won more than 24 million votes, surpassing even the record set by Khatami 12 years ago.

Mousavi and Karroubi have called the announced results “ridiculous.” Mousavi said Sunday that invalidating the election is now the only way to restore the people’s trust. The Iranian supreme leader’s post-election statement, in which he described a “people’s epic” through a “completely fair and free election,” did not prevent shocked followers of reformist candidates from rioting over the weekend to chants of “down with the dictator.”

The challengers also asked people to go to the roof of their homes and shout “Allah is great,” a slogan that reminds people of the 1979 revolution. Mousavi has invited protesters to gather this afternoon on Enghelab Square in Tehran; gatherings are expected in more than 20 other cities.

The current social solidarity and political unity in Iran is unprecedented since the revolution. Banners, headbands and signs in green, the color of the anti-Ahmadinejad movement, were prominent before the election and are still on display. No one can predict where this situation will lead and whether Khamenei’s nightmare of a “velvet revolution” will come true.

Earlier this year, in his message on the occasion of the Iranian New Year (Nowruz), Barack Obama became the first U.S. president since the hostage crisis to address “Iranian leaders” and the “Islamic Republic” rather than the Iranian “regime.” The Obama administration had been careful not to take any position that could be seen as supporting a particular candidate in the Iranian election. Obama’s Iran team was surely watching the decreasing support for Ahmadinejad and waiting to see what would happen. While Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and leaders of the Palestinian Hamas and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movements were among the first to congratulate Ahmadinejad, people everywhere, certainly including in Iran, expect the United States to speak out.

This military coup is a turning point in Iran’s domestic and foreign policies that the West cannot ignore. The U.S. reaction in particular is meaningful not only for Iran’s democratic movement but for all democrats in Islamic countries who suffer under autocratic governments. In coordination with European and other nations, the United States should respond to the message being sent by Iran’s supreme leader by condemning the election and backing the Iranian people’s demand for a free and fair revote under the supervision of international observers.

Iran’s people have a living memory of U.S. involvement in the 1950s coup against the government of Mohammed Mossadegh. They expect the Obama administration not to make the same mistake at this crucial time in U.S.-Iranian relations by recognizing the coup carried out under the cover of this election.

It will be easier to bring an end to Iran’s controversial nuclear program and defiant foreign policy working with a democratic Iran rather than the military government that is in power. Iranian society will not forget this historic moment and is watching to see how the free world reacts.

NYTimes.com, June 18, 2009

The New York Times convened an online panel of four Middle East experts to discuss the Obama administration’s response to the landslide victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the June 12 Iranian presidential elections. The following is a contribution by Washington Institute senior fellow Mehdi Khalaji, who focuses on Iranian politics and the politics of Shiite groups in the Middle East. Read the entire discussion on the Times’s website.
Let Protesters Know the U.S. Cares

Only before the June 12 elections could I have agreed with President Obama’s statement on Tuesday that “the difference between Ahmadinejad and Moussavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised.”

What is happening these days in Iran has little to do with Mir Hussein Moussavi’s policies or background. What matters now for the Iranians participating in the daily demonstrations, even those who did not vote or voted for the other reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, is not Mr. Moussavi’s agenda as he expressed during his campaign but rather what he represents: the Iranian people’s resentment of the militarization of the government, the humiliation and isolation of the nation on the world stage.

Despite Ayatollah Ali Khamenei being the one who has the final say on the Islamic Republic’s foreign, nuclear and military policies, Mr. Moussavi, in his televised debates before the election, criticized the government’s economic agenda and political and cultural suppression. He also challenged Iran’s foreign polices and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory statements about the decline of the U.S. and the annihilation of Israel.

Close

The Obama administration’s caution in passing judgment about the legitimacy of the election is wise. It will do best if it watches and waits for the final decision of the Iranian supreme leader. But President Obama should make it clear in his public statements that there is a big difference between a President Ahmadinejad and a President Moussavi because two things cannot be ignored by the U.S. administration.

First, if we assume that Ayatollah Khamenei is the real power in Iran, there should be an explanation for his persistent support of Mr. Ahmadinejad in the last four years despite strong criticism of the president’s policies from a wide spectrum of reformist and conservative Iranian politicians. There are many reasons to believe that Ayatollah Khamenei sees a fundamental difference between Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Second, had Mr. Moussavi won the election in the same way that Mohammad Khatami did 12 years ago, the supreme leader could have used all the same tools to weaken him. But in the current situation, if Mr. Moussavi comes to power out of the mass mobilization of Iranian society, it would mean the defeat of not only Ayatollah Khamenei but the institution of the “ruling jurist” and the agenda of the militarization of the government. Mr. Moussavi would be the first president in the history of the Islamic Republic who comes to power by defeating “the real power” in Iran.

What President Obama should to do now is focus more on the people in the streets rather than the election itself. He should condemn the Iranian government for using violence against the peaceful demonstrators no matter who would come to office as a president. According to several sources in Iran, more than 30 demonstrators have been killed and at least 150 leaders of the reform movement have been arrested in the last few days. President Obama’s strong statement in favor of human rights can have a significant impact on preventing further arrests and bloodshed.

Following article is originally published in Washington Institute website on June 10, 2009
With Iran’s presidential campaign culminating on June 12, all three challengers to incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad are expressing increased concern about the possibility of election fraud and manipulation of the election. Not only are there complaints about regime influence on the campaign, such as biased coverage by state-run television, the voting itself can be manipulated in numerous ways.
Voting Procedures

According to Iranian law, the Interior Ministry administers elections. In each ward or county, the ministry forms an executive committee that consists of the ward or county head, the local head of the National Organization for Civil Registration, the chief prosecutor or his representative, and eight respected local figures. The Guardian Council has the duty of supervising the electoral process at each polling station and has created observation committees with more than 130,000 members. Each candidate has the right to send an observer to each fixed polling station to observe both the voting process and the ballot count.

In Iran, voting follows quite different procedures than those used in most Western countries. For instance, there is no voter registration. Instead, a person’s voting eligibility is determined by a “birth certificate” (BC). (Although Iran has recently introduced national identification cards, these are not used for voting.) The BC, issued by the National Organization for Civil Registration, looks like a passport, with pages that can be stamped. Voters can go to any of the more than 60,000 voting stations across the country or around the world, including those in thirty-five U.S. cities. Since there is no requirement to vote near one’s residence, voter turnout at a particular voting station, or even in a city, can theoretically exceed the estimated number of eligible voters in that locality. When a person receives a ballot, the BC is recorded and stamped, but there appears to be no verification, either during the voting or after, of the documentation.

Manipulation Mechanisms

Voting can be easily manipulated in several ways:

Collecting birth certificates. In previous elections, reports have surfaced that the Imam Khomeini Committee, a large state charity affiliated with the leader (or, as he insists, supreme leader), Ali Khamenei, “rent” BCs belonging to the poor. It has been alleged that after regular voting hours, those engaged in fraud fill out ballots using the rented BCs. In some elections, polls remained open for many hours after the designated closing time, feeding concern that irregular votes were being cast.

Eligible voters. Relying on birth certificates complicates the calculation of eligible voters. Different government offices give very different estimates: while the Interior Ministry puts the total number of eligible Iranian voters at 46 million, Iran’s Center for Statistics claims the number is over 51 million. Not being able to even estimate the number of eligible voters makes it difficult to judge if “ghost” votes have been cast. According to the National Organization for Civil Registration, the number of existing BCs considerably exceeds the number of Iranians. Many BCs are issued as replacements for reportedly lost BCs, and there is little to prevent people from using the duplicate BCs to vote at two different polling stations. Also, some Iranians do not invalidate their relatives’ BCs after they die. In the last presidential election, reformist sources announced that more than two million fraudulent BCs may have been used by the Basij militia and others to obtain ballots.

Illiteracy. According to official statistics, the illiteracy rate in Iran is more than 20 percent. Voters are required to write the name of their preferred candidate on the ballot; there are no pictorial symbols, and voters are not allowed to make an “X” to indicate their choice. Since many people are unable to write, the government allows volunteers, mostly affiliated with the Basij, to be inside polling stations to help voters write the name of their preferred candidate. Obviously, these Basij volunteers can easily write in any name they wish.

Mobile polling stations. According to the Ministry of Interior, there will be more than 14,000 mobile ballot boxes for people unable to vote at the nearly 47,000 fixed polling stations (for instance, the infirm, the elderly, and the military); the number of mobile boxes is more than ten times the number used in the previous election. Adequate supervision of the mobile boxes is extremely difficult, creating a situation where no one watches who casts the ballots or is present during the tally.

Counting process. The two-stage counting process presents perhaps the most troubling aspect of the elections. At each polling station, after the end of voting hours, the votes are counted and recorded on Form 22 in the presence of representatives from the candidates, the Interior Ministry, and the Guardian Council. These forms are secret however; the results are not announced to the press or released to the candidates. Instead, in the second stage of the counting process, the forms are sent to the Interior Ministry, where the votes are tallied and published on Form 28, which reports the votes by province or county. But because there is no supervision of the preparation, there is no way to compare Form 28 to Form 22. In other words, it is possible for agents from the Guardian Council or the Interior Ministry to change the vote totals before announcing them. This stage provokes suspicion among candidates as well as independent observers about the accuracy and fairness of the counting.

Validation of the election. The official validation of the election results is a two-stage process. The first stage is validation by the Guardian Council, which is a partisan body that does not bother to conceal its political preference. In the past, the Guardian Council has canceled the voting in some districts where voting problems allegedly occurred, and not surprisingly, these are often districts where reformers do well. The second stage of validation is by Khamenei, who has the constitutional authority to overrule the voters if he so chooses. In an open letter published on June 7, a group of Interior Ministry employees expressed concern about the ministry’s plans to intervene and manipulate the election by various means. They mentioned a fatwa issued by an ayatollah in Qom, which provides ministry officials with a religious justification for manipulating the election in favor of Ahmadinezhad. Some reformist sources such as roozonline.com believe that the fatwa was issued by Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, who is known to be a fervent supporter of Ahmadinezhad and his religious worldview. The representatives of Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karrobi also sent an open letter, published on June 8, to Ahmad Jannati, the secretary of the Guardian Council, warning about manipulation of the election.

Conclusion

Ahmadinezhad’s rivals have no faith that the Interior Ministry will respect the law and conduct a fair election. Mehdi Karrobi and Mir Hossein Moussavi suggested that a “committee for safeguarding the fairness of vote” supervise the election on behalf of the candidates, but the Interior Ministry and the Guardian Council rejected the idea. It is not clear how much voting manipulation will occur on June 12, but it is abundantly clear that Iran’s election procedures leave ample opportunity for massive voter fraud.

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The Iranian regime has given the West ample cause for worry about its intentions and general mindset in recent years. Over and above tensions stemming from terrorism, nuclear activity, and other issues, statements from Iranian leaders since President Ahmadinezhad’s election have led many to conclude that the regime may be guided by an apocalyptic vision that would welcome chaos as a way to hasten the reappearance of the “Hidden Imam.” Can the president and Supreme Leader be treated as rational actors on issues as fraught with peril as nuclear proliferation?
In this Policy Focus — the third entry in the Institute’s “Agenda: Iran” series — Qom-trained theologian and Iran expert Mehdi Khalaji examines the complexities of attitudes about the Hidden Imam, both in Shia tradition and among Iran’s current leaders. He highlights the spread of superstitious religious practices, as well as the influence of anti-rationalist trends rooted in Mahshad, Iran’s holiest city. He also explores whether religious factors have a strong influence on the regime’s decisionmaking. Iran’s leaders have displayed an often bewildering vacillation between “end of days” thinking and self-preservation — understanding these seemingly contradictory tendencies is crucial to formulating more effective policies aimed at curbing Iran’s ambitions in the nuclear arena and elsewhere.