Iran had an election yesterday, and the results are not exactly what were expected (if you want updates on the situation, Andrew Sullivan is posting frequently, if rather breathlessly, on this news). Current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected by apparently unrealistic margins, especially when the reported election results over time are examined.
From Kevin Drum at his weblog hosted by Mother Jones:
I was at a book party for Bob Wright’s The Evolution of God last night, and even then it was obvious that the Interior Ministry was probably rigging the vote. One of the topics of conversation was: when autocracies decide to do something like this, why do they do it so clumsily? Why not give Ahmadinejad 52.7% of the vote, which would be at least within the realm of reason? Or force a runoff and let Ahmadinejad win a week from now? Why perpetrate such an obvious fraud?
Hard to say. Maybe it’s just too hard to orchestrate something more believable. Maybe, against all evidence, they believe that smashing victories are always more convincing than close ones. Maybe it’s just rank panic and stupidity. It’s a mystery – and a counterproductive one, too: there isn’t a person on the planet who thinks that Ahmadinejad could have won two-thirds of the vote with a turnout of 85%, and the possibility of inciting an internal revolt is a lot higher with a barefaced fraud like this than it would be with something a little more subtle.
On the other hand, maybe we’re looking at this through the wrong lens. Obviously something about Mousavi started to badly spook the powers-that-be during the past week, and maybe they decided something needed to be done about it. Maybe they wanted to provoke a round of violence from Mousavi’s supporters as an excuse to lead a crackdown on dissidents. And what better way to do that than to make the election rigging so obvious even a child could see it?
This suspicion of Machiavellian planning brings to mind Hanlon’s razor (or possibly Napoléon Bonaparte’s observation): Do not attribute to malevolence what can be assigned to simple incompetence.
We’ve seen our nation, the United States of America, how incompetents can gain control of the government and keep it for at least eight years.
Perhaps we should be thankful that one of the apparently defining characteristics of evil is incompetence…
Unfortunately it is also prevalent among the well-meaning…
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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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