Iran: is the 'H' word at play here?

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 18 June 2009 08:00

Opinion and Analysis

The blanket coverage had its effect on Ahmadinejad; like any good dictator, he decided to play safe and ensure that he would be elected by a lopsided margin. That's my hypothesis.

(There is a famous joke in the Middle East about the late Syrian dictator Hafez Al Assad being told by an aide, "Mr President, you have won the election by a landslide; only 95 people did not vote for you; what more could you want?" To which Assad replies "The names of those 95 people.")

But, remember, we have no concrete evidence of rigging - yet. For all we know, Ahmadinejad could have scraped through if he had let the counting go on as it should. Given the conservative nature of Iranian society - and I lived across the Straits of Hormuz from this country for a decade - it is highly unlikely that there would be such a swing during a single election.

But the Western view still has it that the dictator has done the dirty. Just one example: this morning Slashdot has this heading: "Statistical Suspicions In Iran's Election" followed by this material: ""An expert in electoral fraud, professor Walter Melbane, has released a detailed analysis (PDF) of available data in Iran's controversial election (summary here). While he did not find significant indications of fraud, he does note that all the deviations from the predicted model are in Ahmadinejad's favor: 'In general, combining the 2005 and 2009 data conveys the impression that a substantial core of the 2009 results reflected natural political process... [These] stand in contrast to the unusual pattern in which all of the notable discrepancies between the support Ahmadinejad actually received and the support the model predicts are always negative. This pattern needs to be explained before one can have confidence that natural election processes were not supplemented with artificial manipulations.'" (emphasis mine)

If I understand English (and I use term advisedly), then that headline has little connection to what is planted (again the term is used advisedly) underneath. Remember Disraeli's famous statement about statistics.

George W. Bush rigged two US presidential elections - in Florida and then in Ohio. I haven't seen the good, unbiased people at Slashdot ever touch on those subjects when they came to light.

Neither did the Bush campaign's rigging figure prominently in any Western publication. There's a word that begins with the letter "h" that suggests itself to me but you, dear reader, have more than enough intelligence to guess what that is.

There were no mass protests in the street when Bush "won" in 2000 or 2004. In sharp contrast, the people in Iran are out on the streets and venting their anger. Americans? Oh, they just "moved on" and let an unelected man rule them for eight years.

It may turn out that Ahmadinejad has pulled a few strings here and there to get his numbers to look impressive. He wouldn't be the first leader to have done this. Given the US example, when passing judgement on Iran it is always good for people in the West to remember that, in this case as in many others, charity begins at home.