Dear internet, please shut up
Honestly, the fervor over Iran? Enough. While it’s certainly an important event, it merely serves to illustrate that the people of Iran have a nominal choice over their president. That is all. There’s some feeling of solidarity with Iran’s youth (about 30% of the populace) in the US, but people seem to have deluded themselves into thinking it’s another Iranian Revolution or a harbinger of Western-style democracy. First, I guess, a little background on Iran’s government structure:
- Supreme Leader:
- Assembly of Experts:
- Guardian Council:
- Expendiency Council:
- Majlis (parliament):
- President/VPs/Ministries
Controls everything, really, as we’ll see in a bit. Personally has the power to declare war and peace, command army/intelligence/police forces.
Clerics who determine who the next Supreme Leader will be, though they capitulate to his desires in every recorded instance(see: Montazeri). Elected to 8 year terms by direct public vote, but the list of candidates is screened anyway, so it’s not like a “free election.”
Easily the most powerful force in Iranian politics. Twelve members, 6 picked directly by the Supreme Leader, 6 picked by the head of the judiciary (who is also picked by the Supreme Leader). Confirmed by Parliament, but it’s mostly for show. Functions as a combination Supreme Court and presidential veto (except Parliament cannot actually override their veto, it just gets sent back for revision). Screens candidates for every imaginable branch of government and arbitrarily excludes them (this has been happening for a while to keep reform candidates out — the 2004, 2006, and 2008 electiosn were particularly bad). May as well have total control of the Revolutionary Guard (which is not a branch of the normal army).
Nominally there to function as a screen between the Guardian Council and parliament. In reality, just advises the Supreme Leader
Does the things you’d normally expect parliament to do (approve budgets, treaties, drafts legislation), only neutered by the Guardian Council. As with everything else, candidates are screened.
Executive branch stuff — day-to-day running of the state. Nominally right below the Supreme Leader. In truth, Guardian Council wields more power. Candidates are elected, but are screened by Guardian Council beforehand, ensuring real reformers never even make it to the vote. Best described as a figurehead.
There is very little debate in Iran about the importance of religion. They’re not going to turn into a secular nation. There’s hardly any protest (even now) against the Supreme Leader, though some resentment against the Guardian Council for the behavior of the Basij. No matter how the protests go, it’s unlikely to be another revolution — very few revolutions succeed without support from another sovereign nation, which they are not getting. The nature of the screening pretty much ensures that it’ll be another conservative candidate even if it does succeed, but Ahmadinejad and the Guardian Council control the complete apparatus of the state. It’s likely to be brutally repressed (granted, I’ve seen very little from outside Tehran, which I consider to be an indication that it’s relatively calm there).
Mousavi’s campaign? Move control of the police from Khamenei to the president. Make government a little more transparent. Allow non-state run television. Not exactly Kucinich here, or even Obama. Maybe Ron Paul is an apt comparison.
Karroubi? Actual reform! Freedom of the press, women’s rights, nationalize the oil industry and distribute the profits to the people, etc. As you’ve maybe seen, he was not the winner.
With that out of the way (and the background may have been necessary for those thinking about Iran becoming South Korea or post-imperial Japan), can we stop the damn Twittering? Changing your timezone to Tehran? Ahh… I’m not sure what you think that’s accomplishing. Under the assumption that the Iranian government can track individual people Twittering (and really? They’ve got more important things to worry about — just that people don’t post updates after going to rallies), it’s because they control the feeds out of the country. Your timezone isn’t fooling them, unless you’re routing it through Iran, which is doubtful. Open proxies? Let’s say they can track Twitterers — that means they’re using Deep Packet Inspection and, well, proxies don’t exactly help against that. They get around blackholing IP blocks (Facebook/whatever), and the headers change a little, but the packet contents are still eminently sniffable.
Tor exit nodes are a better option, but there’s the possibility the Iranian government is running an exit node themselves as a honeypot (extremely unlikely). VPNs are much better, and not all that hard to set up, as long as you keep the address of the server relatively private. For the sake of argument, we’ll say OpenVPN — which is SSL based — running on port 443. It should be utterly indistinguishable from HTTPS traffic, since the key negotiation is also encrypted, and DPI isn’t going to help them here. For all they know, people would be conducting internet banking or one of the million other things SSL is used for.
Of course, doing this requires more effort than changing your Twitter timezone or giving yourself a green background for “solidarity.” Worse than that, the technical issues should have been obvious to a lot of people by now (or at least the contradiction in assuming they can track what IP addresses are using Twitter to individuals, yet thinking that packets which are never routed through Iran will somehow fool them). The irony of the “solidarity” is that our elections in 2000 and 2004 were filled with questionable voter purges, yet we didn’t rise up. The candidate they elected (assuming the leaked results are true) is more comparable to Reagan or one of the Bushes than Johnson or Carter — a man who the people in support of “#iranelection” would never, ever vote for, but they don’t realize that as he’s a “reform” candidate. We arrested twice as many journalists in the 4 days of the RNC in Saint Paul than Iran has in a week of street riots.
Until you can drop the hypocrisy, technical incompetence (and don’t think most of the people wanted to think about that, since they might have to stop patting themselves on the back for “helping Iranians” with a fucking website that has the same limitations as SMS), and utter lack of understanding about Iran’s politics (ahem, even if Mousavi is inducted, not much is likely to change in Iran until the Guardian Council stops culling candidates who want actual change), you can shut the fuck up and keep your self-righteousness to yourself.
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By Dan, June 22, 2009 @ 7:37 pm
I happen to disagree with you completely. As I know you’re aware, Iran is a Shi’a country. And, as I’m sure you’re aware, one of the core tenets of Shi’a is that religion should be separate from politics. This goes all the way back to Ali and the first Ummayid Caliphs. The idea that the Iranian people could rise up in such large numbers and not change their form of government is, frankly, unbelieveable.
Mousavi was not much of a reformist. He has now closed ranks with Karroubi, and the reforms that I consider likely to come out of this uprising are more sweeping than you believe them to be. Khamenei has made the mistake of endorsing the election results while admitting fraud. A Shi’ite leader who deliberately thwarts the feelings of the people is not going to be well thought of in the Shi’ite community. Khamenei has to go, and he’s going to go.
The nature of revolutions (as I am sure, yet again, you are aware) is that they often end up diverging quite a bit from their original goals and veer towards something more… idealistic. I suspect that the Iranian people are going to determine that the Velayat-e Faqih is an abomination. The position of Supreme Leader will be abolished, and Iran will trend more towards a traditional Shi’ite separation of church and state.
Of course, this is all speculation from my end. That said, I consider it much more likely than a return to the status quo in the country.