Patrick Doherty, Deputy Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, discusses the Iranian government crackdown that reinforces the perception of electoral fraud, the popular Iranian discontent with autocracy, the dearth of legitimate polling in Iran that increases uncertainty and how Ahmedinejad’s tough negotiating with the U.S. is seen by some as the Persian equivalent of Nixon going to China.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And you might remember last week we talked with Ken Balin from Terror Free Tomorrow about the polling that they did in Iran prior to the election, and now he's got an article in the Washington Post from yesterday with Patrick Daugherty about the Iranian election and how the results, such as they are, coincide with that polling data.
And we have that co-author, Patrick Daugherty, on the line right now.
He's the deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and is the co-director of their counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency initiative there.
Welcome to the show, Patrick.
How are you, sir?
I'm very well.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Well, thanks very much for joining me, especially on short notice this morning, or this afternoon.
Okay.
So I guess let's go back over your poll results that you guys did, the survey that you did before the Iranian election, and then I guess give us a little comparison contrast with what we've seen since last Friday.
Sure.
Well, what our polls showed, and just to give you a little bit of background, we conducted a poll in May, about three weeks before the actual election was held, and the poll was done in Farsi over the phone on a representative sample, essentially what you call a scientific poll, across all ethnic groups and geographic regions of Iran.
What we found was that the Iranian people had not yet made up their mind completely on who to elect, but as of that time, President Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran, was leading his next closest opponent, Mousavi, by a margin of two to one.
Now what we've seen happen since is that the elections in Iran have been claimed to be illegitimate, and part of the argumentation that the opposition and people who are claiming fraud are using is that there's no possible way that Ahmadinejad could have had the margin of victory that the government is claiming he does have.
In that particular case, what we're trying to say in this Washington Post op-ed is that it is in fact possible to have that margin of victory.
He had it before, essentially in our polls he was winning two to one, and the numbers there were 34% to 14% for Mousavi.
And then in the actual election results, it was 63% to 34%, and so he actually came down compared to our polls in terms of the percentage of a margin of victory.
And in fact, the number that he got in these 2009 polls, the 63%, is not too far off from what he got when he beat Mohammad Khatami, the past president of Iran, back in 2005.
What we just wanted to say was that let's not jump to conclusions that the number is rigged.
What we've seen, however, since then is that the Iranian government has been acting as though it is suppressing the Iranian democracy, is acting as though there is something larger going on than a clean victory, and that has changed the dynamic in Iran, and we're starting to see this move from being an issue about who won the election, and it's now becoming an issue about what kind of government should be running Iran.
Well, and I mean, I guess that's really the thing, is despite the numbers, it's on now.
Something's on now.
There's either going to be a massive crackdown, or there's going to be some kind of power sharing, or something's going to change after all this.
There's millions of people, or, you know, I read Robert Fisk in The Independent this morning saying that there are a million people marching from one side of town to the other yesterday.
Yeah, that's a lot of people, and what we think happened, and this is borne out in our polling results, is that while it is possible that Akhundizadeh could have won with those numbers, all of the eight governments, actually, since then have been working against the government's interests in terms of keeping the people on their side, and that's because in our polling what we see is that 87% of Iranians, whether they're voting for Mousavi or for Akhundizadeh, 87% of Iranians want their government to prioritize free elections, and 84% want their government to prioritize a free press, and by clamping down on the press, by creating the perception of electoral fraud, the Akhundizadeh government has lost the support, we think, of a lot of the people who otherwise probably voted for them in this last round, and that's, I think, what's driving the numbers.
The Iranian people believe, fundamentally, that they have a great sense of pride in their independence, in their sovereignty, and their ability to govern themselves, and they were extraordinarily upset, and are still upset, that the United States was involved in the coup against Mossadegh in 1953 that installed the Shah, and the revolution in Iran was a combination of not only Islamists led by Ayatollah Khomeini, but also a lot of secular Democrats who really wanted a return to sovereignty, and a lot of secular students, and people who wanted just Iran to govern itself, and that's really what's going on, there's this great sense of pride that Iran should be, and must be, a democratic Islamic republic, and not an authoritarian state, and I think that's what we're seeing, is a real reaction to the power grab.
Well, do you think it's possible, I guess, you're saying that the numbers are close enough, it sort of seemed to me like maybe they stole the election that they were going to win anyway, kind of thing, that they were worried that they might not, and so there really was a lot of fraud, but that basically, you know, your survey still holds up, kind of thing, at the same time.
You know, we just had an election across the river in Virginia, for governor, for actually, it's in the primary, for the democratic primary for governor, and everyone expected the front runner in the polling a month out, Terry McAuliffe, who was a major fundraiser, head of the DNC, major fundraiser for the Clintons, to win far and away, and he was way out in front.
It turns out in those three or four weeks that pre-deeds, the current guy who won the primary, was able to make up ground and beat handily Terry McAuliffe and the rest of the democratic field.
So what we're saying, that is a plausible scenario in the Iranian context.
It could have been that there was a surge of support for Mousavi.
What we're saying is, though, that three weeks out, that didn't exist, that Ahmadinejad did have a very commanding lead, and if the rest of the, if the undecideds broke the way that the decided did, then, which does happen in American politics very often, that this would have, that these results could have been legitimate.
So what we wanted to say is just, let's not, just because it went against the perception of what is in the United States interest, let us not jump to the conclusion that it was fraud.
We've got enough problems trying to impose democracy in the Middle East.
Let's not complicate our lives by jumping to the wrong conclusion.
And that's really what we wanted to say.
We can't judge whether there was a fraud.
We can't judge whether there, whether Mousavi had a surge in the polls.
And, you know, it's strange to me that if, if there was an election in Texas and the Democrats in Austin were surprised that the rest of Texas voted Republican, and, you know, I can't imagine that they would convince themselves that the election certainly must have been stolen from them because everybody knows that in our neighborhood, we all voted Democrat, that kind of thing.
I mean, they got to know they live in the center of Texas.
They know that the governor is going to be a Republican, that kind of thing.
So I guess I wonder whether, you know, we ought to assume that the people of Tehran who are so convinced that they won, you know, maybe there really is something to that, that, that this has been stolen from them because they don't seem to be recognizing that, hey, the rest of Texas votes Republican.
That's just the way it is here.
Right.
You know what I think, we have the, the citizens of Texas have the advantage of having multiple polls done probably weekly in the context of, say, an election for governor, election president or senator.
And then they also have the, the, the, the luxury of exit polling.
We had none of that in Iran.
We had, there was only one scientific poll that was ours, and it was done three weeks before the election.
There was no exit polling, which is what, which is the best way to check the official vote counts.
There's, there's no way to do exit polling in that state, in that government in Iran.
And it, Joe Sixpack in Texas is going to know how the rest of Texas votes, because they have all that polling data.
We just don't have that.
And, you know, there's a sense in, in, in, in a lot of countries that have a kind of a mixed democracy system.
They, it's not a very, the media and the ability to communicate reality across the countryside is not very developed.
And you can have a conversation just within the capital city where the elites are just talking to the elites and convincing themselves.
It is plausible.
And, you know, I don't know what happened.
I don't know what people were reading, what data they were seeing, but there was no data that we could see that, you know, there were lots of polls done in Iran, but none of them provided, none of them were transparent.
None of them said, you know, how they conducted their, their, their research, their surveys.
And we just can't, you know, there were polls that were saying that Mousavi was winning, but they wouldn't publish their findings.
So it's very difficult to, to, to see whether they were accurate or not.
Well, and I guess it's going to be very difficult for you to answer this, since you guys only did this one poll since the last one was what, I guess, a couple of few years back, right?
In February of 2008.
Yep.
Oh, okay.
So, you know, a year and a half ago.
I'm interested in the effect of all the recent attacks by the Jandala group, which has been credibly reported over and over again, including by Brian Ross and other, you know, official mainstream outlets like that is being backed by the CIA.
Seymour Hersh and Andrew Coburn both wrote about a year ago, about hundreds of millions of dollars being appropriated for covert action.
And the Leverett's Hillary Mann, Leverett and Flint Leverett there at the new America foundation recently wrote in the New York times that, you know, have we already lost Iran?
There's no reason for Iran to think that we're serious when we talk about trying to be friends with them because Obama has done nothing to undo that covert operation or the set of covert operations put in effect by presumably, you know, Dick Cheney and them during the Bush during the Bush team.
And it was just in the news, you know, a week or two ago about all these attacks inside Pakistan by Jandala.
And I wonder whether that helps solidify support for Ahmadinejad.
You know, I'm good friends with Flint, and he sits down the hall, sitting down the hall for me right now.
What and I don't I have to say, I don't know what the US government has done in terms of stopping or, or doing any or even escalating the the covert operations initiated under the supposedly initiated under the Bush administration.
I just don't know what that is.
But I do know what I can tell you from the polling is that I think that the favorable opinion in the United States right now is about 40% in terms of the US government.
However, what the big issue on Iranians minds is not the fight with the United States, except in so far as it affects the local economy, their economy is really hurting.
They, they've been they, they were doing a little bit better when they had high gas prices, and I'm sure Texas was doing, but they, they've been, they've got a poorly managed economy, partially because Ahmadinejad is in power.
And that improving their economy is the number one thing.
And what they really want is for to normalize trade relations with the United States.
And they see that as a way of vastly improving their economy that the sanctions regime is really hurting.
And, and one of the reasons why there was support for Ahmadinejad is that they see Ahmadinejad as the bulldog negotiator who can get the best terms in a deal with the United States kind of what the way we say it is, it's a Persian Nixon going to China, that if you get a tough negotiator, you get a better deal.
And in the context of a deal, most, most Iranians would support and these are numbers around 70%.
Most Iranians would support allowing full inspections of their nuclear program.
They would, they would support cutting off, reducing support, if not cutting it off for the Shiite militias in Iraq.
Reducing support, if not cutting it off for Hamas, and Islamic Jihad in Palestine.
So what, you know, what I'm saying, yes, I'm sure there's a, there's a sense of, of, to the extent that these reports are true, and to the extent that the Iranian people know about the reports of Saiharsh and other reporters who are doing some great investigative work on what our government's been doing.
Well, and they got their cops being executed.
I mean, they know that there's attacks going on, whether they know that, I mean, certainly the Iranian government must be blaming the CIA for stuff like that inside their country, whether, whether they're even telling the truth or not about it.
There is, but you know, it's, the question is, to what extent is that, is that message penetrating the Iranian mind?
Well, that's what I wish you'd done four polls in a row here, but I guess that was beyond, beyond y'all's ability to do.
I know that the reason I ask is because back in 2005, in July 2005, there was just no doubt of the correlation and the causation going on when George Bush and, and others in his administration, especially the American president, came out and told the people of Iran, you better not vote right wing.
And all the right wingers came out to vote.
All the old people, all the rural people, all the, all of them came out in defiance of George Bush.
And Ahmadinejad's guys were quoted in the papers laughing and saying, thanks a lot for helping us get elected, you dummy.
Yeah.
You know, I don't, I don't think that the, that the, any of these covert programs have had that same effect.
I just, I just don't see it.
What I see is that they're, they recognize that Obama is different and they recognize there's an opportunity for a negotiated deal.
We hear the, the leverets, Flint and Hillary man, call it a grand bargain.
I think it's the way to go.
And I think they're recognizing that this is the time we've got, you know, three and a half years at least to, to get a new modus vendi between the United States and Iran.
And they want the best negotiator to cut that deal.
And, and, and, and so that they can just trade and go on about their, their lives and, and do better for their kids, just like the average American.
All right, everybody, that's Patrick Daugherty.
He's deputy director of the American strategy program at the new America foundation.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, take care now.
Oh, and again, the article in the Washington post is called the Iranian people speak.
It's by Ken Bailyn and Patrick Daugherty.
