How should U.S. respond to Iran election?

Gary G. Sick, who worked on Iranian affairs for three U.S. administrations, says the reelection of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad amounted to an internal political coup that stole victory from Mir-Hossein Moussavi. Sick says that it would be wise, however, for the Obama administration to say as little as possible about the election right now, so as to not undercut the Iranian opposition.

"No matter what was said or done by the administration, it would be interpreted as intervention and would actually undercut severely the position of the reformists as they would be tagged as ‘tools of the West,'" he says. He says it remains important over the long run to engage Iran in negotiations on making sure its nuclear program remains peaceful.

CFR's Bernard Gwertzman: The events in Iran over the last several days surprised almost everybody.  Almost everybody in the country thought it would be a very close presidential election with the chief challenger, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, having a good chance of winning.  The announcements of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "victory" seemed to come before the votes could have been counted. Do you think this was an internal political coup?

Gary G. Sick: I agree with you. I really do believe that the talk during the election campaign by Moussavi's people of a Green Wave was beginning to be interpreted as a Green Revolution.  And Iran and its leaders have been absolutely paranoid in the last several years, demonstrated by the arrest of several people who have been accused of having associations in the West and allegedly seeking something like a "Velvet Revolution" [term used in Czechoslovakia to mark the collapse of the communist government in 1989]. 

The fact that they've cracked down so hard in the last couple of days is a clear indication that they were worried about things moving outside their control. It was a huge gamble on their part and they didn't realize that this has been tremendously unpopular in the rest of the world and that it reduced their legitimacy. 

They were really very foolish but it seems that they were willing to gamble because they were more concerned about their own power structure than about the way they are perceived in Iran or in the rest of the world.

Only time will tell what the implications are within Iran. I suspect that many of the clerics who are not enamored of Ahmadinejad are very upset at this development, don't you?
We really haven't heard from the senior clergy thus far. There are reports that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani [a former president] who is a powerful figure in his own right, and somebody who was supporting Moussavi, and who was on the attack against Ahmadinejad when the elections took place, has gone to Qum to talk to the senior clerics. If so, this would be an attempt to accumulate support from that quarter.

There are many senior clerics that have never been that happy, first of all, with the whole idea of an Islamic Republic but also about Ahmadinejad in particular.  He was snubbed by them after he became president. They don't like his sort of pop spiritualism. They don't like the idea that he sets an extra place for the Mahdi [under Shiite tradition, the Twelfth Imam, a messiah figure] at the table to return.

And if Rafsanjani is doing what the reports say, it would be understandable as a way of mobilizing support in an area that really matters to the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei and also to Ahmadinejad.

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Why do you think Khamenei moved like this?  He had to have given his approval to this whole internal coup.  Do you think he himself was scared of losing power?
The role of the Supreme Leader is deliberately shrouded in mystery. It's one of those things that people in Iran speculate about. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories that perhaps Khamenei didn't know about this, or that he was accidentally behind it and so forth. We never know the truth. And he keeps his counsel to himself.

Several of Khamenei's supporters have come out publicly-people like Ali Larijani, who is the speaker of the Majlis [parliament], and who, though a bitter opponent of Ahmadinejad, has now gone public in support of the election. This is probably not so much about what happened in the election as it is a reiteration of Larijani's position that he supports the Supreme Leader.

And if that is the case-if he is in fact making this statement even though he personally is opposed to Ahmadinejad-that suggests that the Supreme Leader wanted this to happen and is requesting that his closest lieutenants back him up on this. So on the basis of the evidence we've got so far, my reading is that it couldn't have happened without Khamenei's knowledge; it was much too orchestrated and premeditated, and now that it's over, supporters of Khamenei are coming in to support him.

It looks like the votes were never really counted, they just decided to announce a victory, right?
The timing of the thing suggests if in fact there was a record turnout, 85 percent to 86 percent of the population voting, the fact that they could announce the results about the time the polls closed or not very long afterwards, obviously, even if they had the world's best voting machines, they would not have been able to do that. And they don't use voting machines-they have people dropping their ballots into boxes which have to be opened and counted.

The fact that this was a stolen election is not in doubt at all. The kind of information they put out — and then the fact that as the polls were closing they deployed police and military forces and paramilitary all over Tehran, they surrounded the Interior Ministry — they closed down Facebook sites, Twitter, mobile phones were all turned off, and regular news sites were blocked.  Those things don't happen instantly — they had to be planned, they had to be organized.

And the reality is that they were expecting a severe reaction, which is what they got, and they were fully prepared to meet force with force. And that is what they have done.

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