What should we do about a rigged election?

What should President Obama do now that it is pretty clear that the Iranian government has rigged the election. Obama's statement on Friday welcoming the vigorous debate that he imagined was taking place in Iran's election looks even more foolish today than it did at the time. He might have been able to fool himself and the American media into buying the Potemkin election that the Iranians were putting on before the votes took place but now when just about everyone acknowledges that the authorities didn't even do a good job of rigging the election by trying to make us believe that Ahmadinejad would have racked up a 57% majority vote in Mousavi's home Azerbaijani province, an area that has always been very insular in supporting Azeri candidates. No one believes that result. Juan Cole totes up all the reasons to be suspicious the purported vote. As Cole describes it, it's as if the Supreme Leader decided to fake the results but couldn't be bothered to order that the Electoral Commission provided any sort of verisimilitude in putting up their phony numbers so they just gave Ahmadinejad about the same majority across the country without even taking the time to gin up varying percents for different provinces. It's as if we had results where Obama won each state by the same percentage across the country. Elections just don't happen like that.

Apparently Khamenei decided it was more important to squelch any deviation from the revolutionary ideology that has ruled Iran since 1979 than to cater to fastidious western preferences for honest elections or at least the pretense of an honest election. As Suzanne Maloney of Brookings writes,

Since the revolution and its violent aftermath, Iranian politicians have proven reluctant to indulge in street politics, as have its citizens. And the current environment is particularly precarious: The security forces are mobilized for a fight, and the supreme leader has issued a thinly veiled warning to the public not to dispute the results. The regime is ready and capable of repressing small-scale protests, a move that is intended to forestall any large-scale popular challenge to the regime.

And that is precisely what Khamenei and some of the other hard-line leadership saw in the vibrant, jubilant scenes from the Mousavi rallies in the campaign’s final days—the young people dancing all night in the streets of the capital were not a sign of hope, as they were for many Iranians and spellbound international observers. Instead, for Khamenei they represented dangerous cracks in the stability of the Islamic system, the seeds of a "color revolution," as a Revolutionary Guard commander flatly asserted last week. Their goal in the manipulation of the election results was to eradicate the threat as quickly and definitively as possible. Subtlety was neither necessary nor desirable. Most analysts of Iran presumed that the rigging would be restrained by the need to maintain some perception of the system’s legitimacy, of which its representative institutions and popular participation are a crucial component. This assumption proved false. For Khamenei, stability does not require legitimacy, and when forced to choose the regime will sacrifice the latter for the former.

Perhaps the lack of care in jiggering the election results is a statement in itself of how little they care about foreign opinions.

So what to do now? Obama and his supporters as well as the media (but I do repeat myself) had loved the story of there being some sort of "Obama effect" that would encourage the Iranians to vote for the supposedly reformist Mousavi. But now that storyline has been punctured by the rigged election and protests springing up across the country. Obama's approach to Iran has been predicated on the belief that somehow he could have a willing interlocutor in Iran who would want to negotiate away the nuclear advantages that the regime has been striving to obtain for decades. As Maloney writes,

For the Obama administration, the developments of the past week in Iran represent perhaps the worst possible outcome. The U.S. administration’s strategy of engagement was never predicated on the personality of the Iranian president, who after all is not even the country’s final authority. But a win for the reformists would have added real energy to the effort, both within Iran and here at home, in the excitement over shifting ideological tides in Tehran and the inclusion of Iranian leaders who were both capable of and prepared to countenance serious negotiations. A plausible Ahmadinejad victory, while unwelcome, would at least have offered Washington the prospect of dealing with a consolidated conservative government that might have felt confident enough to pursue a historic shift in its relationship with an old adversary.

Instead, Washington now faces a newly fractured Iranian polity ruled by a leadership that is willing to jettison its own institutions and legitimacy in its determination to retain absolute control. That does not bode well for Iran’s capacity to undertake serious talks and eventually engage in historic concessions on its nuclear program and support for terrorism.

Right now the Obama administration is taking a wait-and-see approach to the election results.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs issued a measured statement Saturday afternoon, saying, "Like the rest of the world, we were impressed by the vigorous debate and enthusiasm that this election generated, particularly among young Iranians. We continue to monitor the entire situation closely, including reports of irregularities."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at Niagara Falls, took a similar line, saying, “We, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide,” and that “We obviously hope the outcome reflects the genuine will and desire of the Iranian people.”

So, once they've waited a bit and Khamenei's statement that this was a "divine assessment" becomes the standard line, should the Obama administration pretend to believe it? It really wasn't very polite of the Supreme Leader to not even try to rig the results in such a way that the Obama administration could have the fig leaf of pretending to believe them. Do they still want to push for discussions with Ahmadinejad while ignoring the illegitimacy of his election? Will they ignore the young people in the streets crying for reform? What about the arrests of members of the reformist party or Mousavi's appeal of the election results? Do we ignore all that? That might be the pragmatic approach. After all, the world, particularly the Middle East, is full of countries whose leaders have little or no electoral legitimacy. Think of our pals in Saudi Arabia or Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. After some protests, it's basically what we did 20 years ago with the Tiananmen Square, the anniversary of those thousands of deaths we remember this month. But it lacks some of the uplift and hopey-changey impact that Obama was aspiring for in Cairo speech. It's going to make it a mite bit harder to throw Israel under the bus while continuing to appease Iran.

And will the events of this weekend put an end to those cozy invitations to speak at an American university or to address the United Nations? Don't bet on it.