Buttermilk & Molasses

Yemen and Questions of War

There are so many strands to the situation currently confronting the United States on the Arabian Peninsula (read: Yemen) and the Horn of Africa (read: the other al Qaeda refuge) that it's difficult to even imagine how to begin weaving something comprehensible.

Fortunately -- despite that blowhards like former Vice President Dick Cheney and others might suggest -- the Obama administration has been engaged militarily and diplomatically in Yemen since early last year. And while that didn't stop an apparent al Qaeda operative from boarding a U.S.-bound plane with explosives in his pants last month, it's a helluva a lot more than the Bush administration did in its last years to address another unstable corner of a very unstable region.

My own sad interpretation of Cheney's rather virulent attacks on the Obama administration as being naive, unengaged and unwilling to acknowledge that there is a war going on between the U.S. and the United States of Terrorism is that -- from his vantage point and political perspective -- he genuinely believes what he says.

That's because the Bush administration's method of war-fighting was almost entirely reactive.

Situation bubbling out of control? Send in the drones. Or a surge. Or more covert aid.

That's what kept the Bush administration engaged in Yemen during the first part of this decade. Anyone remember a series of drone attacks on top al Qaeda figures in Yemen way back in 2002 and 2003? Of course not. But there was a time when Yemen and the Horn of Africa were almost part of a strategy to dismantle al Qaeda. Back before an obsession known as Iraq distracted the U.S. military and took the political winds out of any sails not headed toward Baghdad.

But to a conflict-minded reactionary like Cheney, that's how you fight. You find the fires, and you stamp them out. And then you move into the next flare-up. Never mind the smoldering ruins you leave in your wake, ready to flame up while your back is turned.

But no matter how you slice it, the Obama administration has been fundamentally more engaged in Yemen than the Bush administration.

Two great sources to stay current with the latest activities and thinking on the Yemeni situation are the Waq al-Waq weblog and Abu Aardvark's blog at Foreign Policy.

Somewhere East Of Iran, A War Is Brewing

Maybe we could call it the conflict forgot, or the war to forget all wars. It's been almost invisible since the triumphant arrival of American forces on the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, way back in the winter of 2001-2002. (For the record, the journalists got there first.)

Don't count on it staying that way. Afghanistan is getting hot, and the prime fighting season is just around the corner.

Somewhere east of Iran, a war is brewing.

A tip from Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing led me to the embedded reporting of WIRED Magazine's defense technology reporter Noah Shachtman from some of the hottest fighting of the summer:

For three days, the Marines of Echo Company wondered when the next one would come. Since they got here at the beginning of July, Echo has been in a near-constant series of battles with the local Taliban, making this one of the most violent flashpoints in America’s renewed war in Afghanistan. On Thursday, election day, militants woke Echo up by firing rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifle rounds into the school compound these Marines now use as an outpost. It was the 39th day out of 50 that the Taliban and Echo had exchanged lead.

Iran Revolution 2.0 - Game the Grid, Nibble the Edges

Time Magazine's Robin Wright has a great piece out this week on phase two of the Iranian revolution, which has been lighting slow-burning fuses for several weeks now since the regime leaders managed to stamp out the extremely popular street uprising following the presidential elections:

The second phase plays out in a boycott of goods advertised on state-controlled television. Just try buying a certain brand of dairy product, an Iranian human-rights activist told me, and the person behind you in line is likely to whisper, "Don't buy that. It's from an advertiser." It includes calls to switch on every electric appliance in the house just before the evening TV news to trip up Tehran's grid. It features quickie "blitz" street demonstrations, lasting just long enough to chant "Death to the dictator!" several times but short enough to evade security forces. It involves identifying paramilitary Basij vigilantes linked to the crackdown and putting marks in green — the opposition color — or pictures of protest victims in front of their homes. It is scribbled antiregime slogans on money. And it is defiant drivers honking horns, flashing headlights and waving V signs at security forces.

The tactics are unorganized, largely leaderless and only just beginning. They spread by e-mail, websites and word of mouth. But their variety and scope indicate that Iran's uprising is not a passing phenomenon like the student protests of 1999, which were quickly quashed. This time, Iranians are rising above their fears. Although embryonic, today's public resolve is reminiscent of civil disobedience in colonial India before independence or in the American Deep South in the 1960s. Mohandas Gandhi once mused that "even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled." That quotation is now popular on Iranian websites.

While Wright delivers in the long form, The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney continues to excel with short-form, in-the-moment coverage of events in Iran.

Today, police confronted protesters and mourners alike at a graveside memorial commemorating the 40th day since the death of Neda Agha Soltan; Neda was shot by one of the regime's basiji street militias and quickly became a face of the revolt.

Our Future Leaders Are Doing Their Practicums in Afghanistan

Thomas Friedman is hanging out in Afghanistan this week, pontificating about the need to hang in their and continue to hammer stability into one of the more unstable corners of the world. I could launch an entirely new blog with that conversation.

But what Friedman really got me thinking about was the next generation of leaders that will emerge from the streets of Baghdad and the mountains along the Pakistan border. I suspect they will be as pragmatic and out-of-the-box dealing with issues both domestic and foreign when they are out of uniform as they have been in firefights and humanitarian missions in uniform. Pragmatic and out-of-the-box are rare enough qualities in leaders these days, especially when they are combined.

The reason for optimism? All those deployments have left us with a deep cadre of officers with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, now running both wars — from generals to captains. They know every mistake that has been made, been told every lie, saw their own soldiers killed by stupidity, figured out solutions and built relationships with insurgents, sheikhs and imams on the ground that have given the best of them a granular understanding of the “real” Middle East that would rival any Middle East studies professor.

I’ve long argued that there should be a test for any officer who wants to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan — just one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer “yes,” you can go to Germany, South Korea or Japan, but not to Iraq or Afghanistan. Well, this war has produced a class of officers who are very out-of-the-box thinkers. They learned everything the hard way — not in classes at Annapolis or West Point, but on the streets of Fallujah and Kandahar.

Friedman is optimistic about the mission in Afghanistan. I've spent time with some of these folks, and I can't wait for the military to cut them loose so they can come home. I'm optimistic about the mission that follows -- reshaping our own country in the years to come. It's not like we're doing such an excellent job with the leaders we've been getting out of our business schools...

The Downtown Plan: At the End, Again, Again, Again

If you've been avidly following the evolution of Richmond's Downtown Master Plan since the first inklings of its very public development (Yes, it has been more than two years. Buttermilk & Molasses kicked off the public dialogue on the plan on July 6, 2007.) you may well be wondering why City Council is finally nearing closure on what has felt like endless debate and discussion on the plan's details.

Blame it on state law, which requires the plan get a stamp of approval within two weeks -- or back to the drawing board.

If you're looking for reasons to be frustrated by bureaucratic process, the two-year crawl of this plan would be a great exhibit. Launched with a week-long series of public, hands-on design activities, the plan was delivered to Richmond's Planning Commission just five months later -- in December of 2007. And it's only taken 19 months to make its way through that body, and into the hands of City Council.

And while large swaths of the plan have actually been approved for several months now, a conflated series of amendments to the plan have ensured that the guiding document has received more attention and felt far more important than it might have otherwise.

As tempting as it is to blame Council for being a bureaucratic, slow-moving mess, the truth is more discouraging -- what essentially slowed the Downtown Plan's progress through Council is good old-fashioned politics. Will Jones at the Times-Dispatch has more on last night's second-to-last hearing on the plan:

Last night's 8-0 vote came with fireworks. Councilman E. Martin Jewell was unable to get support for an amendment to give the council greater flexibility in considering Echo Harbour, a condominium, hotel and office development that's proposed for the eastern riverfront.

The project has met strong community opposition over its potential impact on river views from Libby Hill Park.

Jewell said the "council gives its rights away" by having the eastern riverfront area designated by the plan as an "urban center area," which suggests that the property may be used for mixed-use development with building limited to four to six stories.

The developers of Echo Harbour, which is proposed with building heights ranging from six stories to about 10 to 12 stories, have been asking for relief from the designation.

Jewell suggested a change to underscore that development projects could be judged on a case-by-case basis. However, Councilman Charles R. Samuels successfully urged colleagues to reject the change.

"We have the possibility to lose not one viewshed but all viewsheds," he said.

Jewell's motion to have proposals considered without the urban-center guidelines failed on a 4-4 vote. Later, the council voted 8-0 to schedule the remaining amendments for a final up-or-down vote in two weeks.

Those incorporated several amendments outlined earlier by Councilman Bruce W. Tyler, including one dealing with maps that show possible future uses of the site for Echo Harbour. The change would put a development scenario sequentially ahead of a "public open space" scenario for the Echo Harbour site -- an order preference previously endorsed by council.

Tyler is a principal with the architectural firm for Echo Harbour, but he has been advised by the city attorney that he may participate in master-plan issues relating to the property.

The good news? We're only three years away from the launch of a state-mandated revision to Richmond's Downtown Plan.

What Social Media May Be Missing in the Iranian Protests

There are so many facets to the unrest sweeping the heart of Iran, and one of the most important to regional stability has to do with what shakes out -- a dictatorship jointly led by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (the religious and legal head of government) and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; a strongly nationalist and slightly more modern (and moderate) government led by a reformed Council of Guardians led by Khamenei's long-time rival Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani ; or just another imploded nation-state completing the daisy chain stretching from Iraq to Pakistan.

Of course, this is all one giant leap from where we stand today -- a fledgling series of protests hoping to become a popular revolt, and attempting to throw the lessons of 1979 back in the face of the once-revolutionary government. It is a small wave thus far, but one that not only threatens the current government of Iran but holds some unsettling lessons for other governments in a region facing a demographic tilt that continues to skew heavily toward the young.

And as a young and modern Iranian populace -- I should say Tehranian, since the rural demographics are heavy on the young and less driven by the modern -- flexes its political muscle on the streets of Tehran and as many as a half-dozen other Iranian cities, the eyes of the world are fixated on Twitter.

This is partly because they eyes of the world have been effectively blindfolded by a regime that controls much of the news content flowing across its borders; partly because the student population in Iran is demonstrating some reasonably strong demographic chops; and partly because there is a growing demand on the social media front to prove the merit of street-level, ad-hoc journalism.

And so newspapers and websites across the United States have taken to calling what is happening on the streets of Iran the "Twitter Revolution".

I'm afraid that's only our side of the story.

In this new age of media as a conversation, huge swaths of the world have been invited to take part in what once could have been a private dialogue between an angry regime holding on to power and its wayward, rebellious youth. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have given the Iranian protests an immediacy, an urgency and a sense of personality.

Two things are missing.

First, the pace of the action on the streets is being tweeted and videotaped much faster than organizations -- mainstream media, political think tanks and the like -- can digest, much less provide context for. While this creates an energy for the growing number of people following the action directly (via the social media platforms) or indirectly through The Huffington Post or The Atlantic or The Guardian, it doesn't provide much of a basis for understanding what's really happening, or why it matters.

And so far the connection is loose and surfeit -- it precludes any sort of formal solidarity between the students in Iran and those around the world. Sure, we're giving our avatars a gentle green hue. (And, going back to context, do many of us understand the religious and political significance of the color green in Iran? Does it matter if we do, now that the color has taken on a symbolic meaning?) We're following an Iranian or three on Twitter. But beyond technological gestures, how do we turn solidarity into support -- and how do the Iraninans turn our support into political power? Do they even want to?

Social Media will become a transformational tool when it learns how to consistently connect the dots between the scattered pellet shot generated by the likes of Twitter and YouTube to the more focused analysis and bigger picture approach of individuals and organizations who have been immersed in the story for years. Consistently connect the dots without slowing down the story, I should say.

If Social Media figures that one out, it's game, match and set.

The other missing piece? The old folks. You remember them, don't you? They're the ones calling most of the shots in Iran right now. While students and some elements of the professional class face off against the police and militia in the streets on Tehran, there's some serious behind-the-scenes happening in the Iranian holy city of Qom. If only someone was tweeting what's going on at Rafsanjani's dinner table...

Sysomos Blog has a fascinating bit of analysis about the prevalence of Twitter in Iran -- specifically, about its Tehran-centric nature and the contextual relationship between the dates (before and after the presidential election) and the tweeted conversations.

Sysomos points to the more than doubling of Twitter accounts geographically tagged as being in Iran between May and June. (Commenters on the post note correctly that Sysomos doesn't appear to account for the vast numbers of people outside of Iran who changed their locations to read Tehran to express solidarity or an an attempt to confuse Iranian censors.) Regardless, somewhere south of 9,000 Twitters users tagged themselves in Iran in May and almost 20,000 did the same in mid-June.

And where did these Twitter users reside? Almost totally in Tehran -- 93% of them, in fact.

And who are they talking to?

Simon Owens at Bloggasm decided to take a look at exactly that, sort of. Owens decided to see how much individual tweets purporting to be from Iran were rewteeted -- forwarded or reposted by other Twitter accounts:

To test this, I picked 100 tweets at random that were coming from Twitter users that claimed they were in Iran. I only used tweets that were using one of the many standard hashtags and only included tweets that had been published sometime today (Saturday). I then used search.twitter.com and plugged each one of these tweets into the engine, counting up how many users retweeted it.

Out of the 100 random tweets, each one was retweeted an average of 57.8 times. The tweet that received the highest volume of retweets had 311 retweets. The smallest had only 6 retweets. Most of the tweets I found had between 30 and 50 retweets.

Of course this was done during normal Eastern Time hours, so it may be that the volume fluctuates throughout the day. But it does show that a single tweet coming out of Iran can be seen by a massive volume of Twitter users fairly easily.

A lot of people are listening on Twitter outside of Iran. That's a good thing. But it hasn't proven itself to be an organizing force in Iran itself.

Ethan Zuckerman at WorldChanging has the most cogent piece I've read yet on Twitter and the Iranian situation.

Rather than tell you what I and colleagues have been saying to reporters, I’ll point you to one of the better stories, by Anne-Marie Corley in MIT’s Technology Review - she interviews several of my Berkman and Open Net Initiative colleagues and outlines the argument many of us are making:

• Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on the ground.

• Iranians have been accessing social networking sites and blogging platforms despite years of filtering - there’s a cadre of folks who understand how to get around these blocks and are probably teaching others.

• Because so many Iranians use social media tools - often to talk about topics other than politics - they’re a “latent community” that can come to life and have political influence when events on the ground dictate.

Zuckerman goes on to suggest that what social media has done, essentially, is to have created a generally false sense of connection and involvement in the protests.

He goes on to wonder whether a growing media bias toward social media (a new phenom driven largely by traditional media's inability to report from the ground, and the steady stream of YouTube video footage streaming across the border) and the focus on the Twitter feeds of Mousavi supporters has skewed the picture.

Iran on the Verge

I've been struck today by what appears to be a turning point on several fronts in Iran, though sorting through the immediacy of the reports flowing through Twitter and YouTube makes the bigger picture virtually impossible to absorb.

But here's a fascinating perspective -- the Islamic Republic of Iran has taken to the streets in clear defiance of the country's military dictatorship. If you know anything about Iran, ponder that for a moment. As recently as eight days ago -- the day of the presidential election in Iran -- the Islamic Republic was the government, and Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was the firm voice of that government.

No longer.

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note lays the case out quite clearly:

And given that collapse of legitimacy and the mystique of the Islamic Revolution, Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and those who organized the head-crackers to assault Iran's citizens will probably have a fragile grasp on their lives from here on out.

The New York Times' Roger Cohen who has been braving the streets of Tehran today just filed a gripping account of today's events, but he too notes that Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, has lost "his aura."

Khamenei had one opportunity to regain his footing, and that was during Friday prayers. But instead of lessening the tension his regime had been holding on the situation, he pulled in all the tighter. The irony? Khamenei has defaulted to the playbook of the last revolution, casting himself in the role of the deposed Shah whose military government collapsed beneath the strategic genius of the Islamic revolution 30 years ago.

Numerous people (including myself somewhere along the way) have wondered if Iran would have a Tienneman moment -- refering to the face-off between students and the Chinese government two decades ago. It's become clear that the strong cultural and religious differences between China and Iran will make for a far different outcome in Iran -- the culture of martyrdom means that the death of students and others in the streets will create a stronger reaction by the street.

The deaths allegedly came in droves today -- reports are that as many as 150 people have died this week, and the majority today. Clearly, the government thought it's strategy of massing the streets with soldiers and basiji militia to prevent large crowds from gathering as they did earlier in the week would be effective. It was -- to a point.

Earlier in the day, reports suggested that the crowds were smaller and more fragmented than the million people who massed the streets of Tehran on Monday. For a few hours, it was as if the air had been sucked out of the movement. Then the violence erupted.

Josh Shahryar AKA NiteOwl recently posted a summary compiled from Twitter and vetted fairly extensively. He paints an amazing picture of what transpired in the streets of Tehran and throughout Iran today.

Clemons mentioned Roger Cohen earlier. Here's a snippet of his reporting from the streets of Tehran:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had used his Friday sermon to declare high noon in Tehran, warning of “bloodshed and chaos” if protests over a disputed election persisted.

He got both on Saturday — and saw the hitherto sacrosanct authority of his office challenged as never before since the 1979 revolution birthed the Islamic Republic and conceived for it a leadership post standing at the very flank of the Prophet. A multitude of Iranians took their fight through a holy breach on Saturday from which there appears to be scant turning back.

Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.

He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.

The taboo-breaking response was unequivocal. It’s funny how people’s obsessions come back to bite them. I’ve been hearing about Khamenei’s fear of “velvet revolutions” for months now. There was nothing velvet about Saturday’s clashes.

Watch for the students and religious moderates to take to the streets in the days ahead, using their own playbook from the 1979 revolution -- pulling millions into the streets to mourn those martyred by the regime's misplayed gambit.

Following Four Threads of the New Iranian Revolution

I haven't had much time to blog about what's happening in Iran this week, but I've been as fascinated by events as most people -- and have found a handful of outstanding aggregators of information that have not only provided depth but also more "live" coverage than your traditional news outlets. (An exception might be The Guardian in London, which has done a very good job of keeping up with events.)

Like many Americans, I started making sense of the Iranian situation through a handful of Twitter feeds -- most specifically, Tehran-based persiankiwi, ABC News' Jim Sciutto, a thread alleged to be run by close followers of Mir Hossein Mousavi, and Change for Iran. Each of these Twitter-centric voices has found their footing this week, delivering 140 character snapshots of protests, basiji/student throw-downs, rallies and everyday events consistently and regularly. This despite their proxies constantly being shut down by Iranian authorities. You can follow #iranelection for a massive dump of all things Iran on Twitter.

The Huffington Post has provided a level of depth and degree of context you're not likely to find on Twitter, and Nico Pitney has been working overtime to deliver increasingly solid updates from a growing stream of sources -- ranging from traditional news media to a growing number of Iranian-Americans and Iranians on the ground in Iran. Truly amazing stuff. Others have cited The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan's coverage, but Pitney has been all over the Iranian eruption with a stepped-up game I don't see from Sullivan.

Which brings me to The Washington Note, Steve's Clemons' utterly professional political news blog with its reporting staff and cotterie of smart people providing rich commentary. Clemons' Iran coverage is a little more poli sci and insider than pretty much anything else you'll stumble across out there, but that's what makes his site such a great place to develop a slightly richer understanding of the immense nuances of the Iranian situation.

Want to keep your finger on the pulse of an increasingly chaotic Iran? The above destinations will keep you grounded, and ahead of the CNN news summaries.

Twittering Tehran

As computer and telecommunication systems across Iran went into government-imposed, emergency shut down mode after the hotly contested and disputed reelection of President Ahmadinejad, one system proved difficult to shut down -- Twitter.

Case in point? At 9:00 local time in Tehran, literally tens of thousands of Iranians took to the rooftops to shout the Muslim prayer chant "Allah O' Akbar (God is great)". The orchestrated effort -- in a city in lockdown with limited communication -- was coordinated by a series of Twitter feeds. Two newer requests are circulating now; here they are as posted by a follower or the campaign of MirHossein Mousavi (who stood for election against Ahmadinejad):

• Mousavi asks his supporters to protest throughout Iran from 4pm on Monday 15 June (in Tehran: Enghelab Sq. to Azadi Sq.) #IranElection

• امشب همه از بالای پشت بام ساعت نه، مرگ بر دیکتاتور. EVERYONE: Tonight at 9pm Iran time from rooftops: "Death to Dictator". #IranElection

The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan (a fan of popular revolts) has been blogging nonstop about Friday's Iranian election and the chaotic, violent aftermath. Like many observers, Sullivan is trying to discern whether we're observing another Tianeman Square (protests crushed by government) or another Orange or Cedar revolution (ala Ukraine and Lebanon).

Here are some of Sullivan's "tweet captures" from the Green Revolution (followers of Mousavi wear green scarves, or green tape around their fingers):

• URGENT JUST IN, there r TANKS in front of the interior ministry of tehran in valiasr st. & fatemi CAREFUL I can't find my friends on streets.

• Rasht, glass splinters on the streets, riot police not hesitating to beat men, women and even kids

• From Enghelab Sq friend just call me, Police & unknown forces beating everybody for no apparent reason!

The Huffington Post is also provided some excellent coverage -- both breaking news, aggregated news and blog reports (Thanks for the tip, @aaronsdotson). Nico Pitney is doing a great job with his blow-by-blow accounts, including the text of this CNN interview with one of its Tehran-based journalists; it clearly paints a picture of the violence sweeping the Iranian capital:

Late last night, I went out to one area in Tehran and that one got a bit ugly. You had pro-Mousavi protesters moving out, smashing windows and facing off with a group of individuals who are described as vigilante because they were not wearing uniforms. They were plain clothes, carrying baseball bats. They were carrying metal pipes, and they were just beating up anyone that was that was in that area. Today, I went to a second protest...probably the most violent that I've seen, that we have seen. We went to an area in midtown, where we saw hundreds of pro-Ahmadinejad protesters. The difference here is that these protesters again did not wear any uniforms who identified they were except for the Iranian flag that they were waving. They were on motorcycles. There were some on foot but again, they had weapons. No uniforms but they had weapons such as metal pipes, and they were actually just driving around, intimidating people, beating up people, anyone that was in the street, anyone that was in the road, anyone that dared to chant "Mousavi, Mousavi," they were beating them senseless.

If you're interested in keeping tabs on one of the most poignant -- and potentially earth-shattering -- news stories of the year, Mashable has tips on tracking the Iranian election and its aftermath using social media tools.

Iran as a Game Changer, or Not So Much

There are only a handful of political moves that could transform the Middle Eastern landscape, and one of the biggest would be a counter-revolution in Iran. That seems to be a growing meme among Western media voices, even as others suggest that the West got a bit ahead of itself with its hopes that a moderate would pull out a win in Friday's elections.

And while the truth of the matter -- as is always the case in the murky world of Southwest Asian politics -- will be slow to sort itself out, there is one distinct truth: The Iranian body politic just went through a three-day roller coaster ride, and there's no clear end in sight.

For a visual perspective on what's happening in Iran, a good stopping point might be Talking Point Memo's slideshow of events on the ground. It's a melange of images from a variety of sources. (A selection of which you see here.)

And while there are strong indications that the election was stolen (Or is it so clear, asks Newsweek's Christopher Dickey. More on that later.), what is less clear is whether the protests erupting in Tehran will have equally strong legs among Tehran's rural population. But that's usually the problem with populist moments.

One reporter with a strong sense of Iran and an academic who has spent most of the past decade hyper-analyzing the Middle East present some compelling evidence that the Interior Ministry has played fast and loose with the numbers.

Juan Cole, the academic, provides his case point-by-point by looking at polling data, regional and ethnic trends and the actual results. He also suggests that the Interior Ministry was so unprepared for a Mousavi win that they simply sent a blanket mandate out to individual polling centers to fix the final count -- which is why the imbalance is so strong. If the final polls showed Ahmadinejad winning with 54% or 56% of the vote, this might have slipped past with a disappointed sigh.

The reporter, the New Yorker's Laura Secor, was in Tehran covering the elections over the weekend, and paints a picture of the mood-shifting first reports:

But then the first ominous Facebook update came in. The Ministry of Interior had announced that of twenty-five million votes counted thus far, sixteen million were for Ahmadinejad. The time, in Tehran, was just past midnight. The polls in the cities had just closed. It was not time to panic yet; maybe this was just the rural vote. But the mood in our little circle darkened. It wasn’t true, came another update; only five million had been counted, and of them, both candidates were claiming sixty per cent. Then the tally reached ten million, with sixty-seven per cent for Ahmadinejad. And then the most sinister news of all: the public had been told that if anyone approached the Interior Ministry, which would be the obvious site for a protest of the vote count, the police had orders to shoot.

There can be no question that the June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much. Government polls (one conducted by the Revolutionary Guards, the other by the state broadcasting company) that were leaked to the campaigns allegedly showed ten- to twenty-point leads for Mousavi a week before the election...

Like Cole, Secor says the blatantness of the official tally is what sent people into the streets:

What is most shocking is not the fraud itself, but that it was brazen and entirely without pretext. The final figures put Mousavi’s vote below thirty-five per cent, and not because of a split among reformists; they have Karroubi pulling less than one per cent of the vote. To announce a result this improbable, and to do it while locking down the Interior Ministry, sending squads of Revolutionary Guards into the streets, blacking out internet and cell phone communication and shuttering the headquarters of the rival candidates, sends a chilling message to the people of Iran—not only that the Islamic Republic does not care about their votes, but that it does not fear their wrath. Iranians, including many of the original founders and staunch supporters of the revolution, are angry, and they will demonstrate. But they will be met with organized and merciless violence.

Secor's entire post is well worth a read.

Newsweek's Dickey, often a bit out-of-step with his reporting from the region (and not always in a bad way), moves past the story of the moment and straight into analysis -- What does this mean for the rest of us? But his starting point -- that the election is over -- is a departure from the rest of the media:

What happened to all those charming, articulate young men and women in North Tehran, interviewed again and again on Western television? They were so enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's main opponent, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi. They were excited about the prospect of more freedoms. They thought Ahmadinejad was a failure and an embarrassment, and they really seemed to like us Americans. Indeed, they seemed almost to be like us Americans. Didn't they speak for the real Iran?

Actually, no. It appears that the working classes and the rural poor—the people who do not much look or act or talk like us—voted overwhelmingly for the scruffy, scrappy president who looks and acts and talks more or less like them. And while Mousavi and his supporters are protesting and even scuffling with police, they are just as likely to be overwhelmed in the streets as they were at the polls.

Except for that last line. Pretty much everyone agrees that the populist moment in Iran will be brief. Which is why this is not a game changing moment in the Middle East, but only another move in a very long game of three-dimensional chess.