Khamenei gives a speech.
I think we find one clue to why he rigged the vote count so crudely. His argument that a majority of eleven million was too big to allow for any irregularities suggests he believed that a big lie was the only one that would work. But if you utter a big lie, you had better hope it could persuade some. It appears to have persuaded no one but a few fools at the Washington Post and the executive editor of the New York Times.
We have made this point a number of times, and it bears repeating once again: Mousavi was a candidate approved by the mullahs. He’s part of the “ruling system,” not a “governing system.” While he may have some stylistic differences with Ahmadinejad, Mousavi takes his orders from the same people as Ahmadinejad, which means that a Mousavi win would not make a tremendous difference in Iranian policy. Barack Obama was correct when he pointed this out earlier this week.
However, the people of Iran also clearly understand this. The crisis has moved beyond Mousavi, and Khamenei knows that. The people in the street may shout Mousavi’s name, but their protests have evolved into a protest against being ruled and not governed. Mousavi could choose to join that fight, or he could choose to remain within the ruling system, but the people on the street now may choose to fight absolute rule without him. Khamenei can’t back down without losing his conceit of infallibility in temporal matters, and if the Iranians refuse to return to the yoke of tyranny, then this will get ugly very, very quickly.
Rich Lowry at The Corner
Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy
Al Jazeera English has Robert Fisk and Farzad Agha on the speech.
Jamal Dajani in HuffPo
Michelle Malkin links to Caleb Howe:
On both the right and the left, on the blogs, at twitter, among the pundits, this is largely a shared sentiment. Sure there are some who cynically object – ignorant celebrities or Obama loyalists. But for the most part, the web has seen a sea of green in support of the people of Iran exercising their right to self-determination. And now we see some in Congress standing up.
U.S. Congressman Mike Pence (R-Ind.), Chairman of the House Republican Conference, and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, have introduced a resolution that goes where the President fears to tread: explicit support for the Iranian dissidents.
Spencer Ackerman, linking to Glenn Thrush:
Meanwhile, Glenn Thrush at Politico reports that the White House is backing the resolution, and “worked with House Democrats to moderate a fire-breathing resolution circulated by Republicans to rebuke Iran for its post-election crackdown on dissent, according to an Obama aide.”
“We made it clear that we didn’t want to make the U.S. a foil in a debate that has nothing to do with us,” a senior administration told me this morning. “This is a debate among Iranians.”
If so, then the go-ahead from the White House represents its largest step yet at expressing rhetorical support for the Iranian opposition, even if the language is couched in support for universal human rights.
Another Ackerman post here.
UPDATE: Steve Benen
Thomas Joscelyn in TWS
