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The former NSC staffer and critic of Bush’s policy toward Iran recently wrote that the world needed to ‘get over it’ and accept that Ahmedinejad won the election.
Now, it looks like Leverett was horribly, abominably, disastrously wrong. He was about as off-base on the Iranian election results as he was smug in his preaching about it, which is saying a lot.
As liberal blogger Nate Silver notes, there were more votes than voters in several Iranian provinces.
More people “voted” than were eligible to vote — in a lot of places. The interior ministry admits to 50 such instances out of the 300+ jurisdictions in which Iran tallied results. That is widespread, prime facie and admitted-to evidence of fraud, and I don’t see how the Guardian Council expects people to buy the argument that whatever caused the tub to overflow in those 50 cities was not also tainting the results throughout the rest of the country.
Inconvenient truths, to be sure. Of course, this information came out after Leverett’s Op-Ed. I think it would behoove a so-called expert to wait until the facts come in before spouting off. Of course, this is the same guy who espouses the following policy toward Iran:
To fix our Iran policy, the president would have to commit not to use force to change the borders or the form of government of the Islamic Republic. He would also have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would leave Iran in effect like Japan — a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept that Iran’s relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlements of the Middle East’s core political conflicts.
Basically, he wants the Mullahs to have their way with everything. They get a nuke, an endorsed stranglehold on their country and no repercussions of any kind for support of terrorist groups. With this kind of outlook, it’s no wonder Leverett couldn’t compute the meaning of it all when thousands of anti-government Iranians took to the streets. His first instinct, naturally, was to defend and protect the regime.
I have a feeling we won’t be seeing any “I was wrong about the vote in Iran” Op-Eds coming our way any time soon.
