A couple of days after June’s stolen election in Iran, Flynt Leverett and I were both guests on “The Charlie Rose Show.” Mr. Leverett was waxing eloquent about how Ahmadinejad could have actually won the election. His supposed evidence was a May poll, conducted by phone from Turkey, before the presidential campaign had even begun. Apparently he did not read the entire report of the poll, merely a summary, published in a Washington Post editorial. Much of the full report contradicted his conclusions. Moreover, anyone who believes that Iranians today will reveal their real electoral preferences to a pollster calling from Turkey probably responds to emails from Nigerian princes.
In Wednesday’s New York Times, the Leveretts—Flynt and his wife Hillary Mann—were at it again. As the title of the piece suggests, they take on the mantle of prophets and predict: “Another Iranian Revolution? Not Likely.” They claim that they know that “much of Iranian society was upset by protesters using a sacred day to make a political statement.” They seem to have forgotten that the 1979 revolution was made precisely by using sacred days for political ends. They claim to know that the opposition in Iran “do[es] not represent anything close to a majority.” Yet even if we take the regime’s own figures, 14 million people voted for the opposition. They dismiss this opposition as articulating nothing but “inchoate discontent.”
Crucially, they also suggest th… >>>
