Fraud in Iranian Elections?

I have to admit that until today I was totally taken in by the reports that election fraud had been perpetrated in Iran. There are, however, just a few problems with the too convenient story that things have gone horribly wrong in Iran's presidential election. The first and biggest problem is that there is no evidence that Mousavi was cheated out of the Iranian Presidency. The next big problem is that Mousavi is widely known to be Rafsanjani's man, and Rafsanjani was defeated by Ahmedinejad in the last election. With that in mind it is hardly surprising that Mousavi suffered defeat.

And then there is the following observation from former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts:

"Neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman let the cat out of the bag that there was an orchestrated "color revolution" in the works. Before the election, Timmerman wrote: "There's talk of a 'green revolution' in Tehran."

Roberts further observes:

"Why would protests be organized prior to a vote and announcement of the outcome? Organized protests waiting in the wings are not spontaneous responses to a stolen election."

Indeed, and yet that is exactly what we are now being led to believe, that the protests in Iran are spontaneous reactions to a corrupt election process.

And then there is this from a writer on pakalert.wordpress.com who, to quote Mr. Roberts, says,

"he was intrigued by the sudden appearance of tens of thousands of Twitter allegations that Ahmadinejad stole the Iranian election. He investigated, he says, and he reports that each of the new highly active accounts were created on Saturday, June 13th. "IranElection" is their most popular keyword. He narrowed the spammers to the most persistent: @StopAhmadi, @IranRiggedElect, and @Change_For_Iran. He researched further and found that On June 14 the Jerusalem Post already had an article on the new twitter."

http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/proof-israeli-effort-to-destabilize-iran-via-twitter/
He concludes that the new Twitter sites are propaganda operations.

And finally the piece de resistance: Our own President Obama is now dramatically hardening his response to the (alleged) voter fraud and the violence in Iran. I'll cut to the chase and simply say that I sense the fix may be in on an attempt to destabilize Iran. What is going on here in the west and in Iran smells of CIA Psy Ops which already has an infamous precedent in Iran with the undermining and subsequent removal of leader Mohammed Mossadegh some fifty six years ago.

Before I continue, let's establish a fact or two and hopefully create some context in the process. The first fact is that instead of diminishing the U.S. presence in the (not so) Middle East, President Obama has expanded it. U.S. military forces are now not only active in Iraq, at the same level of force as before the U.S. presidential election, but the U.S. military has also expanded its operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The second fact is that Iran has been, and continues to be, right at the top of the list of nations that the U.S. would like to take down a peg or two. There are at least two major reasons for this, first, Iran is a key player in the oil sweepstakes, and second, Iran is viewed by Israel as a great threat to their national security. Please don't misunderstand me, Ahmadenijad and his merry band of fundamentalist cleric controllers are hardly a sympathetic bunch, but that is beside the point. Iran is not now, nor are they going to be within the foreseeable future, a national security threat to the United States. It is also worth bearing in mind that Iran, as per their initiative to trade their petroleum in, for example, Euros, is diametrically opposed to the U.S. in the great geo-political struggle over the fate of the dollar's global reserve currency status.

What we may be witnessing is the first attempt to take down Iran internally. Should that fail, or at the very least amount to something less than a conclusively successful venture, then the military option would stand a very good choice of being employed. We shouldn't be overly surprised at this, as the Obama Administration will, much like its reviled predecessor administration, have serious need going forward of a major distraction from its failure to successfully contend with the egregiously deteriorating U.S. economy.