Iran's Ruling Class Suggests a 'Velvet Revolution' Is Afoot

Posted by: Steve LeVine on June 11

On the eve of tomorrow’s Iranian presidential election, a senior officer in the influential Revolutionary Guards has come right out and expressed the conservatives’ fear: Opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are trying to mount a “color revolution.”

If Ahmadinejad wins re-election, the likelihood for game-changing U.S.-Iranian diplomacy — including a break in the Moscow-Tehran diplomatic alliance that frustrates pipeline and other economic advances in the region — will be dampened. That’s because Ahmadinejad isn’t likely to tone down his often-belligerent rhetoric sufficiently to allow normal diplomacy to take place.

Hence the import of the latest reporting out of Tehran. As The Washington Post’s Thomas Erdbrink reported today, Gen. Yadollah Javani, head of the political office of the Revolutionary Guards, said, “Any movement for a velvet revolution in Iran will be nipped in the bud.”

Javani of course is referring to the 1989 Czech Velvet Revolution that ushered out Communism, in addition to the clutch of uprisings it helped to inspire -- Georgia's Rose Revolution of 2003; Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004; and Kyrgyzstan's Tulip Revolution of 2005. (On the latter, my former Wall Street Journal colleague Alan Cullison has an excellent page-one piece today on Russia's gain and the U.S. loss as the Kyrgyz revolt has turned sour. )

For the dictators of the world, these revolts were shuddering events. In response, Russia's Vladimir Putin formed his thuggish nationalist movement called Nashi. According to some, the revolts were one reason for Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov's murderous crushing of the 2005 Andijan protests.

And now we know that Iran's ruling class feels similarly. What specifically appears to have triggered Javani's remarks are the enormous, green-clad crowds that have marched through the streets of Tehran in support of Mir Hossain Mousavi. Ahmadinejad has attracted his own large crowds; he is an excellent campaigner, a populist who knows the power of pork-barrel politics, enjoys blanket coverage by state-run television, and appears to enjoy the direct backing of paramount leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The New York Times' Robert Worth writes today that former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was defeated by Ahmadinejad in the 2005 elections, is operating a war room to help prevent official cheating. Rafsanjani is dispatching an army of election monitors around the country

(Note to Rafsanjani: The most pernicious election-cheating around the world occurs not during voting, but long afterward, indeed after the local counting. Specifically, it occurs in the computer rooms of the central election commissions that are both responsible for tallying up the count, and answerable to the country's incumbent leaders.)

Given the general belief that Iran's democracy is a relatively regulated one, what will be the impact of this apparent attitude toward the turnovers of power in the above-mentioned nearby countries? If Mousavi does as well as many predict -- if he wins outright, or forces a second round of voting -- will the announced count reflect this result?

Officials like Javani assert that this gets at their beef -- the opposition, they assert, are prepared to strongly protest the election results regardless of whether Ahmadinejad genuinely wins. That could be true.

Reporters on the spot are calling this Iran's most vigorously contest election since the 1979 revolution. They say, for instance, that it's the first time that women have been so centrally involved. These facts lay on the opposite side of the equation from the official fear of colored revolution as Khamenei decides how to respond tomorrow as the election results come in.