Although bloody images continue to be replayed on American television, the protests that broke out in Tehran following Iran's presidential election on June 12 are, predictably, dwindling. They are fading because further demonstrations would no longer be about alleged election irregularities but, rather, would be a challenge to the Islamic Republic itself --something only a small minority of the initial protesters support.
While the protests are subsiding, days of round-the-clock, ill-informed commentary in the United States have helped to "sell" several dangerously misleading myths about Iranian politics. Left unchallenged, these myths will inexorably drive America's Iran policy toward "regime change" --just as unchallenged myths about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of nuclear weapons and ties to Al Qaeda paved the way for America's invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Myth 1: "Ahmadinejad stole the election."
The proposition that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could not possibly have defeated his principal challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has become a sacred cow for virtually all mainstream commentary about Iran in the United States. But to this day, there is no hard evidence of electoral fraud --which even some Mousavi campaign aides privately acknowledge.
In response to fraud allegations, the Ministry of the Interior has, for the first time ever, published the results of each of the 45,713 ballot boxes. With the personal information for all the nearly 40 million voters in the election registered on a computer database and each voter's fingerprints on his or her ballot stub, it is clear where people voted, and each vote can be accounted for.
The Guardian Council --tasked by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to review alleged electoral irregularities --has acknowledged that the number of votes cast in 50 towns exceeded the number of eligible voters residing in those communities; roughly 3 million votes fall into that category.
But this is not unusual: Iranian citizens may vote in presidential elections anywhere in the country. Since the election took place on the Iranian weekend, many people had left their homes for their hometowns and villages and cast their votes there. Thus, in some places, the number of votes exceeded the number of resident, eligible voters.
Recently, spot analyses by scholars from the University of Michigan and the Royal Institute of International Affairs suggested that this year's election results are out of line with previous presidential elections. These analyses compare this year's results with the first round of the 2005 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani outpolled other candidates to move into a runoff. Viewed through that prism, Ahmadinejad's 2009 tally seems inflated.
But the comparison is structurally flawed. It is tantamount to arguing that, because Barack Obama won 38 percent of the vote in a competitive, multicandidate caucus in Iowa in January 2008, it is implausible that he could have won 54 percent of that state's vote in the two-person general election in November. A more appropriate comparison for this year's results in Iran would be the second round of the 2005 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad trounced Rafsanjani.
From the outset, this year's presidential contest was effectively a two-man race, notwithstanding two other candidates' presence on the ballot. In that context, Ahmadinejad's second-round vote share in 2005 (61.7 percent) was essentially indistinguishable from the percentage of the vote he won this year (62.6 percent).
Myth 2: "The Islamic Republic is internally vulnerable and, indeed, ready to implode."
The proposition that the Islamic Republic's constituent institutions --including the position of supreme leader --are on the verge of collapse reflects nothing more than wishful thinking by some analysts in the United States. While many Americans and expatriate Iranians do not like the Iranian government, Supreme Leader Khamenei's referral of fraud allegations to the Guardian Council and the council's offer to conduct a random recount of 10 percent of the ballots were reasonable legal responses to those allegations within the Islamic Republic's constitutional order.
Similarly, the Iranian government responded to the post-June 12 protests in a manner consistent with its own constitutional procedures --and with far less bloodshed than when the Chinese government suppressed the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989.
The supreme leader's authority has not been diminished; indeed, the opposite has occurred. All factions in the controversy turned to the leader for a resolution that would have legitimacy within the system's parameters.
Significantly, Khamenei's Friday prayer sermon one week after the election attracted a large gathering unprecedented in size. Mousavi's subsequent refusal to work with the Guardian Council and exhaust remedies within the system has actually cost him support from the general public as well as among "principalists" and moderate "reformists" who backed him in the election.
At this point, Mousavi may be dependent on public support from former President Rafsanjani to maintain his campaign to overturn the election results, but it is unlikely that Ayatollah Rafsanjani is really prepared to confront his close friend Ayatollah Khamenei and the Islamic Republic as a whole, notwithstanding his immense dislike for Ahmadinejad.
In the end, there is no evidence that those protesting the results represent a majority of Iranians. Read in conjunction with the election results, the pattern of protests since June 12 underscores the idea that the "opposition" that mobilized around Mousavi never represented a fundamental threat to the Iranian political system. The official results, posted on the Interior Ministry's website, show that Ahmadinejad won a majority of the vote in all of Iran's provinces except in the province of Tehran, where the vote is almost equally divided between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, when the regions of Ray, Islamshahr and Shemiranat are included with the city of Tehran.
Since June 12, there have been isolated protests of the results in Isfahan, Tabriz and a small number of other cities, but the protests have been overwhelmingly concentrated in Tehran.
Certainly, comparisons between the Islamic Republic today and Eastern Europe in 1989, on the eve of communism's collapse, are misplaced. The majority of Iranians continue to believe in the Islamic Republic's legitimacy. Even those who want to see the Islamic Republic evolve in a more pluralist direction do not want to bring down the system. And most Iranians seem to believe that a wholesale implosion of the Islamic Republic's political structures would lead to sustained chaos and disorder --much like what happened in Iraq following the U.S. invasion and overthrow of Saddam's regime.
Myth 3: "The Islamic Republic has been delegitimized, and therefore, the United States cannot and should not negotiate with it."
It has long been fashionable in the United States to dismiss the prospects for serious negotiations with Tehran by arguing that the Iranian government is too divided to deliver or that the Islamic Republic is an immature, ideologically driven state that cannot think about its foreign policy in terms of national interest.
But these characterizations have no grounding in reality. Now, an argument is emerging in the United States that the Islamic Republic is simply too depraved to be a diplomatic partner --like Saddam's Iraq or perhaps even worse.
Left unchallenged, the consensus forming around the aforementioned myths about Iranian politics will lead inexorably to ever greater pressure on President Obama to drop his stated interest in engaging Tehran diplomatically. We can already see this unfolding.
Last week, Congress adopted a resolution condemning the Islamic Republic for its handling of the presidential election and subsequent protests. The Senate passed it unanimously; only one member of the House, Ron Paul (R-Texas), was prepared to vote no.
Congress is likely to become even more determined to legislate additional sanctions against Tehran and expand both covert and overt programs aimed at destabilizing the Iranian government. Already, the neoconservative right is clamoring that "regime change" must become the explicit goal of U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic.
Even some foreign policy specialists who describe themselves as "realists" are jumping on this bandwagon. How long will it be before congressional Democrats join Republicans in arguing that the United States should actively encourage the Islamic Republic's downfall?
The call to embrace regime change as the defining objective of U.S. policy toward Iran is sadly reminiscent of the prelude to America's deeply flawed decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime --a long march that commenced in 1998, when President Bill Clinton enshrined regime change as the goal of America's Iraq policy by signing the Iraq Liberation Act, which had passed both houses of Congress with broad bipartisan support.
As a presidential candidate, Obama promised not only to end America's Iraq war but to end "the mind-set that got us into that war." The risk now is that, in the interest of political expediency, Obama will decide to appease those with this mind-set by going along with congressional efforts to isolate and "punish" the Islamic Republic.
If Obama does this, his Iran policy will, at a minimum, suffer from dysfunctional incoherence. More ominously, lack of strategic clarity could put the United States on the road toward confrontation --perhaps even military conflict --with a more powerful Iran.
As the Islamic Republic becomes "delegitimized" in American public opinion, it will be impossible for Obama to engage Tehran, and, in the eyes of many Americans, he will have no basis to continue telling Israel that it should not launch military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets.
As realism about Iran evaporates in Washington, American officials are losing sight of the fact that policies of isolation or punishment would be disastrous for strategic stability in the broader Middle East.
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