Iran – Prog Gold

Sadly No is surprised and upset that the Wall Street Journal would defend the military coup in Honduras:

It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

A far cry from their treatment of the Iranian elections in which its editorial opinion seems firmly on the side of the protestors and their demands for free and fair elections. How come the Wall Street Journal is so concerned about Iranian democracy but so cavalier about the Hondurian coup?

Simple. Iran is an enemy of the US and is therefore safe to attack. Honduras is an ally and what happened there has not be done without at least some level of support or approval from the US government, if not necessarily any official support. It’s an old, old tradition Mary O’Grady engaged in, this whitewashing of a military coup. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Argentine; every time the US government meddled in a South American country or allowed its military to thwart a nascent democracy, the newspapers of record were there to excuse it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the “liberal” NYT or the “conservative” WSJ, every time an US supported coup happened, they helped whitewash it. Read Manufacturing Consent, read Killing Hope, dig through the newspaper archives and you’ll find the same thing over and over again.

And liberals fall for it everytime.

(Crossposted at Wis[s]e Words.)

As per usual, the western journalist closests to the action is Robert Fisk. The Australian ABC News has a transcript of his experiences of his experiences in Teheran. Some interesting extracts:

It was quite extraordinary because it looked as if the military authorities in Tehran have either taken a decision not to go on supporting the very brutal militia – which is always associated with the presidency here – or individual soldiers have made up their own mind that they’re tired of being associated with the kind of brutality that left seven dead yesterday – buried, by the way secretly by the police – and indeed the seven or eight students who were killed on the university campus 24 hours earlier.

[…]

I went to the earlier demonstration in the centre of the city, which was solely by Ahmadinejad’s people, immensely boring, although I did notice one or two points where they were shouting ‘death to the traitor’. They meant Mousavi.

You’ve got to realise that what’s happening at the moment is that the actual authorities are losing control of what’s happening on the streets and that’s very dangerous and damaging to them.

It’s interesting that the actual government newspapers reported at one point that Sunday’s march was not provocative by the marchers. They carried a very powerful statement by the Chancellor of the Tehran University, condemning the police and Basij, who broke into university dormitories on Sunday night and killed seven students.

They’ve even carried reports of the seven dead after the march on Sunday … almost as if, not to compromise but they’re trying to get a little bit closer to the other side.

[…]

My suspicion is that [Ahmadinejad] might have actually won the election but more like 52 or 53 per cent. It’s possible that Mousavi got closer to 38 per cent.

But I think the Islamic republic’s regime here wanted to humiliate the opponent and so fiddle the figures, even if Ahmadinejad had won.

[…]

[The protest] is absolutely not against the Islamic republic or the Islamic revolution.

It’s clearly an Islamic protest against specifically the personality, the manner, the language of Ahmadinejad. They absolutely despise him but they do not hate or dislike the Islamic republic that they live in

Revolutions are not always made when a majority of the people is dissatisfied with the current regime. Often an impassionate minority can overthrow a government as well, if the rest of the population is not willing to defend it. Mousavi’s followers are such a minority, big enough to mobilise a million people for a protest, but as Fisk says in the final paragraphs, what they want is not an end to the Islamic revolution, but their guy in charge of it. Meanwhile Ahmadinejad does have genuine popular support as well and they mobilised against what they must see as a coup attempt against their guy. Iran is now in a situation in which both sides are mobilising the streets to put pressure on the regime and while the leaders are still in nominal control of their movements and the army and security forces seem to be largely neutral, there is of course the danger that it will all spill out into open warfare between the two groups.

This then looks to be a struggle for the direction of the Islamic revolution, between the socially conservative but redistributive Ahmadinejad and the western orientated, free marketing Mousavi. This is of course a massive simplification, but more accurate than seeing it as a struggle against an oppresive regime that needs vocal (or other) support from the American president.