After the recent elections there has been significant turbulence in Iran. Andrew Sullivan has turned his site green in empathy for the (conservative?) protestors against the current regime. The irritant seems to be that the election was stolen, however different analysis is not turning up any smoking guns in that area. There are multiple ways to game elections, and in the past Iran has simply banned moderate candidates from participating.

Saddam Hussein's simple trick for having a 99% democratic re-election rate was to drop the secret ballot and make the ballots for himself and others different colors; making it very difficult to hand in the wrong ballot when his goons are watching over the ballot boxes.

I feel that John Robb has a good comment with the election results and how media commentators such as Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole were surprised by the results:

It's a classic case of analysts connected to the urban middle class with whom they come from/identify/talk to and projecting that the sentiment they read there is ubiquitous.

I think this also explains the consequent focus on the violence afterwards as well and the claims that the mainstream media are deliberately dodging the story. It has gone on long enough now that the dissent in Iran is gaining wider traction, however that usually comes when a government pushes back with violence.

There is also a reliance on the new media forms for information as well. These are not always so reliable and they are not always representative of the population at large. A good example recently is that my wife is looking for a new car and her mother asked if she had checked in the classifieds of the newspapers - an action that did not occur to either my wife or I to do. Joshua Kucera commented:

These are just a handful of data points that have been shooting around the Internet, via Twitter or the opposition-friendly blogs. And all have been instrumental in building a public opinion case against the Iranian government for undercounting the support for Mousavi.

The problem is, none of them appear any longer to be true. The crowd was in the hundreds of thousands, most newspapers reported. Mousavi's own wife said he wasn't under house arrest Sunday, and Monday he appeared in person at the protest. And if the president of the election monitoring commission has gone over to the opposition, no serious reporter has reported it.

So we come back to the issue of governance in Iran. A theocratic government has been tried numerous times in both Western and Islamic history and all have been economic, social and cultural failures when compared to liberal democracy. Regime after regime aimed for Augustine's City of Light and none have been able to compete with capitalism and liberal democracy.

The protestors in Iran are using the lack of democracy and a stolen election as the irritant, which does not appear to have an empirical basis. The real reason for the pent up irritation, and where youth will put their lives on the line when faced with state violence, is that the theocratic governance of Iran is a failure when compared to liberal democracy and free markets.

Youth unemployment is exceptionally high in Iran and there is a large swell in the demographics for youth in the 15-30 range; approximately 40% and nearly half of them are out of work; though they don't appear to be the ones protesting. Those with access to twitter, facebook and the internet seem to be at the forefront, which suggests it is Iran's youthful elite doing it.

I wish them luck, I would not like to live under a theocracy, and I hope they manage a relatively peaceful transition to liberal democracy and free market capitalism. It is not unheard of, Indonesia has made a remarkable transition from a junta based dictatorship to a free market liberal democracy recently.