Any color but green

Today marks the date of the Iranian "Presidential" "election", and "reformist" "candidate" Hossein Mousavi and others are warning that if the results are rigged to favor the incumbent Ahmadinejad, riots could result. Indeed, there have been riots in Iran before, and the anger and frustration of large numbers (likely a majority) of Iranians at the repressive Islamic Republic is well known.

What's interesting to me is the parallels with another historical event -- Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004-2005. There, too, an authoritarian regime rigged an election to defeat a popular reformist challenger, only to find that it had underestimated the yearning for change among at least part of the population; massive peaceful protests eventually forced the regime to accept its own dissolution by holding a second, honest election supervised by international observers. Since then, Ukraine has had a genuine democracy, albeit an unstable and faction-riddled one.

Could something like the Orange Revolution happen in Iran? There are some obvious differences. For one, the Presidency which was at stake in Ukraine's 2004 election was an office actually holding supreme power, whereas in Iran supreme power will remain in the hands of the ayatollahs, led by Ali Khamenei, regardless of who is "elected" to the "Presidency" today. For another, the Ukrainian regime eventually declined to order its soldiers to open fire on the vast masses of protesters in Kiev, while there is no reason to think the ayatollahs would be any more hesitant to use force to suppress rebellion than they have been in the past (whether the Iranian military would obey an order to shoot Iranian civilians this time is another, more interesting question). On the other hand, in Ukraine the authoritarian regime had substantial public support, with its candidate getting 44% of the vote even in the real, supervised election; it seems unlikely that that many Iranians support the current regime, though certainly some do.

(Paradoxically, the worst outcome would probably be if Mousavi is allowed to "win" today. Such an outcome would probably defuse public unrest and stabilize the Islamist regime, ending the chance for real change.)

I've long thought the most likely eventual outcome in Iran would be a military coup. In Middle Eastern countries, the military is often the most secular and modern-thinking element of society (it needs to cope with modern technology), and Iranian generals must be aware that the regime's nuclear program runs the risk of a possibly-catastrophic pre-emptive attack by Israel or the US. It's unlikely that street protests over a rigged election could bring down the regime on their own, but they might cause enough chaos to give the generals a pretext to step in and sweep the ayatollahs away. What would happen after that is anyone's guess.

It's most likely, of course, that none of this will happen. Iran has had massive unrest before and the Islamic Republic has survived. But one can't help hoping. Iranians have suffered thirty years of stagnation under this brutal, medieval theocracy. It's about time they had a chance at something better.