The Leveretts are wise to be cautious about the immediate consequences of what happened in Iran during the Ashura holiday, but they make two mistakes in their analysis.

One, they base their estimate of the strength of public support for the clerical regime on what even they recognize was a government-organized counterprotest. Repressive governments have a rather unique ability to "organize" their citizenry as they see fit through the fear of the expected consequences of not organizing. As I recall, there were often large demonstrations in Iraq that were supportive of Saddam during his reign, but that never meant every person who showed up truly desired to be there. Second, the Leveretts are weighing the political significance of the Ashura protests in isolation, failing to view this within the context of momentum generated during the protests this summer and again earlier in the fall. They make no mention of the fact that widespread, spontaneous protests could occur again (indeed, they go out of their way to discount this possibility), or of the fact that even the Shah did not fall overnight.

After a while, one begins to wonder what outcome the Leveretts would ultimately like to see in Iran.

Comparing the number of people who turned out at the 'Ashura demonstrations with the number of people who turned out for the pro-regime demonstrations organized by the Iranian government is absurd and the Leveretts are surely smart enough to know it.

The 'Ashura demonstrators turned out in the streets knowing that they were putting life and limb at risk. Based on the regime's behavior after the elections and during the "Jerusalem Day" demonstrations, the protestors knew that they would be physically attacked and if they were arrested they might be raped, tortured or even murdered in jail.

They also knew that all of the brutal instruments of the Iranian State were likely to be utilized to deter demonstrations in the first place and if they could not be deterred, to physically defeat those participating in “illegal” street rallies. The regime's arsenal of thugs included club wielding Basij militia on motor scooters, fanatically religious revolutionary guards as well as Iran's more traditional police force.

The New York Times reported that the regime ordered all government employees to participate in the counterdemonstrations. It is also perfectly obvious that everyone who showed up at the counterdemonstrations knew that they not be subject to attack and that they would be protected by the security apparatus of the State.

Tens of thousands (or more) people marching in the street even though they knew that they might be injured or killed is far more impressive than tens of thousands of people taking the day off from work to participate in rallies that they knew would be perfectly safe.

The 'Ashura demonstrations were revolutionary in nature. The demonstrations organized by the government were akin to the rallies held in North Korea where tens of thousands turn out to laud the "Dear Leader."

Do the Leveretts think their readers are so dumb that they don't realize this?

I am saying that the Leveretts seem to be cherry-picking their protest numbers -- which makes me seriously doubt the objectivity of the rest of their analysis.

Your cherry-picking was much more egregious. Why would start your quote with "[A]ssertions..." when the paragraph started "Important events, no doubt. But assertions..."? Certainly brevity is not one of your writing values.
And why focus only on the two scene-setting paragraphs about the two demonstrations? The rest of the piece was chock full of substantive points. You can't simply dismiss them by saying the crowd numbers they cited (a notoriously hard thing to measure) kills the rest of their arguments.
And why in the world would you lend more credence to the NYT and LAT estimates over "Antigovernment Iranian Web sites" (which surely would be reasonable to take as the upper limit - would you say that Green partisans would low-ball the turn-out?), "others in Iran," an anti-Ahmadinejad website (which would be expected to low-ball the government turn-out, and yet they said one million), and "Photographs and video clips." Did those two papers have reporters on the scene? The only explanation is that you are "rooting" for a particular story-line.
Anyway, enough obsessing over your obsessing. Any chance you would address the rest of the article? How about starting with the next sentence after your quote:

The focus in the West on the antigovernment demonstrations has blinded many to an inconvenient but inescapable truth: the Iranians who used Ashura to make a political protest do not represent anything close to a majority.

Agree or disagree?

The whole argument also seems oddly backward-looking: Previous uprisings in Iran have fizzled out without toppling the regime, therefore the current opposition movement will do the same.

But they don't really bother to explain any of the differences or similarities between the Iran of 2009 and the Iran of, say, 1999.

Their three questions about the Iranian opposition movement are good, but they should have left them rhetorical. They support their thesis with some very dubious arguments.

The Leveretts' arguements are constantly drenched in obfuscation. "Others" put the total of protesters at 2,000? (egregious that the Times let them published that absurdity - sure, a crowd of two thousand could have caused the Baseej all that trouble) While an "opposition blog" estimated one million pro-government marchers? That's a ratio of 500-to-one. Wow, the Iranians must love Khamenei.

Do they actually believe that? Have they remotely taken on board the difference between agreeing to be bussed to an official event (and served food!) and risking your life to hit the streets? They say "people" were offended by the politicization of Ashura. Not that people were offended by the regime murdering kids on Ashura. No mention of the enormous crowds for Montazeri's funeral in Qom, either.

Note they don't _assert_, say, that the wilder pro-regime claims are true. They're just telling us what people are saying. And oddly, their construal of the evidence always points in one direction.

And they fairly sneer at their opponents' - that is, every other Western observer's - support of the Green movement (what they call the "opposition", scare quotes their own). Where are their sympathies, with the Baseej or the protesters? You'll note, they never, never have a bad word for the regime or a good one for their opponents.

The time has come to suspect that they have material interests which would be harmed by political change in Iran. The time has come to evaluate their arguments accordingly.

Their argument doesn't hold water at either end.

Let's forget about the protesters and their numbers on Ashura and accept Leveretts' estimate of 2,000-4,000 protesters.

What then explains Iranian government's obsession with trying to play it down? Why would they bring out "one million people" in a hurry to demonstrate on their behalf? Why is every official, and half-official, is saying "everything is under control", and scurrying to announce how tough they're about to get? Why does the Iranian Consul General in Norway resign in protest and seek asylum? Where is the "elected President", either on Ashura, or when "one million people" come out to support him?

If, seven months after a rigged election, in a country of 70 million, only 4,000 people come out to protest, why worry? Be happy.

How come they don't look so happy?

The opinions of two kinds of experts should be always viewed with deep suspicion: those who are driven by ideology and those who are driven by agenda. While the first group is blind to facts, the second group does everything to blind others from seeing the facts the way they are. Flynt Leverett is of the second kind. Everyone knows he is after a "grand bargain" with the Iranian regime. An idea that got some following in Washington on the basis of a fax sent by Iran ambassador to France at the height of Bush administration's campaign in the Middle East and Mullahs fear of being next in line.

Back to the claims of the article. First Leverettes do not have the courage to reveal their sources of "data" when assessing the size of pro and anti government demonstrations. But someone familiar with the Iranian media outlets can have a pretty good idea where these numbers may come from. The 2000 to 4000 number comes most likely from daily Kayhan, the mouthpiece of regime's security apparatus. When it comes to accuracy, fact checking, and quality of journalism, Weekly World News stories can be taken far more seriously than Kayhan's. How about Leverettes' claim of million march in support of government in Tehran which was organized by bussing people from all around the country, giving them free metro tickets, juice and cakes? Leverettes' "reliable source" seems to be tabnak.ir. Not as bad as Kayhan but not as reliable as Leverettes would like you to believe. This is a site that is close to Mohsen Rezaii, a former IRGC commander who despite his attempt to play the middle of the road game these days cannot be regarded as an independent party by any stretch of imagination. If Leverrets want to play the number game why not quoting Ghalibaf the mayor of Tehran (another former IRGC commander) as to the size of demonstrators who filled the Iranian capital in opposition to the fraudulent elections last summer? His estimate was 3,000,000. So according to Leverretes' calculus that would make it the largest gathering in the capital after Khomeini's death, right? And by the way Ghalibaf is by no means a reformer or an opposition sympathizer and is definitely no less independent than Mr Rezaii is.

The point here is that the Leverettes are using "demonstration size" data from regime's propagandists and other questionable sources to make a claim that is just as grand as their "grand bargain" idea. That the regime is here to stay. Something that even Khamanei is not too sure about these days.

I strongly recommend Levrettes to start sending their op-ed pieces to where they get their facts from, i.e. the daily Kayhan. I am sure they will be more than happy to publish them!

the more they dig themselves into the hole of distortion. By placing hand-picked photographs on www.TheRaceForIran.com, the Leverettes are apparently trying to contrast the small size of anti government demonstrations against the large size of pro government demonstrations. They are comparing apples and oranges!

The anti government demonstrations were DISTRIBUTED in nature and naturally so because of regime's harsh crack down. People who were on the way to Enghelab square were met with batons and in many cases with lethal force and therefore had to retreat to other parts of the city. The result was demonstrations that covered all major squares and streets of Tehran from Mohseni square and Jam-e-Jam in the north to Enghelab and Valiasr squares in the center, College Square, and southern parts of the city, and streets and square in between. Obviously if you look at every single location alone the demonstrations would look scattered but when you add up the huge area where the protests were taking place, the size of the unrest would become much more clear amounting to 100's of thousands that the Leverettes ridicule. The pro government demonstrations in contrast were designed to look huge by concentrating the crowd within a relatively small area so the regime can broadcast images as the propaganda tool for its mouthpieces inside and apologists outside. I do not know if the Leverettes have ever been to Tehran but Enghelab square where the pro-government demonstrations took place is not that big. The real million marches are usually held around Azadi square (which was the site of huge anti-government demonstrations in the summer). Some opposition blog estimated that the size of crowds concentrated around Enghelab square cannot be more than 10's of thousands but it will look huge thanks to professional imagery and photoshop not to mention the juice and cakes that brought the crowd to that square in the first place!

The Leverettes would be much better served professionally if they found themselves another line of business than tying their reputation to a dying regime. If they spoke Persian they could go and read analyses and speeches by regime's own senior intelligence and military ranks to get a better understanding of the dire state the regime is in.

The Leveretts, sadly, are an intellectual embarrassment. Their propaganda has already been fully debunked, but just a few points to add:

-Here as in previous pieces they refer to "contacts in Iran" as their source for their dubious claims. Why not reveal those sources or, at least, indicate their general provenance if specific names cannot be used? That is simply good social science, unless they do it is fair to assume the worst. One commentator here has already correlated their numbers with pro-government propaganda sites, and throughout their series of articles the Leveretts have consistently been a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime. That's fair enough, it's good to have contrary points-of-view. But for transparency sake at least provide a sense of sources.

-Speaking of defensible, the Leveretts are in favor of a very defensible (albeit so far not very productive) policy of engagement with Iran. Again, fair enough...in fact I agree. But as a poster here said, this has blinded them to reality. As any good constructivist will tell you, the need to believe and justify a worldview is deep. That said, one would hope the Leveretts could at least show some minor evidence of moving beyond their built-in biases to give an honest assessment.

-Speaking of sources, the Leveretts have claimed (ludicrously) that it is Mousavi who was staging a "coup." They refer back to this very audaciously by challenging Dan to back up the assertion that the green movement has the support of over 1/2 the Iranian people. It has real chutzpah, it must be said, to cit as their "evidence" a September University of Maryland poll and their propaganda about the reaction to the ashura protests. They say that "we've done our best here to describe the informational bases for our analysis" and, if that's all they have, it is weak tea, indeed. In terms of the elections, beyond the human evidence of millions of Iranians standing up against the elites who control power -- economic, political, and military -- against all odds, there are two academic outfits who have done good work on the Iranian election. Farideh Fardi at the University of Hawaii has done a statistical analysis showing that the reported results were at variance with all previous patterns in Iranian voting. And, on the net, Ali Ansari's piece is available at http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/14234_iranelection0609.pdf

These are sober, well-sourced pieces that back the overwhelming consensus of Iranian opinion. The contrast with the Leveretts silly notion of evidence is striking to any unbiased reader. It is simply sad that the Times would publish something of such dubious intellectual quality (and this after publishing Alan Kuperman's piece to bomb, bomb Iran). There are a lot of serious sources on Iran, one would hope they could be the focus of discussion.

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I am an Iranian with real contacts inside of Iran. I just registered here to voice my concern with Leverrette's shameful support for the Iranian regime. Truly shameful. My real contacts inside of Iran have asked me to say that they would like to have the regime changed in Iran and if people like Leverrette can not support or sympathy with the cause, they would appreciate if he quit discouraging them and encouraging their oppressive mullahs. It's either support us or get out of our way.

First off let me ask the Leveretts one question...Hopefully they will answer:

without looking it up can you name all the prime ministers of Iran following Hoveida?

I suspect they can't. Imagine if I claimed to be an expert in US political history and didn't know who the presidents following Roosevelt were...

I read the NYT article and discussed it with dozens of people who follow the events closely (and CAN answer the previous question) but are of different views regarding Iran's future... the unanimous consensus was that it was a shallow and flawed reading of Iran's past as well as its present precarious situation.... personally I believe President Obama's policies regarding Iran are probably correct... considering the information available to us and to him as objective analysts...

At best the Leveretts are not knowledgeable about Iran... and at worse, (and this is slightly tongue in cheek) they are Lobbying for certain interests who would have sought a less aggressive approach by the Bush administration and now seek recognition of the present Iranian government. I leave judgment to the readers.

If one of my students handed in a paper of similar quality to the Leveretts’ editorial, I would fail them in a heartbeat. This editorial is a classic case of an ideologue covering his ears, closing his eyes and shouting “la la la la” at the top of his lungs when confronted with reality. Rather than letting reality inform their politics, they let their politics dominate their perceptions of reality. Granted, newspaper editorials are limited in space so we can’t expect them to rigorously cite all of their sources, but the level of intellectual dishonesty, exaggeration, and bias is unbefitting of a professor at a major American university.

Let’s have a look at their positions one-by-one.

1) “... one thing we do know is that much of Iranian society was upset by the protesters using a sacred day to make a political statement.”

Asserting something and prefacing it with “one thing we do know” doesn’t make a statement true. There is really no good reason to justify this belief seeing as how it’s quite difficult to take opinion polls of the Iranian population, and of those that are conducted, the accuracy and truthfulness of the results are always in doubt (more on this later). Nor do the Leveretts even attempt to justify this statement (they can’t). In reality, we are not entitled to draw any conclusions about the sentiments of Iranian society regarding the Ashura protests at this point in time.

2) “Vastly more Iranians took to the streets on Dec. 30, in demonstrations organized by the government to show support for the Islamic Republic.

Another totally unjustifiable statement. Due to the media vacuum it is impossible to estimate the size of the crowds of either the pro- or anti-government rallies. Camera angles of the pro-government rallies were intentionally misleading to make the crowd appear bigger and pictures showing the full extent of the crowd were never published (which is very suspicious in its own right). One also needs to account for the fact that at least some portion of the crowd was there against their will (for fear of losing their jobs, being ostracized by employers, etc) or in it for the free food. The opposition protestors came out onto the streets despite being fully conscious of the dangers. One also needs to account for the fact that at least some portion of the pro-opposition population didn’t come out onto the streets out of fear for their safety.

3) “The focus in the West on the antigovernment demonstrations has blinded many to an inconvenient but inescapable truth: the Iranians who used Ashura to make a political protest do not represent anything close to a majority.”

Again, there is no good reason to draw any conclusion about the size of the support for the opposition. We have no way of reliably estimating what the majority of Iranians think.

4) But University of Maryland polling after the election and popular reaction to the Ashura protests suggest that most Iranians are unmoved, if not repelled, by calls for the Islamic Republic’s abolition.

The results appear to support the notion that the government is popular and the vast majority of Iranians view Ahmadinijad as their legitimate president. 90% said they are satisfied with the Islamic Republic. This has to be taken with a grain of salt however. Given the climate of fear and people’s hesitancy to answer questions about voting preferences (26% refused to answer), it’s hard to draw solid conclusions from this data. I think immeasurable influence of the climate of fear needs to be given more weight. How could the pollsters adequately convince respondents that they were not Basij or Revolutionary Guard pretending to be pollsters in order to hunt down opposition supporters? How could they be sure the lines they used weren’t bugged or monitored? Most damning, the survey was conducted using landlines. According to the CIA World Fact Book, only 34% of Iranians have access to landlines. However 60% have access to mobile phones. Most Iranians
(56%) are 25 years old and younger. Younger people tend to use mobile phones over landlines, so again we can’t discount the fact that the results were skewed.

But let’s assume for a second that the results are accurate. To go from a survey conducted in September to the position that Iranians were unmoved by the Ashura protestors is to commit the fallacy of unwarranted unstated assumption. In syllogism form, we have the following:

P1: Most Iranians support their government
P2: People who support their government are unmoved by anti-government protestors
C: Therefore, most Iranian people are unmoved by the anti-government protestors.

At first glance P2 seems like a reasonable assumption to make, but how do we know that? How do we know Ashura didn’t change everything? How do we know the violent crackdown and deaths didn’t persuade people to jump ship? How do we know who blames whom for the events of Ashura? (i.e do they blame the protestors for politicizing the holiday or do they blame the security forces for using deadly force?) How do we know the death of Ayatollah Montazeri and the crackdown on his funeral procession didn’t change people’s opinions about their government? I’m not saying there was a shift in opinions, but how can we be sure of this? Regardless, we hardly have enough to go on to soundly draw the conclusion the authors make.

5) “For example, in late 1998 four prominent intellectuals were assassinated, allegedly by state intelligence officers, prompting considerable public outrage. Yet the mourning rituals for the victims did not prompt large-scale protests. In 1999, nationwide student protests were violently suppressed, with at least five people killed and 1,200 detained. Once again, though, the mourning dates for those who died did not generate significant new demonstrations. Likewise, after the presidential election in June, none of the deaths associated with security force action...resulted in further unrest.”

This is an argument by historical analogy and I’m not sure how sound it is. In fact, a lot of argument by historical analogy is unsound because of the demonstrably false beliefs that A) the past and present always connect through a smooth continuum such that the past and present are very similar (or similar enough to draw sound conclusions) and B) that history repeats itself (the Black Swan Problem, anyone?). Times have changed significantly since the late 90s, thanks in part to new communication technologies and the perception that the election was stolen. It is true that we haven’t seen any mourning cycle protests as I pointed out in the introduction, but I’m not sure how significant this is. The post-election rallies have been driven by a different dynamic than typical
Islamic rallies: protestors have been using the regime’s own tactics and language against itself by using public holidays when it acceptable to come out en mass and protest.

6) From the Leveretts’ response in this comment thread: “It was striking to us that a prominent conservative website, which had opposed Ahmadinejad's re-election, reported that one million people participated in the pro-Islamic Republic rally in Tehran; our own contacts in Tehran and photographic evidence of the crowd and its disposition over specific parts of Tehran bolstered our assessment that the one million figure was very plausible.

This is just plain old bad scholarship. Western media outlets couldn’t source their information so therefore you rely on a source with a strong bias? Imagine a scientist who gets a negative result in his experiment and but then decides to publish a data set which confirms their hypothesis but has blatant methodological problems and other biases (incidentally, this is what “fields” like “complementary and alternative medicine,” “creation science,” and “parapsychology” do all the time). Would this scientist be taken seriously? No, he’d be laughed out of academia. Why should a social scientist not be held to the same rigor? Also, as we all know, images can and do lie.

The authors in this article have a noticeable ideological agenda (their website is basically dedicated to expounding on the virtues of engagement with Iran). They use their shaky-at-best points to draw the firm, unqualified conclusion that “this is not another Iranian revolution,” and then use this conclusion to bolster their case for greater engagement with Iran. Instead of being more levelheaded and waiting to see what happens next before plotting the next move, the authors in effect are saying “move along now, folks. Nothing to see. Stop gawking at the protestors. Let’s get back to our regularly scheduled ideological agenda now.” They are trying to prove that it makes no sense to dither and vacillate for regime change because it’s just not coming so we might as well set up shop in Tehran, sing Kumbaya with the clerics, and have a nice long chat about our differences.

Overall, the Leveretts’ argument is completely unsound and therefore, no one should accept their conclusion. However, I should add that I am willing to change my mind if the authors can provide solid, well-sourced evidence to support their position.

“Unlike Saudi Arabia, Iran's population is engaged in gainful employment. It has a functional economy.”

I’m curious to know how you came to this conclusion. By most statistics (including the government’s own) Iran’s population is not engaged in gainful employment. They officially have a 12.5% unemployment rate (but there is some disagreement about this number). Most seriously, Iran has a serious problem with youth unemployment. People aged 30 and younger make up 2/3 of Iran’s population and estimates for youth unemployment rates in the 15 to 25 year old cohort range from 30% to 50%. There is also a serious problem with “underemployment” (i.e. taxi drivers with PhDs, doctors bussing tables, etc)

I also dispute your claim that it has a “functional economy.” Iran suffers from a 15% inflation rate, lack of foreign and domestic investment, 12 million people below the poverty line, and a massive brain drain. The “Bonyads” or charitable trusts, control as much as 20% of Iran’s GDP. These groups are overstaffed, corrupt, and answerable only to the SL. They hamper healthy economic activities and growth and are a major drain on resources [1]. Not only does the Iranian economy have to content with these religious enterprises, the Revolutionary Guard’s stake in the economy continues to grow. They own huge stakes in key Iranian industries like telecommunications and oil extraction[2]. According to Omid Memarian, the guards have recently been ramping up their efforts to take control of Iran’s economy, draw on Iran’s foreign currency reserves, and evade supervision by the government. [3]

This is hardly the picture of a functional economy. By all accounts, it is dysfunctional. Seriously dysfunctional. In fact, the economic aspect of the Green Movement has been entirely overlooked by most analysts and pundits. People usually don’t put their lives on the line solely for abstract concepts like “freedom” or “human rights.” When people have nothing left to lose-when their lives become intolerable because they can’t put bread on the table or find satisfactory jobs—that’s when they are most likely to revolt. Actually, if you search the news archives during the late 00s, signs of growing unrest were clearly evident. The Green Movement and the explosion of dissatisfaction did not arise in a vacuum; they had been building for quite some time.

[1] See The Economist June 19th 2001: “Iran’s Messy Privatizations,” The Economist June 16th 2003: “A Distorted Economy”

[2] See: The well-sourced Wikipedia article on the IRG.

[3] See: Asia Times Online, January 5th 2010 “Iran's Guards tighten economic grip”

I had a good look and decided to answer those questions in sort of a reply for The Huffington Post.

Here's a link if you wish to have a look:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-shahryar/asking-the-wrong-question_b_414544.html

(P.S. I hope this is not considered self-advertisement as I don't wish to do that. Please remove the comment if you disagree.)

What is happening in Iran now is an inspiring epic that sets a tone for our century- not the least because of the leading role women are playing in it. I'm sorry that history doesn't unfold at times the way historians are able to perceive it beforehand.
It is all good and well for Leveretts to have been impressed with Islamic Republic's emissaries' ability to converse. But, that is no ground to deny the groundswell of rejection for this hideous regime.