Place your bets

Patrick Ruffini asks which is more likely, "the Mullahs accepting the election was a fraud or ABC junking its Obama infomercial?" Bet on the mullahs. Let's think about what we've seen in Iran over the last few days, and what the incentive structure is for the Ayatollah and his colleagues.

Their interest is the same as every other person with power's interest: to preserve that power to the greatest extent. They have no vested interest in preserving this President, or even this particular civic structure, as the vehicle for their power. We can predict that they won't go down with the ship if they can help it, so let's think about their options. If the mullahs sense that the protests are getting too serious, to the point of threatening the survival of the civil government structure, their best play - albeit the proverbial hail mary pass - may be to throw in their lot with the protesters. By doing so, they may be able to leverage having been on the winning side into a maximization of their post-watershed power.

What other options do they have? They could ride it out and hope it goes away. Or they could order a crackdown (or let I'm-a-dinner-jacket do so), but they must surely wonder if doing so will help in the medium term: will it be Tiannamen, or the Moscow Coup? And they have to wonder if the military would even follow that order. The military leadership is presumably in the same situation as the mullahs (or as the Obama administration, or the Reichswehr between the wars, see J.W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power (1956)): They want to survive today and maximize their power for tommorow. They, like the mullahs, can see which way the wind is blowing and will conclude that their interests are best-served by being on the winning side. The trick--for the mullahs and the military both--is figuring out which side that is.

The mullahs will do what they believe is best-calculated to maintain their own position of power. If they believe that they can ride events, or that their power will dwindle unacceptably in any post-watershed Iran, they'll stick with the system. If, however, they believe that the system is coming down, and that their choice is between being on top clinging on or at the bottom shaking with everyone else, they will choose the latter. Declaring that the election was a fraud and coopting the opposition movement makes good sense if the opposition looks likely to win. To my mind, the ayatollah's carefully-worded statement about looking into the elections may be a move to preserve that option.