Iran Update - All Three Opposition Candidates Are Now Under Arrest

From Ace of Spades:

Ahmadinejad says he won, Mousavi files protest and all hell breaks loose.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says his re-election was "real and free" and cannot be questioned — but that isn't stopping his campaign rival from appealing the results.

Reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi accused the government of voter fraud and many of his supporters have clashed with police in Tehran's streets.

"Today, I have submitted my official formal request to the council to cancel the election result," Mousavi said in a statement. "I urge you Iranian nation to continue your nationwide protests in a peaceful and legal way."

Protesters set fires and smashed store windows Sunday in a second day of violence as groups challenging Ahmadinejad's re-election tried to keep pressure on authorities. Anti-riot police lashed back and the regime blocked Internet sites used to rally the pro-reform campaign.

PJ Media has a rundown of the reports getting out of Iran. Some highlights...

* From Tehran and Tabriz to Mash’had, Esfahan, Kerman, Shiraz, Sanandadj, Babol, and many other cities and towns across Iran people are out in the streets, rioting against the Khomeinist regime’s election results, chanting “Death to the Dictators.”

* Following Khamenei’s order of disconnection of the text messaging and SMS system across Iran on Thursday, since late Saturday evening, June 13, all the cellular phones in Tehran have also been entirely disconnected.

* Entekhab News Agency reported on late Saturday night (June 13) that the other three candidates, Ahmadinejad’s opponents, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, Mehdi Karoubi, and Gholam-Hossein Karbashchi, are now all under house arrest. This report adds that thirty of the journalists who write for the newspaper Etemad’eh Melli (National Trust), owned by Karoubi, are all now also under arrest.

There are unconfirmed (via StopAhmadi Twitter feed) that there are tanks on the streets of Tehran. Please add the appropriate amount of salt to that. One of the benefits of local reports is immediacy, while confirmation can be an issue.

The White House is taking a wait and see approach, which in fairness is about all they can do.

We've been hearing for years about the need for the people of Iran to change their government and how much the US should support dissidents. Well, here's their chance. Are the people of Iran able to change the course of their country or will the regime beat them back? Also, the last time the Iranian people overthrew a government, things didn't turn out so well.

While everyone seems to be pinning their hopes on Mousavi as a moderate and reformer, it's helpful to remember that he was Prime Minister under Ayatollah Khomeini.

From Commentary:

The Bright Side of Ahamdinejad’s “Win”

MAX BOOT - 06.14.2009 - 12:57 PM

On the principle of “the worse the better” for our enemies–and, make no mistake, Iran is our enemy–it is possible to take some small degree of satisfaction from the outcome of Iran’s elections.

If the mullahs were really canny, they would have let Mousavi win. He would have presented a more reasonable face to the world without changing the grim underlying realities of Iran’s regime–the oppression, the support for terrorism, the nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. He is the kind of “moderate” with whom the Obama administration could happily engage in endless negotiations which probably would not accomplish anything except to buy time for Iran to weaponize its fissile material.

But instead it appears that the mullahocracy was determined to anoint Ahmadinejad the winner–and by a margin which no one can take seriously as a true representation of Iranian popular will. Ahmadinejad is about the worst spokesman possible to make Iran’s case to the West–a president who denies the Holocaust, calls for Israel’s eradication, claims there are no homosexuals in Iran, and generally comes off like a denizen of an alternative universe. Even the Obama administration will be hard put to enter into serious negotiations with Ahmadinejad, especially when his scant credibility has been undermined by these utterly fraudulent elections and the resulting street protests.

That doesn’t mean that Obama won’t try–but he will have a lot less patience with Ahmadinejad than he would have had with Mousavi. And that in turn means there is a greater probability that eventually Obama may do something serious to stop the Iranian nuclear program–whether by embargoing Iranian refined-petroleum imports or by tacitly giving the go-ahead to Israel to attack its nuclear installations.

So in an odd sort of way a win for Ahmadinejad is also a win for those of us who are seriously alarmed about Iranian capabilities and intentions. With crazy Mahmoud in office–and his patron, Ayatollah Khameini, looming in the background–it will be harder for Iranian apologists to deny the reality of this terrorist regime.

From Hot Air:

In which Christiane Amanpour singlehandedly earns back some of the credibility lost inCNN’s news vacuum last night. There’s a print article about this at CNN.com too but the clip really must be seen to be believed. I can’t tell if it’s just a poor translation or a particularly eccentric example of Ahmadine-speak, but he’s so disjointed as to be almost incoherent. In fact, between this and his surreal dismissal of the growing street protests as“not important,” I wonder if the strain’s made him go goofy. Steve Clemons’s Iranian source predicted that Dinnerjacket would try to have Mousavi and Rafsanjani killed, but it’s one thing to eliminate your opponents and another thing to taunt millions of their outraged supporters by hinting about it on TV. Is this nut trying to provoke a civil war or has he finally gone completely around the bend?

I’m doing my best to stay on top of the Iran story in Headlines — the very latest is Mousavi formally calling for the election results to be voided — but honestly, it’s moving too fast even for that format. Your best bet is Twitter; see, e.g., this report of Arabic-speaking Iranian security forces now on patrol, the first of its kind that I’ve spotted anywhere. If you don’t want to sign up and follow the dispatches from Iranians in the streets, that’s okay: Just go here and keep refreshing or, if you’d rather have updates streamed to you, go toTwitterfall and check the box for #iranelection in the left-hand sidebar. (If it isn’t there when you read this, type #iranelection in the custom field and check the box there.) If you’re already on Twitter and looking for Iranians to follow, I recommendChange_for_Iran, StopAhmadi, iran09, TehranBureau, alirezasha, and jimsciuttoABC. There are others, of course; if you know of any good ones, share in the comments.

Before you watch, ponder a good question asked by a commenter in Headlines: Why is Khamenei so invested in an Ahmadinejad victory, especially if, as we’re forever being told, he holds the ultimate power to set policy in Iran? Mousavi’s no secularist or squish; he’s basically Ahmadinejad lite, duly vetted and approved by Iran’s Guardian Council as Islamic enough to lead the country. The New Yorker theorizes that Khamenei got nervous about how much youth support Mousavi was getting and decided to torpedo him lest he bring some fundie version of Hopenchange to the presidency. But why would Khamenei worry about that when the regime did such an effective job of containing Khatami’s reformist agenda 10 years ago? The safe play would have been to appease the kids by crowning Mousavi the winner, enacting a few token reforms, and then muddling along with the nuke kabuki until they have the bomb. Instead, he validated an electoral sham so brazen that it has the country inching towards revolution. Why? Occam’s Razor suggests that this is atrue coup, with Ahmadinejad rigging the results himself and then somehow forcing Khamenei to bless them. But how could he manage that? What’s really going on here?

Exit question: How soon before Hezbollah and Hamas are ordered to attack Israel to distract the Iranian masses?