Right now I desperately wish I were in Iran. It’s a great story with the whiff of history.

It’s impossible to be sure, but Ahmadinejad’s victory looks extraordinarily suspicious. If he won by that margin, he would be the most popular Iranian president ever — which he certainly isn’t. And it seems exceptionally unlikely that he won in Moussavi’s hometown, as the government claims. That’s the problem with dictators — they don’t just try to steal a squeaker of an election, they try to steal a landslide. In the process they lose plausibility and legitimacy.

Gary Sick has an excellent analysis on his blog. He calls it “Iran’s Political Coup,” and many Iranians see it that way, too. Indeed, Wikipedia’s entry on military coups was altered to include June 13, 2009 as the Iranian coup, as gleeful Iranians immediately pointed out. Gary writes:

The willingness of the regime simply to ignore reality and fabricate election results without the slightest effort to conceal the fraud represents a historic shift in Iran’s Islamic revolution. All previous leaders at least paid lip service to the voice of the Iranian people. This suggests that Iran’s leaders are aware of the fact that they have lost credibility in the eyes of many (most?) of their countrymen, so they are dispensing with even the pretense of popular legitimacy in favor of raw power…. However this turns out, it is a historic turning point in the 30-year history of Iran’s Islamic revolution. Iranians have never forgotten the external political intervention that thwarted their democratic aspirations in 1953. How will they remember this day?

It will be fascinating to see how forcefully the government is challenged by students, the losing candidates and prominent figures like Rafsanjani. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is older and less credible now than ever, and less able to award legitimacy. But at the end of the day, as I saw at Tiananmen 20 years ago, when Might and Right do battle, it’s often prudent to bet on Might, at least in the short run. It’s interesting that the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has specifically warned of the risk of a “Tehran Tiananmen.”

It has been several years since I was last in Iran, and I want to get back. Last year I had trouble getting a visa, but I’ll try again.