Straw Man Watch
Leverett, Leverett and Marandi Edition

Sullivan directs our attention to this by Flynt Leverett, Hillary Mann Leverett and Seyed Mohammed Marandi at Politico. They make some points worth taking seriously, but their lead-off claim is:

The proposition that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could not possibly have defeated his principal challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has become a sacred cow for virtually all mainstream commentary about Iran in the United States.

Personally, I haven't heard anyone say that Ahmadinejad "could not possibly have defeated...Mousavi." Far from being a "sacred cow," this claim is not even on the screen so far as I can tell. I thought the conventional wisdom was that Ahmadinejad probably did get more votes, but that there are anomalies in the data that suggest "electoral irregularities." I was under the impression that the issue wasn't so much who got more (legitimate) votes, but, rather, whether there was fraud. Someone can get more legitimate votes, and still pull shenanigans--some of which can make an election illegitimate. (Too bad we didn't care as much about fair process during the recount (or almost-recount) debacle of 2000; if we had, the world would might very well have been spared the disaster of the Bush years. But we were happy to allow ourselves to be railroaded into a Bush presidency. On most ways of counting ballots, he won. But it's not clear that the election was legitimate, given that the recount was stopped on the basis of patently fallacious arguments by the SCOTUS majority.)

The authors go on to make some interesting points, for example offering the following explanation for the fact that in 50 towns there were more ballots than legal voters:

But this is not unusual: Iranian citizens may vote in presidential elections anywhere in the country. Since the election took place on the Iranian weekend, many people had left their homes for their hometowns and villages and cast their votes there. Thus, in some places, the number of votes exceeded the number of resident, eligible voters.

So that's interesting.

Too bad, though, that the piece leads off with a straw man and ignores what I take to be the real issue.