The case of Edward J. Snowden raises a number of difficult issues for the United States.  The case impacts on Washington’s foreign policy and on US domestic politics.  The decline of American representative democracy is now sharply in focus.

Americans naturally want appropriate and necessary capabilities to defend our country but we do not want such capabilities turned on ourselves in violation of the US Constitution.

The impact on domestic US politics is squarely on issues of constitutional law.  Already the watchdog American Civil Liberties Union filed a court case against the government as a result of Snowden’s revelations.

Critics are outraged by what they see as White House lying about possibly illegal domestic surveillance activity.  There is further outrage over the recent congressional testimony of the head of the National Security Agency and the head of the US intelligence community.  Critics say these two men committed perjury by lying to Congress and that is a high crime.

In the US system governed by our unique constitution, the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers is a fundamental core value. It is based on ancient principles found in Greco-Roman tradition as well as in European parliamentary tradition.

The construction of the “imperial presidency” and distortion of the separation of powers increased during the Cold War.  Today, it is evident that US constitutional democracy is in deep decline reflecting not only the disintegration of the rule of law but also reflecting the disintegration of American civic culture.

From massive NSA spying, to IRS targeting of the administration’s political opponents, to collection and sharing of our health care information as part of Obamacare, it seems every day we learn of another assault on our privacy. Sadly, this week the Senate took another significant, if little-noticed, step toward creating an authoritarian surveillance state. Buried in the immigration bill is a national identification system called mandatory E-Verify.

The Senate did not spend much time discussing E-Verify, and what little discussion took place was mostly bipartisan praise for its effectiveness as a tool for preventing illegal immigrants from obtaining employment. It is a tragedy that mandatory E-Verify is not receiving more attention, as it will impact nearly every American’s privacy and liberty.

The mandatory E-Verify system requires Americans to carry a “tamper-proof” social security card. Before they can legally begin a job, American citizens will have to show the card to their prospective employer, who will then have to verify their identity and eligibility to hold a job in the US by running the information through the newly-created federal E-Verify database. The database will contain photographs taken from passport files and state driver’s licenses. The law gives federal bureaucrats broad discretion in adding other “biometric” identifiers to the database. It also gives the bureaucracy broad authority to determine what features the “tamper proof” card should contain.

Regardless of one’s views on immigration, the idea that we should have to ask permission from the federal government before taking a job ought to be offensive to all Americans. Under this system, many Americans will be denied the opportunity for work. The E-Verify database will falsely identify thousands as “ineligible,” forcing many to lose job opportunities while challenging government computer inaccuracies. E-Verify will also impose additional compliance costs on American businesses, at a time when they are struggling with Obamacare implementation and other regulations.

According to David Bier of Competitive Enterprise Institute, there is nothing stopping the use of E-Verify for purposes unrelated to work verification, and these expanded uses could be authorized by agency rule-making or executive order. So it is not inconceivable that, should this bill pass, the day may come when you are not be able to board an airplane or exercise your second amendment rights without being run through the E-Verify database. It is not outside the realm of possibility that the personal health care information that will soon be collected by the IRS and shared with other federal agencies as part of Obamacare will also be linked to the E-Verify system.

Those who dismiss these concerns as paranoid should consider that the same charges were leveled at those who warned that the PATRIOT Act could lead to the government collecting our phone records and spying on our Internet usage. Just as the PATRIOT Act was only supposed to be used against terrorists but is now used to bypass constitutional protections in matters having noting to do with terrorism or national security, the national ID/mandatory E-Verify database will not only be used to prevent illegal immigrants from gaining employment. Instead, it will eventually be used as another tool to monitor and control the American people.

The recent revelations of the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Americans, plus recent stories of IRS targeting Tea Party and similar groups for special scrutiny, demonstrates the dangers of trusting government with this type of power. Creation of a federal database with photos and possibly other “biometric” information about American citizens is a great leap forward for the surveillance state. All Americans who still care about limited government and individual liberty should strongly oppose E-Verify.

RPI Founder and Chairman Ron Paul is interviewed by RPI Board member Lew Rockwell on war, peace, and the neo con domination of US foreign policy.

Listen to the interview here.

The Egypt experiment is falling apart. The crisis point may be reached as early as tomorrow, June 30th, when massive demonstrations are expected to rock the rule of Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. It has been a slow-motion disintegration from the begining, however.

US-backed liberal Egyptians took to Tahrir Square in 2011, trained by the State Department to mobilize masses through social media to overthrow Mubarak rule. Their success resulted in their being shunted aside in favor of the real power in Egypt, post-Mubarak: the Muslim Brotherhood and the military.

Since then, contrary to US government predictions, democracy and freedom has not broken out bringing with it economic prosperity and social harmony. History teaches us that revolutions are not as simplistic and binary (bad out, good in) as their supporters would like us to believe. The Egyptian economy, dependent on tourism, has been in free-fall since the unrest, leading to deep layers of resentment in those who were told that overthrowing Mubarak would bring economic growth.

Why did the US support both the position (Mubarak) and the opposition (April 6 Movement, Kifaya, etc.)? It is not as uncommon as it might seem. Mubarak’s sclerotic rule was coming to an end anyway, Egypt’s population was young and frustrated, and though the US did not necessarily wish to spoil its relationship with the Egyptian dictator it did seek maximum influence on the coming succession struggles.

Additionally, as Mubarak explains in an interview this month, he was proving an irritation to the US over his refusal to allow permanent US military installations in Egypt and his refusal to allow the US to “help” with establishing a communications network in Egypt.

Said Mubarak this month:

“[Late defense minister Abdelhalim] Abu Ghazleh came once to me and said the Americans requested to build a base here and I agreed. I told him: You have no authority to approve that and neither do I. You don’t own (Egypt) and neither do I.

“When I later met with the then-U.S. Secretary of Defense during an official visit to the U.S., he told me Abu Ghazleh approved establishing a military base. I told him the Egyptian constitution allows neither Abu Ghazleh nor me to approve that. Such an issue requires the approval of the parliament, and even if the latter approves, a popular referendum is required. I ended the subject there. They have more than once requested establishing bases in West Cairo and Burj al-Arab. They wanted bases at any expense.”

Mubarak also stated that the U.S. had attempted to assert control over Egypt’s communications systems.

“Then they wanted to establish an electronic network for the armed forces. This is of course so Israel and America monitor [the armed forces]. I told the defense minister to make them forget about it. But they returned later wanting to connect all Cairo central terminals with Ramsis’, and they actually agreed on that with the telecommunications minister.”

Mubarak said that he was informed of the American plan by the armed forces and realized that such a plan, if carried out, would allow the U.S. to paralyze all communications in Egypt.

“This means that when work at Ramsi’s central terminal stops, all communications in Egypt stop. I summoned the telecommunications minister and told him: ‘So in this case, any phone call made passes through Ramsis central.’ He said the Americans will do this for free.’ I told him: ‘Don’t you dare approve that. He said that the Americans had already connected Giza’s central terminal with Ramsi’s. So I told him to just obstruct the plan at this point.”

It is easy to dismiss this interview as the revisionist mutterings of a former US concubine tossed aside in favor of a more youthful suitor. But considering revelations about US/UK spying not just in far flung areas but even in the heart of Europe, suddenly such claims seem less far-fetched. And reports that the US military is deploying to Egypt suggest its new rulers may welcome a bit more foreign muscle to keep unrest from becoming too threatening.

Unrest is reaching a crisis point, though. Clerics are warning of a civil war. And the US is worried. In Africa, President Obama has expressed concerns over the increasing likelihood of major violence and has taken steps to protect the US Embassy in Cairo.

Tomorrow’s protests will pit various factions against each other, including the reformists, Morsi’s Islamists, and the increasingly restive military. The stakes could not be higher.

When Egypt falls apart completely, which is likely, the result will be even more chaos, economic collapse, and bloodshed. Blame will be apportioned to the rulers, the opposition, the military, the Mubarak-era decay, the economy. All have a role, to be sure. But what we will not see, particularly in the US mainstream media, is the blame that should be laid at the foot of a decades-long wrongheaded US foreign policy, which props up one corrupt regime, finances armies of regime-change specialist NGOs, switches sides, calls a revolution in the streets “democracy”, and looks on seemingly-puzzled at the dislocated and desperate society left in its wake. The role of US interventionism in the destruction will not be raised in the US media or by US politicians pretending to seek answers. Interventionism can never be blamed because…well…we meant well.

Copyright © 2013, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted provided full credit is given and a live link provided.

I am reading the heartbreaking suicide note of Daniel Somers, a US combat veteran who spent several years fighting in Iraq. Mr. Somers was only 30 years old when he took his own life, after being tormented by the horrific memories of what he experienced in Iraq.  He wrote:

“The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from.”

Many who shout the loudest that we must “support the troops” urge sending them off to unwinnable and undeclared wars in which there is no legitimate US interest. The US military has been abused by those who see military force as a first resort rather than the last resort and only in self-defense. This abuse has resulted in a generation of American veterans facing a life sentence in the prison of tortured and deeply damaged minds as well as broken bodies.

The numbers sadly tell the story: more military suicides than combat deaths in 2012, some 22 military veterans take their lives every day, nearly 30 percent of veterans treated by the VA have PTSD.

We should be saddened but not shocked when we see the broken men and women return from battles overseas. We should be angry with those who send them to suffer and die in unnecessary wars. We should be angry with those who send them to kill so many people overseas for no purpose whatsoever. We should be afraid of the consequences of such a foolish and dangerous foreign policy. We should demand an end to the abuse of military members and a return to a foreign policy that promotes peace and prosperity instead of war and poverty.

Copyright © 2013, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted provided full credit is given and a live link provided.

Last week the Taliban opened an office in Doha, Qatar with the US government’s blessing. They raised the Taliban flag at the opening ceremony and referred to Afghanistan as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”—the name they used when they were in charge before the US attack in 2001.

The US had meant for the Taliban office in Doha to be only a venue for a new round of talks on an end to the war in Afghanistan. The Taliban opening looked very much like a government in exile. The Karzai government was annoyed that the US and the Taliban had scheduled talks without even notifying Kabul. Karzai’s government felt as irrelevant to negotiations on post-war Afghanistan as they soon will be on the ground. It seemed strangely like Paris in 1968, where the US met with North Vietnamese representatives to negotiate a way out of that war, which claimed nearly 60,000 Americans and many times that number of Vietnamese lives.

For years many of us had argued the need to get out of Afghanistan. To end the fighting, the dying, the destruction, the nation-building. To end the foolish fantasy that we were building a Western-style democracy there. We cannot leave, we were told for all those years. If we leave Afghanistan now, the Taliban will come back! Well guess what, after 12 years, trillions of dollars, more than 2,200 Americans killed, and perhaps more than 50,000 dead Afghan civilians and fighters, the Taliban is coming back anyway!

The long US war in Afghanistan never made any sense in the first place. The Taliban did not attack the US on 9/11. The Authorization for the use of force that we passed after the attacks of 9/11 said nothing about a decade-long occupation of Afghanistan. But unfortunately two US presidents have taken it to mean that they could make war anywhere at any time they please. Congress, as usual, did nothing to rein in the president, although several Members tried to repeal the authorization.

Afghanistan brought the Soviet Union to its knees. We learned nothing from it.

We left Iraq after a decade of fighting and the country is in far worse shape than when we attacked in 2003. After trillions of dollars wasted and tens of thousands of lives lost, Iraq is a devastated, desperate, and violent place with a presence of al Qaeda. No one in his right mind speaks of a US victory in Iraq these days. We learned nothing from it.

We are leaving Afghanistan after 12 years with nothing to show for it but trillions of dollars wasted and thousands of lives lost. Afghanistan is a devastated country with a weak, puppet government—and now we negotiate with those very people we fought for those 12 years, who are preparing to return to power! Still we learn nothing.

Instead of learning from these disasters brought about by the interventionists and their failed foreign policy, the president is now telling us that we have to go into Syria!

US Army Col. Harry Summers told a story about a meeting he had with a North Vietnamese colonel named Tu while he visiting Hanoi in 1975. At the meeting, Col. Summers told Tu, “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield.” Tu paused for a moment, then replied, “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”

Sadly, that is the story of our foreign policy. We have attacked at least five countries since 9/11. We have launched drones against many more. We have deposed several dictators and destroyed several foreign armies. But, looking around at what has been achieved, it is clear: it is all irrelevant.

Today we learned from the Guardian newspaper that Federal judges and Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on an NSA request to make use of information it “inadvertently” collected on Americans without a warrant. According to the paper, the NSA was given permission to retain our intercepted information for a broad and vaguely defined variety of reasons, including “if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity.” That could cover almost anything.

This revelation suggests that the president was not telling the truth recently when he assured us that “nobody is listening to your phone calls.” Not only is someone listening, but they have been given secret permission to keep the information they collected for future use against us!

When the White House and Congressional leaders were pressuring Members into voting for the PATRIOT Act and the FISA Amendments, they assured Congress that Americans would not be targeted. The skeptics who voiced concerns about the unconstitutionality of the measures were said to be over-reacting. But as many of us suspected at the time, they were not being honest. Does it make any difference whether the information collected on us without a warrant and kept for future use was the result of “targeted” or “inadvertent” collection?

The Administration and Congress is angry over recent revelations of the full extent of the US government spying on its citizens not because it threatens national security, but because they expose the morally indefensible actions of police state tactics in what is supposed to be a society under the rule of law.

Copyright 2013, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Article may be freely reproduced in whole or in part provided full credit is given and a live link provided.

Remember the Sequester? Remember the Administration threatening the end of the world if the phony “cuts” (which were actually just decreases in future spending increases) came into effect? Remember the cuts to Air Traffic Controllers while we were told “good luck” on our flights? Remember the cuts to TSA agents while we were told to enjoy our two hour wait in line to be groped or irradiated?

So now we find out that not only has the president found the money to start a new war in Syria, but also to embark upon his own $100 million African safari at our expense!

As USA Today reports, Obama’s African adventure will include:

“Military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet­proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts, giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace, so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.

So the big ticket items are exempt from cuts, while maximum pain is being inflicted upon Americans under the guise of the Sequester. That is how Washington works.

Declan McCullagh at cnet.com reports on Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s revelation that the United States executive branch has admitted in a secret briefing to Members of the US House of Representatives that a US government analyst can listen to phone calls at his own discretion without any warrant or other authorization. McCullagh’s dense article, well worth a close read, proceeds to explain that this means “thousands of low-ranking analysts” probably can unilaterally decide to snoop on the contents of email, text, and instant messages as well. McCullagh also addresses the enormity of the mass spying operation and its capabilities.

Nadler’s revelation directly contradicts President Barack Obama’s emphatic denials earlier this month:

When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls.  That’s not what this program is about.  As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.  They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.  But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.  If these folks — if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.

So I want to be very clear — some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so — nobody is listening to the content of people’s phone calls.  This program, by the way, is fully overseen not just by Congress, but by the FISA Court — a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them, and that it’s being carried out consistent with the Constitution and rule of law.

And so, not only does that court authorize the initial gathering of data, but — I want to repeat — if anybody in government wanted to go further than just that top-line data and want to, for example, listen to Jackie Calmes’ phone call, they would have to go back to a federal judge and indicate why, in fact, they were doing further probing.

Now, with respect to the Internet and emails — this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.  And again, in this instance, not only is Congress fully apprised of it, but what is also true is that the FISA Court has to authorize it.

Obama’s claims that only metadata was collected, that the program was fully overseen by Congress, and that content of phone calls and Internet communications could only be obtained via FISA court authorization was repeated approvingly by ardent defenders of the mass spying program.

Even if Obama’s claims had been true, they provided little assurance that the spying program is not dramatically infringing on our privacy.

First, metadata of our phone calls and Internet communications, rather than being trivial, does provide very detailed information about our personal lives. Jay Stanley and Ben Wizner’s concise article at Reuters laying out the revealing nature of metadata begins with the following observation:

In the wake of The Guardian’s remarkable revelation Wednesday that the National Security Agency is collecting phone records from millions of Americans, defenders of this dragnet surveillance program are insisting that the intelligence agency isn’t eavesdropping on the calls – it’s just scooping up “metadata.” The implication is that civil liberties complaints about Orwellian surveillance tactics are overblown.

But any suggestion that Americans have nothing to worry about from this dragnet collection of communications metadata is wrong. Even without intercepting the content of communications, the government can use metadata to learn our most intimate secrets – anything from whether we have a drinking problem to whether we’re gay or straight. The suggestion that metadata is “no big deal” – a view that, regrettably, is still reflected in the law – is entirely out of step with the reality of modern communications.

Second, keeping Congress apprised of the mass spying program provides little extra protection. As Nadler’s revelation indicates, not all Members of Congress had been fully informed about the mass spying program. Indeed, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper even claimed, in response to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden, that the National Security Agency was not intentionally collecting any kind of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. Yet, even if all members of Congress had been fully informed of the program, that would provide little consolation. Congress is capable of supporting bad programs and doing so for decades. In fact, the highest ranking Democrat and Republican Senators on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reacted to the revelation of the FISA court order for Verizon to give over to the US government information concerning its millions of customers’ phone conversations by quickly preparing a joint press conference to unequivocally defend the mass spying program.

Third, while Nadler’s revelation indicates FISA court approval is not required to snoop on the contents of Americans’ private communications, requiring such approval would likely provide little to no protection. The secretive FISA court last year failed to deny any of 1,789 applications for monitoring electronic communications.

The US government’s mass spying program would be a horrendous abuse of power even if it were draped in a shoddy coat of legitimacy as President Obama described it. Nadler’s new revelation confirms the suspicions of critical observers and the warnings of whistle-blowers that the program is even worse.

President Obama announced late last week that the US intelligence community had just determined that the Syrian government had used poison gas on a small scale, killing some 100 people in a civil conflict that has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. Because of this use of gas, the president claimed, Syria had crossed his “red line” and the US must begin to arm the rebels fighting to overthrow the Syrian government.

Setting aside the question of why 100 killed by gas is somehow more important than 99,900 killed by other means, the fact is his above explanation is full of holes. The Washington Post reported last week that the decision to overtly arm the Syrian rebels was made “weeks ago” – in other words, it was made at a time when the intelligence community did not believe “with high confidence” that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons.

Further, this plan to transfer weapons to the Syrian rebels had become policy much earlier than that, as the Washington Post reported that the CIA had expanded over the past year its secret bases in Jordan to prepare for the transfer of weapons to the rebels in Syria.

The process was identical to the massive deception campaign that led us into the Iraq war. Remember the famous quote from the leaked “Downing Street Memo,” where representatives of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration discussed Washington’s push for war on Iraq?

Here the head of British intelligence was reporting back to his government after a trip to Washington in the summer of 2002:

“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

That is exactly what the Obama Administration is doing with Syria: fixing the intelligence and facts around the already determined policy. And Congress just goes along, just as they did the last time.

We found out shortly after the Iraq war started that the facts and intelligence being fixed around the policy were nothing but lies put forth by the neo-con warmongers and the paid informants, like the infamous and admitted liar known as “Curveball.” But we seem to have learned nothing from being fooled before.

So Obama now plans to send even more weapons to the Syrian rebels even though his administration is aware that the main rebel factions have pledged their loyalty to al-Qaeda. Does anyone else see the irony? After 12 years of the “war on terror” and the struggle against al-Qaeda, the US decided to provide weapons to the allies of al-Qaeda. Does anyone really think this is a good idea?

The Obama administration promises us that this is to be a very limited operation, providing small arms only, with no plans for a no-fly zone or American boots on the ground. That sounds an awful lot like how Vietnam started. Just a few advisors. When these few small arms do not achieve the pre-determined US policy of regime change in Syria what is the administration going to do? Admit failure and pull the troops out, or escalate? History suggests the answer and it now appears to be repeating itself once again.

The president has opened a can of worms that will destroy his presidency and possibly destroy this country. Another multi-billion dollar war has begun.

The United States’ perennially mistaken Iran “experts” are already spinning Hassan Rouhani’s victory in Iran’s presidential election as a clear proof of the Islamic Republic’s ongoing implosion. In fact, Rouhani’s success sends a very different message: it is well past time for the US to come to terms with the reality of a stable and politically dynamic Islamic Republic of Iran.

Three days before the election, we warned that US and expatriate Iranian pundits were confidently but wrongly positing how Iran’s election process would “be manipulated to produce a winner chosen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei – a “selection rather than an election” – consolidating Khamenei’s dictatorial hold over Iranian politics”. Many, like the Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney, identified nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili as Khamenei’s “anointed” candidate; the Washington Post declared that Rouhani “will not be allowed to win”.

By contrast, we held that Iran was “in the final days of a real contest”, during which candidates had “broad and regular access to national media”, had “advertised and held campaign events”, and had “participated in three nationally televised (and widely watched) debates”. The election “will surprise America’s so-called Iran ‘experts’,” we wrote, for the winner will emerge “because he earned the requisite degree of electoral support, not because he was ‘annointed’”.

The real contest

Rouhani’s victory demonstrates that the election was a real contest, and that the perceived quality of candidates’ campaigns mattered greatly in many Iranians’ decisions for whom to vote. In the end, most Iranians seemed to believe – and acted as if they believed – that they had a meaningful choice to make. Besides the presidential ballot, Iranians voted for more than 200,000 local and municipal council seats – with more than 800,000 candidates standing for those seats – a “detail” never mentioned by those constantly deriding the Islamic Republic’s “dictatorship”.

Certainly, Western “experts” were wrong that former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s disqualification had driven Iranians into a state of political alienation and apathy. Rafsanjani is, at this point, not a popular figure for many Iranians; he almost certainly would have lost had he been on this year’s ballot. Rafsanjani’s sidelining was a necessary condition for the rise of Rouhani, a Rafsanjani protege.

More broadly, Rafsanjani’s dream has been to build a pragmatic centre in Iranian politics, eschewing “extremes” of both conservatives – or “principlists”, as they are called in Iran – and reformists. Instead, he has antagonised both camps without creating an enduring constituency committed to a centrist vision.

The election of Rouhani – the only cleric on the ballot, who campaigned against “extremism” in all forms and was endorsed by Rafsanjani – may contribute more to realising Rafsanjani’s dream than another unsuccessful Rafsanjani presidential bid.

Going into the campaign, Rouhani’s biggest weakness was foreign policy; in 2003-05, during Rouhani’s tenure as chief nuclear negotiator, Tehran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment for nearly two years, but got nothing from Western powers in return. In fact, criticism of Rouhani’s negotiating approach was an important factor in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s first election to the presidency in 2005.

During this year’s campaign, Rouhani effectively addressed this potential vulnerability, arguing that his approach allowed Iran to avoid sanctions while laying the ground for the subsequent development in its nuclear infrastructure. Moreover, Rouhani’s campaign video included praise from armed forces chief of staff General Seyed Hassan Firouzabadi, which bolstered Rouhani’s perceived credibility on security issues.

In the week between the third candidates’ debate – on foreign policy – and election day, polls showed with accumulating clarity that Rouhani was building the strongest momentum of any candidate, along with Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf – who came in second, and whom we flagged two days before the vote as a likely contender with Rouhani in a second-round runoff.

By election day, polls showed Rouhani pulling ahead of Qalibaf and his other opponents – a sharp contrast to Iran’s 2009 presidential election, when no methodologically sound poll ever showed former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi ahead of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Key to Rouhani’s success was his ability to forge coalitions, especially with reformists. Rouhani is not himself a reformist. He belongs to the Society of Combatant Clergy, the conservative antipode to the Assembly of Combatant Clerics founded by Mohammad Khatami – who became Iran’s first reformist president in 1997 – and other reform-minded clerics. Overall, Rouhani’s share of the vote was higher in small towns and villages, where people are more conservative, than in larger cities – largely because he is a cleric.

The real reformist on this year’s ballot was Mohammad Reza Aref, who served as Khatami’s first vice-president. Aref, however, proved a lacklustre candidate and attracted little popular support. Other reformists pressed him to quit after the final candidates’ debate, which freed Khatami to endorse Rouhani. While reformists were not the core of Rouhani’s electoral base, their votes were crucial to getting him over the 50 percent threshold.

Iran’s 2013 presidential election also confirms a point we have been making for four years – that, contrary to Western conventional wisdom, no hard evidence has been put forward showing that Iran’s 2009 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad won re-election over Mousavi and two other opponents, was “stolen”.

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