Juan Cole on Iranian Elections

As always, it is going to take some time to piece all of the evidence together. Fortunately, we have Juan Cole, one of the best middle eastern experts, to help give us some insight into what we know so far.

Here is a short clip from Cole's excellent post, which I encourage everyone to read:

I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation.

But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene.