Wow. This could be the worst article the New York Times has produced since Judy Miller and Billy Safire retired. And it has Bill Keller’s byline on it. In fact, it is so bad that it has me a little concerned that the Establishment in this country is thinking like Max Boot.

Let’s start with the headline: Iran’s Leader Emerges With a Stronger Hand. That’s wrong for two reasons. Ahmedinejad isn’t Iran’s leader (that would be the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini) and there is no way that he has emerged from the election in a stronger position than he entered them. He hasn’t been declared the loser of the election, but no one believes that he won the election or that his second-term (if he survives to serve it) will have the slightest shred of legitimacy.

But the headline is the least of the problems with this article. Look at the lede:

Whether his 63 percent victory is truly the will of the people or the result of fraud, it demonstrated that Mr. Ahmadinejad is the shrewd and ruthless front man for a clerical, military and political elite that is more unified and emboldened than at any time since the 1979 revolution.

The clerical elite is more unified? In what way? According to the Tehran Bureau, it doesn’t sound like there is any unity in Qom:

Mir Hossein Mousavi’s, the main reformist rival to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, letter to the important ayatollahs in the holy city of Qom, asking them to protest the fraud and declare it against Islam, has sparked protests by the ayatollahs and clerics as well.

The Association of Combatant Clerics, which consists of moderate and leftist clerics and includes such important figures as former president Mohammad Khatami, Ayatollah Mohammad Mousavi Khoiniha, and Grand Ayatollah Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardabili, issued a strongly-worded statement, calling the results of the election invalid.

Grand Ayatollah Saafi Golpaygaani, an important cleric with a large number of followers, warned about the election results and the importance that elections in Iran retain their integrity.

Grand Ayatollah Yousef Saanei, a progressive cleric and a confidante of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, has declared that Mr. Ahmadinejad is not the legitimate president and cooperation with him, as well as working for him, are haraam (against Islam and a great sin). He has also declared that any changes in the votes by unlawful means are also haraam. Several credible reports indicate that he has traveled to Tehran in order to participate in nationwide protests scheduled for Monday (June 18). It is said that he has planned a sit-in in some public place, in order to further protest election fraud. His website has been blocked.

Credible reports also indicate that security forces have surrounded the offices and homes of several other important ayatollahs who are believed to want to protest election fraud. Their websites cannot be accessed, and all communications with them have been cut off.

The nation is waiting to hear the views of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the most important ayatollah living in Iran and the strongest clerical critic of the conservatives. He has been asked to issue a clear statement, explaining his views about the election fraud.

As for the political elite, three out of the four permitted candidates for the presidency (i.e., the representatives of that elite) do not accept the legitimacy of the election. The most conservative candidate, who used to head the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, had this to say:

Mohsen Rezai, a former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who had fought the election as a conservative, entered the fray late yesterday, writing to the guardian council questioning his official total of less than a million votes.

“According to my election headquarters and my experts, in a worst-case scenario I should have had between 3.5 and 7 million votes,” he said in a letter posted on his official website.

Do you think the security forces are united? Does the Times have anyone doing any reporting?

Keller goes on:

As president, Mr. Ahmadinejad is subordinate to the country’s true authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who commands final say over all matters of state and faith. With this election, Mr. Khamenei and his protégé appear to have neutralized for now the reform forces that they saw as a threat to their power, political analysts said.

How do you neutralize the reform forces by forcing hundreds of thousands of them out into the streets? Because, at 4PM Tehran time today, that’s how many Iranians are likely to be out in the streets protesting the theft of this election (permit-denial be damned).

More Keller:

With the backing of the supreme leader and the military establishment, [Ahmadinejad] has marginalized all of the major figures who represented a challenge to the vision of Iran as a permanently revolutionary Islamic state.

In many ways, his victory is the latest and perhaps final clash in a battle for power and influence that has lasted decades between Mr. Khamenei and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who, while loyal to the Islamic form of government, wanted a more pragmatic approach to the economy, international relations and social conditions at home.

I don’t think marginalized is the correct word. Maybe he will arrest them. Rafsanjani actually sits on the Council of Experts, who have the responsibility for selecting or replacing the Supreme Leader. It’s a tad bit early to be talking about ‘victory’, although ‘final clash’ is probably accurate. It’s quite amazing to peruse this article that reads like matters are already settled in Iran.

We’ve already covered the Revolutionary Guard schism, but let’s hit this next bit because it’s the second time Keller resorts to an anonymous source.

The elite Revolutionary Guards and a good part of the intelligence services “feel very much threatened by the reformist movement,” said a political analyst who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. “They feel that the reformists will open up to the West and be lenient on the nuclear issue,” he said. “It is a confrontation of two ways of thinking, the revolutionary and the internationalist. It is a question of power.”

I am going to guess that this ‘political analyst’ is not an Iranian.

I love this next part.

Since the vote was announced Saturday, Mr. Moussavi has been the hero of seething antigovernment protests in Tehran, but so far they have been contained by legions of riot police officers and hampered by a shutdown of that critical organizing tool, text-messaging. Mr. Moussavi said he was being “closely monitored” in his home, but hoped to speak at a rally on Monday.

Keller should read read his own newspaper because Twitter has replaced text-messaging.

And despite writing all of this, Keller finally gets to the key conditional clause that defines what is really going on (emphasis mine):

Unless the street protests achieve unexpected momentum, the election could cast the pro-reform classes — especially the better off and better educated — back into a state of passive disillusionment, some opposition figures said.

“I don’t think the middle class is ever going to go out and vote again,” one Moussavi supporter lamented.

Well, why would they, since the elections don’t count? But the story in Iran is that these people, these democrats, are not backing down. If Keller wants to predict that they will eventually back down, that’s fine. He could very well be right. But they haven’t backed down, yet. It looks like they’re just getting started.