At Least Bellicosity Gets Results
THE RECENT Iranian presidential elections were a triumph for the principle of one man, one vote. And the man with the vote this time, as always, was the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran’s new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may well be the choice of the urban poor, the anti-sleaze candidate and the favourite of the military. But ultimately, he’s the winner because he’s also the guy who did best with one key demographic — bearded sixtysomething clerics called Ali who enjoy wielding supreme power within theocratic republics.
Even before the first vote was cast, a thousand potential presidential candidates were barred from running by the state’s Guardian Council, itself hand-picked by Ayatollah Khamenei. The two rounds of voting that Iran just held were charades, Potemkin exercises designed to give the outside world the illusion that the Islamic Republic could hold an open election and sustain the lie that its leaders enjoy popular backing.
The television pictures of voters queueing to get to the polls were taken from previous elections, the polling stations themselves were policed by fundamentalist militias, ballot papers were held in reserve to ensure the vote went the prescribed way and the figures eventually announced were manufactured in a fashion that would have brought a tear to the eye of Saddam himself.
Finally!
Before 2004 the Iranian leadership had allowed figures to emerge who were portrayed as reformists, such as former President Mohammad Khatami. He was sold to the West, and indeed to Iranian democrats, as a moderniser. His election was designed to lure the West into a policy of conciliation rather than confrontation with the Islamic Republic, while mollifying growing popular demands within Iran for regime change. Having succeeded in embroiling the EU’s foreign ministers in negotiation (Jack Straw has been to Tehran more than any other foreign capital apart from Brussels and Washington) Iran then proceeded to see just how robust the Europeans were prepared to be. They escalated their rhetoric against Israel, calling for the state’s annihilation, escalated their nuclear programme in defiance of every international agreement, and they escalated their own campaign of repression, imprisoning democrats, torturing them and releasing them on “medical leave” so families could see the horrific price to be paid for dissent.
Not only did Iran pay no price for this behaviour, it continued to enjoy the EU’s flattering attentions, not least because European leaders were desperate to show that their softly-softly negotiation could be more successful in the Middle East than American “bellicosity”. The biggest victims of this process have been the democratic Iranian opposition, who have been rewarded for their bravery in standing up to fundamentalism by seeing their oppressors indulged by the EU. The Iranian regime’s decision now to select a President who does not even make a pretence of being “reformist” is designed to crush the spirit of the reform movement, by indicating that the regime no longer feels the need to make even cosmetic concessions. And its also designed to exploit the constitutional weakness of Europeans who do not have the will to hold Iran to account, as well as the apparent weakness of a US President judged to lack the political capital to deal with Iraq and Iran at the same time.
Lovely. Like a fiiddle.
Update:
LGF - From Hostage-Taker to President
Brian Nichols was born in the wrong country.
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