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15 June 2009



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Ahmadinejad Claims Victory in Disputed Iranian Election

Iranian President Mahmoud “Madman” Ahmadinejad claimed victory in Friday's presidential election in Iran. According to elections officials, he snagged 63% of the vote, with second-place finisher Hossein Mousavi garnering just 34%. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at first backed the officials, but street protests and simple arithmetic got him to reverse his position. He has ordered the Guardian Council (the real government) to investigate charges of vote-rigging. It will be for naught, as the mullahs want President Ahmadinejad to continue in office. He is, for them, a useful idiot.

The election result is implausible for a number of reasons. First, the Interior Ministry, which administers the election, had announced several months ago that 51.2 million voters would be eligible to cast a ballot. By April, that number had dropped to 46.2 million. So, 10% of the voter were disenfranchised. Then, when votes were counted, many areas were so dedicated to democracy that more than 100% of the voters turned up. Additionally, Mr. Ahmaninejad's stronghold is rural Iran, not the cities – yet he carried the major urban areas handily.

The election was a four-way race once the 12-member Guardian Council eliminated over 4,000 candidates. Apart from the incumbent, the mullahs approved one of their own, Mehdi Karoubi, Mohsen Rezai of the Army, and a technocrat and former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi. Mr. Rezai was plain robbed as Amir Taheri writes in The Times, “Almost all the 10,000 people of Lali, a southwestern town, are relatives of Rezai, who was born there and is from the local Bakhtiari tribe. Even there Ahmadinejad was credited with a two-thirds majority. The trouble is, the original results put out on Saturday morning had shown Rezai winning in his hometown.”

However, the result isn't all that important. One must understand that Iran is structured much like the old Soviet Union. The government is merely window dressing, able to do little without the support of the Party (the mullahs). The mullahs own much of Iran, and the Revolutionary Guard is almost a state within a state. Had Messrs. Mousavi, Karoubi or Rezai been allowed to win, it would only have been with the blessings of the men in the black robes. While the comparison with Stalin and Khrushchev is probably inappropriate, the differences between the candidates does resemble the differences between Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko – precious little.

There is some good news for people of goodwill. The Iranian people aren't taking the theft of the election lying down. Protests are small but numerous, the military has felt the need to arrest students, and there has been violence from the authorities. This is good news because the mullahs might feel sufficient pressure to accept some minor compromises. There won't be a revolution in Iran, and the mullahs won't fall from power, but there is a chance that, having been caught stealing an election, the powers that be will have to walk carefully for a time.

Be that as it may, one wonders how much more civilized the country would be if it still still called itself “Persia.”

© Copyright 2009 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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