One forgets that every country has their own version of the right. And despite the efforts of our right wing nutcases to align liberals and those on the left with Iran’s hard line conservative regime, the truth is that many hard core Fundamentalist Christians would be thrilled if they held the kind of power that the ultra-conservative Imams do in Iran. The only beef they really have is with the dogma of Islam. The power to impose their own brand of religion, and the imposition of laws based on a holy book (in the case of our fundies, the Bible) which deny women, gays and other minorities basic human rights would be exactly the sort of thing our most extreme right wing Christian fundamentalists would kill for.
So, it is regrettable that it appears the ruling mullahs in Iran and the radical conservatives who backed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appear to have rigged the election and have now declared a massive electoral victory by Ahmadinejad against his more moderate opponent, Hossein Mousavi, according to this report by McClatchy:
Iran’s government announced an overwhelming re-election victory Saturday for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but his chief opponent called the results a fraud and confrontations broke out between students and security forces.
Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli said Ahmadinejad won more than 62 percent of the vote, or about 24 million ballots, compared with about 34 percent for former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, his principal challenger and a relative moderate who attracted intense support from many young people.
Mousavi, his advisers and his supporters called the election a fraud.
“They cheated and rigged the election,” Saeed Laylaz, a prominent reform economist and adviser to Mousavi, said by telephone.
I might have believed a narrow victory by Ahmadinejad was legitimate, but a margin of 2 to 1 in his favor is preposterous on its face. Mousavi had attracted massive crowds to his rallies in the larger urban areas, such as in Tehran, and I simply find it impossible to believe that he garnered only 34% of the vote unless massive vote fraud occurred. As the McClatchy report indicates, there are already scattered reports of protests and confrontations with police and Mousavi supporters. A description of those protests and police clashes with the protesters is also being reported by UPI:
TEHRAN, June 13 (UPI) — Riot police
charged on protesters Saturday in Tehran as the Iranian government declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected president, sources said. […]Police with riot batons charged thousands of Mousavi supporters gathered in central Tehran Saturday, but it was unclear if there were serious injuries.
Other than neocons like John Bolton, no one can be happy about this development. This is just the result they were praying for — literally. Now they can use the election result to intensify their campaign against Obama’s policy of reaching out to Iran diplomatically, while also raising the specter of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which Bolton had already fantasied about before the election results were known on the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page.
Mousavi is calling for his supporters to oppose the election results. Here’s the statement he made available to Reuters:
“I’m warning I will not surrender to this dangerous charade. The result of such performance by some officials will jeopardise the pillars of the Islamic Republic and will establish tyranny[.]”
According to Reuters a scheduled Mousavi press conference to address his charges of fraud did not happen, as journalists were told it had been canceled by police when they arrived at the building where it was to be held. Not, as they proverbial saying goes, a good sign.
During the election campaign Ahmadinejad had demonized his opponent as a “dangerous extremist” whose foreign policies would endanger the security of Iran. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A common tactic of right wing politicians world wide apparently is to play on the fears of the electorate that their more moderate opponents are treasonous radicals whose policies are dangerous and unpatriotic.
Sadly, this “tainted victory” by an Iranian right wing extremist is only playing into the hands of right wing politicians both in America, and in Israel, as well. Here are the comments of Israel’s deputy Foreign Minister to the election results:
“If there was a shadow of hope for a change in Iran, the renewed choice of Ahmadinejad expresses more than anything the growing Iranian threat,” Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in a statement. “The international community must stop a nuclear Iran and Iranian terror immediately.”
Obama’s ability to pressure Israel to back down on its settlement policy and its aggressive security approach in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank has been dealt a severe blow. And overall, his job to bring peace and stability to the entire region just got a whole lot tougher. Netanyahu can now point to Iran as a justification to continue Israel’s policies of territorial expansion and pre-emptive wars, such as last year’s invasion of Lebanon. Ahmadinejad will in like manner now feel emboldened to maintain a hard line stance regarding Iran’s nuclear program, since it is clear to me that he could not have perpetrated this fraud without the direct assistance of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei and the other imams who control the military and security forces. In effect, democracy, to the extent it existed at all, is dead in Iran. Only those who thirst for more and more wars and more innocent blood to be shed can be happy at this outcome.
