Iran’s ACORN-worthy election

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the “‘pure son’ of the Pasdaran” — was declared the winner in Iran’s presidential election. Iran may mock our elections here in the U.S., but Iran’s elections are such a hoax that it would make ACORN sick. Or at least give them something to dream about until 2012.

Walid Phares of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies wrote an analysis at the International Analyst Network breaking down Iran’s massive fraud. Phares writes:

[…] the win was a given from the beginning of the so-called Iranian presidential elections — there wouldn’t be any result that would contradict the principles upon which the “Islamic Republic” was founded. There was not a shred of doubt about the complete control the supreme ruler, Ali Khamenei, had on the process and the result.

[…] the selection process of a “new” president for the “Republic” has multiple security mechanisms which ensure that the “elected” leader is in line with the Khomeinist ideology, platform, and long term goals.

First, no candidate opposing the “Islamist ideology” can be granted the authorization to run.

Imagine the DNC selecting the field of candidates for you: you get to “vote” on Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, or Cindy Sheehan. Or if you are a liberal, imagine that only “Reagan Conservatives” were allowed to run (unfortunately, I can’t think of any). While an election exclusively among Conservatives sounds nice, our republic and what it stands for is dead once we silence the opposition — a fact that is lost on today’s liberals. Candidates with opposing ideologies don’t even get to run. In fact, in Iran, they are either dead or in exile. Is that democracy? I don’t think so.

The institutions regulating the elections are solidly in the hands of the ayatollahs. Hence, there is no pluralist process to begin with. Voters must select from those candidates “chosen” for them by the regime. Democracy dies in the first stage of the process, since citizens can only choose from one basket and candidates can only discuss what is permissible by the authorities. In short, Iran’s presidential elections are a charade, a show of colors and sounds, nothing more, nothing less. But international public opinion, particularly in the West, has seen images of “different” candidates, some labeled more moderate than others, and have seen large numbers of voters rushing to the polls in Iran.

The elections are more for us than they are for their people. As long as the New York Times prints the words democratically-elected, Ahmadinejad, and Iran in the same piece, their bases are covered. The Basij will handle any problems with dissention in Iran.

Weren’t the candidates really clashing over real differences? In fact, they were engaged in a “real” clash but not over “real” differences.

OK, the Guardians Council — which we discussed yesterday — select the candidates. Remember that the members of the council are appointed by the Ayatollah, and before the election, the chairman of the Guardians Council endorsed Ahmadinejad. No surprise, right?

The four candidates that Iranians could vote on: Ahmadinejad is the current president and a previous member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The second candidate was Mir Hossein Mousavi, Iran’s prime minister during the war years of the 1980’s, under Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the leader who advocated the nuclear weapons program. The third candidate is Mohsen Rezai, a former chief of the Pasdaran, wanted by the Interpol for alleged involvement in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Argentina (can you imagine the world’s reaction if Israel nominated a Jewish terrorist for president?). The fourth, Mehdi Karoubi, a former speaker of the Parliament, was one of Khomeini’s activists who supported the fatwa to execute British novelist Salman Rushdie (again, put the shoe on the other foot).

Thus the four candidates were all part of the regime and were his faithful sons running against each other to snatch the top office of the executive branch. Khamenei’s top elite throw these bones to the public every presidential cycle to have them choose the “best CEO” for the “Islamic Republic” but would never allow a candidate to argue against this “Khomeinist Imamate.” Thus the question here is why would a solid regime, with a powerful repressive Pasdaran, endowed with millions of petrodollars even allow this charade? Why the show and for whom? Here are the two reasons for this spring’s production:

1.) Playing to the Domestic Audience

[…] pressure is growing in Iran from young people, women, labor unions, intellectuals and many other citizens to move towards democracy. Watching women being freely elected in Afghanistan after the Taliban, witnessing the rise of more than a hundred political parties in a multi-ethnic Iraq after the fall of Saddam, and watching the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon defeat the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in elections has led to an epiphany among regular folk living under the oppressive rule of the Mullahs. The longing for debates, the simple freedom to carry signs, scream the names of candidates out loud, and watch televised debates cannot be so easily contained, and the ruling elite of Tehran have realized this. Even Kuwait and Pakistan are producing slowly mutating democracies. “If you don’t give some room to breathe they will explode,” advised the regime’s architects about their country’s citizens. In addition, the question of ethnic minorities is already exploding: Arabs in Khusistan, Baluch in the East, Azeris in the Northwest and Kurds in the West are all in ebullition over obtaining autonomy. The regime organized this sumptuous feast of a presidential “election” as way to divert national attention from the real ethnic uprising taking place in many regions of the “Republic.” How ironic it is to conclude that the Iranian presidential elections have been initially organized as a national show to delay democracy, not to hasten it. How can the real domestic opposition, whose leaders and cadres are assassinated, pursued, exiled, tortured and jailed claim a lack of freedom if millions of Iranians have been “part” of an election? To preempt a full democracy, the regime plays a few of its tunes to the public, before it closes the gates on real change.

2.) Performing for an International Audience

But the “show” had an international audience as well. Iran’s regime has been accused by many in the West, including the former Bush administration, of being “oppressive.” Even though the current Obama administration has dropped the word from its lexicon and calls Tehran’s totalitarian Ayatollahs with the name they prefer, “The Islamic Republic of Iran,”

Does anyone really believe that calling these tyrants what they want will solve anything? We called them oppressive because they are. Choosing to not call them oppressive is pouring salt on the wounds of the groups that mullahs massacre and oppress on a daily basis. And let’s not forget that we are fighting the Iranian proxies in Iraq, and that Iran has been killing our troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan for years. Make no mistake — this is not the kind of engagement that will bring us security and a lasting peace. Working with state sponsors of terrorism like Iran violates page one, chapter one, verse one of counterterrorism:  never appease, validate, or legitimize a terrorist. Obama is doing all of the above with Iran, especially when you hear what he finally came out and said about the ordeal.

still the regime feels it needs to embellish its tarnished image. And, as the current U.S. administration and some European governments are gearing up for a sit-down with the Iranian rulers to eventually cut a “realistic” deal with them, it would be very helpful for Western liberal democracies to show their own public that they are indeed dealing with an emerging democracy in Iran.

What on earth is a realistic deal? And if ‘realistic deals’ worked why have humans throughout civilization fought it out until one side was defeated? Maybe we could have met Hitler, Tojo, and Stalin in the middle instead of losing millions of people to war.

Hence, covering Iran’s elections as real and free suffrage with people actually “electing” a president will allow certain leaders in the West to move more comfortably in the direction of Khamanei’s Islamist republic. Hence, not only the multi -candidates’ (controlled) cacophony is good to numb democratic feelings inside Iran, but it is also good to numb criticism abroad and facilitates deals between diplomats and eventually businessmen.

So what Phares is saying is that the elections are essentially a means for Iran to “wag the dog” — or cover up the ticking time bomb of democracy that is perhaps about to go off in the mullah’s faces. But what they have done is throw up a facade that shows Ahmadinejad as the “democratically” elected president of Iran, with an overwhelming majority to boot. This will serve as an additional layer of protection for their developing nuclear weapons program, because how can one democracy undermine another, right?

Unlike previous elections, this last one ended with violent demonstrations, rioting and civil unrest in Tehran and some other locations in the country. For the first time Western audiences were watching Iranian police and Pasdaran cracking down on demonstrators upset with the regime’s electoral fraud. […] Students, young people, men and women have been emulating the Tiananmen Square uprising, as well as Eastern Europe’s awakening against the Soviets and going beyond the electoral dispute. In reality, the people clashing with the regime’s militia aren’t solely Mousavi’s supporters. Most of them are anti-Khomeinist protesters who are seizing the opportunity of the election fraud to show the world how disenfranchised they are.

Obama has finally come out and said something about the elections. “I have deep concerns about the election,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “I think that the world has deep concerns about the election.” Hold up — deep concern is what you have when your baseball team is on the verge of not making the playoffs — not what you have for apocalyptic regimes on the threshold of a nuclear weapons program.

But the New York Times reported that he did express optimism in the Ayatollah’s decision to review. The problem with that is — knowing that the entire process is staged from the ground up — what is Obama optimistic for? Surely the president knows that the “review” will find nothing out of order, and perhaps might find more ballots for Ahmadinejad, like the ones that keep showing up in Democratic recounts here in the U.S..

He stopped short of criticizing the results and, using words that could have been uttered by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself, said that he didn’t want “to be seen as meddling,” adding that it would not be “productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations.” Now that’s leadership!