Musings on yesterday's elections in Iran

Let me begin my saying that I did not follow the campaigns of the four contenders to the post of President of Iran very closely. Nor did I carefully scrutinize their electoral platform. I did have a vague preference for anyone the West would consider a "moderate" (an utterly nonsensical concept) if only because it would make a military aggression on Iran by Israel and/or the USA harder to sell, and therefore (very) marginally less likely.

As for Ahmadinejad, I had carefully read his speeches, I listened to several of his interviews, I saw the full videos his speeches in the USA, (at the UN and in Columbia U) and I basically liked him. He is very smart, his arguments are always well thought through, and I like his calm but firm stance towards the constant US and Israeli sabre rattling. But Ahmadinejad has a huge drawback: he is not photogenic (a key factor for the Western public) and some of his statements can be easily distorted to paint him as a raving lunatic. In other words, Ahmadinejad is a good target for the Zionist press and that is why I had personally hoped that a guy like Ali Larijani would become the next President.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I was generally leaning towards a change of faces in the Iranian Presidency, and if the new face was a "reformer" (another stupid concept, but hey - if they like it, let's give them what they want, no?).

And then this:

Ahmadinejad wins by a landslide and Mousawi declares the elections "stolen" and riots break out.

Considering the current situation in Iran and, even more so, around Iran, Mousawi's attitude is worse than irresponsible, it smacks of outright treason, if you ask me.

First, he is insulting our collective intelligence when he speaks of fraud. Yes, fraud can happen anywhere, including Iran, but not with the following figures:

The final results of Iran's closely-contested 10th presidential election indicate that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has won a landslide victory.

According to Press TV, of 39,165,191 votes counted (85 percent), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 24,527,516 (62.63 percent), Mir-Hossein Mousavi came in second with 13,216,411 votes (33.75 percent).

These are figures which are impossible to create by fraud, that is obvious. Dubya could steal the elections from Gore with a couple of hundred of votes, yes, but he simply could not have done so if Gore and received almost the double number of votes. No election rigging technique allows that kind of thing. If that is what a regime wants to do, then it simply cancels the elections, period.

Also keep in mind that the post of President holds no real power in Iran to begin with. Why bother with fraud?

No, the fraud accusation is an insult to everybody's intelligence. Either that or, which is far more likely, it is a carefully orchestrated destabilization operation against Iran. I say that this is the latter.

Mousavi is no idiot for sure (check out his resume here), and since he is not an idiot, he must know that he lost this election and that, in fact, Ahmadinejad won by an un-fakable landslide. Still, he choose the destablilize his own country at a moment when that country is facing a possible military agression from abroad. What does that tell you about Mousavi? It tells me that he is objectively the tool of yet another US backed destabilization campaign. It matters little whether Mousavi himself is a paid CIA agent, or whether his entourage is carefully using his ego to push him towards the kind of action he has taken now. The bottom line is still that Mousavi is now hurting his country and helping to destabilize it.

And that brings another question to my mind, and that question is a scary one: how could the Guardian Council ever approve Mousavi when it clearly turns out that he is precisely the kind of candidate which should should have been carefully vetted (and rejected!) by this body?!

I don't think that this Mousavi thing is going anywhere. Both the vast majority of Iranians and the entire power structure of the government will never let him destabilize the country. Sure, the Western press will constantly remind us that "Ahmadinejad stole the election", but it's not like Ahmadinejad was ever popular with the Zionist press corps, or like anybody in Iran really cares.

But the ability of the Iranian Vilayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists) system to vet presidential candidates is now clearly in doubt. Sure, Mousavi probably had impeccable Muslim credentials, but why 12 members of the Guardian Council were not informed of his character and inclinations is rather puzzling for me. Either that, or they did know, but could do nothing to prevent him from running. In either case, this entire business seems to show that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not as impermeable to destabilization operations as one might have thought.