The winner has been declared in Iran's presidential "election:"
The ultraconservative Tehran mayor won Iran's presidential runoff, the Interior Ministry announced today — a stunning upset by a man reformers fear will take Iran back to the restrictions of the Islamic Revolution.The mayor was rolling toward a landslide victory. Figures indicated Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could finish with more than 60 percent of the vote, said Mani Alizadeh, a campaign official for his more moderate opponent, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Ahmadinejad, a 47-year-old former Republican Guard commander, has presented himself as a champion of the poor in a country where unemployment is as high as 30 percent. But he has also vowed a return to the rigid principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
That stance has sent liberals and business leaders rushing into the arms of Rafsanjani, an insider of Iran's theocracy.
While many reformers have been suspicious of 70-year-old Rafsanjani in the past, they were more afraid Ahmadinejad will crush the greater social freedoms and openings to the West won over the past decade.
James Joyner surveys U.S. press coverage and notes that the contest is being reported largely with a straight face, which is a problem: it ain't so.
Strangely, none of the reportage on the Iranian presidential "election" questions the validity of the outcome. Indeed, the press has treated this as if it were a Western election decided on campaign issues.A reader approaching any of these stories without background knowledge would come away with a decidedly distorted view of reality.
Iran watcher Michael Ledeen saw it much more clearly yesterday.
I don’t know who will win, and it may well be that nobody knows. Iran today reminds me very much of the death struggle between Hitler and the SA, the brown-shirted thugs who led the Nazi "revolution." At a certain point Hitler knew they were a potential threat to his rule, and they were violently purged. Supreme Leader Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s Fuhrer, faces two possible outcomes: If Rafsanjani wins, he will have a certain amount of independence because of his vast wealth (accumulated in tandem with Khamenei) and his corrupt network of cronies and clients. If Ahmadinejad wins, he will have a certain amount of independence because of the support of the most fanatical killers in Iran, those from the Basij, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Quds Force, from which Ahmadinejad emerged. Khamenei may well judge that Ahmadinijad is the greater threat, and he may have ordered that Rafsanjani be declared the winner.Posted by Alan at June 25, 2005 10:38 AMPlease keep two basic facts in mind as this melodrama unfolds: Neither Rafsanjani nor Ahmadinejad has any intention of altering the basic structure of the Islamic Republic, nor of "liberalizing" Iranian society (the Reich was not notably more "moderate" after Hitler crushed the SA, was it?). Both are known murderers; one way of evaluating the outcome of today’s events is that the next Iranian president will be wanted for murder either in two countries (Ahmadinejad — Austria and Germany) or in just one (Rafsanjani — Germany). This is not a fight over the future of the country; it’s a power struggle within the tyrannical elite.
From our national standpoint, the outcome doesn’t matter, because Iran will continue to be the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism (did you notice, by the way, that MSNBC’s website laconically reported that the "management" of al Qaeda went to Iran after the liberation of Afghanistan?), and will continue to give its full support to the terror war in Iraq. Our leaders will still be forced, one fine day, to confront the mullahs or retreat from Iraq; there is no escape from this grim choice.