Posted by
Always To The Right on Sunday, June 14, 2009 1:41:05 PM
Anyone who thought that Ahmadinejad didn’t at all times represent
exactly what the Guardian Council and Supreme Leader Ali Khameini want
is projecting Western politics onto Iran — a huge mistake. As this
election shows, the GC and Khameini get exactly what they want.
Ahmadinejad didn’t get elected president the first time because the
people of Iran wanted an obscure mayor of Tehran to run the country;
the GC wanted Ahmadinejad for their own reasons. He is entirely their
creature, which is why they made sure that the election this week was
nothing more than a formality, although they certainly botched it badly
in the end.
Note that he also dodges the question of whether Iran is a
democracy. That reflects Biden’s Inspector Clouseau approach to Iran in
this interview. He’s talking about “counting the votes” in an election
in which the mullahs hand-picked the candidates, including the
now-arrested Mirhossein Mousavi, the supposed “reformer” who found out
a little late that he was just a sop to the masses. The vote count is
about as relevant as the tallies for an election in Soviet Russia
during the Cold War. The problem isn’t the vote count; it’s that the
election was never free or fair from the very beginning.
The administration seems to keep laboring under the delusion that
Iran is anything other than a theocracy run by a group of mullahs who
hold all of the real power, and have no intention of sharing it.
Elections are just a way to mollify the 70 million Iranians by offering
them the illusion of power sharing. When the administration wakes to
that fact, then they will understand that all of this handwringing over
polls and vote counting is entirely ludicrous, as is the notion of
continuing to offer dialogue to a regime that has made the
perhaps-fatal mistake of making all of this even too obvious for the
Western media.
And remember that Barack Obama chose Biden as a running mate for his foreign policy expertise.