Don’t get too excited
About the prospect of democracy and liberty in Iran, because it was never on the menu anyway:
In yet another sign that the Iranian mullahcracy realizes the gravity of their error in their gross manipulation of the otherwise meaningless elections this past weekend, the Guardian Council has announced a ballot recount — although not yet an annulment of the election, as protestors have demanded. As the protests have spiraled into a street movement, the mullahs have also seen disturbing signs within their power structure that indicates the pressure may have produced cracks in their safety net…
The arrest of “16 senior members” won’t break the RG (Revolutionary Guard), but it’s an event that could indicate a trend away from the mullahcracy. If more arrests follow, the RG may wind up fatally compromised, and the mullahs will have to act quickly to secure their position — possibly by hanging the entire mess on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and tossing him to the mobs.
If they give the election to Mirhossein Mousavi, don’t expect much of a change. The ironic part of the entire crisis is that Mousavi wouldn’t have been appreciably different from Ahmadinejad, except perhaps in tone. The Guardian Council approved Mousavi’s presence on the ballot not out of a desire for plurality but because they knew he’d kowtow to them. Rigging the election, especially in the clumsy manner in which the mullahs did it, was hardly necessary to continue their grip on power. The only way the mullah’s power would have been threatened is if they did exactly what they did in this election.
It’s a typical Muslim-nation dumb-show start to finish. And then there’s this:
On the one hand we have democratically elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reputed hardliner, who on Sunday abandoned his own long-held position and, to the immense disappointment of much of his political base, spoke of his willingness to accept a Palestinian state — provided only that the Palestinians forswear military pursuits, resettle Palestinian refugees in their own territory, and recognize Israel as a Jewish state, just as the U.N. did at the country’s founding.
On the other hand there’s Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Holocaust-denier and nuclear aspirant, who on Friday was declared the winner of an election so transparently rigged that the only serious question is whether the regime even bothered to stuff the ballot boxes. Since then, scores of reformist politicians have been arrested or intimidated, rallies have been banned, and the possibility of an Iranian Tiananmen hangs in the air.
Question: Toward which of these two leaders does President Obama intend to play the heavy?
Not, apparently, with the Iranian…
Rarely in U.S. history has a foreign policy course been as thoroughly repudiated by events as his approach to Iran in his first months in office.
Oh, just wait. The one sure bet with the Administration On Training Wheels is that we’ll see more, and worse.
- Entries
The way he stated it and the conditions that he laid out for it to happen guarantee that it will never, ever happen. He knew this the minute he made his press release.
So, in a sense, he was giving TheWon a reach-around while at the same time giving him a hard punch in the kidney.
I like BiBi.
The Israelis as a group are some pretty smart characters. They think well and are educated is good schools. They were expressing the sentiment last summer when I was there about how screwed they were going to be by the US but that they knew they would survive. Why? Because the nation was founded on one principle = "Never again."