Over the weekend, the government of Iran announced that current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won re-election over three challengers, the closest being former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. However, supporters of the pro-reformist candidate, as well as many from the rest of the world, are crying foul and fraud.
The main issue with the election result was announced within an hour or two after the polls closed rather than days or weeks later with the usual paper ballots. There also were no outside election monitors from the international community watching to make sure the Ahmadinejad government isn't pressuring the electorate to vote for him when they don't want to.
The result of the announced result? Mousavi's supporters started marching the streets calling for a reversal of the election, or at least an investigation of the vote. It seems Iran's supreme ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has listened to the people. He's ordered an investigation on the vote. Of course, the international community is calling for an outside entity to investigate.
The point is here that Iran's rulers may have fixed the election so that their favored candidate, Ahmadinejad, continues to be the figurehead to the rest of the world. Ahmadinejad has been calling for the elimination of Israel, ambitious in getting nuclear weapons, though the Iranians say the nuclear ambitions are for peaceful (i.e. electricity) means, and has been threatening the rest of the world.
Seven years ago, we invaded Afghanistan, Iran's eastern neighbor, to hunt down Osama bin Laden and get an oppressive regime, the Taliban, out of power so that bin Laden's network, al Qaeda, doesn't have a safe haven there. We were initially successful, but the Taliban is strengthening both there and in Pakistan. Two years later, we invated Iraq, Iran's western neighbor and long-time enemy, because its oppressive leader, Saddam Hussein, was 1) an ally of al Qaeda (which he wasn't), 2) obtaining nuclear weapons (he wasn't) and/or 3) still had weapons of mass destruction and was hiding them from UN inspectors (he didn't).
Now that we have a different president, the U.S. has been trying to get into talks with Ahmadinejad and Khamenei about ending the nuclear ambitions of Iran, as well as eliminating its state sponsorship of terrorist groups like Hamas. It seems that Iran has slapped that hand away by fixing this election. Reports were that Mousavi was wanting to better Iran's ties to the West, which has been almost non-existent since the 1979 Islamic Revolution 30 years ago. Of course, that was highlighted by Iranian university students capturing the U.S. embassy there and holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
President Obama has a tough choice now. Does he continue his quest to open relations with Iran's current regime, or does he do what he predecessor, former Pres. George W. Bush, did and invade Iran to get rid of the clerics that really rule the country? Or does he take a middle ground, help encourage a new revolution by Iranians who feel oppressed by the current system?
Whatever Washington, the rest of the world or the UN does for this issue, they'd better do it soon.
Iran is in the midst of an internal political struggle to determine who will run the country. The U.S. should not be seen as attempting to influence the outcome in any way, so we will have some credibility when we talk to the survivors of the process. We do not have the military capability to successfully invade Iran. Now, we may not even have the capability to win in Afghanistan where we should have been concentrating our efforts for the last 8 years to kill Osama and defeat al-Qaeda. A very large percentage of the world’s oil passes through the straits of Hormuz so with an invasion of Iran $10.00 a gal gasoline would be cheap.
ReplyDeleteWell, I was being sarcastic on that point, trying to take the position those on the right might want to make. Yes, the U.S. government would like to see a regime change in Iran, because of the oppressive nature of the Guardian Council and the Ayatolla. Pres. Obama even said on CNBC earlier that no matter who ended up winning between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, Iran would still be on the same path in its foreign and domestic policies, since Khamenei actually runs the country.
ReplyDeleteWhat I guess we can hope to see is a new revolution. And as Rachel Maddow said on her show tonight, the revolution can't be televised because of the international media blackout imposed by the Iranian government, it will be digitized, through Facebook and Twitter. In fact, the State Department even asked Twitter to delay its scheduled maintenance window until 5 p.m. EDT, when everyone in Iran would be in bed.