While every western press tries to present the opposition party in Iran as some kind of Obama who is rising up to do business with progressive countries, the reality of the situation is plain to anyone who has been doing something more constructive than watching the media-coverage of the Iranian election. The fact is, there was never a moment when Ahmadinijad was not the most likely to win, having the endorsement of the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Who is Mir Hossein Mousavi, called by the AP, as if it were an established fact, the “reform candidate”? The Independent’s Robert Fisk explains:
“Mr Ahmadinejad, the first non-clerical president in more than 25 years, basks in the support of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called on Iranians to vote for an anti-Western candidate. The Ayatollah ultimately calls the shots in Iran, where the president can only influence policy, not decide it.
“Life for President Barack Obama would be a great deal easier if Mir Hossein Mousavi had won Iran’s election. The man who was prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s says he would seek detente with the West, ask Mr Obama to debate at the UN with him, and floated the idea of an international consortium overseeing uranium enrichment in Iran.”
Meanwhile, in the New York Times today, a breathless Thomas Friedman confided, “I knew something had changed when I sat down for coffee on Hamra Street in Beirut last week with my 80-year-old friend and mentor, Kemal Salibi, one of Lebanon’s greatest historians, and he told me about his Facebook group!”
Aside from the grotesque naivety of his theory of believable change in Iran, the notion that true, un-western (insert initials) interference has not played a part in the escalation of violence against protesters – and its subsequent non-stop coverage on 24-hour media – is a product of a grass-roots, Obama-like movement among your average Iranians, is, well, grotesquely naïve and recklessly misleading. President Ahmadinijad will do what we all know he will do in these circumstances: suppress a popular uprising by any means necessary. That the media is cheering the “revolutionaries” on with such appalling gusto, as if their attempt at “democracy” carries a truly revolutionary chance for success, looks to me like manipulation by the very invisible, far-away internet forces Friedman lauds to the skies in his absurd editorial. Watch some videos of the Iranian Army beating protesters – do they look like they fear serious reprisals? People are already being detained: (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/world/middleeast/15iran.html?hp) Let’s face it: if a thug like Mugabe could so easily get away with a « majority » in Zimbabwe’s « elections », who is going to school Iran? Just sayin.
Here’s Fisk again, another journalist with an old mentor on the inside, but with a lot more seasoning and not so underdone:
“An interval here for lunch with a true and faithful friend of the Islamic Republic, a man I have known for many years who has risked his life and been imprisoned for Iran and who has never lied to me…He has often criticised the regime. A man unafraid. But I must repeat what he said. ‘The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad.’”
This is the media saying, “see, the Axis of Evil!” And yet President Obama, of the United States, is going to have to negotiate with Ahmadinijad, and he’s going to have to prevail. One can see dark agendas in the continuing sabotage of U.S. foreign policy, just to keep the power/billion$ gravytrain on track. For those behind escalating the war-machine, to let go is to risk real exposure.
I hope Mr. Obama will not listen to the Henry Kissengers; the time is now to ignore the howls of domestic fundamentalist know-nothings, expose the corruption of the Bush past, and continue with the real work of international diplomacy.
“And from Oceania, that’s the news about Eurasia. On to Eastasia, where another Menace is celebrating a country-wide Day of Plutonium…”
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-iran-erupts-as-voters-back-the-democrator-1704810.html