Iran's Sham Election

Fire of Liberty

"Today, Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world. Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy. .. And to the Iranian people, I say: As you stand for your own liberty, the people of America stand with you."

President George W. Bush
June 16, 2005

While watching the political round-table on FOX News' Special Report with Brit Hume yesterday, I heard Jeff Burnbaum make a silly statement about how the democratic wave in the Middle East has reached Iran because the people of the ancient Persia were able to vote for a "moderate" or "conservative" leaders this past Friday. The only problem with these elections is that no matter how many candidates with differing political philosophies run in such elections they are still miles away from what you would call democratic. Now its true the the demos or the people went out and voted for a candidate but the only problem is that the folks running for such posts were chosen by the mullah's. According to June 15, 2004 Op/Ed in The Wall Street Journal by Shirin Ebadi and Muhammad Sahimi (Ebadi is a 2003 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize & Law professor at Tehran University and Sahimi a professor at USC), the mullahs continue to pull the levers rather than the people of Iran, which blows up Birnbaum's theory of democracy spreading to Iran. What the mullahs have fashioned for the MSM and people in the Western world a mirage of democracy while they continue their steely grasp on the power of Iran via an unelected body known as The Guardian Council. Just read what the professors wrote about the mullahs complete-control of the show in Iran:

The Guardian Council, a constitutional body controlled by Islamic hardliners, has thwarted many of the reforms introduced by President Khatami and his allies. In principle, the Council should approve bills passed by parliament after ensuring their conformity with Islamic laws. But in practice, it has barred reformist candidates from standing in elections and has vetoed legislation aimed at curbing its power. The hardliners have also jailed university students, intellectuals, dissidents and rights activists, and President Khatami has failed to overcome the Council's obstruction of reform.

Friday's presidential election is another part of the political process under the heavy hand of the Guardian Council. The election will not be free and fair because the Council controls who can stand. The main reformist candidate, former Minister of Higher Education Mostafa Moeen, has been allowed to run. But many other qualified candidates -- including every woman -- have been disqualified. Meanwhile, hardliners are exploiting many of the state's resources (including radio and television) to promote their candidates, while censoring many progressive positions of Dr. Moeen and attacking his supporters.

The hardliners view victory in the upcoming elections as the final step in consolidating their grip on power, following last year's rigged parliamentary elections. They already control many of the unelected instruments of power, and have put forward four candidates, all of whom are connected to the most powerful branch of the armed forces, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.

One can only imagine what dangers Professor Ebadi faces by writing this Op/Ed, luckily she has the distinction of being a Nobel Peace Prize recipient that the thousands upon thousands of people who march or voice their opposition to the regime. These brave souls are the ones who are seeking a government that respects the wishes of the people and allows them more freedom from the all-powerful mullahs. As the people of Iran continue to voice their opposition towards the regime while battling the thugs who are sent to harass and assault them, the Western media has be transfixed with a joke of democracy known as the Iranian presidential election and have waxed eloquently about how this "demonstration of democracy" and how it can initiate a possible era of rapprochement between Iran and the US. To make matters worse, the MSM has dove head first into this "reformist" canard by promoting Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as Iran's best hope for political reform. Now Rafsanjani might be able to put on a happy face to the talking heads, newspaper reporters (which includes the diligent San Francisco Chronicle reporter Sean Penn) and the "useful idiots" but his ability to turn the heads of the Iranian people seems to be nill. Amongst the various observers who seem to look beyond the MSM's rose-colored vision of the "reformist movement" is Danielle Pletka, who is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. In a June 16, 2005 Op/Ed in The New York Times, Pletka points out that the Iranian people who are struggling for a democratic state are well aware that the MSM's purported reformer is far from what is expected from a person promoting democratic reforms. She noted on the eve of the rigged election that:

The Iranian people, however, are less easily had. In his first tour as president, Mr. Rafsanjani cemented a reputation as a corrupt and power-hungry wheeler-dealer. He crushed personal freedoms and presided over a sharp economic downturn. He ushered in a particularly aggressive phase of Iranian sponsorship of terrorism -- including alleged roles in the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 that killed more than 80, and in the assassinations of several Iranian exiles, including former Prime Minister Shahpur Bakhtiar in 1991.

Few in Iran lamented the end of his tenure in 1997, and in 2000 a thinly disguised account of his regime's brutality became a best seller. That year he was humiliated in parliamentary elections, finishing 30th in his district, and his political career seemed over.

His comeback is due not to popular demand, but to the machinations of the mullahs. Of the thousand-plus registered candidates for the presidential election, all but eight were disqualified by the unelected Guardian Council. A spokesman for the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, remarked that with a Rafsanjani victory, ''We will finally be able to have for ourselves the atomic bomb to fairly stand up to Israeli weapons.'' And we expect to catch a break from this man?

It's rather interesting to watch the people in the MSM fall all over themselves promoting the "moderates" of Iran (They did the same in 1997 and 2001 for Khatami), even though they are falling for the same old tricks that past members of the media have fallen for in the past. What the Iranian government has actually done is drawn the media into their spider-web of lies without the knowledge of their complicity to the regimes totalitarian behavior. As Michael Ledeen notes over at National Review Online, all this excitement about elections and moderate candidates in Iran are just absurd because:

We have heard these slogans before, applied to other tyrannies shortly before they attacked democratic societies. When Stalin ruled the Soviet empire, great attention was paid to elections to the Politburo, as if the Molotovs and the Berias were independent actors, capable of moderating or liberalizing or reforming the Soviet Union. When the Fuhrer ruled the Third Reich, even British diplomats confidently announced that Hitler had "no further territorial ambitions," and was, after all, surrounded by reasonable industrialist types like Goehring. And who can forget — — actually, who can remember — the surge of empathy when it was announced that comrade Andropov — until yesterday the boss of the KGB and now the new Soviet dictator — liked jazz?

Sensible folks have learned that it isn't about personality, it's about freedom and tyranny. All the totalitarian regimes of the last century staged elections, and they were all meaningless, because the structure of the state concentrated power in the two hands of the dictator, and exercised through the single party.

What we are seeing is the beginning of the end of mullahcracyracy as we know it. As these elections have demonstrated, the mallahs could care less than a fig about the people of Iran as long as they retain their power. Unfortunately for the regime, this rigged election will come back and haunt them by becoming a clarion call for the true democratic movement of Iran. The people of Iran have been under the mullahs for far too long and have become a tempist in the democracy tea-pot waiting to let off some steam against the regime. Luckily they have some help from the folks in the West in pushing their democratic revolution in Iran. So I bid them G-d's Speed in their quest for freedom and democracy. While the MSM might be diluted in the reality in Iran, Fire of Liberty will continue to provide the light of freedom for the people of Iran.