Unless Rafsanjani has been bought out, I don't think the West is a major factor in the confrontation we're now seeing in Iran.
Khamenei, for all of his faults and all of the faults of the Iranian regime, is an idealist. He does believe in elections. The only reason he would have participated in a fraud would have been that between when Mousavi was vetted and when the results came in, he was made to believe that a Mousavi victory would threaten Iranian national security - possibly due to links between Mousavi and foreign powers.
If Khamenei was made to believe that, that does not mean it was necessarily true, and acting on such a belief, as we see now, could predictably have led to Iranian turmoil that favors interests hostile to Iran.
The problems we're seeing in Iran, we've never seen in the constellation of pro-US/Israeli dictatorships, because the Iranians are idealists who believe in elections, while the Jordanians openly disregard the wishes of their people in favor of the foreign US and Israeli powers that they are truly accountable to.
I shudder to think that Rafsanjani really is cynically positioning himself to be Iran's next Shah or Mubarak. Because if he is, Iran will from now on have no more electoral problems than the the Saudis, Jordanians, Abbas or Mubarak do, and this time Iran's dictator will carefully tame the clergy. CIA-aligned intelligence services are also far more efficient, and far less squeamish about applying brutality today than they were in 1979.
The biggest danger to Iran is that just as the West was able to find a weakness in Iran's electoral system in 1953, it has found one today, that is being exploited with the cynical and greed-based connivance of Mousavi and Rafsanjani and the naive connivance of many Iranian students and Western liberal and conservative spokespeople.
I hope this is not the case. I hope this is purely an internal struggle of Iranians determining what the proper balance of power in Iran should be moving forward.
At this point though, I'm slightly worried that Rafsanjani and Mousavi have reached understandings with powers hostile to Iran.
4 comments:
If Khamenei was told that Mousawi was conspiring with one or more foreign powers, why not just go public with the information and force Mousawi to deny it.
The other thing that is puzzling is that Ahmadinejad has just gone abroad to the SCO meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia. He must feel very secure.
No, I'm not saying I think Khamenei was told that there is some foreign connection to Mousavi, but if he was he may not go public to see if there more information can come through the same channel as that information.
I am saying if it was the case that there was information about foreign interference in the election, that would explain Khamenei suddenly interfering in the election process, even calling the election by fiat.
I am also saying that without an extreme circumstance like that, Khamenei would have no motive to conduct the type of fraud Juan Cole accuses him of. Juan Cole has not presented a motive for Khamenei. Nobody has. Mousavi winning the election has never, by itself, been a threat to Khamenei's position in the system.
The situation does seem to be stabilizing. The protests are not spiraling out of control and Mousavi is not fueling them to as much as he could if he wanted to push the Iranian political system out of power.
I never thought we were heading in that direction, but I was slightly worried that we might be.
The son of the former shal of Iran spoke on C-Span (he's been in exile since 1984 in the US), and said he would return and 'help his people' if needed.
This might be a clue.........
Whoops - meant to write 'former shah of Iran', not shal - sorry..........
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