Iran's Sham Election

The Jerusalem Post:

Ahmad Janati, described in one news report as an "ultra-conservative" cleric, said of tomorrow's presidential election in Iran: "Myself, Imam Khomenei, supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the twelfth imam expect the voters will declare a great 'Death to America' by going to the polling stations."

The Iranian people can be expected to do just the opposite in a silent protest against the sclerotic regime.

Unfortunately, international media continue to treat this sham election seriously, writing breathlessly about how close it will be, how hotly it is contested, and pretending there is a difference between the "reformers" and "conservatives" who are running.

Let us not get too carried away with the range of choices being given the Iranian people. As our columnist, Amir Taheri, explains on these pages, "All the candidates are government employees with decades-long records of military and civil service within the regime. Five of them are active or reserve officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. All eight describe themselves as members of the Iranian branch of Hizbullah and trace their ideological ancestry to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini."

Human Rights Watch, an organization not known to pull punches when criticizing either the United States or Israel, has panned the elections as "pre-cooked" and "neither free nor fair."

None of this is news, of course, to the Iranian people themselves, who are as desperate to be free after 26 years of clerical rule as the Soviet bloc was after decades of communism. The shame is the failure of the world, including the United States, to stand by them.

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that President George W. Bush "lately has begun meeting personally with prominent dissidents to highlight human rights abuses in select countries, a powerfully symbolic yet potentially risky approach modeled on Ronald Reagan's sessions with Soviet dissidents during the Cold War."

So far, Bush met human rights activists during his trip to Moscow, and with North Korean and Venezuelan dissidents in the White House. His secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has met with opposition leaders from Belarus.

The run-up to tomorrow's election would have been an opportune time for Bush to have met with Iranian dissidents who support the widespread campaign for a referendum on clerical rule. Such a meeting would have been a signal that the US would stand with the people if mass protests came out to reject the election results, as happened in Kiev and Beirut, forcing those governments to step down.

The fact that this did not happen seems to indicate that the US is still giving the European-led diplomatic track vis-a-vis Teheran some time to play out. Yet it seems fairly evident who is playing whom.

Teheran's game is to buy more time to build a nuclear weapon and to wear down the West into accepting that feat as a fait accompli. In particular, the mullahs had to ensure that they safely got through this week's election without a full-blown challenge to the regime.

Fortunately, despite the West's evident flubbing of a golden opportunity to support the Iranian people at a particularly vulnerable time for the regime, more such opportunities can also be created. No matter how often this or that mullah is labeled "pragmatic" or open to repairing relations with the US, the Iranian people have had it, and will always be looking for a signal that the US will back them to the hilt if they risk their lives and try to bring down the regime.

Both Washington and Teheran know that such a showdown is inevitable. Nowhere on the globe do Bush's declarations of support for oppressed people and America's war against terrorism intersect as undeniably as in Iran.

If Bush's doctrine linking the promotion of freedom to advancing America's security does not apply there, where does it apply? If the Iranian people – who are struggling in almost daily protests, barely covered by the international media – do not receive American support against the regime that most blatantly threatens American interests, Bush's doctrine will quickly be seen by oppressed people everywhere as a dead letter.READ MORE

The mainstream media prefers to speak about Iran almost entirely in terms a potential military conflict with Iran while ignoring the courageous struggle of the people of Iran to realize a real democracy in this important country. The blogosphere has not done much better, rather it follows the MSM's analysis or lack there of. We must be silent no more.

It is time for those that believe in democracy to "stand with the Iranian people." This election is a sham. No matter who is elected the unelected will remain in power.