Partial results for an Iranian parliamentary runoff election announced Saturday show supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reduced to a small fraction of the legislature, hugely outnumbered by the conservatives who once backed him but then turned against him after he was perceived to challenge the authority of top clerics.
Iran has touted the turnout for Friday's vote as a show of support for the country's religious leadership in their confrontation with the West over Tehran's controversial nuclear program.
It also represents another blow against the populist president who, while usually in agreement with the conservatives on foreign policy and many other issues, had tried to change the rules of the political game in the Islamic Republic, where the president and legislature are subordinate to religious figures like Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khanenei.
Yes, it is a defeat for Ahmadinejad. But that doesn't mean that it is good for us that the opponents won. They are just as supportive of Iran's nuclear path and just as nuts. Remember that just to run for a seat you have to be screened by the religious nuts first. That would explain this seemingly strange fact from the story:
Iran's major reformist parties, who oppose both Ahmadinejad and the conservatives, mostly did not field candidates.
Reformists mostly didn't field candidates? That might seem like an odd omission in a story right from Tehran itself. It's actually amazing that any reformists candidates ran for office given that the hardliners have to approve their candidacy. Remember that it was only after Saddam's regime fell that we heard from our mainstream media who admitted that they tailored their reporting about Iraq to keep their access to Iraq so they could report "from Baghdad." I don't recall a whole lot of soul-searching among our press corps for that journalistic sin. But perhaps I underestimate them, and their long search simply turned up empty.
But the winners of Iran's parliamentary "elections" do represent the corrupt clerics, so that at least will help anger more Iranians. And the split does focus Iran's nuts on internal divisions amongst the nuts for a bit, hopefully. So we've got that going for us.
But the biggest thing I'd like to note is that democracy is apparently important to Moslems. If, as many liberals claim, democracy is just a Western bauble that is unimportant to Moslems because of their very different history, why do autocrats in the Moslem world stage even faux Western-style elections for faux Western-style institutions? Shouldn't they all have forms of government reflecting their own history or even Ottoman history?
I don't speak Arabic or Farsi, I know. And I've never been to the Middle East. So those analysts who boast of both will disregard what I have to say. But doesn't this autocrat commitment to the forms of Western democracy indicate that democracy--however imperfectly ordinary Moslems who have never lived under real democracy may understand it--is important to ordinary Moslems?
As I've long held, we have to help Moslems hold repeated, fair elections. We have to teach them how to elect good men rather than focusing on what good man we can get elected the first (and possibly only) reasonably free election. Hey, if we can get them to Chicago levels of free elections, that's an improvement for those countries, eh?)
