Iran's election: Fixed? or the will of the people?

[Mark in Oshawa]

I am shocked actually this one has to be brought up at this point. Last week Iran had an election. I know...some of you are finding it hard to believe that a religous theocracy would give a free election to its people when they have their perfect president, but apparently something funny happened on the way to the polls.

The people believed they were going to actually have a say. What is more, the opposition was actually advocating "hope" and "change" that THEY could believe in, and unlike America, this might just be an slam dunk no brainer that it would be better.

Well you all know the results, Ahmedinjiad won, and now the people in Iraq are in the streets up in arms, because they think the fix is in. What is more, the Mullahs and their little psycho buddy President keep blaming the west for trying to bring them down. Hey boys..you held an election. If you were not going to actually GIVE the people a choice, then just do the sham elections Hussein used to give to Iraqi's.

Obama has played this one perfectly, making no comment one way or the other. We in the west do not have to do a damned thing except make sure the whole world knows what is going on.

This my friends, is the beginning of a new Iranian revolution, and it will scare all the thugs and jerks in this part of the world because outside of Israel, and recently Iraq and Afghanistan, democracy is a VERY foreign concept. Most of the people in this part of the world have never seen it BUT the Iranians remembered they elected their own president in 1953 and Churchill and Eisenhower in their paranoia about the Soviets used their dark agencies to forment the coup and put the Shah in power.

This revolution is organic, looks to be popular and while we will never know if the fix was in, usually it doesn't matter.

A poli sci prof once told me that political legitmacy is 90% of power. If you don't believe your leadership was legitimately elected, you wont follow it to the point of anarchy. That is what we are starting to see.

[Rollo]

The problem is that no-one outside the country knows if the elections were or weren't fixed and there's not really a reliable method of proving if they were or not.

If they weren't fixed then you have a very vocal group of people who are unjustified in their protests, but if they were fixed, then that loudness is justified.

I know that we'll never find out the answer though.

[Easy Drifter]

I agree we will probably never know if the fix was in.
However, the reaction of the current Iranian leadership, with the banning of foreign news coverage, arresting of opposition leaders and so on, is typical of a fixed election.
As one columnist put it (Lisa Van Dusen) the Genie is almost all the way out of the bottle. Stuffing it back in may be impossible.
As I said in another thread-- So much for Eki's stable Iran.

[Mark in Oshawa]

I agree we will probably never know if the fix was in.
However, the reaction of the current Iranian leadership, with the banning of foreign news coverage, arresting of opposition leaders and so on, is typical of a fixed election.
As one columnist put it (Lisa Van Dusen) the Genie is almost all the way out of the bottle. Stuffing it back in may be impossible.
As I said in another thread-- So much for Eki's stable Iran.

Easy, as loathe as I am to agree with Lisa Van Dusen of SunMedia here in Canada, I think even she got that one right.

The fix doesn't have to be legit if the people refuse to believe they were not jobbed and are willing to flout the law to make their point.

The only things I have read here and there about the election is there was some monitoring by the UN and the French apparently who thought the voting process looked valid. The Iranian embassy in Ottawa had Persian-Canadians voting in it, so like the Italians, they allow the dispora to vote. Based on THAT, you would think it was legit, but a sneaking suspiscion the behind the scenes auditing and counting was flawed.

[Mark in Oshawa]

Geeze...I was on the other Iran thread and completely forgotten it was there and that I had posted on it!!!! Someone I suppose could merge this mess in to it......

[Hondo]

I usually don't pay any attention to cries of "the elections are rigged". It is usually the normal whining of election losers. I also believe there is truth in the saying "it takes a thief to catch a thief" so to have top American Democrats insinuate the elections are not completely on the up and up, well...I bow to the experts. After all, having more votes cast than you have voters in a district does seem to be one of their favorites along with disquailifing votes you don't like.

So if Team Obama doubts the vote, I'd believe him. It's the only issue in his Presidency so far he has any real experience with.