Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 5:57:00 PM
I read on
Best of the Web some who are arguing that there is no evidence that the election in Iran was rigged. This is amusing in itself, but I do have to ask, why anyone is upset at the thought the election results might have been fixed. After all, you can't run in Iran unless the religious leaders approve your candidacy, so who cares if the results are fixed? The
WHOLE ELECTION is fixed. Does it matter if they jigger the results if they can prevent anyone they dislike from running?
Of course, this does make it seem less likely that Mousavi is a real reform candidate. But then again, Mousavi himself really doesn't matter any longer. The unrest in Iran has gone beyond putting Mousavi in office. However, should he end up in office, even if it is as the result of a popular uprising, I think we should keep in mind that he was acceptable enough to the religious authorities that he was allowed on the ballot.
On the other hand, that is not a reason to fail to support the current unrest. Mousavi himself may be less than an inspiring choice, but anything which reduces the power of the religious authorities can only be good for the people of Iran, and for the world in general.
POSTSCRIPT
While it is true that Mousavi is a creature of the religious government, every bit as much as Ahmadinajhad, it was a bad move for our president to say so immediately after the uprising started. Doing so basically was to cast his vote in support of the religious regime. For someone who is supposed to be such an adroit handler of foreign affairs, Obama showed a horrible tin ear in his handling of the whole Iranian affair.
Then again, the left insisted Reagan was an idiot who had nothing to do with the end of communism, at least until after he was dead when they pretended they supported him all along. And they still haven't admitted Bush had anything to do with Syria withdrawing form Lebanon or Libya's ending its WMD development. And they still think Oslo was a great idea. And...
Actually, I don't need to go through the whole list. All I need to say is this: "Nobel prize winner Jimmy Carter". Anyone who can look at the late 70's and imagine them a triumph of US diplomacy has lost any right to speak about foreign affairs.
NOTE: By the way, have the media settled on an official transliteration of the Iranian president's name? I try to use the same spelling every time, but he has almost as many spellings as Qaddafi/Ghadaffy/Qadhafi/Godhafi did throughout the 1980's. And, on a related note, have we decided how many M's Hammas/Hamas has in its name? Or how to spell Hezbollah/Hizballah/Hesbullah?
In some ways this reminds me of that stupid transliteration war among Greek scholars in the 80's arguing "Hektor" was somehow "better" than "Hector" or "Akhilleus" better than the familiar "Achilles". The second, I grant, is closer to the original, but the first, how is K "more like" Kappa than a hard C? Don't they both sound the same? I would happily accept a less "exact" transliteration if it would allow us to settle on just one spelling, even if it were a little inaccurate. After all, any transliteration will always be inaccurate. That is the nature of transliteration.