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USADI Commentary
The Untold Story of a Rigged Election
In case you missed it, a well-organized political coup last week
propelled an obscure radical with a wicked past as a
hostage-taker, assassin, and interrogator - nicknamed “the
Terminator” by colleagues for firing coup de grace shots at
political prisoners - into the office of presidency.
The move, backed and blessed by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei and engineered by the notorious Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corps (IRGC), cements the dominance of the
ultra-conservative faction of the ruling regime over all key
levers of power in Iran.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former commander of the IRGC, was
declared the winner in last week’s rigged presidential
elections. The untold story of the elections, however, was the
evident metamorphosis of the ideological army of the mullahs,
the IRGC, into a full political-military powerhouse.
Ahmadinejad’s Presidency, therefore, will have major internal
and foreign policy implications. Constitutionally, office of
presidency in Iran has little power or control over key domestic
or foreign policy issues. These issues are all decided by the
office of the Supreme Leader. It is however a different matter
when the person occupying the presidential office is a crony of
Khamenei and will act as an executor of the office of the
Supreme Leader. As one analyst told the Time magazine after
elections, “Ahmadinejad is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind
him are the regime's most powerful political and military
institutions."
Ahmadinejad has not wasted any time to articulate the direction
of his presidency, which gives a sneak preview into the thinking
of the IRGC elite. According to Iran’s state news agency, IRNA,
he vowed this week to spread the “new” Islamic revolution
throughout the world.
He told the agency, "Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new
Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384
(the current Iranian year) will, God willing, cut off the roots
of injustice in the world." "The wave of the Islamic revolution
will soon reach the entire world," the former assassin told IRNA.
What is more, the IRGC-sponsored Lebanese Hezbollah said that
the election of Ahmadinejad would “revive and rejuvenate” the
goals of the Islamic Revolution. “With the victory of
Ahmadinejad in Iran’s presidential race, this country returned
to the foundations and revolutionary objectives which Ayatollah
[Ruhollah] Khomeini founded,” a member of Hezbollah’s political
bureau was quoted by the Iran Focus as saying.
With such policy pronouncements, Ahmadinejad, an obscure figure
for Iranians until recently, should feel very much at home in
the presidential office. He was a commander of the Guards Corps’
Qods (Jerusalem) Force, tasked with “exporting the
revolution to Qods (Jerusalem) through Karbala”.
For all the self-congratulatory diplomatic dispatches from their
embassies in Tehran to their home office, predicting an easy
victory for Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and even meeting with his
close aides in Tehran right before the elections, the EU’s Big-3
now have to deal with a new President who is a member of the Old
Guard.
The recently published photo reportedly showing Ahmadinejad
holding an American hostage in November 1979, fits well with his
recent tirade against the United States, vowing, “the wave of
the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world.”
Ahmadinejad’s win also serves as a wake-up call that we are
indeed dealing with an irreformable fundamentalist regime that
has all centers of theocratic power, the judiciary, the
Parliament and now the presidency under his control. The IRGC,
aided by para-military Bassij force and a multitude of security
and intelligence agencies, has been in full control of internal
security and crackdown on dissent since 1979.
In addition, through the spread and sponsorship of terrorism,
covert actions to undermine regional rivals and assassination of
prominent Iranian dissidents, it has made its international
presence felt since 1980. Last year, Supreme Leader Khamenei,
who had already placed Iran’s nuclear development under the
IRGC’s command, praised it for “running effective intelligence
and diplomatic operations” in Iraq.
It is imperative that we fully comprehend the policy
ramifications of Ahmadinejad’s win and articulate our
long-overdue Iran policy accordingly. The proposed
“wait-and-see” response by the EU will not add anything
substantial to the equation. The writing is on the wall: The
ruling regime is incapable of change and the policy of
engagement has been dealt a serious blow and must be
discontinued. Only when Iran tyrants are unseated by the Iranian
people, this growing regional and global menace will be
neutralized. (USADI)
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The Times
June 29, 2005
Iran's human
face is gone
By
Michael Gove
THE RECENT Iranian presidential elections were a triumph for the
principle of one man, one vote. And the man with the vote this
time, as always, was the country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei. Iran's new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may well be
the choice of the urban poor, the anti-sleaze candidate and the
favourite of the military. But ultimately, he's the winner
because he's also the guy who did best with one key demographic
- bearded sixtysomething clerics called Ali who enjoy wielding
supreme power within theocratic republics.
Even before the first vote was
cast, a thousand potential presidential candidates were barred
from running by the state's Guardian Council, itself hand-
picked by Ayatollah Khamenei. The two rounds of voting that Iran
just held were charades, Potemkin exercises designed to give the
outside world the illusion that the Islamic Republic could hold
an open election and sustain the lie that its leaders enjoy
popular backing.
The television pictures of voters
queueing to get to the polls were taken from previous elections,
the polling stations themselves were policed by fundamentalist
militias, ballot papers were held in reserve to ensure the vote
went the prescribed way and the figures eventually announced
were manufactured in a fashion that would have brought a tear to
the eye of Saddam himself.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the second
round of the presidential election with 17,248,782 votes. In the
first round he got just 5,710,354 votes. In one week he secured
the support of an extra 11,500,000 people, trebling his
popularity, and scooping dramatically more votes than those
earned in the first round by all the "hardline" candidates put
together. All while the recorded turnout actually dropped. The
figures just don't add up. And that's because they're made up.
No independent observers are allowed to monitor what happens in
polling stations, to scrutinise ballot boxes or attend counts.
That would be to let daylight in upon the magic of theologically
guided democracy.
Instead, Iran's ruling
fundamentalist elite makes its dispositions, plucks the
appropriate figures out of the air to lend support their choice,
and then European chancelleries rush to play their appointed
role in this farce by welcoming the people's choice to his new
office.
There is, however, one important
difference between this Iranian election and previous polls. It
confirms the change in strategic direction decided on by
Ayatollah Khamenei and his allies in the past 18 months or so,
and apparent in their conduct of the 2004 parliamentary
elections. That poll was every much an exercise in chicanery as
last week's election, with huge numbers of candidates excluded
even from consideration and comprehensive result- rigging. But
what was significant, and different, about both these elections
was the Iranian regime's decision to abandon their previous
policy of fundamentalism with a human face and replace it with
something altogether more uncompromising…
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The Wall Street Journal (Editorial)
June 28, 2005
Iran Unveiled
To gauge the
radicalism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's next president,
consider that prior to Friday's run-off election Western media
widely described him as a "hardliner," whereas rival candidate
Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was a "moderate."
Mr. Rafsanjani
is the former president whose tenure was marked by repression at
home and dozens of terrorist attacks and assassinations abroad,
including the 1994 bombing of the Jewish cultural center in
Buenos Aires. Yet that record seems positively benign next to
Mr. Ahmadinejad's. If there's a silver lining here, it is that
the West may at last see the unveiled face of the Iranian regime
and begin acting accordingly.
A student
radical during Ayatollah Khomenei's revolution in the late
1970s, Mr. Ahmadinejad was involved in planning the seizure of
the U.S. embassy and helped organize Khomenei's Islamic Cultural
Revolution, during which universities were shut down and
ideologically suspect lecturers and students were arrested and
shot.
In the
mid-1980s, he worked as an interrogator, or worse, in Tehran's
infamous Evin Prison, according to Iranian sources. Mr.
Ahmadinejad then joined the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary
Guards, where he was an officer in the "Jerusalem Force," which
had responsibility for terrorist attacks and assassinations
abroad, including against prominent Iranian dissidents.
In the late
1990s, he was one of the organizers of Ansar-i-Hezbollah,
government-sponsored vigilantes assigned to break up peaceful
demonstrations. In April 2003, Mr. Ahmadinejad was appointed
(not elected) mayor of Tehran, where he set about organizing "Abadgaran"
(Developers) groups, which seek to return Iran to sterner
Khomeinist principles…
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