THEOCRATIC THUGGERY
By RALPH PETERS
NEW YORK POST
June 20, 2005
PRESIDENT Bush was right. Again. The first round of Iran's presidential election was as phony as Howard Dean pretending to care about our troops.
On the other hand, Iran's doctored election results must have been inspiring to our domestic left. The fundamentalist Guardian Council in Tehran did what American intellectuals have dreamed about doing for decades. When the voters rejected them, the hard-liners changed the vote count.
The way it went down was as shameless as a Donald Trump bankruptcy. On election night, Hashemi Rafsanjani, an old fox trying a new approach, led the pack. The white-knight reform candidate, Mostafa Moin, ran second. A moderate, Mehdi Karroubi, placed third.
There wasn't a religious fascist within sight of the finish line. And the regime panicked. Pushing aside the Interior Ministry, which bore the responsibility for tallying the votes, the Revolutionary Guard jumped in to "help" count ballots. The fundamentalist Guardian Council announced the results before the counting was done.
With chutzpah worthy of a celebrity lawyer, the hardliners even inflated the number of voters by 10 percent.
The turn-back-the-clock mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, raced up from behind like a mugger on meth. Suddenly, hizzoner was running a close second. Even though he's a fundamentalist thug with as much chance of winning a nationwide poll as George W. Bush has of being chosen Commissar of the Upper West Side.
Why'd they do it? Why make such an obvious mockery of the electoral process, when the regime had bet so much on the appearance of democracy?
The tough guys lost their nerve. A cleric himself (if a cynical one), Rafsanjani is the one man who could out-maneuver the entire Koran-thumping pack in the ruling theocracy. Old Hashemi may not be Iran's Thomas Jefferson, but he's a devilishly capable political operator who senses the pulse of the people better than Bill Clinton.
If elected president, Rafsanjani will do a Vladimir Putin, bribing the people with social freedoms and economic progress while consolidating his own political power — at the expense of the old guard who tried to deal him out of the game.
If Moin, the "pure" reformer, had been allowed to take second place, the upcoming run-off would not have featured any candidate tolerable to the men in power. They felt they had to keep one of their own in the race. No matter the cost in credibility.
Now what?
The good news is that the hardliners are still going to lose out — unless they engage in electoral fraud at a level not seen since the Soviet collapse. If the hard-liners stuff so many ballot boxes that their utterly unpopular candidate "wins" the next round, they'll trigger a level of unrest unseen since the revolution that overthrew the shah.
Whether or not a big fix would result in immediate violence in the streets, the regime would be forever discredited in the eyes of the average citizen and the world (well, maybe not France).
One caution: don't expect an easy transition in Iran. The dying regime has a nasty core of supporters, just as Saddam did. But change is coming. The desperate vote rigging is likelier to hasten it than to delay it.
The hard-liners are going to pull out all the stops to elect their man in the run-off — voter intimidation, bribes, phony ballots, miscounts and every other ruse they can think of. But in a paradoxical turn of events, pro-democracy Iranians now have a critical chance to make a difference.
Democracy activists were split on this election, with many advocating a boycott. But poll boycotts are always dangerous. In the first round of voting, the non-participation of many reform advocates made it easier for the regime to manipulate the vote count.
In the run-off, those Iranians who want change must turn out. Rafsanjani, with his checkered past, is far from an ideal candidate. But he's well positioned in every respect to move change forward — from economic revitalization to smoothing relations with the United States.
Had they been smarter, the regime's insiders would have rigged it for Moin, the weaker reformer, to win. He would have been easy to marginalize. Instead, we're about to see a wild shoot-out at the electoral corral.
The gunslingers aren't really the two candidates who'll face each other, but one battle-scarred candidate — Rafsanjani — and Iran's Grand Poobah of Religious Doodoo, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who believes it's been all downhill since the seventh century.
Khamenei's man, the mayor, can't win without massive fraud. If the regime declares him the winner after the next round, the transparent disregard for the people's voice will further weaken the regime, not strengthen it.
The rigging of the first-round vote was foolish on another count, too: lacking a choice, reform voters will flock to Rafsanjani. He'll become an even stronger president than he otherwise might have been.
It's a strange world, when we find ourselves rooting for one of the original "Death to America" boys to become Iran's next president. What's even stranger is that he may be the man who spells death to the rogue regime he helped create.
Ralph Peters is a regular Post contributor.
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