Search Foundation, August 2005 – By any standard of democracy, the Iranian presidential elections in June were a joke. But the joke was on the world because the results were a tragedy.
The election as president of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, a 49 year-old commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime’s ideological army, ended any pretense of “moderation” within the mullah’s regime.
The new president was a key player in the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979. His activities in the Revolutionary Guards were related directly to suppression of dissidents in Iran and terrorist attacks abroad. As a result of factional feuding within the mullah’s regime.
It was disclosed that Ahmadinejad personally fired the coup de grace (the final death shot) into political prisoners.
In an interview in May, he stipulated: “We did not have a revolution in order to have democracy”.
During “constructive engagement” in 2003 and 2004, supreme leader Ali Khamenei purged what “moderates” there were from the parliament in 2004.
Ahmadinejad’s “election” completes the supreme leader’s plan to consolidate power with the most loyal and fascistic factions.
Policy makers argued that realpolitik compelled the West to stand by the moderates.
A by-product of this misguided policy of tolerating the egregious human rights abuses, the mullah’s quest for a nuclear arsenal, and their undercutting of Middle East peace, was Europe, the US and Australia giving Tehran what it demanded most – blacklisting the only effective opposition in Iran, the People’s Mojahedin.
Giving Iran’s nuclear ambitions, these elections are quite disturbing, certainly no laughing matter. Tehran has succeeded in quelling Western fears about nuclear proliferation by paying lip service to a tentative and shaky pact to put a hold on its uranium enrichment program (the existence of which only became known when the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the main coalition of Iranian opposition groups, blew the whistle).
The project was temporarily suspended through mounting global pressure, but the emphasis here must be on the word “temporary”. In his first press conference as president, Ahmadinejad made it clear that he planned to resume the uranium enrichment program, and on August 9 he did so.
The clerical regime has ballistic missiles with a range of 2,000 km and more.
Now this is in the hands of a man like Ahmadinejad, who only in July claimed that the Islamic “revolution wants to establish a global rule.”
This “election’ makes it urgent for the West to abandon its failed appeasement and develop a coherent policy towards Tehran. As Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the president elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran said during an address to European Parliament in December 2004, “No concession is going to dissuade the mullahs from continuing their ominous objectives. The equation of “either a military invasion or appeasement” is an exercise in political deception. A third option is within reach. The Iranian people and their organized resistance have the capacity and ability to bring about change.”
With factional feuding causing it to weaken, the regime will step up repression inside the country, and it will increase the export of terrorism and religious fundamentalism abroad.
The West should look to the Iranian people – who in great numbers boycotted the election and by all indications want real change to the ruling clerical system. Their resistance should be the source for democratic change. Any other option will lead to more chaos and havoc in the troubled Middle East.