election in Iran

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verte76

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A hard-liner was elected to the Presidency in Iran. The guy evokes the memory of Khoumeini and the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Is this going to make U.S.- Iranian relations more tense?
 
Hey, why so tense? You guys have a conservative leader and so do they, some like bedmates to me.:wink:
 
The Iranian public knows who is really in power, and they know that no matter who is president, some things aren't going to change. On the other hand, the guy who did win campaigned on helping the poor and played up his more modest roots, and you see what happened. For most of the world, capitalism and democracy are meaningless, unless it translates into the masses cashing in on it. With an estimated, unofficial 30% unemployment and mass poverty, the masses have made themselves pretty clear on what's important to them.

Melon
 
Yeah, this election was a big time class thing. The guy's opponent is a member of the wealthy elite and the people didn't want him. To heck with the fact that he's a moderate. And yes, it's accurate and fair to call our president a "hard-liner" so they are two peas in a pod, so to speak. But in the two very different nations the phrase "hard-liner" mean two different things. The moderates in Iran are also called the "pro-democracy movement" and "liberals". From my perspective, anyway, it's unfortunate that these people are considered in any way elitist.
 
So the Mullahs stick their preferred puppet into power with the election, considering that Rafsanjani was still a "conservative" in reformist clothing, one must also consider the boycott that was in place because there were no reformist campaigns allowed to take place.

This guy is probably going to be in posession of nuclear weapons in his term, this will be the the greatest failure of the Bush administration ~ spending so much time and money stopping Iraq while neighbouring Iran slipped under the radar.

regime change in Iran now ~ www.activistchat.com
 
I find it amusing that the U.S. decried the election, because now there's no challenge to the conservatives' power. Hmm...funny. Doesn't that sound like a description of the U.S.?

Melon
 
It would be just like the US elections, if in the US you were running Jerry Falwell against Pat Buchanan and they were each puppets of a ruling class of theocrats who command the loyalty of their own enforcers and because of this there was an election boycott by a significant proportion of the population.

I mean Rafsanjani is just as bad as the "conservative" opponent, there was absolutely no representation for the reformist movement, merely puppets of the Mullah's in their charade to the world. I think that the boycott may do a lot of good in highlighting the ultimate absence of political freedoms in the country.

The most worrying thing is the commitment to the atomic program by both the candidates and the stated intention of the weapons.

"If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world",' ~ Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, December 2001

It is that type of aspiration that can get millions of people incinerated in nuclear firestorms, I truly do hope that one way or another (preferably diplomacy and democracy) that never, ever happens.
 
A_Wanderer said:
It would be just like the US elections, if in the US you were running Jerry Falwell against Pat Buchanan and they were each puppets of a ruling class of theocrats who command the loyalty of their own enforcers and because of this there was an election boycott by a significant proportion of the population.

Not exactly. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are the "ayatollahs" and Bush would be puppet President who just listens to everything they have to say, no matter how hysterical and pseudoscientific it is.

I mean Rafsanjani is just as bad as the "conservative" opponent, there was absolutely no representation for the reformist movement, merely puppets of the Mullah's in their charade to the world.

Sounds like the modern state of the Democratic Party. Just as bad as the conservatives; no real choice. And the candidates that might have affected some change, like John McCain or Howard Dean or Bill Bradley, end up sidelined every time for the same old kind of do-nothing candidates.

The most worrying thing is the commitment to the atomic program by both the candidates and the stated intention of the weapons.

"If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world",' ~ Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, December 2001

It is that type of aspiration that can get millions of people incinerated in nuclear firestorms, I truly do hope that one way or another (preferably diplomacy and democracy) that never, ever happens.

"Monkey see, monkey do." (And no, that's not meant to be a racial slur; it's a common saying.) I don't see us interested in relinquishing our nuclear weapons, so I can see why they notice the double standard. Iranians likely see the adoption of nuclear weapons as an issue of national pride. In other words, they see it as an affront to an outside world that wants them to remain nothing more than a poor third-world country that's nothing more than a vassal to the U.S.

Anyway, my point is to say that this situation is more complicated than we perceive it. And, as I like to say, all decisions must be made to give the other party dignity in the process; otherwise, it will lead to nothing more than resentment and, very possibly, unrest and a semi-permanent insurgency. Putting the rebuilding of Iraq in charge of American multinational corporations is an example of doing things the wrong way. If Iraq was incapable of rebuilding itself, perhaps we should have turned to other Arab nation construction companies and had the contract reflect that they had to hire mostly Iraqi labor, where possible.

Melon
 
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