Elections in Iran

The government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, backed by the 12 member Guardian Council, has declared itself the winner in the recent elections in their country. The protests of thousands of opposition voters, along with the relatively mild violence they have employed in trying to draw attention to their cause, has become a concern to the West. The protesters feel the election was rigged.

Consequently, the Ahmedinejad ruling party has reacted in a way that a dictatorship generally does, shutting down protest sites on the Internet, closing the offices of foreign journalists covering the activity, and even detaining overnight some of the top aides from opponent Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign. Even Mousavi's newspaper was interestingly unavailable Sunday; there are certainly in place all the earmarks of an autocracy unwilling to hand over power.

It won't happen easily. For starters, the Guardian Council apparently holds the real power in Tehran, witnessed by the recent action on the part of Mousavi himself to try and convince it to overturn the election results. Beyond the Council itself is the man with the most real authority in Iran, the Muslim cleric and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has endorsed the results. A conservative Islamic religious leader is not, in my humble opinion, a likely candidate to overturn on appeal an outcome he surely wanted.

So, what to do? Watch and wait, basically. We do not want or need another unstable nation in the Middle East. On that point alone I do not see President Barack Obama acting quickly, and to be fair, why should he? If Iran is to fall internally anything he might say or do to encourage it could be seen as threatening to the rest of the Arab world, and I don't see him wanting to risk that after his recent speech in Cairo. After the bad old days of aggressive Bush foreign policy, he wants nothing more than goodwill.

The problem is, does Ahmedinejad or Khamenei or the Guardian Council? And that is exactly why Obama's little fatherly talk in Egypt will fall on deaf ears in certain quarters no matter what. Some folks just aren't interested in playing fair no matter how much you cajole and plead.

Finally, to the question of whether Ahmedinejad really won in Iran, I have to say that we will likely never know. That fact itself tells us all we need to know about the leadership of that Persian Gulf nation. When your power is consolidated by closing offices and detaining supposedly free people, perhaps we already know the answer.