Wednesday February 25, 2009

I've Been Thinking:

On June 12th Iranians will go to the polls.

Democracy in Iran is a concept very different from the democracy we know and depend on. In Iranian democracy the winner is predetermined, it is the person chosen winner by The Supreme Leader.

That is the way it has always been in Iranian elections and I am not expecting any changes come June 12th.

There is, however, one slight wrinkle in the upcoming election.
There is a reformist candidate running against Ahmadinejad, he is none other than the former president of Iran, Mohammed Khatami.

Reform, like democracy, has very different connotations in Iran than it does in the West. In Iran, reform relates exclusively to economic responsibility. That's it, nothing else.

Even though The Supreme Leader has tapped him to continue to reign supreme, the Ahmadinejad campaign is running scared.

This week two of Khatami's websites were shut down.

There was nothing taboo on the sites and they was nothing denigrating the current leadership. All they did was advocate Khatami's positions on economic issues in Iran.

They were knocked off the air not by hackers or by kids, they were knocked off by the official government agency that regulates the Iranian internet.

In Iran's democracy, things like this happen all the time.

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