Now that I'm unemployed, I have all day to read every article in my Google reader. This means that I've been reading a lot about these elections. As soon as the results were published, most people assumed there was something wrong. Now there are articles describing rioting against Ahmadinejad's government and the election process as a whole. Young Iranians and especially women feel they were cheated. It is not my place to say the election process was flawed, or that the Iranian governmental system is unstable. However, it appears increasingly likely that a democratic process was attempted and the incumbent government intentionally interfered with its results. If this turns out to be true, it puts our government in an awkward position - not because we have to play nice with Ahmadinejad's government if/when it is officially accepted as the winner, but because we care greatly about free and fair elections, and that phrase pops up frequently in discussions about countries with "unstable" governments. As it becomes increasingly evident that the elections were neither fair nor free, the US sort of ends up eating its words...or at least ignoring its stated policy.
I don't know how much this will really interfere with our plans for the Middle East. I assume Ahmadinejad's election will make Israel more uneasy about giving up territory to a Palestinian state, but that could just as easily be attributed to Netanyahu's being the prime minister instead of Tzipi Livni. There are always so many different factors in play.
I've always felt that change in nations has to come from within the nation itself and from the nations' own people, rather than be foisted upon them by an outside force. Hopefully this will occur in Iran sooner rather than later. If Iranian citizens who oppose Ahmadinejad constitute a large enough proportion of Iranian society, they will destabilize the system (assuming that the Iranian government doesn't go the way of SLARK in Myanmar/Burma, and start imprisoning everyone who makes the slightest objection to government policy).
I actually heard Reza Aslan talk about the elections (the day of, before the results were in) on NPR. I was wondering about the legitimacy of the elections but he said Iran actually does a very good job with elections and that the results should be trustworthy. Intimidation at the polls wasn't horrible. It sounds like the youth majority just didn't get out in the numbers that were expected.
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