Una verdad simulada

The incumbent President Ahmadinejad won a landslide victory in the recent Iranian elections that saw a very high turnout, the country is experiencing a lot of protests — met with an iron fist of the government. The NYT has a slide-show on the Iranian unrest. This picture of a “rioter” rescuing a riot policeman tells a lot about the current situation in Iran. While there is a possibility that the rural and conservative Iranians favoured the hardliner Ahmadinejad, several people in the west including expat Iranians feel that the election results were possibly rigged. Andrew Sullivan has been blogging about developing situation in Iran for the last couple of days.

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Update: A suggestion by Larison:

Except for the most generic statements condemning violence and urging peaceful resolution to the crisis, Washington should say nothing, and I mean nothing. After all, whose interests do we serve by having our government speak up? The casual assumption is that condemning foreign election fraud, of which there was probably a great deal in Iran, is both some kind of moral imperative and a strategically wise thing to do in order to aid Mousavi, which in turn is based on another questionable belief that Westerners are somehow obliged to aid him and his supporters. The first part of this is very dubious, and the second is clearly wrong.

Western policing of other nations’ elections, like our annual lectures to other states about the state of their human rights record, is getting very old. We readily assume not only that their elections are in some way our business, but we also usually identify with one side as being somehow more valid, genuine or representative of that country’s people.
(read the rest too)

Tags: General //