Devildawg15's blog: "Iran's Sham Election"

Last Friday's Iranian presidential election yielded a result that
should surprise few who understand the regime's true nature: hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner, by a landslide.

Many Iranians had supported Mir Hossain Mousavi, whose foreign policy largely resembled Ahmadinejad's, albeit with less confrontational rhetoric. The apparent competition between incumbent Ahmadinejad and three other candidates led many foreign observers to believe that Iran's election would actually reflect the will of the voters.
 Middle East expert Jim Phillips reminds us, however, that "Iran's government is not a true democracy but a theocratic dictatorship that cloaks the rule of the ayatollahs with a façade of representative government."

Experts have called on President Obama to approach this
abrogation of democracy by firmly "denouncing the elections and
indicating U.S. support for the demonstrators."



"The president should be questioning the legitimacy of the elections,"
Heritage Vice President Kim Holmes tells the Washington Independent.
"He doesn't need to go into any great detail. He needs to show that,
in the long run, the United States is on the side of the Iranian
people."


Ahmadindejad's three rivals -- each of them like-minded Islamist
extremists, hand-picked by senior clerics of the ayatollah's Guardian
Council -- expressed concern that the vote would be rigged by the
incumbent's supporters. "They had no faith in the fairness of the
vote-counting process. And they have good reason for their concern,
based on their long experience with Iranian elections, which are
neither free nor fair," Phillips argues on FoxNews.com.


Mousavi and his supporters are challenging the election's outcome on
the grounds that the presidency was stolen from him by a
state-controlled media that, as Phillips writes in a Heritage
analysis, "spoon-fed Iranians a steady diet of slanted information,
misinformation and disinformation that favored Ahmadinejad."


Thousands have taken to the street in protests that have turned
increasingly violent. This has led the ruling Guardian Council to call
for a recount of some of the ballots from the disputed presidential
elections.


Last Friday's election and the subsequent turmoil only confirms that
"Iran belongs to the ayatollahs, specifically the Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who casts the ultimate vote on all important
matters," Phillips explains.