Last week, elections were held in Iran. If you’re following the news, you’d get the sense that the outcome was a good one for people who care about human rights and the general thawing of relations between the U.S. and Iran. And further, we are told, the election result was big vindication for the Obama administration’s controversial nuclear deal with Iran.
CNN says, “Reformists win in Tehran.” The Guardian insists, “Iranian elections deal blow to hardliners.” The BBC runs with the headline, “Reformists make gains.” Nearly all reporting would leave you with the impression that free elections were just held in one of the most repressive countries on earth, and things just got a lot better. Of course, the reality is that a bunch of terrible people were elected in place of people who might well have been worse. The Wall Street Journal‘s Sohrab Ahmari notes that since Khomeini’s revolution, western observers have been insisting Iran’s elections will bring moderates to power any day now. But they can’t, and that’s by design:
Half of the original 12,000 or so candidates for the 290-seat Majlis were disqualified ahead of the election. As were 75% of the 801 candidates for the 88-member Assembly of Experts—including Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of regime founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. That leaves a ratio of candidates to seats in the Assembly of Experts of less than two.Even if every single disqualification were reversed, however, it wouldn’t matter a wit, since the regime’s popular branches are subservient to its unelected institutions.Further, the elected Iranian government is still subservient to What you’re left with is nothing to celebrate, as Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports:
Two former intelligence ministers, accused by Iran’s democratic opposition of having dissidents murdered, Mohammad Mohammadi Reyshahri and Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, also ran on the list endorsed by Iran’s moderate president for the Assembly of Experts, the panel that is charged with selecting the next supreme leaderAnd even though they make great effort to ensure the ballot is rigged from the get-go, Iran still won’t allow anything in the way of meaningful election observers from the international community. On February 4, I was with three congressmen — Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., and Rep. Frank LoBiondo, N.J. — when they requested visas from the Iranian government to visit the country to talk to officials and witness the elections in Tehran. According to their joint statement, the three congressmen were upset by reports that candidates were being unjustly thrown off of ballots but that they would “welcome the opportunity to be convinced that these elections will be fair and free.” The result was that Iranian officials failed to respond to the congressmen’s visa request, and instead attacked them in the press. According to a member of the Iranian parliament, the request for visas “seems to be rather an inquisitive act having in mind the obstacles the Congress used to create against the making and implementation of the deal which showed their enmity to the Islamic Republic.” The Tehran Times says the Iranian foreign ministry called the request to observe Iran’s elections “political propaganda.” Alaeddin Boroujerdi, chairman of the Iranian parliament’s committee on national security and foreign policy, said the congressmen had no right to even ask for a visa.It’s fair to say the Iranian government treats American congressmen as hardliners. At the same time, the western media won’t stop calling the Iran’s sham elections a victory for “moderates” and “reformers.” Until Iran makes a meaningful embrace of democracy, we should probably find some new labels.
