Election hitch
International affairs - - Posted on May, 3 at 7:47 pm by Tim
In an article designed largely to descredit Middle Eastern studies professor and commentator, Juan Cole, the largely discredited Christopher Hitchens makes this observation about the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
This uncultured jerk is, of course, only a puppet figure with no real power, but this choice of puppet by the theocracy is unsettling in itself.
Now, uncultured jerk I can buy (though George W. Bush and John Howard should be pleased it isn’t a qualification for high office ); and I can buy puppet figure with no real power too. But isn’t Hitchens going a bit too far to imply that Ahmadinejad was installed as a puppet by the Mullahs?
UPDATE: There was much more to this post but the ‘more’ tag seems to have eaten it. Apologies: am trying to figure it out.
ELSEWHERE: Someone else has an opinion about this.
Posted in International affairs |
May 3rd, 2006 at 11:13 pm
Ahmadinejad was declared president by the Guardian Council a year ago. The election was closed to international observers, so there’s no way to verify the vote tallies, thus there is no way to know whether he was legitimately elected. The mullahs drive the bus in Iran, and they are the master puppeteers, as I wrote here.
May 3rd, 2006 at 11:23 pm
Thanks for the link, Charles. As I note in the update, I went into more detail, and made some other comments, but it seems to have been glitched by the ‘more’ tag.
May 4th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I’m sure that the missing ‘more’ was not merely repeating the ludicruous assertion that Iran is a functioning democracy. After all, you wouldn’t want to lower the bar for success in Iraq that low would you?
May 4th, 2006 at 9:34 am
Iran is not a democracy. It does have a voting system though and I’ve read a bunch of reports suggesting that the vote wasn’t rigged, though there have been lots of accusations. I actually said (in the ‘more’) I wasn’t criticising Hitchens (not for that, anyway) just trying to clarify the point.
May 4th, 2006 at 10:40 am
I don’t know how this ‘trackback’ thingy works, but I wrote a post in reply on my blog.
May 4th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Well, until a couple of years ago, Australia had a prince of the Christian church as the appointed (not elected) vice regal representative of an overseas hereditary monarch, who herself is the head of a branch of the Christian church.
It would be easy for puzzled Mullahs and general citizenry in Iran to wonder why we’re bothering to dissect their democracy, when we don’t have one of our own.
You might object that ours is a religious monarcy only on paper. But if so, why don’t we re-write our constitution to make this absolutely clear? The Queen can still fire the government, as can her federal or state Viceroy (who has done so on two occasions: Whitlam in 1975 and Lang in 1931).
You could say that we did in fact vote for this setup in the Republic referendum, but I would reply that the vote did not represent a true desire to be ruled by the monarch of England, rather it was the result of a wedge tactic prosecuted by the Prime Minister to divide the vote. “Ah,” (I hear you say), “the result is the result”. Well maybe, but then why can’t the Iranians say the same thing about their electoral and constitutional results? They have a system and it produced a result without a flawed electoral process. So did we. What’s the difference in reality, and in particular how would you explain this difference to an Iranian person who has just voted in their own elections, on the outside, looking in?
If you want to accuse the unelected Mullahs of being the de facto rulers of Iran (leading to the point that Iran isn’t a democracy), you’ll first have to answer why our system has a roughly similar setup, with admittedly rarely used - but not never used - powers of veto over the elected government vesting in the Head Of State and Church. You might also ask how is it that we claim to be a democracy when a Catholic or a Muslim or a Calathumpian cannot - by the constitution of another country, England - be King or Queen of Australia. Can the Head of State of Iran be a Christian? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he or she can’t. Then again, that would only make their system the same in substance as ours.
Iran doesn’t have a democracy like ours, but with elections conducted fairly, and the person popularly representing the will of the voters installed as Head Of State, the differences blur, somewhat.
As the Battlers would say in defending the bribing of Saddam by AWB: “It’s just the way they do business in the Middle East”.
Looked at from either a constitutional or de facto basis, both systems can easily be said to be “undemocratic”, or - just as convincingly - be said to be workably “democratic”.
It depends on your point of view.
May 4th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Juan Cole makes an interesting point in his follow-up to Hitchen’s article that for the last eight years prior to Ahmadinejad, Iran had a moderate President who made regular overtures to the West but was consistently snubbed.
Now I know nothing of the details of this, but Cole mentions it in the context of the current manufacturing of the Iran nuclear crisis.
May 4th, 2006 at 11:45 am
Cole’s riposte to Hitchens is a beauty. Quite sensational writing.
May 4th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
Geez, I reckon that Juan Cole ends up sounding completely unhinged by the end of his rant. Anyway Aussie Bob, your post is an example of how the Left can pride itself over its clever argument that black is white just before getting run over at the zebra crossing on the highway of history. (Apologies to Douglas Adams.)
May 4th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
Thanks for the detailed and erudite response to my (I thought, fairly simple) question on comparative constitutionality, Steve.
I guess what you’re saying is that we just know our country is democratic - despite the fact that we have the most senior religious figure of the Church Of England (to the exclusion of other churches) as our hereditary head of state. Meanwhile we just know that of course Iran is not democratic, because they have senior religious figures in control over there.
This really doesn’t even merit discussion, does it?
They’d be wrong to judge our constitution by their standards, but we’re right to judge their constitution by our standards.
Simple really.
I should have thought of that before.
May 4th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
Surely someone else wants to take up the argument with Aussie Bob on this one? Someone with left leaning sympathies, I mean. I would be surprised if all such readers agreed with it.
May 4th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
“What is really going on here is an old trick of the warmongers. Which is that you equate hurtful statements of your enemy with an actual military threat, and make a weak and vulnerable enemy look like a strong, menacing foe. Then no one can complain when you pounce on the enemy and reduce his country to flames and rubble.”
..from the Cole link. This sounds familiar??
Remember when the Iraq invasion was going so well and we were reminded that we hadn’t yet encountered the Republican Guard…Ooooh the Republican Guard.
Hey Steve I bet you really cheered that we f*cked them up real bad, despite the Republican Guard eh? Fucking brave bunch of bastards we are eh. The things we have to do for Freedom and Democracy.
May 4th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
I read this about Ahmedinejad by Jeff Wells the the other day - it strikes me as plausible:
‘Yesterday morning I was watching a streaming English-language news broadcast from Russia. (And I expect that’s enough cause right there for the telecommunication giants to seek the end of the Internet as we know it.) The lead story was the press conference of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the main points hit by the Russia Today correspondent were Ahmadinejad’s renouncing nuclear weapons as contrary to Islam and his reiteration of Iran’s 30-year commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, though Iran reserved the right to revisit its commitment if adherence to the treaty imperiled its sovereignty.
It was an unexpectedly optimistic piece. Ahmadinejad was allowed to speak at length and appeared relaxed and informed while fielding questions. If the excerpts were representative and the translation accurate, he appeared to be credibly attempting to defuse the crisis.
Naturally we need to compensate for spin whatever the source, and Russian news tailored for a foreign audience has a spin no less than Wolf Blitzer’s Panic Room. Knowing that, I was still taken aback by the absolute unfamiliarity of the same press conference when soon after I started reading accounts of it in the Western media. The accent was almost entirely upon provocation, not concilation: the UN “lacks guts” to impose sanctions; “Defiant Iran in threat to quit nuclear treaty”; and “Iranian President insists ‘Israel can not continue to live.’”
There’s a Central Casting-like quality to Ahmadinejad’s villainy. If he didn’t exist the Pentagon would have had to create him to justify moving the goalpost to Tehren. And perhaps they did. (The election fraud, rule by crisis and religious fascism are certainly familiar enough. A reformist Iranian government was the war party’s nightmare.) But did he really say that? Did he insist that Israel must die? The headline is drawn from this quote, provided without context: “We say that this fake regime cannot logically continue to live.” To arrive at the headline, the government has to be conflated with the nation. Likewise we could say about the Bush administration, and with considerable accuracy, that “this fake regime cannot logically continue to survive.” (Without knowing Farsi I’ll presume that the original could be translated as either “to live” or “to survive.”) And is that the same as saying America must die?
Ahmadinejad says the darnedest things, but perhaps, when translated, his rhetoric is subject to overinflation by parties interested in conflict.’
(from Rigorous Intuition)
May 4th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
The idea that the US government invaded Iraq for completely spurious reasons, committed itself to its limits, is living in apparent cloud-cuckoo land about the state of play - and is now making the same moves against a larger, better armed and better organised country would promote a certain rhetorical excess in me, too. I don’t think the derangement is on Cole’s side.
May 4th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Oh fuck it, let’s go ahead and bomb Iran. What’s the worst that could happen? Large radioactive clouds from exploded reactors drifting across a region with two of the world’s most touchy nuked-up countries -Pakistan and India.
Kinda funny how the same kinda folks who’d like to quote Heinlein’s “an armed society is a polite society” get all sort of thingy about nations behaving the same way. EG: notice how the US doesn’t lean on China, India, Pakistan or North Korea the way it’s trying to on Iran.
Usual disclaimer: Fuck all religious leaders - from the Ayatollahs to the Pope.
May 5th, 2006 at 5:37 am
Hold on now, let’s get real. There’s nothing nuclear about Iran axcept maybe a nanogram of slghtly enriched uranium. The radioactive clouds if any will come from the US and Israeli warheads. What’s the worst that could happen? (Aside from from 30,000-3,000,000 dead people depending on whose counting) Chardonay sippers will definitely have to join the coalition of the willing because anyone not obviously of Middle East appearance better stay away from, you know anywhere near the Middle East, unless they are wearing Kevlar and Emu feathers.
May 5th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
For those interested, Hitchens makes a response to the Cole rant here: http://www.radioblogger.com/#001591.
I remain astounded that Aussie Bob’s argument does not attract any public dissent from other readers here, including TD.
May 5th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Ooooh ‘e does sound posh dont ‘e?