Word: ahmadinejad
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...Ahmadinejad-isms...
...spent nearly three weeks in Iran over the winter, talking to clerics, students, street laborers and professionals. People's anger and despair over Ahmadinejad's mismanagement of the economy pulsed throughout Tehran. People were not just discontent; they were punching-the-wall furious. Dismissing opposition to Ahmadinejad as a north Tehran phenomenon, limited only to affluent urban areas, is insulting to the millions of middle-class Iranians who have suffered the most under his tenure. As a rule, affluent Iranians aren't much affected by high inflation and unemployment. As the foreclosure crisis in the U.S. has shown...
...started sniffing around the question of the President's much discussed popularity in smaller cities and rural areas. Family and friends whom I trusted, people who spent time regularly outside Tehran, said rural Iranians weren't as pleased with Ahmadinejad as was supposed. For every hospital he had built, there was a promise either undelivered, or delivered so shoddily that the project at hand, a bridge or a road, was unusable. I applied for official permission to report a story on the President's popularity outside Tehran and was turned down. Given the government's constant griping about the Western...
...Others were less sanguine. The thousands of Iranians who were following the run-up to the vote on Facebook fretted about whether the vote would be clean. Each day brought with it a panicked spread of messages about anticipated vote-tampering: take your own pen to the ballot box, Ahmadinejad's supporters are spreading pens whose ink will evaporate after a few hours; don't listen to anyone who tells you that supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi are supposed to vote at schools - it's a plot to tamper with his votes...
...notion that Ahmadinejad won this election by a landslide is farcical. And the tepid response of Western governments, who are clearly most concerned with nuclear negotiations under another Ahmadinejad government, has been shameful. If it hadn't been for the extraordinarily high turnout in Friday's election, the fraudulent result would not have been such a watershed moment for Iran. That Iranians buried their cynicism and turned out in such record numbers to vote is what makes this such a bleak and precarious moment for the nation. Any vestige of legitimacy that the government might have had in many Iranians...