Word: mousavi
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...implausible that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won in a landslide re-election. It is doubtful that he not only took the capital city, Tehran - the heart of the reformist movement - by a staggering 50% but also managed to win in Azerbaijan, the birthplace of his chief rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, by a 4-to-1 margin. (As an Azeri friend of mine said, this would be akin to Senator John McCain winning the African-American vote against Barack Obama.) It seems odd that the election was called so soon after the polls had closed, despite the many millions of ballots still...
...government has already declared the opposition's protest marches illegal, and in a Wednesday meeting with opposition candidates, Khamenei urged them to "dissociate themselves from rioters" and pursue their complaints about the election results by petitioning the various appointed councils of the regime. But for Mousavi, heeding the Supreme Leader's call to take his supporters off the streets - and rely only on clerical bodies loyal to Khamenei to sort through a contested election - would be to surrender his trump card: it is the street protests that have caused Khamenei to hesitate after doing his utmost to get his ally...
...Khamenei had publicly requested the attendance of all the main players in the political drama that has roiled Iran since the disputed election. Reports on Thursday suggested that opposition presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi encouraged his supporters to attend the event, but overnight word circulated that he and reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi had urged their followers to stay away, although the authenticity of those claims could not be verified. Indeed, the latest reports confirm that Mousavi and Karroubi were themselves conspicuous by their absence from Friday's prayers. Ahmadinejad, however, was in attendance as was fellow politician Mohsen Rezaie...
...None of this is to exonerate the other candidates. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Iranian paramilitary force responsible for most of the terrorism against the U.S. Conservative Mohsen Rezaei was the Guards' commander. And Mehdi Karroubi, like Mousavi, was deeply involved in Lebanon in the '80s. According to my Hizballah contact, he too was a patron of Mughniyah...
...Iran's fledgling democratic movement, and history the Op-Ed pages of our newspapers would prefer to forget. But at the very least, it should be a reminder that, when it comes to political leaders, there are no good choices in Iran. It is a promising sign that Mousavi has put his violent past behind him, as has Iran for the most part, but let's not completely forget his far-from-democratic roots...