The AP reports that according to final results today, conservatives “consolidated control of Iran’s legislature in run-off elections,” but at the same time, opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also gained strength in the Parliament. Reformists in Iran “favor greater democracy, closer ties with the West, and reducing clerical powers in Iran” and made a “respectable showing even after most of their candidates were barred from running.” The results suggest the “hard-line” Ahmadinejad “is growing increasingly vulnerable ahead of a bid for re-election next year.”
Imagine that, such a creative idea. Iranians thinking for themselves. What I hear is a country doing what civilized people do – going through a political process in order to escape the dark ages of an oppressive and reactionary government. I expect that what Dick Cheney, William Kristol, John Bolton, and their American Enterprise Institute colleagues is, "Holy Shit! We’ve got to bomb them before they reform and cut off our chances of getting at their oil."
This is the saddest piece of the Neoconservative cosmology. They actually believe that Reagan’s massive military spending brought down the Communist Soviet Union, rather than the people of Russia and her Satellites. The Neoconservatives believed that Saddam Hussein would never fall unless brought down militarily by outside forces. They have Iran pigeon-holed in the Axis of Evil category, rather than as a group of relatively civilized human beings moving along a political journey from Despotism, through Theocracy, on the way to wherever they are going.
Our leaders don’t really understand the policy of "containment," and how it both protects us and respects the people of other countries. It’s interesting that we don’t seem to care about places where the people actually suffer, like Tibet or Burma. We only show an interest in countries that have something we want. Containment is a reasonable strategy for a country with our resources to be involved in. The policy called "The Bush Doctrine" is grandiose, unsustainable, has disasterous results, and creates enemies rather than allies. Iran is going to correct her own course without our intervention or in spite of it. So would Iraq, had we been patient with containment, embargo, and diplomacy…
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