Well, I haven’t taken this much satisfaction in an election result in years:
TEHRAN — Hassan Rouhani, a moderate Shiite cleric known as one of Iran’s leading foreign policy experts, has won the election to succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Islamic Republic’s next president, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar announced Saturday evening.
With results from all the precincts in, Rouhani had won 50.7 percent of the votes, avoiding a runoff, Mohammad-Najjar said.
The mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, came a distant second, with 16.6 percent of the vote. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s hard-line nuclear negotiator, came third with 11.4 percent. A handful of other conservative candidates fared poorly.
After a surge of support in the final week of campaigning from Iranians who did not plan to vote, Rouhani won a surprising decisive majority in a field of six candidates considered loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei…
This could change everything. It might not — millions of things can go wrong — but it just might. It could be the best of all possible outcomes.
For years, we’ve all said that the Iranian people are not like their leaders, but didn’t see how they could get the upper hand after 35 years of Khomeini-inspired fanaticism. The 2009 outcome showed how desperately the extremists would hold on to power.
Could positive change in Iran truly be this simple to bring about? The people turning out — unexpectedly — to reject six candidates favored by the hard-line mullahs in favor of one moderate, even preventing a runoff?
What a repudiation of Iran’s policies up to now! And remember, those policies have included developing nuclear weapons, expressing the wish that Israel cease to exist, backing Assad in Syria, backing Hezbollah in Lebanon and elsewhere (including providing rockets to fire at civilians in Israel), and on and on.
No, this one vote doesn’t reverse all of those things. But it gives hope — hope that apparently has been burning in the hearts of the Iranian people, bless them. Here’s hoping the bad guys don’t find a way to turn this around. This is such a wonderful development…
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I think you might be reading a little too much into the Iranian vote if you think it’s a repudiation of ALL of Iran’s policies of the last few years. From what I can tell, like most people in the world, their main concern is economic: Iran’s hard-line on the nuclear issue has led to international isolation and crippling sanctions. It seems the Iranian people would like the rhetoric ratcheted downwards and I think that’s the best we can hope for, especially since Khameini will still hold the reins of foreign policy for the most part.
Still, ratcheting tensions down counts for a lot, and if this fosters dialogue, so much the better. If the US and the West think this is their best bet for dealing with a semi-rational Iranian government, they would be well-advised to find some way to strengthen Rouhani’s hand early on by working to find even some tiny steps each side could take towards progress, even the lifting of some symbolic small facet of the sanctions, which could always be reinstated if progress in the negotiations was not sustained. Rouhani is going to have to have something to show domestically that his approach is going to be more successful than Ahmedinajad’s clownish “provocateur” act.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath on any big change in support for Assad, for example. The Syrian regime and Iran are both Shia, after all, and Iran considers Syria a fundamental bulwark against the threat that Iran perceives a nuclear-armed Israel to be, rightly or wrongly. But there’s no question the election is good news in a region that badly needs some.
Generally agree with Phillip on this.
Oh, I do, too. Any change is likely to be incremental. I’m just happy that there’s such good news out of Iran at all, given what a debacle occurred there four years ago.
And so what if this guy is just “cautious,” instead of a real reformer, as one headline I saw asserted? He’s still the closest thing to a reformer on the ballot, and the “conservatives” were utterly crushed by the voters.
The good news for me is a two-parter:
1. The people of Iran sent such a strong signal that they didn’t want same-old same-old.
2. The people in charge are letting them have their way.
Phillip should be really happy that I’m happy, and don’t want to bomb, bomb Iran today.
Of course, that still could become necessary, and I’m sure Israel is still working on the plan. But now, that’s a less savory option than ever, and one hopes more fervently than ever that it should prove unnecessary.