Ahmadinejad's time

Half of the world was pending on the results from Iranian elections during the last weekend. From those results will overcome half of the answer to the region’s stability during the next few years. The other half came from Israel a few months ago.

Three candidates, all of them moderated or reformists, faced the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It wasn’t difficult to be more moderated than Ahmadinejad, in the end, he is the closest thing to a neocon in Iran.

The best positioned to challenge his position of power was Mir Hossein Mousavi. Mousavi is a moderated reformist. Painter, architect and former Prime Minister from 1981 to 1989, when the charge was abolished. He disappeared from the political scene until now. It was believed he will face Ahmadinejad supremacy in one of the most disputed polls in Iran in many years, but the end showed us something completely different.

It’s, however, not the victory of Ahmadinejad what surprises the West, it’s the dimension of it. The Iranian president won the reelection by a margin of 30 points. That’s at least suspicious coming from an election initially due to be decided in a second round. And of course, Moussavi’s supporters saw it as a corruption scandal and reacted violently.

The facts are there. There is enough raw material to suspect about a fraud. But the truth is that, even if it has been orchested from the Government, after the supreme leader, Khatami, announced Ahmadinejad’s victory, there is not much left to do. Opposition faces a dilemma. Either they don’t accept the results and are condemned to a brutal repression or they accept it and are condemned to lose the trust of the reformist people who trusted on them for this election. For now, they stand their ground, but it's unclear for how long they will.

Many of those reformists protesters are young students from Tehran, sons and daughters of the students that developed the revolution. A colleague who was working in Iran a few years ago told me that these parents are afraid of their children facing the same prosecution they suffered, even if they agree with them, and are overprotecting them.

Indeed, those fears aren’t unreal. Just after the election, the country started to move its weapons. Not literally, but in a manner resembling to China, Iran detained reformist politicians, banned text messages and access to some Internet sites as Facebook from its soil; so they ran into Twitter. Foreign media also was affected by this, as claimed by the BBC and others. Al Arabiya even was forced to cease reporting at all.

This is what Iran less needs right now. And I’m not only talking about the election but the president itself. The system applied to their citizens applies too to foreign countries. He doesn’t want to speak or let others speak, and that may doom Iran into international isolation. That’s a dangerous place to stay, a place where only another country of the region is now: Israel.

If Ahmadinejad is brave enough to face Obama’s challenge and embraces dialogue, that could leave Israel alone and without arguments in his war against everybody. They could isolate Israel internationally and hit him severely.

But with Ahmadinejad that won’t happen. That’s why Israel didn’t wanted Moussavi to win and is more than happy with Ahmadinejad. The policy of fear is more useful with wolfs than lambs, even if those lambs are wolfs inside. Ahmadinejad, however, is a pure wolf. And Israel didn’t miss a minute to continue calling wolf after the results were known.




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