A Cedar Falls and No One Is There to Hear It

In Iran you've got to get approval from the Ayatollah to run for president. In America, you have to raise a billion dollars. Which is harder? Who knows! Iranians seemed eager to vote, but should probably have just stayed home, since, as Elliott Abrams is eager to remind us, they did not have the opportunity to vote for the candidates and parties that most closely matched their extended families' historical ethnoreligious affinity group identities, unlike the Lebanese, who did. But at least, says Abrams, "the majority of Lebanese have rejected Hezbollah’s claim that it is not a terrorist group but a 'national resistance.'" Unlike the last election, in 2005, when . . . the results were almost identical to the results this year. I suppose Abrams and the gang at CFR are free to view this as a national referendum on Hezbollah's legitimacy, but to a more reasonable observer it seems plain that the same people and districts which voted for Hezbollah last time voted for Hezbollah this time, a pattern broady repeated across the parties in both the governing and opposition coalitions. But it was all very free and fair, whatever that means.

While it remains unfortunately popular to view the Iranians as the great boogety-boogety, it turns out that Iran is a great big country full of fairly ordinary people with jobs, homes, and worries about their economy. Their political system is insane, cracked, corrupt, and impenetrable, but try explaining the American electoral college to even an educated, politically observant European and see if you won't say more or less the same about our own. If we have mistaken Iran for our nemesis, perhaps it's because we see an uncomfortable likeness in the Iranians, a religious people who may not be quite so religious as popular assumption would have it, struggling with their own odd and idiosyncratic version of democracy.