Christopher Hitchens views as particularly significant the June 28 “flabbergasting statement” by the Association of Teachers and Researchers of Qum, in Iran, that the Iranian presidential election results are illegitimate. The statement was a direct challenge to Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is supposed to be guided by God and who confirmed the “re-election” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Hitchens also sees a connection between the liberation of Iraq and the pro-democracy protests on the streets of Iran.
Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran's regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media.
Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a “let’s pretend” election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis — but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.
Iran’s freedom can’t come too fast.
Frank Warner
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