One of the strangest things about watching and listening to all of the news coming out of Iraq was how much their recent election, in a sense, followed the recent US elections. In Iran a religious conservative defeated an intellectual politician, in part by going after value voters.
(Of course the other comparison is that there was funny business going on in the election balloting, matching our own problems back in the state.)
In Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative mayor of Tehran, beat his relatively moderate rival Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani and was declared Iran's next president.
In a sense, Ahmadinejad has George Bush to thank as it was Bush's election eve criticisms of the Iranian election that push people to vote for Ahmadinejad. Bush denounced Tehran's theocracy for manipulating the vote by eliminating candidates and ignoring the "basic requirements" of democracy.
One has to wonder if Bush did that on purpose with the expectation that a hardliner would be elected and that would either lead to the people working to overturn the system or if he is just plain stupid and didn't realize the impact his words would have on the Iranian people.
While Bush may say he is not happy with the election, he may find a soul mate in Ahmadinejad as they both share religious conservative views, won elections by appealing thanks to negative campaigns, and an interest in seeing issues only in black or white. The problem may be that they are too much alike, stubborn and uninterested in the wishes of the electorate.
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