Hitchens on Iraq and Iran
Christopher Hitchens has an excellent piece on Slate Magazine's web site today.
Hitchens writes:
...Even though numerous American media outlets have fallen into the lazy trap of saying that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was overwhelmingly "elected" as president of Iran last June, the plain fact remains that his last-minute emergence was a manipulated fraud, concocted behind the scenes after the original list of candidates had been screened and purged, and was an even grosser fraud on the day itself, with no attempt made to hide the ballot-stuffing and vote-rigging. Whereas, with the exception of some bans on individual Baathists, rather than on Baathism itself, the successive votes in Iraq have been a more and more accurate reflection of actual political differences as well as of ethnic and confessional ones.
Nonetheless, everything I can glean from friends and contacts in Iraq makes it ever-clearer that the Iranian state and its clerical proxies made a huge intervention in the Iraqi voting earlier this month, most especially in the southern provinces and in the capital city of Baghdad. It was probable that the Shiite parties would have won anyway, but they made assurance doubly sure by extensive fraud and by using both militias and uniformed policemen to exclude, coerce, or intimidate voters. So, the regional dilemma is now as follows: Will the Iraqi model be one day followed in Iran, or will Iran succeed in imposing its own "model" on Iraq? ...
Read the whole thing for his answer.
Hitchens writes:
...Even though numerous American media outlets have fallen into the lazy trap of saying that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was overwhelmingly "elected" as president of Iran last June, the plain fact remains that his last-minute emergence was a manipulated fraud, concocted behind the scenes after the original list of candidates had been screened and purged, and was an even grosser fraud on the day itself, with no attempt made to hide the ballot-stuffing and vote-rigging. Whereas, with the exception of some bans on individual Baathists, rather than on Baathism itself, the successive votes in Iraq have been a more and more accurate reflection of actual political differences as well as of ethnic and confessional ones.
Nonetheless, everything I can glean from friends and contacts in Iraq makes it ever-clearer that the Iranian state and its clerical proxies made a huge intervention in the Iraqi voting earlier this month, most especially in the southern provinces and in the capital city of Baghdad. It was probable that the Shiite parties would have won anyway, but they made assurance doubly sure by extensive fraud and by using both militias and uniformed policemen to exclude, coerce, or intimidate voters. So, the regional dilemma is now as follows: Will the Iraqi model be one day followed in Iran, or will Iran succeed in imposing its own "model" on Iraq? ...
Read the whole thing for his answer.
posted by Thomas Joscelyn at 3:48 PM
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