Ahmadinejad Congratulates Karzai on Presidential "Victory"
Iranian authorities maintained that they counted the ballots of a nationwide election in June in only about 10 hours and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad immediately claimed victory, despite widespread suspicions of fraud.
Afghanistan held its presidential election on August 20 and all the ballots are still not counted, and it isn't clear whether there will be a runoff election because of widespread ballot fraud.
But Ahmadinejad knows how to handle all this. The Tehran Times writes: "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has congratulated his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai on his re-election. In a telephone conversation on Thursday, Ahmadinejad said that Afghan people have voted for Karzai as he is a 'devout and competent' leader."
You wonder if Karzai can survive that endorsement.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/20/2009 04:45:00 PM
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8 Comments:
The US will support the illegal election in Afghanistan, but will condemn that same kind of election in Iran. Gee, if you kneel to American demands you can do almost anything.
There are lots of problems with the theory of Ahmadinejad's insanity. But the main one is like follows. If Ahmadinejad is as insane and obsessed as Hussein, then why his foreign policy is so smart?
Why attacks against him like the recent one during the Iranian election so brutally backfire as now in Afghanistan? Denying that Iranian elections were more fair than in Afghanistan don't make much sense.
Took me a minute to realize this wasn't the onion. :)
Of COURSE Mahmoud LUVS Hamid!
I do suppose his tongue was firmly in cheek when he said " ...'devout and competent' leader...."...
I can hear the snickering from 7,342 miles away...
Karzai IS devoutly pro-Western business and entirely competent to scam America into bankruptcy with the help of the Pentagon and it's buddies in the military-industrial complex, to maintain his personal fiefdom...
A fiefdom that's getting smaller with each passing day, and much like Vietnam... not even his lair (the capital) is safe for him, or US troops.
There's a bottom line Vietnam/Afghanistan comparison for ya!
Is that your evidence that there was fraud? That the votes were counted in 10 hours? Seriously?
Do you realize that when the point came in your argument to demonstrate the election was stolen, that's what you produced? We can see you have nothing better, but do you understand what that means? Three months later, that's your most convincing argument. Think about that.
In Iran, votes are counted in the local poll locations and the results transmitted to the central location that reports them.
With an average, if memory serves, of fewer than 2000 votes per voting location, 10 hours is hardly an unusually fast speed for counting.
There were early reports that men wearing black on motorbikes removed the votes from the local locations nationwide before they could be counted. These reports never made it into Mousavi's or any other candidate's official list of grievances to be investigated.
The best explanation for that is that the alleged vote-removal didn't happen. The votes were counted locally, as they always are.
The stories of men in black on bikes likely were pre-designed lies quite possibly of Western origin - but either way, even Mousavi wouldn't sign his name to them, despite his having nearly 40,000 poll observers together present in nearly every polling location in the country.
The idea that the Iranian results were falsified is quite far-fetched at this point. Iran has hundreds of thousands of highly respected local people who participated in the count - any of whom can, at any time, swear an oath to tell the truth and say that the reported results (every ballot box' result was reported) show a different winner than what they counted.
That hasn't happened, most likely because the reported vote counts are not different in any important way from the true counts that were counted locally.
Anyway, 83% of Iranians believe the votes were fair. The things you've been saying saying about the "vast majority of Iranians" since the election have been almost perfectly wrong, Dr Cole.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/639.php?nid=&id=&pnt=639&lb=
Polled two months after the disputed election, 81 percent of Iranians consider Ahmadinejad to be Iran’s legitimate president. Only 10% disagree. Eighty-three percent say the election was free and fair, though only 66% say it was completely free and fair, while 17% say it was somewhat free and fair. The same number (83%) say they are confident in the results, though only 62% say they have a lot of confidence, while 21% say they have some confidence.
But on Afghanistan, we're seeing, as we saw in Iraq, Iran and the US supporting the same candidate for leadership. As the US rushes to sanctions, all I can say is, we don't have to see this. Iran could be a lot less cooperative.
Ahmadinejad, who has 80% legitimacy in his country is in a position to challenge Karzai's legitimacy if he chooses. The US really does not want that.
(Obama has 90% legitimacy, but there was no foreign-supported challenge to his legitimacy. If a country with 40 times the US GDP was supporting the birthers, they'd probably be a majority of the US by now.)
We'll see. Hopefully the US is not going to stab its own back and antagonize Iran while Afghanistan hangs in the balance. If it does, 2 things: 1) Israel is threatened by Iran enriching uranium as it is now, within the NPT the way Japan and Brazil have broader programs, but the US itself never has been directly threatened by this. 2) Vietnam II, here we come!
Those who wish the US badly all over the world are eagerly and impatiently awaiting the US' next moves regarding Iran.
Protesters vs Basijis
Qods Day clash in Tehran
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb7ztHcOZH8&feature=player_embedded
There can be no doubt that Karzai will survive any endorsement from anyone and whatever is thrown his way. You see, the U.S. is at his beck and call. That thing blithely called the 'world community' is too. So Karzai decides, U.S. and NATO soldiers die for him. Leave Afghanistan today.
Look, there is NOTHING fundamentally wrong with counting a nationwide ballot in 10 hours. Stop repeating that as if it proves something. It doesn't. Iran had 47,000 counting stations operating, meaning that on average each had to only count 900 votes or so --easily done in 10 hours.
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