Many people don’t know that while Iran has been an authoritarian state for decades, it also has a strong democratic tradition for offices under the national level and for many of those at the national level. Now in ongoing local elections,

Opponents of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took an early lead in key races in Iran’s local elections, according to partial results announced Monday, with moderate conservatives winning control of councils across Iran.

If the final results hold - especially in the bellwether capital, Tehran - it will be an embarrassment to Ahmadinejad, whose anti-Israeli rhetoric and unyielding position on Iran’s nuclear program have provoked condemnation in the West and moves toward sanctions at the U.N. Security Council.

A freelance Iranian journalist of reformist sympathies, Iraj Jamshidi, described the vote as “a blow to Ahmadinejad,” who was elected in June 2005.

“After a year, Iranians have seen the consequences of the extremist policies employed by Ahmadinejad. Now, they have said a big ‘no’ to him,” said Jamshidi.

But even if “moderate” candidates win office, they are still Islamic expansonists.

I guess we can expect to see Iran’s soon-to-be-former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad standing on the corner holding a sign saying, “Will hate Jews and threaten the USA for food.” Why? He was videotaped leering at dancing, unveiled women.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who flaunts his ideological fervour, has been accused of undermining Iran’s Islamic revolution after television footage appeared to show him watching a female song and dance show.
The famously austere Mr Ahmadinejad has been criticised by his own allies after attending the lavish opening ceremony of the Asian games in Qatar, a sporting competition involving 13,000 athletes from 39 countries. The ceremony featured Indian and Egyptian dancers and female vocalists. Many were not wearing veils.

Women are forbidden to sing and dance before a male audience under Iran’s Islamic legal code. Officials are expected to excuse themselves from such engagements when abroad but TV pictures showed Mr Ahmadinejad sitting with President Bashar Assad of Syria and Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister, during last Friday’s ceremony in Doha.

Religious fundamentalists, usually Mr Ahmadinejad’s keenest supporters, are asking why he attended a ceremony that violated his own government’s strict interpretation of Shia Islam.

So, Mahmoud is hoist on his own petard (whatever the heck that means). Stick a fork in him, ‘cause he’ done. He’s gonna make like a tree and leave. Yep, just like horse poop, he’s gonna hit the trail. Didn’t Hollywood already make a movie about him? Oh, yeah, there were two: “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “Gone With the Wind.” Yes, indeedy, he’s ghost. So long, Mahmoud, sayonara, goodbye, wiedersehen, tschuss, au revoir! Been nice knowing ya! Oh, wait, no it hasn’t.

A confederal, rather than federal, type of nation may be looming, as I predicted in early ‘03

CNews reports that the Iraqi parliament has passed legislation that would allow the country to be paritioned along sectarian lines in 18 months.

Evidence continued to mount in the 44th month of U.S. involvement that Iraqi centres of power - politicians and the government, the police and military - were unable or unwilling to rein in violence in parts of the country where Sunni and Shiite Muslim or Kurdish populations rub up against one another. …

The Shiite Majority in parliament, over complaints of dirty tricks from rival Sunni and even some Shiite legislators, adopted a measure that would allow the effective partition of the country after an 18-month waiting period, something widely opposed in polls of Iraqis.

“The starting point is to recognize that Iraq is not going to be a democratic, unified country that serves as a model for the region. The violence and the Sunni-Shiite division have already ruled that out,” Dennis Ross, a Mideast peace negotiator and policy maker for former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, wrote in an Op-ed column for the Washington Post on Sunday.

A partition would leave Iraq with a weak central government and largely independent states run by Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south and Sunnis in the centre and west, giving impetus for still more violence and still further population upheaval.

Iraqis so-called national unity government announced that next Saturday’s much-anticipated national reconciliation conference was indefinitely postponed for unspecified “emergency reasons.” …

Ross said the best solution was, in fact, the formation of a federal state, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds running areas where they are majorities. …

Sunnis, a minority sect in Iraq that ran the country until the ouster of Saddam, are violently opposed, fearing it would leave them with no revenue from Iraq’s oil riches. Natural resources are largely absent from their lands in central and western Iraq.

We can’t say we were’t warned. I wrote on the odds of Iraqi democracy in February 2003, before the invasion and cited an Arab News piece (no longer online),

Saudi Arabia said yesterday that it feared a US-led war on Baghdad would set out a turmoil in the volatile region and transform Iraq into another Afghanistan with rival ethnic and religious factions fighting for power.

“If things fall apart, who will come back and bring it all back together?” Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal asked while addressing a news conference.

“All the factions inside Iraq will present their visions for a new government like they did in Afghanistan. These are the consequences of a conflict, and if that happens, it will result in the division of Iraq,” he said.

My long-time readers know that I always held invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam’s regime was justified, and that I have consistently denounced the shortsighted management by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for trying to do it on the cheap. See, for example, Rumsfeld v. the Army, from June 2003. That the US should have sent in many tens of thousands more troops to establish post-combat control of the country is so blindingly obvious now that I’ll spend no more time discussing it.

The question is, what about Iraqi democracy? In my Feb. 03 post I discussed it thus.

Not all of even the most rabid Iraqi opponents of Saddam Hussein are friends of America or wish for American-style democracy. The organizing principle inside Iraq has always been the tribe. Political idealism as we know it has no history there. In fact, citizenship as we know it has no history there. The boundaries of Iraq were drawn up by the British after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In the West, citizenship is by definition territorial; it was the shared territorial identity among different people, unified by language and religion, that gave rise to the modern nation state. This territorial loyalty did not arise from nationhood, it was a precondition of nationhood. But the tribes of Iraq have never thought of themselves as common citizens of the entire territory bounded by the British-drawn lines on the map. Tribal territorial loyalties are far more limited than that. Hence, whatever loyalty Iraqis have for “Iraq” as a nation has been imposed from above, not grown from below.

It does not help that the Iraqi people have never known a government that was staffed from the top down with public servants; what they have known is imperial rule and dictatorship. So any democratic-type government that might be instituted is handicapped at the outset: the people will not invest their full trust and confidence in it right away because all their governments have proven to be untrustworthy and oppressive. And the people elected to the actual offices will not take them understanding what it means to be a democratically elected office holder.

So will there be Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq? I don’t think so. Maybe the best we can hope for is a confederation of tribal regions, united only in their desire to share in oil profits. I don’t see a successful federal system being emplaced there. The boundary lines of “Iraq” on the map will be merely the limits of centripetal expansion of tribal regions. They will define the limits outside of which tribal frictions and conflicts may not spill. But inside the external boundary of Iraq there is real danger of violence as competing claims are settled. And American troops will be caught in the middle.

Then I closed with this prediction:

My bottom line analysis: Something close enough to democracy as we understand it is a reality now in the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq. I think that the various factions among Iraqi exile groups and populations will try to set up a federal-type Iraqi government under the aegis of the American occupiers, but the attempt will ultimately fail.

I am not happy to be shown apparently correct.

Strategy Page says “Ahmadinejad Seen As a Loser Back Home.”

Overall, Iranians are angry at Ahmadinejad for not doing anything to get the economy going. Despite the rising price of oil, Iran’s big export, most Iranians are still poor. Iranians blame this on incompetence and corruption among the religious leaders that dominate the government. The nuclear weapons program is now perceived as another example of incompetence. Ahmadinejad’s battle with the UN, over inspections of the Iranian nuclear program, are moving towards the imposition of international economic sanctions. These will hurt all Iranians. The poor will get poorer, and the religious leaders will still have their fancy cars and big houses.

And Iran’s military is less than happy with him, too.

Iran has said it will deliver its response to the latest demand to surrender its nuclear program on Aug. 22. Why that date? Armageddon Cocktail Hour explains,

According to IslamiCentre.org, August 22, 2006 corresponds with the 27th day of Rajab, making it the anniversary of the beginning of Muhammad’s prophetic mission, according to the Shi’ites. This is a different occasion than the “Night Journey” or “Miraj” cited by Robert Shelton in FrontPageMag.com, in which Muhammad, after years of preaching, is taken on a journey by the angel Gabriel to the “farthest mosque” (understood by some to be Jerusalem) before ascending to heaven. So another theory as to the significance of August 22 to Iran begins to emerge. …

August 22 is at the very least an auspicious day for the Shi’ite Ahmadinejad: in that it is the day that Muhammad’s power to create a new Islamic society became manifest, it can be analogized with the beginning of the putative new era of Islamic justice to be ushered in by the Mahdi. As Iran comes out of its period of isolation — its time in the cave — Ahmadinejad’s public statements indicate that he sees himself as an agent of change in the next phase of Islamic development, one in which “the world is standing on the threshold of great development and the Muslims are expected to overcome their aggressive enemies.” Symbolically, it may be that Ahmadinejad sees August 22, the day on which he has promised to respond to Western nations regarding their offer of incentives to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear program, as the day on which he begins his own transforming mission.

If the speculation is correct and Ahmadinejad has chosen August 22 for spiritual reasons and not just because it falls easily between already-scheduled dental and car inspection appointments . . . whether Ahmadinejad decides to initiate Iran’s new global Islamic mission in imitation of Muhammad-as-moral-reformer-and-politician, or in imitation of Muhammad-as-conquering-general, is something that remains to be seen.

Read the whole thing.

As is being exhaustively covered this morning, UK and American authorities busted a plot to bomb 10 US-bound airliners en route from Britain, over the Atlantic.

Is there a North Korea connection?

Authorities have not confirmed that the plotters are al Qaeda members, but have strongly hinted they are. The plotters, authorities said, planned to bring binary liquid explosives aboard the planes in handbags. “Binary” means that the explosive would be formed by mixing two apparently-innocuous liquids after takeoff.

One airliner, a Boeing 707, was destroyed in a similar manner:

Korean Air Flight 858 was a flight that flew from Abu Dhabi International Airport in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates to Gimpo Airport near Seoul, South Korea via Bangkok International Airport in Bangkok. On November 29, 1987, it mysteriously disappeared.

According to the South Korean authorities, the Boeing 707 took off from Abu Dhabi and was flying to Bangkok on the way to Seoul. Two passengers who departed from the plane at Abu Dhabi left a radio containing 350 grams of C-4 and liquor bottle containing cca 0.7 l of PLX explosives in an overhead rack on the airplane. The bomb exploded while the plane was over the Andaman Sea near Thailand. Radar contact was lost at the time of the explosion.

All 11 crew members and 104 passengers on Korean Air 858 were killed, making it the deadliest terrorist attack against South Korea.

Two North Korean agents were arrested by South Korean officials shortly after the bombing. One killed himself with a suicide pill but the other, Kim Hyon Hui, was captured before she herself could commit suicide. She told investigators that the bombing was ordered by Kim Il Sung’s son, Kim Jong-il.

It has long been established that North Korea is in terrorist bed with Iran. Iran is the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism and has the technical capability to produce sophisticated exlosives. Although al Qaeda in Iraq, under its fortunately-martyred, former leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, considers Shiite Muslims its enemy, there is no such enmity between Iranian mullahs and the upper levels of al Qaeda’s leadership. Both Iran and Osama bin Laden characterize the United States as the “Great Satan,” with the UK not far behind.

Whether the plot actually has an Iranian or North Korean connection we may never know, but remember that the man who ordered the destruction of KAL 858 now runs North Korea.

Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency reports of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that, “martyrdom-seeking is the only way to save mankind.”

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here on Wednesday that selflessness and martyrdom-seeking is the only way to save mankind, adding, “We are all obliged to keep alive the culture of martyrdom-seeking in the society.”

According to IRNA correspondent in Bushehr, Ahmadinejad made the remarks in a meeting with families of martyrs and war-disabled veteran of the province on Wednesday night at a religious center, adding, Culture of martyrdom-seeking is our most effective weapon and best guarantee for our national security.”

The President reiterated, “Ruthless enemies who have a chronic enmity against our country and our nation have not succeeded in achieving their objectives so far thanks to the existence of this culture of martyrdom-seeking among our nation.”

Further stressing that the attitude and culture of martyrdom-seeking is the best guarantee for a nation’s survival, he said, “He who is ready for martyrdom is always victorious.” Ahmadinejad reiterated, “Martyrdom is the peak of mankind’s perfection and the martyrs enjoy the highest status of humanity in this world and the Hereafter.”
He added, “People spend tough years of strenuous work in a bid to achieve the peaks of grandeur and pride, while our dear martyrs achieved those high peaks in shortest possible time.”

This is a man with some serious religious issues - he has an apocalyptic fixation. And he’s about to get nukes. The two don’t go together well. Arnaud de Borchgrave reported three days ago,

The man in charge of hoodwinking the Western powers about Iran’s now 18-year-old secret nuclear program believes the apocalypse will happen in his own lifetime. He’ll be 50 in October.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Shi’ite creed has convinced him lesser mortals can not only influence but hasten the awaited return of the 12th Imam, known as the Mahdi. Iran’s dominant “Twelver” sect holds this will be Muhammad ibn Hasan, the righteous descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He is said to have gone into “occlusion” in the 9th century, at age 5. His return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war, bloodshed and pestilence. After this cataclysmic confrontation between the forces of good and evil, the Mahdi will lead the world to an era of universal peace.

“The ultimate promise of all Divine religions,” says Ahmadinejad, “will be fulfilled with the emergence of a perfect human being [the 12th Imam], who is heir to all prophets. He will lead the world to justice and absolute peace. Oh mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one.” He reckons the return of the Imam, AWOL for 11 centuries, is only two years away.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is close to the messianic Hojjatieh Society, which is governed by the conviction the 12th Imam’s return will be hastened by “the creation of chaos on Earth.” He has fired Iran’s most experienced diplomats and scores of other officials, presumably those who don’t share his belief in apocalyptic conflagration.

Arnaud asks whether the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction can work against a nuclear-armed Iran. I’ll try to explore that question in a later post, but I’m not hopeful.