Anti-Westerner Wins Election in Iraq

Iran elects ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in a landslide vote, the interior ministry confirms.

For more details: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news 

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I would venture a guess that the Bush administration may be in a slight state of shock this morning over yesterday's victory by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. Condi is a Sovietologist -- not a specialist on contemporary Islam. However, one need not be the latter to recognize that democratic push pulls -- particularly in Middle Eastern nations under pressure by the Bush & Co.'s depredations -- are unlikely to produce pro American governments. A good read in the area, say Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century:

http://www.palgrave-usa.com/Catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1850437513

will alert the amateur to the basic facts that the neocons have been ignoring. There are at least 3 different factions (with subdivisions) likely to win out in any election over there:

1) Secular modernists

2) Islamists who wish to reform Islam and return it to its roots -- moderate or extremist (subdivided again into 'Taliban' and/or jihadist terrorists)

3) Traditionalists -- largely those in the streets who can be variously drawn or coerced by either of the prior two.

What we are seeing today in Iran is most likely a surprise to the Bush people from events that emerged almost overnight -- an Islamist who has pulled a significant number of the traditionalists with him to defeat a moderate pragmatic modernist mullah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullah

The same thing occurred in Algeria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algeria
not so long ago and was suppressed by the generals there. Many of the authoritarian Muslim states -- pro modern and Western in alliances such as Turkey, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Egypt, and more recently Sudan, Libya, -- and some in South East Asia -- have only suppressed the Islamists and traditionalists or other minority groups by brute force.

Now that the Bush administration has opened the Pandora's box of 'democracy', we may expect to see a number of new Irans emerging which will:

a) restore some measure of Sharia (fundamentalist Muslim law).

b) put the chadors back on women's heads -- Saddam's Iraq had liberated women while suppressing Kurds and Shiites:

http://hjem.get2net.dk/lomografi/iran/sider/chador.htm

and variously make life uncomfortable for Americans and their corporate interests there.

Needless to say others will be seeing the possibilities for emulating this victory -- the radical Shiites in Iraq, the banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt:

http://allafrica.com/stories/200506230768.html

which assassinated Sadat for making peace with Israel:

http://www.goegypt.org/aboutegy/history/21-theruleofsadat.htm

It looks like we 'ugly Americans' are doing it again!

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