Iran's broken election
The News, June 23, 2009
Mosharraf Zaidi
What is happening in Iran is not a CIA conspiracy to destabilise the Middle East. It is simply more evidence of the incapability of Muslim societies to competently conduct their affairs within the confines of an agreed set of rules. The Great Satan is not in Washington DC, or at the CIA headquarters. The Great Satan is the unfettered and dysfunctional state. In Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and almost everywhere else where Muslims make up a majority of the population, this Great Satan is feeding monsters that are always a few speeches away from being out of control. It is not unnatural that the United States should applaud some of these monsters (like those in Iran) and not others (like the millions of Pakistanis that, for two years, protested for the restoration of the judiciary). Iran's democrats are more convenient for US foreign policy than Pakistani democrats. The United States is a rational animal, and the US state, as problematic as it may be, is not the unfettered and dysfunctional beast that mullahs in every corner of the Muslim world pretend it is.
Many contest the use of the term Muslim world, and perhaps there are good reasons to do so. There continue to be enough reasons however not to get rid of the term. At the top of that list is the collective inability of Muslim societies to construct viable and sustainable states that work. At the top of the list of examples of states that don't work is Iran. And at the top of the list of examples of how it doesn't work is the June 12 election.
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Related:
Analysis of Iran ’s Presidential Elections - By Zafar Bangash
A Shift on Iran - Editorial, Washington Post
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