Iran's Elections--I Already Miss Ahmadinejad

Regardless of who wins Iran’s elections, he will not be as beneficial for Israel and for the rest of the civilized world as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The departing Iranian president has been the best PR Israel could have hoped for. He made an incredibly compelling case for not letting Iran acquire nuclear capability. He was the ugly façade that made all intelligent people pay attention to Iran’s bullying, conspiring and directing global terror activities, rewriting history, and telling all of us how much he wanted to wipe Israel off the map.

He alerted us; he was letting us in on Iran’s intentions. His denials of Iran’s quest for nukes were not believable. His demeanor and his personality invited suspicion, hostility and antipathy.

Most Americans have been unaware of the upcoming danger Iran has been posing to the world. But Mr. Ahmadinejad has made good where Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, has had seen only a limited success—convincing many Americans that the Iranian regime was dangerously militant, that the US could become a victim of its hate-driven, insane Islamic objectives—that it’s time for preventive action.

In addition to raising awareness of the upcoming Iranian threat to the US, Mr. Ahmadinejad has been successful in stirring up emotions. His flaming rhetoric, lies, hypocrisy, denial of facts and history, his genocidal threats, and his exasperating demeanor served to convince the American public of the ugly truth—that the Iranian regime and its leaders are evil.

The president of Iran serves at the pleasure of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—a write-wing extremist, a religious nut and the true leader of the Iranian dictatorship. When it comes to foreign policy, to military-related decisions such as “nukes or no-nukes”, Khamenei is the only decision maker. The president is merely a façade, a puppet placed in front of the world as the key messenger, delivering the Supreme Leader’s edicts.

To sum up, Ahmadinejad has been a wake-up call, the horn of an incoming train, the canary in the coal mine—I will greatly miss him.

The Iranian election is a travesty. It bears the same stench as elections in the former Soviet Union, Mubarak’s Egypt, and other dictatorships where it does not matter who votes for what candidate. The only thing that matters is who does the counting, or who picks the candidates.

Imagine an election in the US where the only candidates allowed to compete for the top job are members of the Tea Party, or picture an Israeli election where no party other than United Torah Judaism is on ballot. This is what elections in Iran are like.

The change in leadership at the Iranian presidency level contains a great deal of peril since whoever wins the phony election may be perceived as a moderate by the west, only because he does not come out of his leech-filled closet. A win by a perceived soft-spoken or a perceived moderate could have enabled Iran to break the isolation, avoid western sanctions, grant legitimacy to the Ayatollah’s regime, then move it more rapidly toward the nuclear bomb. Anyone who can put down that crack pipe and get a grip on reality could see the teeth of that jaw trap.

Replacing one loud-mouth Iranian president with a soft-spoken lipstick-wearing pig can only contribute to a faster-growing, untreated cancer. Masking a problem does not make it go away; it only wards off treatment; it only speeds up the emergence of its ugly end.