<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"> <title></title> </head> <body> <pre wrap="">On Thursday, June 30, 2005 11:03 PM [PDT], Mycos <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:mycos@shaw.ca"><mycos@shaw.ca></a> wrote: </pre> <pre wrap="">There's just something about this story that has the sound of another inflammatory set-up by the hawks....something that is being pushed on the public to justify some kind of unusually aggressive stance yet to be taken by the US administration, military or otherwise, against the new leader. It's certainly possible that the guy was there, and I hope I'm wrong about this but the track history of the US is clear about this kind of thing.</pre> ____________________________________ <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"> <title></title> Well, they can't quite say the guy wasn't democratically elected...so they had to come up with something else. I won't waste time commenting on how the U.S. which is routinely kidnapping people and shipping them off to be tortured can take the moral high ground here....but.... A friend described the situation thus: "Speaking of Iran, the significance of the results of the recent presidential election have gone little noticed.  But it is significant that this hitherto unknown, youngish-looking guy won, and it is significant that he was the mayor of Teheran ( like being the mayor of Mexico City, say).  And of course it is significant that he won by a landslide against  a fabulously wealthy and corrupt old "high mullah" (Rasfanjani, western liberal's favorite) by pulling the votes of the poor and working class of Iran.  (I got to see video details of him and the Iranian elections on TV Japan (NHK) - they won't show this stuff here in Freedom's Land). That does not mean he is a "good guy" - although this looks similiar to the left-populism seen in Latin America (and probably is at the mass level) - he is tied into the "lower mullahcracy", but it does mean that the Iranian regime can count on the support of the masses to defend their  country against an American aggression.  The result is bad news for the US, it now knows beyond doubt that there is no prospect for a pro-American mass faction taking power along the lines of Condi Rice's "worldwide democratic revolution" (a strategy that is nothing but a confession of military weakness, though it seeks to be an auxillary), and it also knows that any military action will be met by fierocious resistance, by which Iraq will pale in comparision, for Iran is not now a war-weary country exhausted by a decade of vicious, murderous Anglo-American bombing/sanctions. But it will also light a fuse to Shia Iraq, now relatively quiet, and that is the significance." Sounds good to me. Joanna </body> </html>