--- On Thu, 6/25/09, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
>
> forum? Thought experiment: Suppose all you anti-Ahmadis
> were somehow
> to be really convinced that the vote wasn't faked to the
> point of reversing
> the result. Would that change your stance in any way? Put a
> different
> way -- would you still be for annulling the election if you
> concluded
> that Moussavi actually, well, lost it?
>
[WS:} The point is not whether any candidate got 50% + 1 vote, but that there is a substantial share of the population that is sufficiently dissatisfied with the status quo and the only way for them to be heard is to take it into the streets. That is to say, there is a large number of people, albeit not necessarily a majority, that is effectively disfranchised by the Islamic governance system in Iran. In most Western democracies, political minorieties not have to use such drastic measures to have a political voice.
Wojtek