There is certain urgency in the rhetoric coming out of Washington towards the Iranian election protests that worries me.
We have to be patient enough as a country and stand by and let the protests in Iran play out. We have to let them have their own revolution if that is truly the democratic voice of the people in that country.
The way it looks the Iranian leadership saw the early returns and decided to not take any chances and simply closed down the elections. It was to close for comfort and rather than have Ahmadinejad pull out a narrow victory that could have been contested they decided to skew the results to portray a landslide on behalf of their candidate.
What needs to be remembered is that Ahmadinejad is simply a spokesman that deals mostly with domestic policy, so Khamenei who is really in charge did not want to have to fight with a leader that would be given worldwide platform and disagree with him on a strong deterrent foreign policy. It was going to end badly either way.
The real fight is the fight that is being displayed now and that is a gradual growth in the progressive movement in Tehran and around the country.
I believe that the reason that the politicians in Washington are latching on to these protests so securely is because they know that they already have too many irons in the fire with Iraq and Afghan/Pak. It is the same deal with North Korea and the Washington insiders latching onto the missile launches.
It is a tool to put international and in the case of Iran internal pressure on regimes that do not line up with the agenda’s of the elite in the United States.
The CIA has been there for a long time (please see Seymour Hersh’s amazing reporting on the subject).
So to believe that the CIA did not have a hand in spending years building the opposition to Ahmadinejad is naive. Not only were they there collecting intelligence on the situation with Iran’s nuclear program but they were also sowing the seeds for regime change.
These elements already existed in the Iranian population but the US government funded them and helped to organize their efforts.
The story that is being told in the mainstream press is that these protests were organic and essentially organized through the Internet, when the seeds had been sowed for a long time regarding this moment.