TANCREDI, the young opportunist in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard, expressed it perfectly: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
He would have understood perfectly the minds of the mullahs who stage-managed last Friday's Iranian presidential election. Although the pseudo-reformer Mousavi lost, it would have made only a cosmetic difference if he had won.
The world media lash
ed themselves into a frenzy of excitement over this non-event – beyond the highest expectations of the theocracy. Mass rallies of supporters of rival candidates – the tricolour-wrapped nationalists of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the green-swathed enthusiasts for principal challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi – mimicked scenes during an American presidential election.
The Western media fell for it in a big way. Most of them are suffering withdrawal symptoms from the Obama circus, so they persuaded themselves that here was another election of seismic significance, with an historic reformer bidding for power on a tide of public euphoria. Mousavi played up to this, even becoming the first Iranian presidential candidate to have his wife publicly campaigning for him.
Foreign reporters concentrated on Tehran, which may have given them an exaggerated impression of Mousavi's strength. Although Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran, his real power base is among the rural poor and he is the first of the Iranian leadership to have visited every province in the country. However, such calculations merely bolster the illusion that this was a real election.
The underlying reality is totally different. All four candidates were approved by the Supreme Leader (the title says it all: what you see is what you get in this theocracy), Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the junta of mullahs that governs Iran. The media have short memories: we have been here before. At the last presidential election in 2005, the run-off was between Ahmadinejad and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, that season's wee pretendy moderate.
Then, however, we had a less deluded American administration. George W Bush dismissed the whole charade, saying: "Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy." Contrast that with the starry-eyed illusions of Barack Obama.
The most dangerous element known to the geopolitical world is not plutonium, but wishful thinking. On this, American Democrat administrations have previous. Former Democrat attorney-general Ramsey Clark visited Ayatollah Khomeini in France and urged Washington not to help the Shah. Jimmy Carter pulled the rug from under the Shah in 1978 and sowed the seeds of his own downfall. Andrew Young, Carter's ambassador to the UN, predicted that Khomeini would "eventually be hailed as a saint". Donald Rumsfeld was by no means the first swivel-eyed fruitcake to influence American foreign policy.
Now we have had Obama in Cairo, selling the pass with the fatal concession that "any nation – including Iran – should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty". Back in the Zionist Entity, strategists pounded their foreheads in dismay and exclaimed: "Japanese Model!" This is Israel's nightmare scenario: that Iran would be allowed, like Japan, to operate nuclear reactors, but not to develop weapons. Such licensed development would, in the words of the Jerusalem Post, "put the Islamic republic a turn of the dial on the centrifuges and mere months away from an atomic bomb".
Ironic as it might seem, Ahmadinejad's most fervent supporters were in Tel-Aviv. They rightly calculated that a sabre-rattling loudmouth would keep America on the qui vive, whereas a snake-oil salesman like Mousavi could have kept Obama sweet for years. After all, on whose watch did Iran's nuclear programme begin? Name and shame this threat to civilisation. It was – er – Mir Hossein Mousavi, during his premiership from 1981 to 1989. A Mousavi administration would not have been one inspired by CND; his defeat is no catastrophe.
Nuclear considerations, rather than enlarging by two inches the amount of female physiognomy that may be exposed beneath the headscarf or free access to degenerate Tom and Jerry cartoons, were the real issues underlying this bogus election campaign. The outcome would have been identical even if Mousavi had won. It was not free, it was not democratic, there were no reformers standing: things simply changed, for a few weeks, in order to remain the same.
