Ahmadinejad congratulates Karzai

juan cole's dry sense of humor, when he decides to use it, always tickles me...

Iranian authorities maintained that they counted the ballots of a nationwide election in June in only about 10 hours and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad immediately claimed victory, despite widespread suspicions of fraud.

Afghanistan held its presidential election on August 20 and all the ballots are still not counted, and it isn't clear whether there will be a runoff election because of widespread ballot fraud.

But Ahmadinejad knows how to handle all this. The Tehran Times writes: "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has congratulated his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai on his re-election. In a telephone conversation on Thursday, Ahmadinejad said that Afghan people have voted for Karzai as he is a 'devout and competent' leader."

You wonder if Karzai can survive that endorsement.

'nuff said...

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The Iranian people aren't going gently into that good night

from juan cole via al jazeera english...

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's former president, has made his first public appearance since the country's disputed election, in which he backed opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

During a sermon at Tehran University, Rafsanjani said the country was "in crisis", and that all Iranians were the losers, following the election result.

As Al Jazeera's Roza Ibragimova reports, the speech came as thousands of opposition supporters staged more demonstrations outside.

professor cole also reports on the size of the public demonstrations, a sizeable number that reports from other media seem to be underestimating...

Borzou Daragahi in Beirut and Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran have just filed a summary of Friday afternoon's events in Tehran. They let slip about two-thirds down the article that opposition sources are claiming that a million protesters filled the capital's streets and that even their political foes admitted that the crowds were enormous. It is easy to over-estimate the size of crowds, but given the government's harsh crackdowns on demonstrators, even 500,000 would have been very impressive.

i sincerely wish that MY fellow citizens were half as tenacious...

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Juan Cole: more demonstrators were arrested in New York protesting Bush than in Tehran

kinda puts things in perspective, doesn't it...?

juan cole...

The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.

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Proof positive the Iran election was stolen

if you're going to steal an election, best do it in such a way as to make it at least somewhat believable...

juan cole cites the chatham house study (pdf) and sums it up this way...

The numbers do not add up. You can't have more voters than there are people. You can't have a complete liberal and pragmatic-conservative swing behind hard liners who make their lives miserable.

The election was stolen. It is there in black and white. Those of us who know Iran, could see it plain as the nose on our faces, even if we could not quantify our reasons as elegantly as Chatham House.

would that when our presidential election was stolen in 2000 and 2004, we would have had the stones to kick up a fuss the way the iranians are doing...

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