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Iran's Potemkin Election

[Wall Street Journal] Con Coughlin - After suffering three decades of international isolation and unremitting Islamic revolution, millions of pro-democracy voters in Iran were supposed to have the opportunity in this Friday's presidential election to express their disenchantment with religious dictatorship. It is not to be. The guardians of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution will remain deeply entrenched. For the past two elections to the Iranian parliament, the Revolutionary Guards have carefully vetted all the candidates to ensure only those with the right revolutionary credentials are allowed to stand. Now the regime has employed the same tactic ahead of the presidential election: Of the original 475 applicants, only four candidates have survived the cull. All of them have revolutionary credentials beyond reproach. The writer is the executive foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph in London and the author of Khomeini's Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam (Ecco, 2009).
2009-06-10 06:00:00
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