AHMADINEJAD REELECTED: OBAMA RODNEY KING FOREIGN POLICY A FLOP

Based on multiple reports from an array of news services and including Iran’s  Interior Ministry Ahmandinejad has been reelected by a two-thirds to one-third margin and declared reelected. Two other candidates received only a fraction of the vote.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme leader who has the final say on policy has  congratulated Ahmadinejad and the Iranian people for their 85% turnout. He called the results a “divine assessment” and called on all the candidates to support the president.

Overnight Mousavi supporters clashed with police and set up barricades of burning tires as authorities declared that Ahmadinejad had been re-elected in a landslide. Opponents responded with the most serious unrest in the capital in a decade and charges that the result was the work of a “dictatorship.”

The clashes in central Teheran were the more serious disturbances in the capital since student-led protests in 1999 and showed the potential for the showdown over the vote to spill over into further violence and challenges to the Islamic establishment.

Several hundred demonstrators - many wearing the trademark green colors of Mousavi’s campaign - chanted “the government lied to the people” and gathered near the Interior Ministry as the final count was announced. It gave 62.6 percent of the vote to Ahmadinejad and 33.75 to Mousavi, who served as prime minister in the 1980s and has become the hero of a youth-driven movement seeking greater liberties and a gentler face for Iran abroad.

News agencies reported that cellphone text messages, used most by young urbanites, Mousavi’s constituency, couldn’t be sent on Friday. There were even bizarre reports  that pens provided at polling stations were filled with disappearing ink. Supporters of Mousavi and fellow reformist challenger Mahdi Karroubi were urged to bring their own.

Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli disputed that there were problems, however, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who holds ultimate power in Iran, urged voters, as he cast his ballot Friday, “Don’t pay attention to the rumors.”

Nevertheless Mousavi’s supporters called the results “a cruel joke.”

This contradicted Western predictions that the record-breaking turnout would favor challengers.

Friday a high-ranking Obama White House official, quoted by a British TV correspondent, even stated that a second round was inevitable and Mir Hossein Mousavi was bound to win. Even before that, Obama said optimistically: “Whoever ends up winning the election in Iran, the fact there has been a robust debate hopefully will advance our ability to engage them in new ways.”

Their insistence on hoping against hope for a change of presidents in Tehran remains a big puzzle, now that it is obvious that the Islamic Republic’s exercise in democracy was carefully stage-managed for a predetermined outcome. This became apparent in the next developments.

By Saturday afternoon, riot police and Revolutionary Guards thugs were clashing with thousands of protesters who surged onto the streets of Tehran after their defeated hero, Mousavi, said he strongly protests “the many obvious violations that could lead to tyranny in Iran.”

Police blocked him when he tried to hold a press conference and blacked his efforts to send text messages to his supporters. Iran’s ultimate authority, supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered “all Iranians to support the elected president.”

So how come the Obama administration, with so much at stake, continued to back the loser well after his defeat could no longer be denied?

In a Saturday morning Fox News statement California Republican Congressman Dan Lungren inadvisedly said he thought the Iranian election had been “cooked” — an unwise move.

According to Israel based DEBKAfile Washington sources have two explanations:

1. Obama wildly overestimated his impact and importance and completely missed every other wign. Obama’s Iranian experts missed the point that in Middle East politics (except for Israel) it is not the people who determine an election, the shape of government and its policies but the unelected head of the tribe - in this case supreme ruler Khamenei.

This was the second time in a week that an American intelligence prediction missed out on a Middle East election result. Having widely anticipated a massive Hizballah win in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections of Sunday, June 7, Washington was stunned by the victory of the pro-Western camp.

2. Mousavi’s portrayal as a “reformist” by the Western media was false. As prime minister in the 1980s under the Islamic revolution’s founding father, Ayatollah Khomeini, he laid the foundations for Iran’s nuclear program and international terror network (”exporting revolution”). He was therefore hardly the figure to step out of the Islamic regime’s value system and make good on his campaign platform of change.

 But Obama decided to seize on Mousavi’s build-up as a candidate capable of beating the hard-line Ahmadinjed and leading Iran to change in order to vindicate Obama’s hopes of a successful dialogue with Tehran.

By falling through, this scheme puts a big question mark over Obama’s essential strategy of diplomatically engaging rogue states to de-emphasize conflict.

The way the North Korean crisis was handled illustrates this point. Closely in step with Iran on their nuclear and missile development, Pyongyang has brought its relations with the United States to the brink of a military confrontation whose conclusion no one can predict.

Finally removing the gloves, Washington persuade UN Security Council members to unite Friday, June 12, behind a resolution imposing harsh sanctions for the North Korean nuclear test last month. US warships were authorized to search North Korean vessels for suspected nuclear materials, financial measures were tightened.

 The Obama administration will now have to follow through on the Security Council’s directives - even in the face of North Korea’s threat to treat a US embargo as “an act of war” and respond with military, including nuclear, action. Failure to do so would make America a paper tiger which no US president can afford especially under the eye of the re-elected Ahmadinejad. North Korea “retaliated” by pledging to “weaponize” all its plutonium. It has 100-120 pounds of the fizzile material - enought for 5-6 nuclear weapons.

Newly empowered for a second four-year term in office, Ahmadinejad need not be expected to let Obama off the hook for supporting his leading challenger which itself was a colossal, foolish mistake. The tough Iranian president will drive a harder bargain than ever when they sit down to talk.

 And in other parts of the Middle East, despite the US envoy George Mitchell’s unquestioned diplomatic skills, the tour he began in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, moving on to Cairo, Amman, Beirut and finally Damascus on Saturday, has produced no breakthroughs. Iran’s election results, hailed enthusiastically by the Palestinian Hamas and Jihad Islami, are a shot in the arm for the most radical forces in the region, such as Syria and the Lebanese Hizballah  - Obama’s cold-shoulder to Israel is also encouraging anti-West and anti-Israel forces. .

 Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, will take Ahmadinejad’s victory into account when he finalizes the text of the major policy speech he is scheduled to deliver at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv next Sunday, June 14.

 In any case Israel is stuck for another four years with the same aggressive champion of a nuclear-armed Iran and radical Islamic terror, hater of Israel and Holocaust denier, and Obama who has been at best tepid toward the Jewish state

Originally billed as the Israeli response to Obama’s Cairo speech of June 4 and his policies on the issues in dispute between them, Netanyahu has the choice of echoing Washington’s wishful thinking on the Middle East or looking at the real problems of the region squarely through the prism of Israel’s interests.

 Obama has created for himself a reputation for waffling and as  he continues to waver, he will end up with another wishy-washy product that satisfies no one.