Iran's sullen majority to speak out?

■"Iran's Giant Question Mark: To Vote or Not?" by Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, 14 June 2005, p. A4.

■"As Iran's Vote Nears, Even Clerics Are Hip, Or Are Trying to Be: Front-Runner Rafsanjani Woos Young People; Disco Balls, Soccer Rallies," by Farnaz Fassihi, Wall Street Journal, 13 June 2005, p. A1.

■"Iran's Giant Question Mark: To Vote or Not?" by Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, 14 June 2005, p. A4.

■"Iranian Women Defy Authority to Protest Sex Discrimination," by Nazila Fathi, New York Times, 13 June 2005, p. A8.

■"Kuwait Names Woman to Cabinet," by Hassan M. Fattah, New York Times, 13 June 2005, p. A8.

■"Why I'm Joining Al Jazeera," op-ed by Riz Khan, Wall Street Journal, 13 June 2005, p. A12.

The Iranian election is proving to be quite the show. Two-thirds of the population are under 30 and since you can vote at 16, roughly 70 percent of the voting public is under 30. Attracting the youth vote is a must, so even a Nixon-like Rafsanjani, whose presidency in the 1990s was full of corruption and tough stances on liberals and critics, gets into the act.

Still, Rafsanjani would like be an improvement over the dashed hoped created by Khatami, whose surprise victory in 2001 led many to hope for reforms, only to see those hopes dissolve with 9/11 and Iran being namedóquite deservedly, mind youóto the Axis of Evil.

I think Rafsanjani offers more hope in the same way that Nixon went to China: you need someone trusted by the hard-liners but practical enough to see the future for the current log-jam to be solved. That log-jam being Iran wants to rejoin the world enough to revive its economy, but doesn't seem willing to compromise enough on key political issues (WMD, terrorism) to make that connectivity a possibility. So maybe Nixon doesn't need to go to Tehran if he's already there in the form of a newly "re-elected" president.

And maybe we'll just have Rafsanjani to kick around for a few more years.

If elected, and he's now the front-runner (something I blogged as a possibility a while back), Rafsanjani will face a public that's getting impatient for real change, with a key driver being women who are sick and tired of being treated like minors in their own country throughout their lives (their placards, not mine). So either Rafsanjani placates such demands somehow, or he would inevitably oversee a further distancing of even more of the public from a government that most loath. Again, the Nixon imagery here is more than apt.

But I am more than upbeat on the Big Bang's continued unfolding in the region. There is a real sense of urgency, of "enough already!" When Al Jazeera starts its English-version channel, I'll be interested enough to watch it, assuming I can locate it somehow on cable or the web.