Iran: connecting and disconnecting at the same time
Saturday, June 25, 2005 at 7:33AM ■"Victory Is Seen For Hard-Liner In Iranian Vote: Reformers Fear Sharp Shift on Freedoms," by Michael Slackman, New York Times, 25 June 2005, p. A1.
■"Iran Pipeline Complicates South Asian Policy: U.S. Tries to Balance Aiding India-Pakistan Rapprochement With Isolating Tehran," by Jay Solomon and Neil King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, 24 June 2005, p. A4.
The news on the Iranian election is depressing. The hard-liner Tehran mayor wins by pulling in the rural poor and enough of the middle class, which apparently is sick of state corruption and felt Rafsanjani wouldn't do enough to tackle that (his presidency in the 1990s was full of corruption). It's a sad expression of how bad things are in Iran that a public hungry for reform will take the hard-liner who promises a cleaner government over one far more likely to open up to the West.
But the vote makes a lot of sense from an internal perspective. What good is better ties with the outside world if the government is that corrupt?
This election portends no movement on the nuke issue with Tehran.
But you know what else won't be going away soon? The U.S.'s uncomfortableness over the gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan to India. No one will budge on that project, because India and Pakistan see it as a huge confidence-building measure and India simply needs the gas too bad.
Hard-liners will come and go, but the pipeline will stay. We better figure out how to come to grips with Iran given these inescapable realities.
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